Skip links
social media news

Social Media News Roundup: March 2019

In social media news this month, Instagram is planning on making it easier to get to where you want to in videos on their app, Facebook wants to improve users’ experience in group chats on Messenger and Facebook ads is looking to change their relevance score for the better.
Instagram Wants You to Skip

Instagram is making it easier for users to find what they want on the social media app as they test new features that will allow people to skip into a video. Video content on Instagram has been limited to sixty seconds, meaning lots of videos have to be cut to allow for them to be shared. Instagram users have pleaded the app to have more controls for videos than just the simple play and pause features and it seems they’ve honoured these pleas with a test feature of a bar that can be moved, so the video can be skipped through.

However, if they do release this feature, it may mean that Instagram will look at making time limits for videos on the app longer.

Organised Replies in Your Group Chat

Facebook have been working on a new feature for their Messenger app this month that will allow users to quote messages and reply to them. This feature is similar to WhatsApp’s tool which helps users to stay on track among large group conversations. Quoting another person in the chat can help you answer individuals quickly and directly, rather than go through the tedious process of having to explain who you’re talking to. Disorganisation in group conversations could be a thing of social media past.

Facebook Plans on Making Ads More Relevant

Facebook is also making improving on its ads features in social media news this month by replacing the relevance score with three new metrics to measure relevance. The original relevance score, which only singularly measured how relevant your ad was for your audience, will now be split into three different components. The elements will be the quality of the ranking, how the ad compares with ads with the same target audience in terms of engagement rate and finally how the ad compares in terms of conversion rates.

These evolved measures of relevancy will be much more helpful for advertisers in targeting their audience more efficiently. You can then align the relevance scores with your objectives and see how well your competitors are performing in comparison.