This week’s ‘Skim: Why and how Facebook is testing its first “dislike” button of sorts; what drove Twitter to its first profitable quarter ever; why your Facebook Page will begin showing much lower organic reach as of this week; Snapchat paves the path to wider sharing and media use with the launch of the embeddable Snap Map; what platforms are outpacing Facebook’s growth among youth; Snapchat finally gives creators detailed analytics; and much more…
1. Facebook might (kind of) let users ‘dislike’ content
Facebook this week took perhaps its closest step yet to creating a button that allows users to express their discontent on the social network. By trailing what it calls a “downvote” button, the social giant could give users the ability to flag and hide comments on posts (not the posts themselves) made on public pages.
Currently available only to a small subset of US users, the feature provides options to report a comment as “offensive,” “misleading,” or “off-topic,” and then hides the associated content.
Users have been clamoring for a way to show their disapproval of content on the social network, but so far Facebook hasn’t given in. With the social network’s goal of bringing the community closer together, this potential new downvote button is likely as close as users will ever get.
— Taylor Lorenz (@TaylorLorenz) February 8, 2018
2. Twitter makes a profit for the first time ever
For the first time in its 12 years of existence, Twitter recorded a profitable quarter, reporting profits of $91 million in Q4. The reversal was largely due to the social network’s focus on and investment in adtech that provided better targeting and measurement results for advertisers.
Although it recorded slightly less revenue in 2017 than in 2016, Twitter also learned how to cut its net losses by a few hundred million, and its expansion of the character limit from 140 characters to 280 for users resulted in an engagement spike.
Could 2018 be the year of the Twitter renaissance?
3. Facebook redefines how it measures your organic reach, and it will affect you
Starting this week, many pages and brands will notice plummeting organic reach numbers on Facebook, but it’s not because the content you’re producing suddenly stopped working.
In what’s been a long wait since its announcement, the social network this week redesigned Insights and finally implemented a big change in how it measures the organic reach your posts have.
Rather than counting every time your post populates within the News Feed of a user as a person reached, Facebook will now consider only the number of times a post has visibly entered a user’s screen.
Brands will be able to view their old reach equivalents right next to the new ones within Facebook’s Insights tool for the next few months. That should make the transition and acceptance of yet another Facebook overhaul slightly easier to swallow.
Snapchat’s eyeing some new, hyper-shareable territory for its Snap Map product, a recent addition to the app that lets users view a map of the globe and, within it, public snaps based on geolocation. Now, the feature is headed to the World Wide Web.
Though Snap Map on the app also lets users see where their friends have logged into the app recently (assuming they’ve…
