Facebook rolls out the Explore Feed
If you like reading awkward sex advice columns as much as I do, you’ll be happy to hear that you should now be able to find them all in one place – Facebook’s brand new Explore Feed, an ad-free area exclusively held for publishers and their content. The down side of this is that is that it looks like Facebook is almost completely killing organic reach for pages. So you’re either A) a publisher and in the Explore Feed or B) a brand/business and you have to pay to get into people’s regular feed, along with all the out-of-focus selfies done by my mum where 90% of participants are not looking at the camera #nailedit!
Facebook enters into Pinterest power struggle with new Sets feature Not very surprising: Facebook has brought out a new way to group content together in order to take on the Pinterest style of posting. I know what you’re thinking: “Facebook eats platforms like Pinterest for breakfast!” and you may be right. ‘Sets’ lets users group photos, status updates and videos together based on interests, so maybe it’s food, or I don’t know, cos-play (it’s where adults dress up as their favourite characters – look it up Karen!).
Facebook tests the disappearing status
Remember the days when all Facebook statuses started with ‘is’ e.g. Laura is eating a sausage roll (pack of sausage rolls) etc.? Well, Facebook wants to bring those glory days back! And to do this, it is testing disappearing statuses, to encourage people to post (in 101 characters of text max) what they’re doing or feeling ‘in the moment’.
Facebook lets 10 publishes introduce a paywall Ugh, is there anything more joyless than the concept of the paywall? When you’re well and truly clickbait hooked and you forge head first into one? Anyway, I digress, Facebook is allowing a chosen 10 publishers to have them on the platform after users have read 10 articles in a month and they’re not even taking a cut of the profits. How very magnanimous of them, I do hope they manage to make rent this month.
You can now PayPal using Messenger (if you’re in the U.S.) PayPal users in the U.S will now be able to select PayPal as a payment option on Facebook Messenger to send person to person payments. If you get stuck while doing it you also have a friendly bot who can talk you through it all. Just don’t expect it to spot you the week before payday.
Facebook acquires teen compliment app tbh Facebook has announced that it’s bought tbh, the app that’s taking the teen world by storm, which polls your peers and feeds back the results as a lovely compliment – aahhh. The app is going to be able to work independently, so will keep its own branding and leadership team.
Twitter introduces a new video ad format Slightly less sexy but ultimately important news from Twitter HQ. They’re launching a new video ad format which pushes people to visit a website in the moment. How it works is that a video will auto play, ideally a tempting and eye-catching video. Alongside the video a preview of the website will be displayed, harnessing the power of video to drive action.
Brands of all sizes can now run Search Ads on Pinterest Pinterest has announced that anyone can now run a Search Ad on its platform using its ads manager. The site receives two billion searches every month and any brand can now capitalise on this by searching for keywords, broad matches, phrases and exact matches to run their ads against.
Facebook has announced that it’s bought tbh, the app that’s taking the teen world by storm, which polls your peers and feeds back the results as a lovely compliment – aahhh. The app is going to be able to work independently, so will keep its own branding and leadership team.