10Yetis - Weekly Dose of Social - Twitter removes DM limit, Google and Alphabet, Periscope numbers and Facebook ad updates

It's Friday. The Friday feeling is strong. All you want to do is get your work done and go home and veg-out on the sofa. How about before you do that you take a look at this week's dose of social media news.

Twitter removes DM character limit

Twitter has finally answered many avid tweeters' requests by overhauling the direct messaging feature of the site and app. Previously direct messages were limited to the same 140 character limit as tweets themselves. The change now allows users to send direct messages up to 1000 characters long, which is very useful when longer discussions need to take place. Then change has already begun rolling out on android and iOS, if you've got the latest version the app installed then you'll be able to take advantage of the change. the change has also rolled out on Twitter and Tweetdeck, though if you're living in the past and still DM-ing via text, unfortunately you will still have the 140 character limit imposed.

Google under Alphabet

Google had one of the biggest announcements this week when it announced the creation of Alphabet. Alphabet is the new overarching company which will be the name for a collection of companies, one of these companies is of course, Google. The creation of Alphabet allows Google to split of certain areas of their business into smaller subsidiaries. They've done this so that Google can be focused as an internet company and some of their other ventures such as their healthcare research, their manufacturing and other experiments can be focused on separately. As part of the change, Sundar Pichai has now taken over as CEO of Google, the new slim-lined version that is and Larry Page is now moving on to take a greater focus on Alphabets bigger and newer ventures.

Regarding shares and how that will work Larry Page said this in his blog:

"Alphabet Inc. will replace Google Inc. as the publicly-traded entity and all shares of Google will automatically convert into the same number of shares of Alphabet, with all of the same rights. Google will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Our two classes of shares will continue to trade on Nasdaq as GOOGL and GOOG."

This is an exciting move for the company who will now be able to focus on branding their smaller companies and creating strong smaller companies in their own right.

Periscope

Periscope have shared some new figures which give a good insight as to how it's going for the fairly new live-streaming app. On the 2nd of August the app surpassed 10 million accounts. Thats 10 million in 4 months! Pretty impressive when you think about it like that. They've also released a new graph which shows the amount of video watch a day on the app and that now there are over 40 years of video watched every single day on the app! Their daily active users have also seen an impressive increase since launch from around 200,000 to now almost 2 million! Though in their latest blog, Periscope say that they are most interested in focussing on growing the amount of video watched rather than the amount of daily active users because it matches their core principles. They don't want to focus on getting downloads using marketing to drive downloads, instead they are focussed on making the platform better so that they can work to improve the user experience.

Facebook ads

This week Facebook announced 'a significant expansion of ad types and formats available in the Audience Network' which in simple terms means that they've updated tools available to advertisers on Facebook. The changes promise better results for advertisers as well as users of the app. They've introduced the use of native video for advertisers, which is ideal as the uptake in the use of native advertising has been huge on facebook. They've also introduced unique formats for interstitials, which you will have to read more about over here. Basically it includes carousel ads, dynamic product ads, but the lovely Kalli has gone into more detail on what it means for both advertisers and users. http://www.10yetis.co.uk/news/why-facebooks-new-ad-update-is-actually-kind-of-a-big-deal