Latest Social Media News snippets

16 Dec 2014

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Welcome to our latest social media news snippets. To help you keep up to date with the latest changes in social media and improvements to social network functionality, here are some developments and news items that caught our attention.

You can now search Facebook posts - Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+ have had the ability to search tweets and posts since they were launched, so it’s always struck me as odd that Facebook didn’t have this functionality. But at long last you can now search posts that have been shared with you. This is an enhancement to Facebook’s Graph Search that was launched in January 2013 - learn more. My guess is that it won’t be long before Facebook take the opportunity to monetise this search feature in the same way that Google do with Adwords. If you’ve not yet got this feature it should be with your shortly.

Facebook remove Bing search results - With the focus now on searching Facebook content (see You can now search Facebook posts above), Bing web search results have now been removed from Facebook.

Facebook add Call to Action buttons to Pages - Organic reach of your Page posts might be declining but here’s some great news for small and large businesses alike. Pages can now feature a ‘call to action’ button such as ‘Sign Up, Book Now, Contact Us, Shop Now to the left of the Like button. This feature which should help businesses convert visitors to customers is being rolled out in the US and is available on a few UK Pages.

New Publishing Tools from Facebook - There’s more good news for Facebook Page owners with the introduction of two new publishing tools - Interest targeting and Post end date.

Select Targeting and Privacy for Posts (see above) to enable these options which you can select beneath your post (see below).

Interest targeting allows Page Admins to select a subset of people who have liked their Page to publish too. End date removes ‘old’ posts from the Page at a date eg a post on a competition that closed last week.

Facebook introduce Trending App - In yet more Facebook news, the world’s largest social network has turned the trending feature it introduced in January 2014 as an app. Facebook say, “…we’re bringing Trending to mobile and making it easy for people to explore stories from different sources.” It’s available in the US on Android now and in other countries and on iOS in due course.

Google+ introduces pinning - Taking a leaf out of Facebook’s book, Google+ have introduced pinned posts. For greater visibility, you can pin your post to the front and centre of your Page or Profile. It will stay there until your unpin in.

Twitter improves abuse reporting - Twitter has made it easier to report abusive tweets and to block abusive users. A big improvement is the ability for a observer of abuse to report a tweet as well as the abused tweeter.

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