Facebook Corrects Over-reported Organic Reach Data: This Week in Social Media. What’s New This Week Facebook Updates Metrics and Reporting Standards: Facebook rolled out several updates to its metrics and reporting standards to give its partners “more clarity and confidence” about the insights it provides. According to the Pinterest Blog, Explore is gradually rolling out to all users over the next week. Topics include new issues with Facebook metrics and updates to reporting (3:24), Pinterest Explore and checkmarks features (16:04), and Periscope audience and broadcast sharing tools (28:50). Twitter Releases Live Streaming Video App for Android TV: Twitter rolled out its live video app to Android TV. Similar to the Twitter app on other platforms, the Android TV app provides access to “the best of Twitter today plus top global Vine videos and Periscope broadcasts” on big-screen TVs, as well as displaying a running feed of tweets to go with the live video. Medium updated its iOS and Android apps with new features and simplified navigation tools. Twitter expanded its muting functionality to notifications and announced that “in the coming days” all users will have the ability “to mute keywords, phrases and even entire conversations you don’t want to see notifications about.” Twitter is working to “reduce the burden on the person experiencing the abuse” by giving users “a more direct way to report [hateful conduct] for yourself, or for others, whenever you see it happening” with a new Report Tweet option in the menu. Have you seen a change in the numbers being reported in your Facebook Page Insights? Please share your comments below.
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news.
To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week
Facebook Updates Metrics and Reporting Standards: Facebook rolled out several updates to its metrics and reporting standards to give its partners “more clarity and confidence” about the insights it provides. These updates include increased third-party verification to review and validate data on impressions and views, the formation of a Measurement Council that will address the “growing need for measurement standards tied to business outcomes,” a new internal review process to ensure Facebook’s metrics are “clear and up to date,” and regular communication about future updates. Facebook also addressed and corrected several bugs that led to inaccurate data over the last few months.
Earlier this week, Facebook admitted to miscalculating the 7-day or 28-day organic reach in its Page Insights. Recode reports that the new numbers “may differ significantly from what publishers are used to seeing” and cited one incident in which “a metric that measures how many people can see a publisher’s content on its page may shrink by 55 percent.” However, Facebook assures publishers and advertisers that none of the restated numbers affected paid reach and that it “still delivered what [publishers] paid for.”
Facebook points to “bugs in their calculations, not a flaw in Facebook’s methodology” for the discrepancy. According to an announcement on the Facebook Newsroom site, it will fix this bug “in the next few weeks” and will continue “making an improvement to Page organic reach to match what [it has] done for paid reach.”
Pinterest Rolls Out Native Video Pins and New Content Discovery Feature: Pinterest launched Promoted Videos earlier this year and is now testing “a new auto-play version of the experience… [in which] your video jumps right into the action as soon as a Pinner discovers it.” Marketers can include a playlist of videos so that another video automatically starts playing once the viewer is done watching the first video. “In this way, people on Pinterest get a series of ideas from your brand.” Pinterest is currently testing “this engaging new format with a handful of businesses and agencies in the US and UK.”
The autoplay Promoted Videos will appear in a new section on the site called Pinterest Explore. The new Explore section will feature daily picks from top tastemakers, industry experts, and Pinterest employees based what other pinners love and what’s happening in the world around us. Explore will also include a collection of personalized recommendations. According to the Pinterest Blog, Explore is gradually rolling out to all users over the next week.
Periscope Makes Periscope.tv Moments Shareable: Periscope now allows users to share specific moments from Periscope.tv broadcasts with other people on the web. Adweek reports that a new Share Broadcast menu on the Periscope.tv screen prompts viewers “to share a link to the broadcast on Twitter or Facebook with a custom start time which matches the time that they clicked the share button” or “copy custom replay links to share [the broadcast] elsewhere.”
You can now share a specific moment within a broadcast on the web – check it out! pic.twitter.com/fR0GMdihn2
Facebook Updates Inbox to Include Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram: With Facebook’s updated inbox, businesses can link their Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram accounts into one place where you can “quickly scan all three channels for new updates and feel confident that you’re not missing an important message.” Every Facebook interaction in the inbox can show you “basic information about the people who interact with your business” with a simple tap on the person’s name and allow you to “then use that knowledge to personalize your communications with them.” According to the Facebook Business site, “the updated inbox will roll out globally to all users of the Pages Manager mobile app in the coming weeks, and will soon be available on other devices.”
Facebook Opens Analytics and Developer Tools to Messenger Bot: Facebook opens Facebook Analytics for Apps to Messenger bots and invites developers to join its FbStart program, Facebook’s global program to help early stage mobile startups build and grow their apps. By extending analytics support to bots, Facebook is among “the first analytics solutions for bots in the industry to provide actionable insights and transparency.” The reports from Facebook will include information such as “aggregated and anonymized demographic reports such as age, gender, education, interests, country, language and much more to help [businesses] better understand who’s engaging with your bots.” In addition, businesses building bots for multiple pages will be able to “filter results at the page-level to view analytics for a specific Page.”
Snapchat Partners With Foursquare on Location-based Geofilters: Digital Trends reports that “Snap [Inc] has struck a deal to access Foursquare’s location data… [to] power Snapchat’s geofilters.” Prior to this agreement, Snapchat’s geofilters have “generally been tied to broader locations such as cities, major sports arenas and events.” The new partnership with Foursquare “will open up the feature to a lot more people and services around the globe” and allow “a variety of communication signals, including GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to determine where exactly a phone is located.” The expanded, yet specific, range opens the possibility for branded geofilters at every location of a chain of stores or specific types of locations like a beach, park, or farmers’ market.
Our Take on Top News This Week
In this week’s show from Friday, November 18, 2016, Michael Stelzner and guests discuss the top news in social media. Topics include new issues with Facebook metrics and updates to reporting (3:24), Pinterest Explore and checkmarks features (16:04), and Periscope audience and broadcast sharing tools (28:50). Subscribe to future shows here.
More News to Note
Facebook Introduces Community Help and Donations in Live: At its inaugural Social Good Forum, Facebook announced new crisis response and charitable giving tools that “empower [its] community to do more good in the world and help keep them safe.” Facebook introduced Community Help, “a new feature that lets you ask for or offer help, including shelter, food and supplies after a natural disaster,” and expanded Fundraisers “so people can raise money for more than 750,000…
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