This week’s Social Media News snippets

5 Nov 2014

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Facebook bans ‘Like-gating’ - From today, 5 November, a Page can no longer incentive a user to Like a Page. In Facebook’s words, “You must not incentivize people to use social plugins or to like a Page. To ensure quality connections and help businesses reach the people who matter to them, we want people to like Pages because they want to connect and hear from the business, not because of artificial incentives. We believe this update will benefit people and advertisers alike.” Services like ShortStack have removed this functionality from their Facebook Apps. If you are running a competition on your Timeline as a status update, you can still ask people to Like your status update in order to enter your competition. You can also require people to Like a photo, but you cannot require them to Like or Share your Page.

Order your photos in Facebook posts - When you upload multiple photos from a mobile app to Facebook, you can now choose the order they appear in. This gives you the option of ‘telling a story’. Press down on a photo and drag it to the position you want it to appear in. Once you’ve shared your photos, friends will see the story in a new collage layout. Tapping into a photo lets you scroll through the story from beginning to end.

Twitter putting non-followers content in Timeline - You have noticed tweets from people you haven’t followed appearing in your Timeline. Twitter has confirmed that following testing they have now moved to a Facebook type algorithmic approach and are presenting recommended tweets, accounts and topics. Twitter’s Trevor O’Brien stated, “We recently ran experiments that showed different types of content in your timeline: recommended tweets, accounts, and topics. Testing indicated that most people enjoy seeing tweets from accounts they may not follow, based on signals such as activity from accounts you do follow, the popularity of the tweets, and how people in your network interact with them. These experiments now inform the timeline you see today.” This is a controversial move by Twitter who are desperate to attract new users. For many people, the chronological Timeline was Twitter’s main benefit, when compared with Facebook.

5 in 6 Social Messages Sent to Brands Are Ignored - Over the past year the number of messages sent to brands via social media has increased by 77% (Source: Sprout Social) . Regular readers and recipients of my training will know how passionate I am about the importance if listening, so I was disappointed (and staggered!) to learn from Sprout Social that only 1 in 6 of these messages are replied to. It seems that brands are largely ignoring potential and existing customers. However, this does give small businesses the opportunity to compete with brands by paying attention and showing they care about their customers.