Things continue to change in social media! There’s never a “dull moment” (or week) in social. These are key social media updates I think you’ll want to be aware of.
If you’re in an area affected by crisis or natural disaster you can check in with your loved ones via Facebook. When enough people post about an incident Facebook’s Safety Check is activated.
If you’re in the affected area you can go to Safety Check and mark yourself safe. If you know someone in the affected area you can check Safety Check for their safe status.
The Community Help feature helps people find and give help. People can offer food, transportation, and shelter to those affected by the crisis. This feature has been added to desktop.
Fundraisers - People can start fundraisers for the natural disaster immediately and quickly get attention for the cause. This feature will let people help even though they can’t physically be there.
Personal notes - A way for Facebook users in the affected area to relay their personal safety status rather than the default utilitarian safe.
Is Safety Check a good feature? People have been asked by Facebook about their safety status even though they’re 6 miles away from the affected area. Will Facebook Safety Check cause more worry than it alleviates?
Facebook is building a world where each and every person has a sense of purpose and community! To do that they've added some new features to Facebook groups.
Facebook is making it easier to connect with like-minded people. So if you're a non-profit, a group of friends or a business that uses groups to build sales if will now be easier to keep the conversation going in your Facebook group.
These digital book alternatives, which are presented as text messages, have been dominating the app charts for the past few months. The format may seem a little strange for people who are used to paperback books, but at least young people are reading.
Chat Fiction Apps are digital book alternatives that teens are flocking to. Viewed in a chat-like format these books include images (for a small fee). The app is free, but you'll have to wait to get the next chapter, or pay the weekly or yearly cost and get the whole book and it's images right away.
Currently, only suspense/horror YA books are available on the apps.
Right now it doesn't look like these these apps have ads or story sponsors. But that could be a way to monetize them in the future.
To compete with Facebook messenger Apple brings customer service and shopping into iMessage in iOS 11. Now you'll be able to open Maps, Safari, Spotlight, Siri, pay for a purchase using Apple pay, choose an airplane seat or schedule an appointment right from iMessage. Right now all Business Chats will be Human to Human, no bots allowed.
Will this make a big difference to businesses? Probably not because there are more Android users than iPhone users.
Uplevel your customer experience and service with buttons in Twitter direct messages. Now you can combine private messaging with links that make it easy to share from a private message to their public Twitter stream or share a page on a website.
If your brand uses more than 1 Twitter account DM's can be shared across all account. This will keep account admins aware of potential issues. ECommerce companies can now share product pages to drive sales and give the customer an easy way to buy.