It was an epoch-making month for social media companies, especially for Facebook and Instagram, as very important decisions were made in April. Undoubtedly, the most discussed event was the Facebook F8 developer conference and the keynote speech by Mark Zuckerberg in which he declared openly the new direction the company is going to take. And while Facebook stole most of the headlines-so much so that I almost titled this post "Facebook round-up"-other social media networks announced some exciting updates and controversy decisions as well. Without further ado, here is all the news that could drastically change social media marketing.

Facebook

Revolutionary redesign
Among all the main announcements at F8, there is the radical redesign for Facebook's feed, which would both illuminate the mobile application and the desktop version. It will be the most significant design change on Facebook in the last 5 years.
Many people have predicted a long time ago that Facebook would be shifting directions into private communities, and this is the effect of the 'shift' on the redesign.

Mark Zuckerberg, in his speech, stated that there is a "need for closeness and intimacy," moving from the "social media town square" to a "social media living room." The new interface puts the focus on Groups, the private side of Facebook compared to the public Pages. Events will also play a more prominent role in the new version, with a new Events tab right next to the Groups tab. These moves signal the transformation to which Facebook is so keen to become the "privacy-focused communications platform". It also signals that the role and relevance of the News Feed will indeed be much diminished perhaps abandoned outright. One of the key architects of the News Feed, Chris Cox, resigned last month after Zuckerberg announced his new philosophy and planned direction for the company, which helped signal that the News Feed's era was officially over.

Given how much controversy the News Feed has caused in the last few years, it is understandable to minimize its role. But this begs the question: what new ways to advertise on the platform will there be without the News Feed?

At a later stage, Facebook intends to merge the three messaging services into one mega-app: WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. To this date, they are busy improving Messenger for both users and brands.
Changes which took place at the F8 conference aim to make Messenger more accessible: it will take up less space on your phone and will focus on chatting with the people you actually want to talk to. The app will highlight "closest friends", allow you to choose "current status" as well as create video co-watching capabilities. Moreover, Facebook is building a desktop app for Microsoft and MacOS.

Relevant to brands, Facebook gives you more tools to convert in Messenger. Some of the new features it will introduce are as follows:

Booking appointments through Messenger

Lead generation templates for Messenger bots

Easy authentication
As the article in The Verge has described, Facebook has an almost precise vision of developing Messenger as an independent social media app. Maybe, even the News Feed will be resurrected on Messenger at last. At least that is what Asha Sharma believes, who leads Messenger's consumer products:
The opportunity that Messenger has is, we are building a social network around messaging—not the other way around. In messaging you communicate primarily with five friends. If you can build experiences atop those conversations that help you share more and spend real quality time together, that's awesome.

She presented to the Verge's journalist a prototype of the new app, which replaces the People tab of your contacts with content shared by close friends.

"It's a space where I can share into small groups and the people I care most about."

Even though Facebook stated that they are focusing on intimacy and privacy, the new direction for the Messenger app shows a lot of potential for the commercial utilization of brands. At the same conference, it was announced that another messaging app owned by Facebook, WhatsApp Business, will turn into a full-blown e-commerce platform. It will allow brands to showcase Product Catalog and accept payments right in the app.
This also has the potential to benefit brands which want to appear more authentic-the fact that people associate messaging with authentic human contact.

Push for communication

In keeping with the intimacy-focused direction, Facebook really wants you to communicate with people on their platform. And not just the people you know.
Announced at the F8 conference, the Meet New Friends feature will help you discover people in your communities to befriend. It will connect strangers that have something in common-for example, a school or an employer.

The experiment with Facebook Dating, which was launched last year, seems to be going smoothly.

