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Facebook continues its focus on Groups in its quest for ‘meaningful interactions’ on the platform, as it announces a broad rollout of its mentorship programme, matching mentors and mentees via Groups for one-on-one interactions.
More than 200 million users are members of Groups, presenting brands with a potential opportunity to build on Thought Leadership and CSR programmes with a highly personalised approach, if the right individuals are available to act as the mentor.
Mentorship is available to people within select groups focused on parenting, professional and personal development.
After last week’s news that YouTube was adding vertical video support on its web app, the trend continued this week with the launch of Google’s Cameo.
Only available to actors, athletes and other public figures, the app allows them to select commonly searched questions about themselves and record short, vertical video responses.
As the format becomes more prevalent, both demand and uptake are bound to go up (despite the groans of traditional video aficionados!)
With a focus on connecting people and businesses, Facebook rolled out developments which included an update to Facebook Pages.
Pages on mobile are being redesigned to make it easier for people to interact with businesses on a local level, accommodating things like restaurant reservations, appointment bookings or a collation of the most recent photos, upcoming events and offers.
Recommendations will also be more prominent on Pages and there’ll be more focus on the ‘events’ function.
LinkedIn reported that it now has 575million users worldwide, showing slightly above average growth when compared to the other social channels over the past 16 months.
It also supplied a breakdown of demographics, showing that the UK has around 25million of those users. While it’s important to differentiate that these figures don’t reflect ‘active users’ (estimated to be more like around 144million in total), it still shows that LinkedIn is in a strong position to compete with Facebook’s recent addition of job posts.
All platforms are continuing to participate in the conversation on safety and free speech on social media, addressing the issue of widespread public distrust when it comes to public perception of social vs traditional media outlets.
Twitter outlined how its rules have changed in response to public conversation, and described them as ‘a living document’. Facebook’s Hard Questions, a series exploring the most challenging issues the channel confronts, hosted a discussion about “the line between hate and debate”.
Facebook launched multi-player AR games in Facebook Messenger. While this may not present an immediate opportunity to brands and businesses, any developments which take this sort of technology more into the mainstream could present a sign of growing trends to come.
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