10Yetis - Weekly Dose of Social - Facebook vs Google, Vloggers and the ASA and LinkedIn Lookup

Well it's Friday again, already, and I'm here with your weekly dose of social media news.

Facebook tops Google with news traffic

Today we found out that Facebook has overtaken Google as the top platform for online news traffic. This is great news for Facebook and social media sites in general as it shows how important social media now is for news and discussions. The study took a look at over 400 media outlets sites to see where traffic was coming from and Facebook came out on top. On these particular news sites that were being studied Facebook accounted for 43% of traffic whereas Google contributed to 38% of it.

On top of this news, Facebook is reportedly now in their first stage of testing a standalone breaking news app. The product would become part of the ‘Facebook for business’ area of the company and would allow users to get alerts when a breaking news event occurs as well as the option to follow specific news topics. This shows a strong focus for Facebook to get more and more into the news industry where at the moment Twitter is said to be a leader in this. If testing goes well then this will be the 5th app in the Facebook family.

ASA changes rules for vloggers

In the latest news for YouTube stars, and those that aren’t yet stars, vloggers, there are new rules for working with and advertising with brands. The Advertising standards authority has set up a new list of rules for those who promote for brands on their video echannels. These rule changes have come about after the ASA found that vloggers weren’t making it clear enough that they were being paid to promote a product in their videos. This was noticed especially with the Oreo ‘lick race’ videos that were on YouTube.

The ASA had this to say about the changes: “"Our guidance will give vloggers greater confidence that they’re sticking to the rules which in turn will help maintain the relationship and trust they’ve built with their followers."

LinkedIn Lookup

LinkedIn this week announced a new feature called Lookup. Lookup aims to help workers become more productive by helping them get to know and easily contact their coworkers. This feature has been added after LinkedIn found that 30% of members that search for people on LinkedIn view their coworkers’ profiles. In a following survey they found that 46% of people said that they used LinkedIn to find out more about their coworkers.

So what does it do? Well, it means you can easily find your coworkers by searching by name, or if you can’t remember that you can search by job title, experience, education and even their skills. You can learn more about them with their title, skills and most importantly their work email address! It allows you to see all coworkers details even if you are not already existing contacts. Don’t worry this is only available on the Lookup app and will not make your details public on the LinkedIn app. You can even easily converse with the Lookup app, you can send a message directly through the app which will give the recipient an alert so you can get in touch quickly. They count separately to InMails, so it saves you using your limit to contact others.