Last Month in Social Media: Updates from February 2017

February was a relatively mellow month in the social media world.

Facebook, who usually dominates the landscape with updates, only had a few, while smaller players like Pinterest and YouTube had several as well.

Snapchat’s IPO also provided a variety of enlightening data for marketers to use.

Here are some of the top social media updates from February 2017.

Facebook

Facebook’s artificial intelligence (AI) team has built a visual search system that can recognize content that appears in photos and return relevant search results.

Called Lumos, Facebook originally created the platform so that its visually impaired users could understand the content of photos. But Facebook recognized that everyone could benefit from this type of visual search system.

Facebook’s image search system can detect and segment objects, scenes, animals, places, and clothes that appear in images or videos – and understand them.

Learn More: Facebook Search Now Recognizes Objects in Photos

Facebook is changing the way you watch videos on your smartphone. Most significantly: videos in the News Feed now automatically play with sound. Some additional updates include:

• Vertical videos now more easily expand to full screen, whether you’re watching on iOS or Android.
• You can now keep watching a video as you scroll through your News Feed with Facebook’s new picture-in-picture feature.
• The social network announced a new Facebook video app that will be available in the app stores for Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, and Samsung Smart TV.

Learn More: Facebook Turns on Video Sound in News Feed

Pinterest

Nearly seven years after launching, Pinterest is making its first paid search product available to more advertisers. Pinterest search ads will include keyword campaigns, shopping campaigns, targeting, and reporting.

Learn More: Pinterest Expands Search Ads Offering

Snapchat

Snap, parent company of popular messaging app Snapchat, went public. Here are six statistics from Snapchat’s IPO filing that marketers will find interesting.

1. 158 million people use Snapchat every day.
2. User growth is slowing.
3. Snapchat’s revenue skyrocketed in 2016 to $404.5 million.
4. Snapchat lost a ridiculous amount of money in 2016: $514.6 million.
5. Snapchat sells most of its own advertising.
6. Users are spending 20-30+ minutes per day on Snapchat.

Learn More: 6 Surprising Stats from the Snapchat IPO Filing

Snapchat’s IPO filing revealed 158 million daily users use the messaging app for 20-30+ minutes per day.

Here are five interesting marketing trends from a new Snaplytics report, which analyzed 271,000 snaps comprising 24,000 stories from 500 brands in the fourth quarter of 2016.

1. On average, brands post 13 stories per month.
2. On average, about 54.8 percent of Snapchat users who follow brands will view a story.
3. On average, 88 percent of people will view the entire story.
4. The average number of snaps per story was 11. Fifty percent of all stories brands posted had six snaps or less.
5. Video rules on Snapchat. Sixty-one percent of content is video. Images make up the remaining 39 percent.

Learn More: 5 Interesting Snapchat Trends Brands Need to Know

Twitter

The SEJ team conducted a study to answer an internal debate about whether having hashtags intermixed in tweets disrupts the flow of reading, or if it looks cleaner (and takes up less space) if you use existing words in the text and turn them into hashtags.

They survey results indicated 41% prefer adding hashtags to the end of a post. Creating them from existing words came in close at 38%. The final 21% shared they had no preference in this hotly contested hashtag debate.

Learn More: 41% Put Hashtags at the End of a Post [DATA]

@sejournal turn existing words when it fits. Add them at the end when my tweet doesn’t have the words i need. pic.twitter.com/7QnKDaPJVm

— Jose Miranda-Alvarez (@jmirandalv) January 24, 2017

YouTube

Unskippable 30-second video ads will fade to black for good on YouTube in 2018. YouTube has officially announced the end of this hated format.

Learn More: YouTube Is Killing an Ad Format Everyone Hates

YouTube is launching mobile live streaming and a tool to earn money from those live streams – but only for creators with at least 10,000 subscribers.

YouTube promises that eventually everyone will have mobile live streaming. Just not now. YouTube first announced its plans to add live streaming capabilities nearly eight months ago.

Learn More: YouTube Gives Creators Live Streaming, Super Chat

Facebook Image Credit: Facebook

Snapchat Image Credits: Snaplytics