This Week’s Social News — February 25
Welcome to the first of Café Social’s weekly social news updates. We’ll keep up to date with all things digital and social so you don’t have to.
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Facebook vs. Australian News
After last week’s sudden clamp down on a super broad definition of ‘news Pages’, Facebook is restoring those Pages. Some businesses, perhaps like yours, might have fallen under this blunt scope so expect to see your link posting privileges restored. The detail around the reinstatement, especially as Canberra’s just passed the News Media Bargaining Code, is that platforms will have an extended period to prove they’ve negotiated deals with publishers that would make them exempt from government arbitration. Yes, it’s still vague but at least it means your content marketing strategy means you can share links on your Page again — and get your traffic back.
Pinterest pin embeds
In more straightforward news, you can now embed Pinterest pins in Word and OneNote if you’d like to. OneNote makes a lot of sense given its use as a virtual notebook — we swear by soft cover Moleskines — and people do use Word in the same way but the functionality only works in the web version of the app. Microsoft says that teachers in particular have been calling out for this tech.
LinkedIn Pages Communities
LinkedIn is rolling out new Pages Updates to help build your ‘brand’s Community’. Internal research apparently shows employees are 60% more likely to engage with posts from coworkers and 14x more likely to their employers’ content than other brands’ content so the new My Company tab is all about encouraging that sense of office community. They’re also expanding LinkedIn Stories into Stories for Pages — including ‘swipe up’ links for all Pages from the outset.
Twitter tweet warnings
Twitter’s also relaunching their warning test of potentially harmful tweet replies. They experimented with the warnings last year but they’re returning the format now for tweets that have ‘harmful or offensive’ language within them. Their test last year of ‘Read first before tweeting’ warnings meant that people opened articles 40% more after seeing the prompt. You might also have seen their new ‘Potentially hacked material’ warning but it’s less clear what constitutes ‘hacked material’ especially given that apparently innocuous vibes and screengrabs are triggering it.
Facebook Shops expanding
Facebook is rolling out the in-app Shop section to businesses in the UK and Canada. Not huge news for Aussies as we’ve had it for a while but it’s just another step down the native ecommerce road. Expect Facebook Pay to attempt to claw some of this transaction cost back as a substitute for the ad revenue it would have otherwise needed businesses to fork out for such straightforward, on-Facebook sales. Facebook Pay is currently rolling out in Australia.
Facebook’s child exploitation crackdown
Facebook’s also announced new measures to crack down upon and remove child exploitation material. Based on learnings from working with authorities on abusive material to date, the social network is rolling out new policies that include a series of warnings on searches and engagement with certain content, improved detection capabilities, and new reporting tools. It’s unfortunate and disappointing that Facebook has to do this at all but any platform with more than three billion users inevitably has to deal with malevolence.
Facebook’s State of Small Business Report
Clubhouse data breaches
Meanwhile, upstart live audio platform Clubhouse has come under fire for data security breaches. Not unlike Zoom early last year, the platform’s huge growth inevitably means there’ll be some teething issues and data security keeps being a big one for growing networks. This particular breach was courtesy of a user streaming Clubhouse audio feeds from rooms straight to their own website but previous breaches have included Clubhouse audio being made available straight through GitHub. Similarly to TikTok data concerns last year, Clubhouse is routing a lot of its back-end through China. If you’re still not on the Clubhouse train because of data security reservations — or because you don’t yet have an invite — don’t forget about Twitter Spaces.
Spotify betting big on podcasts
On the flipside of the audio content spectrum, Spotify is working on a tool to convert written blog posts — like this one — from WordPress into audio content. Spotify owns popular podcast distribution network Anchor through which this tool would work. And given Spotify’s massive investment in podcast king Joe Rogan last year, expect to see them continue to commit to the podcast space as everyone else on the Internet scrambles to produce as much owned content as possible because Netflix is what we all want to be. As part of the Wordpress integration rollout, Spotify’s also letting more users add video to their podcasts which might remind of you another popular medium — television.
