To prepare for the upcoming holidays, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest are pulling out all the stops to enhance the user experience.
Facebook Reorganizes the News Feed Order
Facebook has been testing its simplified News Feed with three separate, swipeable feed presentation options and a slider-style icon at the top right for several months. However, they are finally starting to release this update to more users. By tapping on the slider icon on the top, you can choose which Feed you want as your primary feed.
Alexandra Voica, an EMEA tech comms manager at Facebook, explained that “Most Recent contains the same content you’ll find in your ranked Feed, but sorted in reverse chronological order (i.e. with the newest posts first), making it easy to stay up-to-speed with what’s happening now. Favorites shows you up-to-date posts from the people and Pages you care about most. You can select up to 30 friends and Pages to include in your Favorites; their posts will then be highlighted with a badge and appear higher in News Feed.”
Instagram Extends the Limit for Live Broadcasts
Instagram announced two new options to help users maximize their Instagram live streams.
One big change is that Instagram has extended the time limit for its live streams from the current 60 minutes to four hours. This will help all those who have had to use digital platforms to host discussions and engage their audiences.
In addition, Instagram also is launching a new option that will allow users to archive their IG Live broadcasts for up to 30 days.
To enhance the live broadcasts, Instagram is also working on boosting live content discovery by updating it’s “Live Now” section within IGTV and at the end of each live stream.
Pinterest Adds New Presentation, Discovery, and Ad Options
Pinterest announced new features designed to help merchants maximize reach and sales. The features include new storefront profiles and a new shopping ad format.
To help, Pinterest is working on an updated Shop tab on business profiles. Pinterest says that the “updated profile enables merchants to transform their shop tab into a storefront with featured in-stock products organized by category, featured product groups and dynamically-created recommendations.” Pinterest is also testing a new product tagging option which would give merchants the ability to tag their own scene images with exact products.
In addition to the updated profiles, when Pinners search for shopping-related ideas, they will also be shown a listing of recommended merchants in their search results.
Pinterest is also looking to improve its paid promotions, with a new ad format and a new automated bidding for sales option, which will look to align your bids with your defined ad objective. Pinterest is also adding new Conversion Analysis visualization tools which will make it easier to see how your Pins are performing for different objectives.
Last year, people spent 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media every day.
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