The media update team shares the latest developments among social media platforms:

Facebook Lists

If you’re a regular Facebook user, you’ll know that people post updates to Facebook in various formats: photos, videos, GIFs, polls and live video. Now, you’ll have yet another way to express yourself: Lists.

Some Facebook users have started seeing an option in their status update boxes to create a list of basically anything they want. TechCrunch reported that the ‘List’ option started appearing for some users on 13 February and that it will slowly be rolled out globally.

Users can create lists with coloured backgrounds and can decorate them with emojis. Users will also be able to copy their friends’ lists. For now, there isn’t much more information about this feature available.

Some journalists are of the opinion that the introduction of Lists is another way Facebook is trying to keep the platform personal. It’s giving users another way to express themselves, as opposed to giving brands and publishers more ways to get their content in front of these Facebook users.

That said, it could be a cool feature for publishers to use. Imagine a list of “Five things you have to know about the the future of social media.” It would offer readers a quick way to consume information. Brands could use lists for fun posts like “Eight reasons why we love summer” or “The five coolest features of our new product”.

No Dislike button for Facebook

This week, Facebook also tested a Downvote Button for comments on public posts. However, only a small group of people in the United States saw the test.

The Verge reported that the feature is not a Dislike button. Instead, it’s a function to explore how people could provide Facebook with feedback about comments they see on public page posts.

The Downvote button is said to give users the option to report a comment as "offensive," "misleading" or "off topic." Right now, there’s no indication that Facebook will expand the test.

The problem with features like these is that Facebook could end up being the one to decide whether a comment is appropriate or not.

Yes, it’s good that users have ways to protect themselves from trolls and to filter out abusive comments. But when a company chooses what’s appropriate, it might end up censoring information that’s important for people to know.

More Snapchat Story Analytics

Good news for influencers, brands, and publishers that love Snapchat is that the platform is introducing more analytics for Stories.

Before we get excited: the only accounts that have access to this at the moment are creators who make official Stories or have large followings. TechCrunch seems to have had the scoop on this story too, and shared what these analytics include:
  • Total Story Views in the past week, month and year to date
  • Time Spent Viewing Stories in minutes in the past week, month, and year to date
  • Daily unique story viewers, average time unique viewers spent watching, and completion rates
  • Audience demographics, including gender, top age bracket, and top regions
  • Audience interests
Influencers on Snapchat could really use this feature. It’s hard for influencers to prove to potential sponsors that their Snapchat audience is really as big as they say, or who their audience is, for that matter.

Right now, all that normal accounts see is how many people viewed each Snap in their Story. The content creator also has to look at the figures within 24 hours of posting the Story, after which everything disappears.

If the feature is rolled out to publishers, these companies would, at the very least, be able to measure whether their Stories are reaching the right audience. For brands, this analytics function could be a more efficient way of measuring the success of their Stories and a much easier way to report on them.

The demographic measures will also tell brands whether the audience they’re reaching is their target audience or not. This could be helpful for brands trying to decide whether their investment in Snapchat Stories is worth it.

Snapchat is definitely not holding back on expanding its product to more potential advertisers, like brands, for instance. Earlier this year, the company beat their expected earnings and revenue. It later announced that it was reaching out to publishers, and also, that its Snap Map can now be embedded on digital platforms outside the Snapchat app.

With this latest news, it can only be assumed that the company is ready to turn over a new leaf, after a bad run it had last year. Brands that dismissed the platform as a potential marketing channel might actually have to reconsider it in the future. 

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With so much going on in the world of social media, it’s important to understand how each social channels measurement metrics work. Find out some helpful hints in our simple infographic, What your social media metrics really mean.