Facebook plans to roll it out in more countries and add several new features, the most 'exciting' of which is Secret Crush: it lets you know which of your friends could be interested in you romantically using Tinder's "matching" principle. Facebook Dating will connect both of you if you both indicate that you like each other, but the other person will never know about your interest if the feeling is not mutual. Twitter Sets a limit to the number of accounts users can follow to combat platform manipulation
Follow, unfollow, follow, unfollow. Who does that? Spammers. So we are changing the number of accounts you can follow each day from 1,000 to 400. So don't worry, you'll be just fine.
Twitter has already taken some steps to prevent follow churn by banning several social media apps which enable it from the platform.
Now they are going even further and limiting the number of users one can follow to 400 a day.
As the official tweet says, this fight against spammers is carried out to harass those people who often use manipulative tactics to gain more followers: they mass-follow people, wait till they follow in response and then unfollow them. Worse, they keep following and unfollowing so you get spammed with notifications. However, some still feel that 400 individuals per day is too many. I sometimes wonder if there will be much more activity and tighter restrictions toward spamming in the future.  Implement the "hide replies" functionality 5/8 We already see people trying keep their conversations healthy by using block, mute, and report, but these tools don't always address the issue. Block and mute only change the experience of the blocker, and report only works for the content that violates our policies. 
 — Michelle Yasmeen Haq (@thechelleshock) February 28, 2019

Earlier this year social media hacker Jane Manchun Wong discovered the new Hide replies feature which gives the author of the original tweet the power to "hide" the unwanted replies from themselves and other users. You still will be able to see the tweets, however, you will need to click through menu settings to do it. The feature is set to launch in June.
Twitter has a notorious inability to handle hate speech and abuse on the platforms.

As part of improvement Twitter has been trying to improve its reporting features and make the process behind evaluating whether a tweet breaks Twitter guidelines or not more transparent.

Last month they also implied that they will be focusing more on identifying abuse with the help of technology.

The platform will try to deal with abusive tweets before they are reported by users. As said by Twitter in its blog post: "The same technology that we use to track spam, platform manipulation, and other rule violations is helping us flag abusive Tweets to our teams for review. Along with our focus on reviewing this type of content, we're also growing our teams in key areas and geographies so that we can stay ahead and work fast in keeping people safe.". Reports give us worthwhile context and a strong signal that we should review content, but we've needed to do more and though still early on, this work is showing promise.

Verification scandal Maybe for the first time in our round-ups, Facebook did not get into much trouble last month. But we couldn't do without controversy, so Twitter bravely stepped up to plate and made headlines with one of the most trivial scandals of the industry. The company officially went out, stating that it stopped the process of verification, while in reality, it continues to verify accounts of those who have personal connections with the company. The company has said little publicly about verification, which it suspended in 2017 following backlash over its verification of a white supremacist.

However, Mashable discovered that more than 10,000 users were verified since then. While some were well publicized, such as the survivors of the Parkland shooting.

But many more lurk in the shadows, such as Twitter CEO's parents Tim and Marcia Dorsey, who themselves received a blue check at some point in the last four months. In the official announcement, Twitter acknowledged that they continue to verify some accounts, but did not provide further details on the selection process. But we are not where complaints are due as Awario itself became verified on Twitter this month. Instagram Instagram begins testing hidden like count

If you use Instagram in Canada, you might no longer be able to see how many people liked pictures in your feed.

Though the like count will still determine how algorithm ranks a post in your feed, you'll only view who liked the post, not the total number of likes.
But that's only for posts others have posted on your timeline-you still view the like count for your own posts.
The test was announced at the F8 conference and forms part of a larger effort to dampen the negative impact on mental health social media have. Instagram wants its users to post more authentic content and "focus on the videos and photos they share, not how many likes they get", and in doing so, battle the low self-esteem issues users might get when they only see thoroughly curated images and videos. Other than that, the platform is also taking its first steps in the fight against bullying by piloting:  A new "nudge" feature that warns users if they're about to comment something abusive. "Away Mode" which allows the users to take a break from the app when needed.

"Manage Interactions" feature, so you can customise the way certain users are interacting with your profile: you don't need to block somebody completely, but not allow them, for instance, to comment your posts — you can do that with this feature.

