Social Media News snippets: 15 July-29 July

29 Jul 2014

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Below is a look at the last fortnight’s Social Media News, focussing on changes and developments in social networks that you can use to help grow your business. For help and training on increasing sales, boosting visits to your website and improving customer services, please get in touch to arrange an appointment or book me for a phone call.

Facebook and Twitter test ‘Buy’ buttons - Facebook have been testing a ‘Buy’ button in Page Posts and Ads and Twitter have been experimenting with a ‘Buy Now’ Twitter card. The idea is to make it easier for users to shop directly from their News Feed on Facebook and Timeline on Twitter without leaving the respective social networks.

Facebook still growing - Along with their financial results last week, Facebook revealed that the number of Facebook’s monthly active users has reached a staggering 1.32bn as of 30 June, an increase of 14% year-over-year. The number of daily users was 829m, up 19% year on year. Facebook also said the number of mobile users topped 1.07bn and that nearly 400 million users access Facebook only via mobile devices.

Facebook introduce Save button - Facebook have announced a new bookmarking tool dubbed the ‘Save button’ that can easily save content such as links, pages, videos and articles that can be looked at later. It looks sure to be a convenient and popular feature and will encourage users to stay on Facebook for longer. Saved items are private although users can Share them.

Twitter improves Direct Messaging - Twitter looks set to take on Facebook owned WhatsApp with an enhanced version of its Direct Message (DM) feature. Deleting DMs on web and mobile will become more consistent and a user’s entire DM history will be able to be accessed on the Twitter iPhone and Android apps. This follows on from pop-up notifications for DMs which were launched in May so it looks like Twitter are working towards a more fully featured chat system

No more check-ins on Foursquare - Following the launch of Swarm which is intended to be a convenient method of keeping up with what friends are doing, the original Foursquare app will focus on discovery, in a similar way to services like Yelp. If you attempt to check-in on Foursquare you’re now redirected to Swarm. The Foursquare app will undergo a major upgrade shortly to provide personalised search. There’s also a new logo (see below).