Social Media News Round-Up: 16/07/21
Twitter says goodbye to Fleets
In a tweet on Wednesday, Twitter announced that it will be removing its Fleets feature on 3rd August and “working on some new stuff” instead. Twitter only launched its stories feature towards the backend of last year, but seems to have quickly realised it wasn’t all that popular. Its other new feature Spaces, on the other hand, is where Twitter looks to be investing lots of its time and focus moving forward.
Clubhouse introduces direct messaging feature Backchannels
Twitter Spaces’ biggest rival Clubhouse has announced the rollout of a new direct messaging feature called Backchannels. Its users can now send DMs to friends and connections, share room links via these private messages, and interact one-on-one with audience members. The new feature will be available to both iOS and Android users of the platform.
Instagram tests new re-share sticker for Stories
On Tuesday, Instagram began testing a new re-share sticker for Instagram Stories that aims to enable people to re-share feed posts in Stories in a dedicated format. This comes after the platform’s efforts to discourage creators from simply sharing feed posts via Stories to extend their reach. The new process would instead allow creators to view a listing of feed posts and even Reels that users have recently viewed or saved in the app, and then choose one to reshare as part of a Story, encouraging a more creative take on resharing.
Twitter adds captions to voice tweets
Twitter is now rolling out captions for voice tweets, just over a year after first launching them. When making a voice tweet in the iOS app, captions will now be automatically generated for 11 supported languages, including English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic. Captions will only appear on new voice tweets, Twitter has said, so won’t be available on older ones, but it’s definitely a great step towards improving the accessibility of content on the platform.
Facebook adds new tools for groups, including expert badges
Facebook has announced some new additions to its groups, including expert badges to recognise community experts as well as auto-invites for engaged followers of similar pages. The new expert badges will enable Facebook group admins to assign members as group experts, a label that will then show up on their comments and posts. Admins will then be able to host Q&A sessions with these experts and invite them into group discussions.
Twitter lets users restrict who can reply to already published tweets
Twitter is now rolling out the ability for users to restrict audiences on tweets they’ve already published. The new feature will give platform users more control over who can reply to tweets and moderate conversations that may have unexpectedly gone wrong, without having to remove the tweet altogether.
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