Social media evolves constantly and it can be hard to keep up with the latest news, updates, and tests. Here are a few that I’m particularly excited about or just flat out dreading if they become a reality.

Facebook

Facebook Pages Can Now Join Groups

Instead of solely posting to their own page, Facebook groups can now contribute to the broader community by posting directly to groups. This can be beneficial in a lot of ways because the Facebook algorithm favors posts in groups in a person’s timeline over posts by pages.

However, a caveat of this new feature is that Facebook group admins have to enable the feature AND approve the page’s membership.

Instagram

Instagram Introduces Shopping in Stories, New Shopping Section in Explore

Instagram wants to become the new place where users can buy goods. It originally had this option for only a select number of businesses but it’s beginning to roll out the feature for smaller brands and businesses. With access to this feature, businesses can add product stickers to stories, which works just like adding any other type of sticker, and users viewing the story can tap on the sticker to open a product page.

Instagram is also in the testing phases of a shopping tab in Explore where users can browse a personalized section of products. Businesses eligible for the story shopping stickers will also be eligible for being featured in the shopping explore tab.

Instagram is testing video tagging

Instead of just being able to tag friends and other accounts in photos, Instagram is testing a way to tag other accounts in videos as well. The option works similarly to tagging photos, but instead of pressing the small icon at the bottom left to see the list of tagged names over top of the content the button links to a list of tagged people. It’s unclear when this update will be available for wider release, and is only available to a select group of users at the moment.

Instagram may divide hashtags from captions to end overhashing

#The #days #of #tons #of #hashtags #at #the #bottom #of #captions #may #be #over #soon. Instagram is allegedly (they refuse to comment on this) testing a new feature that would keep hashtags separate from the caption and clean up users’ timelines. There isn’t much known about this feature at the time, but being able to take those clunky hashtags out of captions are a welcome aesthetic relief.

Twitter

Twitter Announced They Were Bringing Back Chronological Timelines


As someone whose feed has been inundated with “recommended tweets,” tweets liked by my friends and “ICYMI tweets,” this was the best news I’ve heard from Twitter in awhile. Instead of an algorithm deciding what tweets to show users, it’s back to the classic chronological feature which makes it more important to know when your target audience is online again. But if you liked the curated feed, you can flip a switch in your settings and set the feed back.

 

Reply to a Video Tweet While Watching it

This seems like a no-brainer but is a great new feature to have. Being able to reply to Tweets with videos without having to stop watching should make it easier for users to engage with brand content.

Up and Downvotes for Tweets? Twitter has Reportedly Been Testing a New Engagement Option

Mirroring Reddit, Twitter is apparently testing a feature that will allow users to upvote or downvote content on their feeds. With Twitter’s giant harassment and misinformation problem, such a feature could only end well for everyone involved, right?

Did I miss a recent improvement you’re particularly fond of? Let me know @PageJones31 and you can read my other social media blog posts right here.

Lorraine and Page chatted about these trends on Facebook Live. Watch their conversation now.