All these features are still in testing, but if they manage to reduce the negative effect on mental health, then they are sure to be rolled out worldwide.

Erasing the like count might impact the marketing side of Instagram because some influencers will use this to motivate paid collaborations with brands. According to the commentary to TechCrunch, the Instagram representative stated: "We know that this is important for many creators, and while this test is in exploratory stages, we are thinking through ways for them to communicate value to their brand partners."
Introduction of Creator account
Speaking of influencers, Instagram has begun the limited rollout of the Creator profiles that were so specifically designed with the influencer in mind. The Creator accounts are very similar to Business accounts but have some specific features to them. For what it's worth, Instagram says that Creator profiles are best suited to "public figures, producers, artists, and influencers."
As spotted before by Jane Manchun Wong, the account adds four new features:.

Instagram Creator Studio will allow the creator to have an overview of their statistics from the desktop.

Data such as daily and weekly analytics will be accessible to influencers, working with posts, IGTV, and Instagram Stories.

In addition, influencers will have data on when their followers are online, growth insights, and new discovery data.

Additionally, Instagram Creator growth metrics will help users find and know areas where they can improve in reaching their followers.

It also will be displaying the follow/unfollow data so that users get notified about the kind of content their audience prefers. Simplified messaging will help influencers keep up with the crazy amount of DMs they're getting every day. They could rank and filter messages both by relevance, time, and authors. Creators will also have flexible profile controls that allow them to choose how they want to be contacted. This provides easy-to-use profile controls which will enable users to quickly designate a preferred method of contact. Shoppable posts will become available for Creator accounts. This will possibly change the relationship between influencers and brands since from now on the latter will be able to request the actual conversion rate to prove the efficiency of an influencer campaign. The Creator account will considerably affect influencer marketing since influencers will now have much more data to use to guide their growth and report to collaborators.

According to the New York Times, this new feature will be rolled out to 55 creators working with 23 brands. There has been no update yet on when it will roll out to all of us, but I guess by the end of the year we should see it roll out.

New Stories stickers

Instagram introduced the Donation sticker at F8.

The sticker allows users to donate money to the non-profits they wish to support.

Using it will allow you to see how much you have raised by swiping up on the Story, and the full amount of what you see there will go directly to the non-profit you choose.

So far, this feature is only available in the U.S., but Instagram is working to make it available in more countries.
Another sticker wasn't yet officially released but was discovered by Jane Manchun Wong. The Chat sticker allows you to begin a conversation with someone, but by just tapping. There is no ETA yet. LinkedIn Aims to increase the number of engagements, and it introduces new ways to react on posts. According to the update announcement in the blog post, the feature was added in response to user requests. When creating the reactions, LinkedIn considered "what people are already talking about to better understand what feedback they wanted to express and receive.

Apart from making it way more fun to use LinkedIn in general, this update could provide you with a better understanding of how your posts are perceived by the others and what kind of response they evoke. However, which specific reactions will affect the feed algorithm is unknown.

Reactions are starting to roll out now and will be available globally to all members in the coming months in the LinkedIn mobile app and on the web.     Pinterest

Optimizing Ad campaigns to conversions

Pinterest does not typically make an appearance in our roundups, but it's been steadily rolling out new options for businesses to tap into the platform more extensively. Last month, Pinterest rolled out new campaign types for Promoted Pins, which are optimized for certain consumer actions, such as completed online checkouts, higher signups to a mailing list, or lead generation form completions.

According to Pinterest, brands who tested out the new campaigns saw an increase in sales: 
Using conversion optimization, brands like Gravity Blankets achieved a 2x increase in sales and a 58% lower cost per acquisition, according to the company. Flaviar, a club for spirits enthusiasts, saw 409% more traffic and an 8x increase in leads from October 2018 compared to the month before when testing conversion optimization.
And that's all the social media news from April that matter to social media marketers. Do you feel sad about seeing the like count go? Are you comfortable with the brand new world of private social media by Facebook? Let's discuss in the comments!