This month in social media (June)

June has been a big month for Facebook in particular, with the platform testing out a variety of new features for both users and businesses, making it much more user friendly. Facebook’s own Instagram has also had major changes to their stories feature. Find out below what the updates are…

New grid view for Facebook

It’s been a while since we’ve seen any major changes to Facebook profiles, but the recent test has an Instagram feel to it. It’s currently being rolled out throughout the globe, and gives users the option to view profiles in the normal timeline mode, or grid mode. What this means is that it will be a mosaic style page to highlight posts such as videos and images, in square thumbnails. Text only updates are also shown as images.

Source: WERSM

Facebook’s ‘keyword snooze’ incoming…

This one is still in testing, but it follows up Twitter’s recent feature of allowing users to snooze keywords, in the same way as you can profiles or certain pages, for a 30 day period. What it means for users is the ability to not seen any posts at all that include a certain keyword or phrase, which is great if you don’t like football during the World Cup, or are tired of seeing posts about politics, simply snooze the keywords and you’ll be happier on the platform. This won’t apply to ads however, just organic posts.

Updates to Instagram stories (including shopping)

If you’re an avid user of Instagram’s ‘stories’ feature, which allows you to upload Snapchat style updates to your followers in a fun way, then you’ll have noticed a few new updates recently. One of the main updates is the ability to showcase other people’s Instagram posts, along with what you’re listening to on Spotify, as ‘stickers’ with the ability to move these about and add any gifs or text alongside this.

Instagram is constantly improving the things you can do with Instagram stories, and they’ve added another new ‘poll’ feature, which is currently being tested. This allows a user to ask a question and receive open worded answers straight into their analytics for the post (along with who’s viewed it etc).

And to conclude June for Instagram, they are currently testing the option to expand your ‘shopping’ features into stories, in the same way businesses were using it for timeline posts, you will be able to include a shopping bag ‘sticker’ on your stories update for people to click on and view the product connected to Facebook shops.

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