The changes in social media continue at lighting speed which means it’s time for another look at what’s happening on some of the biggest social platforms and how those changes are affecting marketers in positive and negative ways. Here’s what’s been happening in 2019 so far…

Twitter

Twitter is working toward its promise of “healthy conversation” with the release of new camera features and changes to conversations. Twitter is offering the public a look at its prototype for its “twttr” app that changes the format for conversations. It also made its first major camera update since 2016, making the camera more easily accessible on the app and much more. Read about all the enhancements on NBC News, Twitter reveals big changes to conversations and new camera features.

glee’s Take:  These changes to the camera will provide marketers, especially event marketers, the opportunity to enhance their visual presence for their brands, be more creative in strategy and improve the ways they use user-generated content.

TikTok

Been waiting for the next big social media platform? TikTok might be it. Never heard of it or have no clue how it works? The New York Times wrote a piece about it just for you, human adult millenial to boomer: How TikTok Is Rewriting the World. The Times says this video app, created in China, is changing how social media works, whether you use it or not.  

glee’s Take: After some time, this is the next big one for marketers to watch. It’s only a matter of time before we’ll want to get a piece of the action and figure out ways to monetize our presence on the site. For now, it’s important to keep up with this one—where it is going, how can we use it, what is attracting people to it, so when the time is right (which is probably soon), we can jump in.

Facebook

Things haven’t gotten any easier for Facebook since our last update in July 2018. So besides the one million other changes Facebook is announcing, making, or thinking about making related to privacy and user experience, they did make a change that affect marketers directly. Marketing Dive reports Facebook replaces relevance score, changes ad metrics. The changes that the social media giant are making affect reporting and the ways at which marketers gauge the effectiveness of their ads.

Facebook also announced future changes to user privacy which will undoubtedly affect advertising so we’ll have to watch and see how those changes play out.

glee’s Take: It’s not uncommon for Facebook to change the ad manager platform. It can be maddening to rework reports and identify new ways to prove effectiveness of ads, but Facebook believes these changes will provide more transparency and let’s face it, we can do little but roll with the punches.

LinkedIn

At the end of last year, LinkedIn announced changes to its company pages that have been rolling out early this year. These changes are designed to give administrators more options and more flexibility to manage company pages. PR Daily outlined the four big features in 4 LinkedIn Changes that Affect your Social Media Strategy.

Additionally, in February, LinkedIn announced more improvements to LinkedIn Groups after claiming it’s initial round of changes to Groups last year has more than doubled engagement in groups. In LinkedIn Announces New Groups Features, Catering to Increased Group Engagement, Social Media Today lists five new features that include a Group cover photo and new notifications options for group posts.

glee’s take: These new company pages features seem nice, but I’m not confident they will make a significant impact on how companies use their pages on LinkedIn. The notifications in the Groups seems like a feature that could really add some oomph to engagement, which in my experience with clients that use them has been less than desirable. If this starts to add real value, it might be worth revisiting LinkedIn Groups as a marketing tool.

This is where things stand in the social media universe as of the first quarter of 2019. We’ll update again as the situation evolves.