April brought big changes to our favorite digital platforms! Check out these social media news updates to help ensure users have a safe and productive experience on social media. Plus Earth Day gets everyone talking and tweeting. 🌎
Hi I’m Kristin and I’m B. Welcome to this month’s edition of the social media recap where we discuss all the things happening in the world of social media. Here’s the good, the bad and the ugly for April.
In April, Facebook announced that they will be implementing new tools in order to stop the spread of harmful content on the platform. Most notably of these is “click-gap,” a domain ranking system that will stop the spread of questionable news sources by altering Facebook’s algorithm. This won’t fix everything. It won’t keep your crazy uncle from going on rants on Facebook, but it will help stop the spread of unreliable sources on the platform.
In April we celebrated Earth Day. We love seeing so many different kinds of brands showing their support for the environment on social media. It was also great to see the platforms provide tools to help spread the word. For example, Snapchat rolled out a lens that would show everyone how the world would look just 80 years from now if climate change was not addressed. And on Twitter we love a good “hashflag,” that little emoji that you see next to the hashtag. Twitter really nailed it with the one that marks this year’s event.
Instagram is also taking some control in how posts are viewed as they test out removing the like count from posts. The original poster will still be able to see the like count when they click into it, but followers will not. Instagram is leading this charge in an effort to reduce vanity metrics, or people relying on the amount of likes for validation.
Facebook isn’t the only platform that’s worried about the safety of their users. Even though we all want the world to know just how much the world is obsessed with our posts. Twitter is experimenting with enabling users to hide any reply of their choosing on their tweets. The goal of this effort is to improve on-platform discussions and keep their users safe. This is a positive change for both personal and brand accounts.
So that’s it for April. Be sure to follow us on our many social platforms so always stay in the know about social media news updates and never miss an exciting episode.
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