The Changing Landscape of Social Media
This week has been a week of both enacted changes and announced changes for the future on several social media platforms. Some you may have noticed, while others may not have phased you depending on how you use social media.
Twitter Doubles Character Limit
On Tuesday Twitter finally rolled out a new character limit of 280 characters- double from the previous limit of 140 characters.
With the new character limit, they’ve removed the character countdown that used to appear while composing tweets. In its place, they’ve added a circle that fills in with blue as you use up your allotted characters before turning orange when just 20 characters remain.
Links continue to count for 23 characters in tweets, however, with the increased character limit, links won’t be as large of a constraint when composing tweets.
However, while you now have 280 characters to share your thoughts, Twitter continues to ignore user’s desire for an edit feature.
Snapchat’s Poor Earnings Spell A Need for Change
According to The Washington Post, “the firm is ‘having an Everest-like uphill battle getting new advertisers onto the platform,’ said GBH Insights analysts Daniel Ives in an emailed note to investors after the earnings report.”
As a result of poor earnings, and the failed launch of Snapchat Spectacles, “a pair of smartglasses dedicated to recording video,” one year ago, costing the company nearly $40 million, Snapchat’s Chief Executive Evan Spiegel has announced potential drastic changes. If you aren’t prepared for a major overhaul of the way Snapchat looks, acts and feels, here’s your forewarning to get ready. Change is coming, and even Spiegel isn’t sure how it’s going to be received.
Among the potential changes to Snapchat’s platform, is an algorithm that will rearrange how your stories appear when accessing the app. If you aren’t sure what an algorithm is, just take a look at how stories are curated on your Facebook and Instagram news feeds. Nothing is in chronological order, but is instead presented based on its popularity and Facebook’s opinion of whether or not it will interest you.
So, while the future may currently be uncertain for Snapchat, my hope is that some of the upcoming changes will actually be positive for the platform- for instance:
- Let me see how many followers I have by a number, not just a long list
- Fix the bugs in how stories are saved to the memory roll so that stories don’t end up failing to get saved
What changes would you like to see from Snapchat?
A Small Change for Facebook Pages
If you don’t manage a Facebook page, then this is something you may not have noticed. Although, even if you manage a page, you might not have noticed it yet. While managing Facebook pages, in the past (or at least until relatively recently), you had the opportunity to invite the people who had liked a post on your page to in turn like your page. It would appear that this is no longer available for some pages. Does this affect how you obtain new likes on your Facebook page?