Google furore, Facebook updates aplenty, Apple Clips and Instagram censor - Social Media News – 10 Yetis Insight

Happy Friday! TGIF! Catch up on the week's Social Media news here and enjoy your weekend!

Google Furore

You probably heard about this earlier in the week, but Google has been in some serious boiling water, after one of the world’s biggest marketing companies, Havas, pulled all their advertising from the platform; this includes PPC adverts and YouTube advertising. It is reported that Havas spends around £500m on all forms of advertising across a year, so you can see how this is a big blow to Google’s ad platform.

Havas have pulled their advertising due to lack of confidence in Google upholding standards when considering placements of adverts. Many major brands found their adverts being placed alongside offensive or inappropriate content.

Google have responded by saying that they will be making changes to the system, giving brands more control over where there content will appear.

“We’ve begun a thorough review of our ads policies and brand controls, and we will be making changes in the coming weeks to give brands more control over where their ads appear across YouTube and the Google Display Network.” – Ronan Harris, Managing Director of Google UK.

Posts appearing in tabs on Facebook

Facebook, forever rolling out and testing new features, have quietly begun testing a new element which allows you to keep track of posts you’ve commented on. When you’re following a post it appears in a tab at the bottom of your desktop where Facebook messages appear. When a new update happens on the post you’re following, you will get a notification number on the tab, again much like you would with a messenger tab. Facebook haven’t yet officially launched this feature, but it is a great way to keep track of a post conversation without having to leave the newsfeed.

Reactions and mentions coming to messenger

More Facebook updates emerging this week with the addition of reactions and mentions on Facebook Messenger. The reactions work much like they do on a normal Facebook post, you hold down on the message you want to react to and then you get the usual reaction choices as well as a thumbs up and a thumbs down option.

You’ll be able to see how someone has reacted to your message at the lower corner of the text which will be the opposite side to where you can see who has seen your message.

Mentions allow you to tag someone and specifically mention a person within a group message to help draw their attention. When you mention someone in a group message they will receive a notification to their phone saying which message they’ve been mentioned in and who by. Don’t worry, if you have annoying friends who like to bug you, you can turn off these notifications in your settings.

Apple clips

Apple has stepped up out of nowhere with an attempt to compete with Snapchat and Instagram with a new app that reminds me a little of the now deceased Vine. RIP.

The new app is called Clips and is not actually a social network, but more a creative app which allows you to share to social networks.

The idea is to create short stories using photo and video; it has a well-designed, simple to use, user interface, which Apple is known for creating. It has strong editing capabilities for such an easy-to-use app, allowing you to reorder frames and shorten clips, add on filters, as well as an entire bank of fun music to use as a background for your clips.

The app allows you to share your masterpiece to sites such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Vimeo. Clips is meant to be launching in April, though we’re still waiting to see if that is a worldwide release date.

We’re not sure yet whether this app will be a success; will the creative capabilities of the app override competitors such as Instagram and Snapchat’s offerings? We’ll have to wait and see!

Instagram to censor sensitive content

Instagram is taking a new step in trying to prevent minors, or the easily offended, from seeing sensitive content. The social media platform is going to blur out posts which they deem to be sensitive (there’s no official news yet on what this may include). It has been suggested that this could be posts that the community find offensive but that don’t violate the content guidelines on Instagram.

There’s a long history of complications with Instagram and sensitive content and what actually constitutes as violating the guidelines, with one of the arguments about female nudity on Instagram actually being a big point of focus in the #FreeTheNipple campaign.

I imagine Instagram are hoping that this new feature will calm those who are annoyed that their content gets removed, whilst also appeasing those who find the content offensive.