Social Media Monday – RS Digital News Digest
In this ever adaptive environment that we call social media, it can be difficult to keep track of everything that is going on. Introducing Social Media Monday (#SocialMediaMonday), a roundup of social news and events from around the web displayed in bite sized chunks for easier reader digestion. Here at RS Digital, we want to keep you in the know with everything going on in the social space. We break down the news by social network so it’s easier to look for what you’re interested in.
This week has been a slightly larger one for Facebook with two major updates hitting us. The first being the mass roll-out of Facebook Graph Search for users who set their language to US English. Facebook have stated that users in all languages will receive Graph Search eventually but US English users are the first. Graph Search introduces an overhaul of the searching algorithms in Facebook with new ways to search for people, products, pages, groups and so on. Graph Search adds a new level of depth when searching within Facebook as illustrated by this example search for RS Digital:
As you can see, Facebook already prompts us for other options with searching for content relating to RS Digital. When you click through the “See more results for “RS Digital”” we’re shown even more:
Facebook is creating specific ‘Graphs’ of content for any given search term. Creating these kinds of graphs for searchable content is designed to make it easier for you to discover more about the content you’re searching for. Graph search comes as part of Facebook’s partnership with Bing. The “ranking solutions Web Search” is also powered by Bing.
The other main update from Facebook introduces a change to the news feed algorithm when browsing. This update takes into account stories that may not have been seen because a user didn’t scroll down long enough, even though that story might have matched the user’s interests/behaviours. Putting it this way, if there’s a specific page/profile that you interact with a lot (likes, comments re-shares etc) then this page/profile’s posts may appear higher up in your newsfeed, despite the post being old. Facebook is moving away from the strictly time stamped based news feed rankings and trying to make your most relevant posts from your most influent pages/profiles appear higher. The official Facebook post for this algorithm update can be found here.
In the wake of the NSA PRISM scandal, a greater focus has been placed on retaining and respecting user privacy with their data. Twitter (among other social networks) has taken action and is making efforts to support issues users are having with their data privacy. Twitter is doing this with the formation of a Political Action Committee (PAC) to address user concerns with government access to data, pushing free speech online, copyright law and promoting internet freedom. Twitter’s PAC is appropriately named “Twitter#PAC” and the company have hired their first Lobbyist to head up the initiative.
Google+
According to Google, they are going to be retiring the Google+ Local IOS app as of the 7th August. From what we can tell, this is in effect as the app can’t be located on the iTunes App Store anymore. Google have removed the app to pave way for the new updated version of the Google Maps App. The new Google Maps App has the majority of features from the previous app as well as a host of new functions such as the ability to review, search by category, read place information, pricing and share the places you’ve been to. From the 7th August, the app will no longer be in use although previously left reviews will still be viewable on the website and in the new app.
