Written by Loh Wei Rong, Yuan Qi and Naini Gupta.

Much Sadness to March Madness

It may be the start of a new decade, but 2020 is off to a bumpy start. As the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic earlier this month, there’s an increased effort to prevent the spread of the virus, which has meant the cancellation of many events, including sporting games, concerts, festivals, and movies.

Given the scale of the pandemic, marketers and social media platforms have also reacted to the outbreak, with a series of store closures, postponing events and even ad pull-downs from brands, such as KFC’s Finger-Licking Good ad in UK. Ad Age has provided a list of how marketers are reacting to the COVID-19 situation, which can be a good resource for reference. 

For social platforms, apart from prioritizing up-to-date and accurate information, they have also extended help in different ways. Facebook is banning ads and expanding access to local alerts to communicate COVID-19 updates, while Twitter has put up communication guidelines for brands. YouTube is easing ‘Sensitive Events’ policy to allow monetization of some Coronavirus-related videos, while LinkedIn provided LinkedIn Learning’ courses on working from home available for free, and Instagram is banning searches for COVID-19 AR Effects. In case you are working from home, here are some sick tunes curated just for the occasion, courtesy of some Spotify users. 

Facebook Stories Begins Testing Cross-Posting to Instagram

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It’s been reported that Facebook is recently testing out cross-posting its own Stories on Instagram.

While it is currently possible to do so the other way (Instagram Stories -> Facebook), having the option to do it the other way could save users a lot of time to maintain activity on both platforms, and at the same time maximizing the reach that Stories can achieve.

In the screenshot above, the new option would show up as a simple toggle – making the process faster and easier. However, it is important to note that settings might not float across seamlessly between both platforms. Issues such as frame size and native tools such as polls might not reflect correctly on Instagram.

There is a way to edit your tweets, but it’s not Twitter.

In recent years, Auto-deleting tweets also became a very in-demand request especially due to older tweets coming across as too personal, oversharing or just embarrassing. Some high-profile Twitter users have even been targeted by critics who dug up their tweets to shame them. For that reason, Brizzly saw the opportunity and took over, serving the needs of Twitter users in search of features Twitter itself failed to build.

Undo: Briefly store your tweet before posting it – you can go back, make corrections as needed before it goes live and even configure how long of a delay you need (between 10 seconds to 10 minutes). 

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Auto-deletion: You can opt to have your tweets automatically erased after 24 hours.

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Fave to Save: A handy addition to the auto-delete feature, this feature allows you to set a threshold of likes for your tweets in order to prevent them from being auto-deleted.

Redo Tweet: This feature enables you to fix your typos on tweets that have already gone live.

Disclaimer: Featured image taken from Peninsula Daily News.