10 Yetis Insight – Social Media Round-up - New Facebook games and improved safety & tools for Twitter & Instagram

Hello and happy Friday everyone! It's Rhodri here with some of the latest and greatest social media news, enjoy!

Facebook Introduce ‘Instant Games’ for Messenger

Last week Facebook introduced a number of games within their messenger app and news feed. I’m sure everyone remembers not so long ago getting bombarded by CandyCrush requests via Facebook, showing the potential this gaming market has. With the shift to more people using Facebook on their smartphones and more apps becoming available, gaming declined; but the introduction of ‘Instant Games’ is likely to bring a revival.

Users won’t have to download any additional features to play the game, they can just select the new controller icon at the bottom of the messenger screen to play and scores will be recorded to compete with friends. Users will also be able to share and recommend games via their news feed. Facebook claim the games should load in a matter of seconds as they are built in HTML5, and for the moment they will be prohibiting in-game ads and payments. Facebook are leaving money out for the moment because they claim they want to design something that people love before bringing business into the equation.

Twitter provides an updated safety and privacy guide

Many Twitter users at one time or another will have been plagued by internet ‘trolls’ who set out to offend and insult other users online. This can range from some light-hearted joking to some serious abuse. Twitter has struggled with regulating this behaviour so far, as being able to speak your opinion is the whole premise of the platform. Twitter allows people to have conversations, which can often lead to arguments. Although Twitter doesn’t have a complete solution to the problem, they have now provided an online guide to help users deal with online abuse if they need to. It talks them through using:

• The Quality Filter – this removes tweets from your timeline that may contain any threats or offensive language.

• Notifications – You only receive them from the profiles you follow.

• Mute – you can mute any tweets that contain certain words, phrases, usernames etc.

The new guide is especially for younger users who are more vulnerable, but should help anyone who wishes to have a better experience on Twitter.

Instagram add new safety tools for users

Much like Twitter, Instagram has also created features to protect its community from abuse. Although it may be more common on their pages, it is not a problem that is unique to Twitter. Previously, Instagram allowed users to block key words and emojis that they didn’t want to see in their comment streams.

They will be soon rolling out these new features:

• Turning off comments – as well as the features previously mentioned, users will now have full control over comments on their posts, being able to turn them off completely if they wish. This way users can post what they like without the fear of unwanted comments.

• The ability to like comments – Much like Facebook, Instagram have now given users the ability to like comments in the form of a heart icon next to the text. Unlike Facebook, Instagram say that at the moment, they won’t be using the number of likes each comment has as a means of ranking them (putting the more popular comments at the top). Instagram say that this is done with the aim of “encouraging positivity throughout the community”.

• Removing followers with a private account – For some reason, if your account is set to private, you can only block people who you don’t want to see your posts anymore. Now you can remove people from your follower list and they will be notified, meaning you can better control who sees your content.

• Anonymous reporting for users who may be at risk – Instagram is providing a feature where there will be teams that are available 24hours a day to help anyone who may be at risk of self-harming or suicide. User’s friends and family can anonymously report them and they can then be put in touch with organisations that can help via Instagram.

Twitter add a new indicator for direct replies

Twitter has now provided a new tool at the bottom left corner of posts that counts the number of direct replies that a post gets (next to the retweet count). It was rolled out earlier in the month to some users but it is now available to everyone. The tool will also rank the replies based on different criteria, for example, posts from your friends or the author will appear first.

This is a simple but useful addition as it allows people to quickly look at the engagement levels of their posts. It also may end up encouraging more people to join in on the conversation if they see more people are discussing a topic or post.