Facebook fights the spread fake news by banning modified link previews. If you are a social media manager and you publish posts on Facebook via your client’s business page, you’ll want to be aware of this new initiative. In the past, once you published an update on your brand page, you’ve been able to make changes to the meta description, article headline and image. But because fake news outlets have been able to take advantage of these features to spread misinformation, Facebook is disabling the capability to modify link previews to prevent the spread of false information designed to deceive the public.
If you’re a publisher, how can you gain access to edit links hosted on your own domain? This TechCrunch article shared by Kris Haamer is what you need to read.
Facebook fights fake news spread via modified link previews https://t.co/pmicxUXL88 via @techcrunch
— Kris Haamer (@krishaamer) July 19, 2017
Facebook ‘Groups for Pages’ unlocks fan clubs. Facebook certainly has been busy this week. Another new feature being rolled out by the social giant is the ability for brands, celebrities, publishers and businesses to create Groups connected to their Facebook Page. This was announced by Facebook’s chief product officer Chris Cox last Wednesday.
This is yet another move by Facebook to keep people on the site longer, and it will be interesting to see how this pans out. For now, it’s great news for page owners, since communication and engagement can flow more freely, and messages can be targeted to people who are part of the group. But Facebook is all about monetization when it comes to brands. So there’s got to be a strategy in there that gets people hooked on using these branded groups, then it ultimately costs money in some way. There are some cool use cases here and we’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this.
The only downside with Groups that I can pinpoint right away is that people can still add you to groups without your consent. Doesn’t that bug you? I know it does me. You can opt out of course by simply leaving a group, but when your feed is busy, you may not realize you’re already a member of a particular group. To find out more about this feature, head over to this TechCrunch article.
Traditional TV Viewing: Biggest Decline Coming from Teens, Young Adults. Last week there were so many social posts about the Games of Thrones. I myself have never watched a single episode of the popular HBO series, but I might have to give it a try at some point if I can find the time. I rarely watch anything live anymore, thanks to on demand digital viewing by way of Netflix, Amazon, Hulu and other platforms. Those changing habits (and I know I’m not the only one who does this) drew me to a post from Media Post sharing an interesting study conducted by Pivotal Research about traditional TV viewing, showing a big decline in viewership among teens and young adults.
According to Pivotal Research Group, “12-17 viewers, traditional TV program viewing plus three days of time-shifted viewing (L3) was down 22 percent, while it sank 20 percent among young adults 18-24. Viewing for kids 2-11 was off 14 percent, while 25- to-34-year-olds lost 14 percent.
I believe we’ll continue to see more declines as these age groups are more inclined to binge watch episodes of their favorite shows via their mobile devices than via traditional TV. If you were paying attention to the Emmy nominations, the majority of the shows were from HBO, Netflix and Hulu. This is an important trend to pay attention to for marketers and brand managers. To find out more about these findings, head over to this article from MediaPost.
Traditional TV Viewing: Biggest Decline From Teens, Young Adults @PivotalResearch @nielsen https://t.co/ijQGt7isSd
— MediaPost (@MediaPost) July 18, 2017
Google introduces its own news feed, a personalized stream of news for iOS and Android. Google recently announced they are killing the Google Now brand and replacing it with a news feed on the search giant’s iOS and Android main Google apps. The newly improved feed will allow users to follow topics of interest to them. When you perform searches on the app, results will show a “follow” button along with your results. The categories you can expect to see with the follow button includes news, entertainment, and sports stories. When you click on the button, Google will then bring you related content on the feed.
For now, the new feed will live inside the Google app, but who knows, we may soon see it on mobile and desktop browsers as well. The new feature was rolled out to app users in the US beginning Wednesday and will be rolling out globally over the next couple weeks. To find out more, check out this Verge article shared by Marsha Collier.
Google introduces the feed, a personalized stream of news on iOS and Android https://t.co/bQqsINg2Cl pic.twitter.com/55mwTHvhOI
— Marsha Collier (@MarshaCollier) July 19, 2017
Is Twitter purposefully blocking certain accounts from becoming verified? If you’re not aware of what a verified account is on Twitter, these are accounts that have the blue check mark next to the account holders name. Until recently, only celebrities were given the opportunity to secure the coveted blue check mark. Verification is a great way to show your followers you are what or who you say you are. With the proliferation of spam accounts, I can understand why users want to be verified.
Last year Twitter announced they were opening up the opportunity to apply for verification to all users. But many became frustrated when they applied and received denial emails within days of submitting their application. Many have speculated that one of the reasons for this is that Twitter may be relying on an algorithm that automatically denies applicants instead of manually reviewing applications. I know many long time Twitter users, with amazingly credible reputations and who are very accomplished business people who haven’t been able to get their accounts verified. The funny thing is that it seems that it’s much easier to get your account verified if you’re a guy. That is my observation anyway, have you noticed how many men have verified profiles compared to the number of female profiles that are verified. If you take a look, you’ll likely see I’m not wrong. There’s definitely a disparity. In any event, if you want more information on the verification “process” that doesn’t really work very well, check out this interesting article from TheNextWeb.