The Weekly Roundup: 7.6 – 7.12

Yet again Facebook has updated its News Feed – giving more control to the user. LinkedIn Publisher has reached 1 million posts. What else happened this week?

Facebook Updates News Feed Controls

• Facebook announced several new ways for users to control their News Feeds, including the official rollout of the See First feature it began testing in April.
• With the new controls, users will be able to:
  1. Choose which friends and pages they would like to see atop their News Feeds. – Within News Feed preferences, tap on a friend’s profile picture to see their posts first. You will then see any new stories they’ve shared since your last visit to Facebook at the top of News Feed, with a star in the top right of their post so you know why they’re at the top.
  2. Discover new pages. – Based on the types of pages you’ve liked in the past, you can discover new pages in order to get more of the stories you care about.
  3. Easily unfollow or reconnect with friends and pages. – With an updated design of the tools we previously launched, you can now see a list of the top people, pages and groups that you’ve seen in your News Feed over the past week, and choose to unfollow any friend, page or group if you don’t want to see their updates. You can also see who you’ve unfollowed in the past and choose to refollow them at any time.

Instagram Averaging More Organic Growth, Engagement Than Facebook 

• Instagram continues to grow organic followers and engagement at a much higher rate than parent company Facebook.
• Organic follower growth averaged 1.48%, compared with 0.2% for Facebook.
• Brands averaged 2.41 posts per day.
• 77% of all posts were photos.
• Only 8.23% of posts were videos, but they accounted for 11.6% of all comments.
• Organic engagement per post was 2.61% of the total audience, versus 0.55% for Facebook.
• Photos engage 2.69% of the total audience, while that number drops to 1.47% for videos.
• 2% of all engagements were hearts.

LinkedIn Celebrates 1 Million Publisher Mark

• LinkedIn hit a major milestone, as more than 1 million users have written a post on the site.
• The million-plus unique writers generate more than 130,000 posts per week.
• Roughly 45% of the readers are in the upper ranks, such as managers, vice presidents and C-level executives.
• The top content-demanding industries are tech, financial services and higher education.
• The average post now reaches people in 21 industries and 9 countries.

Meerkat Introduces Cameo, a Way for Viewers to Interact With Stream — and Facebook Integration

• Meerkat this week introduced a new feature that allows viewers to take over and contribute to a live feed on the app. Called Cameo, the feature allows the filmer to select a viewer to appear on screen for up to 60 seconds.
• “It’s a simple yet powerful way to create a deeper human connection with people — going from “broadcasting to” towards “broadcasting with.” — This is the first of many steps to come towards our long-term vision for participatory live-streaming.”
• How can you find friends on Cameo? Through Facebook. After Meerkat saw its connection to Twitter slashed, the app integrated Facebook permissions: You can now connect your Facebook profile and we’ll automatically let you know when one of your friends and Pages you follow join and start streaming.

Facebook Lets You Float Videos

• Facebook is tweaking the interface for videos displayed in its newsfeed, allowing users to float videos from the newsfeed so they can continue watching them while scrolling through other content.
• The feature is enabled by a button that appears in the lower right hand corner of the video player, in the same bar as controls for full screen mode and volume. When the user presses the button the video pops out of the newsfeed and continues playing in the lower left quadrant of the screen, but can be dragged elsewhere.
• The float function is currently only available to some users, although a broader rollout will probably follow.

Instagram Adding Support for 1,080 by 1,080 Images

• Instagram will add support for images that are 1,080 pixels by 1,080 pixels.
• Instagram told The Verge it started gradually rolling out support for the larger images across its iOS and Android applications last week, but there were no plans to do the same for its website.
• Images are currently limited to 640 pixels by 640 pixels.

Twitter wants to know your birthday so it can shower you with balloons and ads

• The social network today introduced the option for users to set their birthdate in its settings menu and have it appear on their profile.
• Twitter says the new feature will allow people to celebrate your birthday more effectively.
• Users who do fill out their birthdays can choose who sees the information, making the date either public, open to followers, or restricted to themselves only.
• But no matter the privacy level you set, Twitter will use the information for marketing purposes: a note in its support database confirms that the social network will use your birthday “to show you more relevant content, including ads.”