7 new social media features you need to know this week
Ready to end 2022 strong and enter 2023 with a clear social media game plan? The first step is to make sure you know what’s new on all the sites you need to do your job.
From Twitter 2.0’s never-ending chaos to LinkedIn’s guts, reliable attempts at tweaks at Instagram and even a Google update, here’s what you need to know this week.
There’s never a shortage of news coming out of Twitter these days. Here’s what’s new this week:
- Twitter Blue, the so-called “verification” service that only really verifies whether you have a working credit card, has relaunched after its disastrous first launch. There are some important differences, as NPR reports. First, gold ticks will indicate companies, while gray will be used for governments. But with users so accustomed to the blue verification tick, can it prevent future Eli Lilly-style disasters? The service still costs $8 … unless you buy from iOS, in which case you’ll pay $11 for the same service to offset Apple’s 30% app cut. Users will also have the ability to edit tweets, upload longer videos and potentially see fewer ads.
- Elon Musk said that tweets from 280 characters will balloon to a whopping maximum of 4,000. Twitter designer Andrea Conway tweeted some “early and basic” mockups of what it might look like. While many were skeptical when Twitter doubled its character limit from 140 to 280, it was a good move for Twitter. But this is a much bigger leap. Will it work out?
https://twitter.com/ehikian/status/1599928299844947968
- While this isn’t technically a new feature, you should know that Twitter plans to delete up to 1.5 billion dormant accounts, freeing up inaccessible @handles. If you’ve been wanting a name that no one has tweeted since 2011, this could be your moment to pounce.
Ah, LinkedIn, the anti-Twitter. They just calmly and quietly keep rolling out useful features that improve the user experience.
This week we have new creator analytics. According to LinkedIn, it will help you better understand your audience with additional tools to help you track follower growth, see demographics and even a “breakdown of your follower base by job titles, location, industries, seniority, company size and see company name.” New tools will also help you identify top performing posts in one convenient dash and export insights for easy reporting.
Instagram is reportedly working on new DM labels to help businesses better test the requests they receive. According to Social Media Today, the tags being tested include “Flag”, “Book”, “Order”, “Pay” and “Ship”. This will probably be most useful for smaller businesses, but organizational tools are always useful.
In bigger news, they’ve also released a new Notes feature, which will finally let you communicate with just text. It might sound like Twitter, but it’s not: As TechCrunch reported, you only have 60 characters of text and/or emojis, and you can choose to target either mutuals or a subset of friends. The message will appear in friends’ inboxes for 24 hours.
Other new features include Candid, another BeReal clone, as well as group sharing updates. Read more at TechCrunch.
Finally, let’s throw in a Google algorithm update. No, it’s not social media, but it’s something PR pros need to know. This one is a tweak to Google’s previous “Useful Content” update, and it’s currently rolling out. Read more about the previous update here.
According to Search Engine Journal, this update will expand to include all languages and potentially adjust the signals Google uses to determine whether or not content is useful — though the search engine isn’t releasing details to make it harder to game the system.
If you haven’t been paying attention to the Useful Content update, it’s time to take notice. Make sure you’re writing for people, not bots, and the king of search says you’ll be rewarded with more traffic.
Have you noticed any changes since the original update launched in August?
Allison Carter is executive editor of PR Daily. Follow her further Twitter or LinkedIn.
