With lockdown still ongoing all over the world, various brands have been working around the clock to come up with new tools and features to help their customers and brands alike. Let’s look at the latest updates that carious social platforms released recently.
Recently, Facebook has revealed some new features that will support small businesses that are impacted by COVID-19. These features include the ‘Support Small Business’ stickers for Instagram and a recent update to the Facebook messenger that will help improve direct response.
These new stickers on Instagram will allow users to share thumbnails of their latest posts from any business they like, directly into their stories.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, they are encouraging the use of #SupportSmallBusiness that should help users in discovering small businesses in their main app. Facebook is also adding ‘Business Nearby’ elements, that will allow users to find some local business around them based on their location.
Facebook also outlined some of the challenges they have been facing related to advertiser verification. Rob Leathern, director of product management at Facebook mentioned these challenges in a twitter thread:
- Not every small business has formal registrations
- There are third party business databases that can highly variable in quality.
- There are regulators or local authorities who aren’t verifying the information themselves.
- Since business are easy to create, its easy for an individual to hide.
Pinterest recently added a few new tools that should help users track their ideas and inspirations. Pinterest has added new notes option that can be found within the boards, allowing people to add any details they want on the pins.
This is possible inside the boards, users will be able to create to-do lists or write down ingredients they need to grab from the store, all this without leaving boards behind.
They have also added a date option, which allows users to mark a board on a date for archiving. This option can also help you keep up to date with things that might be coming in the future. A great tool for brands when they want to keep track of any future events.
Pinterest introduced a new guide that helps a user create a board easily. Users will be able to categorize their pins and it will also recommend pins based on the categories you have mentioned, to add to the boards.
A few days back, Pinterest also launched an updated version of Shopify integration, which should help brands create better shoppable product pins. This new update allows merchants to quickly add their product catalogs directly into shoppable pins. And, the app will automatically create a connection, merchants don’t need to edit any piece of code.
YouTube
YouTube has fast-tracked the launch of Lift for YouTube being watched on TV screens. This allows advertisers around the world to add surveys in the videos to track the response of users related to ads on TV.
YouTube mentioned that these surveys are now optimized for the big screen and can be operated with TV remotes. This should allow people to quickly add a response to the surveys or they can choose to skip them.
To continue their fight against misinformation on the platform, Twitter recently added a new set of labels to alert users about harmful content in different tweets.
Twitter explained that it can be helpful for users to see additional resources from trusted sources amid conversations. But since there’s harmful information available as well, they have added new labels for tweets that will contain misleading information about COVID-19 to warn users. And this update will be applicable to all the tweets, even the ones sent before today.
