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LinkedIn Company Page Updates Rolling Out

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A new generation of LinkedIn company pages is coming! The new design comes with a lofty promise:

“We significantly revamped Career Pages to make it easier for you to tell an authentic story about your culture and careers, improve discoverability of your jobs, and give you robust analytics to measure performance and optimize results.” —LinkedIn

I’m excited about this one. The design is much cleaner and will provide dedicated tabs for two of the most important things on your brand’s page: job postings and your company culture. The latter is on display in the new “Life” tab, where you’ll be able to share photos of your team and your office, as well as blog posts about—or even written by—your employees. The new setup also comes with enhanced analytics to help you keep track of your page’s performance.

Check out Uber’s LinkedIn company page to see the new layout in action. Unfortunately, unless you’re a Career Pages client, you’ll have to wait for the new design to roll out for your brand—so sit tight, and drop us a line when you get access to let us know what you think!

Instagram Stories Featured on Explore Tab

You’ll remember that Instagram Stories—the Snapchat Story knock-off— was introduced in the last few months. If you’re active on Instagram, you’ve probably noticed that more and more people (and, to some extent, brands) are taking advantage of the feature. It seems that Instagram has noticed and is doubling down on the Stories effort, as they’ve now given it top billing on the app’s Explore tab. We expect the Stories feature to continue growing in popularity as more people discover and interact with it, and as brands get more comfortable working it into their marketing plan.

Another note—if you’re using a Windows 10 tablet, it’s your lucky month! Instagram announced that you now have access to a native app. Welcome to the club.

Facebook Offering New Mobile Advertising Options for Retail

If you’re running social for a retail brand with multiple locations, this one’s for you.

Facebook just came out with what they’re calling “dynamic ads for retail.” Now, Facebook ad campaigns can link with your local product catalog in order to “dynamically showcase products available in the store that are closest to the person seeing the ad.” This means you won’t have to worry about advertising for a product that isn’t available at the local store. Along with that, the ads offer the ability to display product summaries and similar products, and you’re now also able to give users the option to contact the local store. Not bad!

Snapchat Playlists

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We hope you got a chance to bid a fond farewell to auto-advancing Snapchat Stories this month!

In an effort to make individual Stories easier to watch, Snapchat announced that Stories will no longer continue playing back-to-back after you tap the first one. Instead, when the story concludes, you’ll be taken back to the list.

While they got rid of the auto-advancing feature, the company instead built a Playlist function. This function allows you to scroll through the day’s Stories, select the ones you want to watch, and then play all of the selected stories in one fell swoop. This feature will make it much easier to navigate the content you actually want to watch, without needing to swipe past the friends you don’t want to see.

This update feels to me like an easier-to-swallow version of Facebook’s infamous Newsfeed update that began the “curated” feed craze that continues today. Except instead of Facebook’s algorithm deciding what we want to see, Snapchat has given users the ability to choose for themselves.

Also of note, Snapchat has now officially become “Snap Inc.” The new name coincided with the announcement of a new tech eyewear product, Spectacles, as well as reports that the company is planning to go public. There’s a lot to keep an eye on here—whether through Snapchat Spectacles or not—so we’ll be sure to follow up on these developments next month.

#TNF on Twitter

ICYMI, the big thing in Twitter news lately—apart from its financial woes and its failed attempts to sell to companies like Disney and Salesforce—has been a focus on live content. The current centerpiece of this effort is a partnership with the NFL. Twitter paid a reported $10 million for the rights to stream Thursday night games for free on the platform, giving viewers access via the mobile app, website, and connected devices such as Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV and Xbox One. The first game reached over 2 million people (compared to 15.4 million viewers on TV). Not too shabby.

Debates on YouTube

Live streaming is the big story on YouTube this month, too, with the presidential debates being streamed to millions of viewers via multiple media outlets making use of the platform. The first debate, which was widely—and accurately—expected to be the most watched in history, also broke YouTube history with “nearly 2 million live concurrent viewers and 3 million live watch hours across the six news organizations that streamed the debate on YouTube.” The second debate went on to beat that number by 40%.

TL;DR: The social media live streaming battle—between the likes of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and more—shows no signs of stopping.

Pinterest User Milestone

Everybody’s favorite wedding planning website announced that the platform now has over 150 million active monthly users.

This still puts it way behind other social platforms—Facebook has over 1.7 billion active monthly users, Instagram has 500 million), Twitter has 300 million—but, that 150 million number means that Pinterest’s user base has seen incredible 50% year-over-year growth. If that trend continues, they won’t be far behind platforms like Twitter for much longer.

Pinterest also seems to have done a good job with attracting more men to the site, with the demographic growing by 70% to make up 40% of signups in the last year.

A new marketplace for hiring creative influencers—the aptly named Pin Collective—was also announced in October in an effort to “connect businesses with Pinterest’s best content creators.” While the program is still in its infancy stages, Pin Collective could become an excellent resource for marketers looking to cash-in with killer designs on Pinterest. Check out their website for more information.

FYI: Google+ is still here

This TechCrunch headline says it all: “Google+ turns 5 and is somehow still alive.”

The butt of many “Facebook ripoff jokes,” Google+ actually continues to be incredibly useful for brands who want to show up first in search results (i.e. everyone!). While the social network might not be the best place to build a loyal brand following, it’s an easy tool for inserting content into search results through Google+ posts, which often show up on the first page of a search.

If this is news to you, take a moment now to sign in to the Google My Business dashboard—which is the best place from which to control a Google+ business profile—and make sure you know how Google is displaying your brand to the world across search, maps, and, yes, even Google+.