The week in social: Instagram emoji, Twitter Q1, and Tumblr growth

Pinterest launches program for Marketing Developer Partners

Earlier this week, Pinterest announced a new program for businesses, called Marketing Developer Partners, that helps businesses scale their work and marketing efforts on Pinterest. Pinterest has selected a small grouping of partners that will develop additional uses and extensions of the Pinterest API to help make the service more useful for businesses. Pinterest listed out the first set of partners on an official blog post, including; Ahalogy, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, Newscred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Tailwind. In addition, Pinterest is currently testing an Ads API specifically in the United States, with the intent of helping ad partners and advertisers enhance their work with sponsored content on the platform.

More information on Pinterest Business.

Instagram updates platform with new filters and emoji hashtags

On Monday of this past week, Instagram released 3 new filters for its mobile app. The filters, Reyes, Lark, and Juno, add to an already extensive set of filter and photo editing options on the service. Perhaps even more newsworthy is that Instagram now supports hashtag emojis. This allows users not only to place a hashtag emoji in a comment thread, but makes them discover-able within search as well. This a very progressive move for Instagram, as other social services such as Facebook and Twitter do not support this. It remains to be seen if the option becomes popular, and how other social networks will respond.

Read more on Huffington Post.

Facebook hits 40 million small business Pages

On the heels of announcing several new programs for small businesses, Facebook also announced this week that there are over 40 million small business Pages in existence. This number is an increase from 30 million approximately one year ago. Out of this number, only 5%, or two million of them, are advertising with Facebook, and it is the company’s aim to make it easier for these businesses to reach new audiences. Facebook will begin hosting programs and events across the country to help with Facebook marketing in general, and the Facebook’s director of small business for North America, Jonathan Czaja, said that having a Facebook Page is an “asset in its own right”.

More information on TechCrunch.

Twitter has its Q1 earnings leaked early on its own service

Selerity, a financial data service, earlier this week gained access to earnings reports regarding Twitter its Q1, and leaked them online straight through tweets. Within the tweets, it was shown that Twitter did not have a very successful or expected first quarter, in that it missed analyst expectation. The company reported $436 million in revenue for the quarter, which although is an increase of 74% from the same quarter last year, still falls short of projections. Although revenue has grown for the company year over year, investors are more largely concerned with profit.

More information on Fortune.

Instagram debuts @Music

Being considered by many media outlets as its first content vertical, Instagram is launching @Music, a community focused around music creators and others involved in the industry, under the @Music account name. The genesis of the account came from the amount of content on Instagram that is focused around music, nearly 25% of the most followed accounts are those from musicians. The account will cover a range of different content, from up and coming artists, to music fans, concerts, and studio sessions. The account will also have series-based content, denoted with hashtags, and the account will limit content to just 6 posts for week to ensure each is meaningful.

Read more on TechCrunch.

Tumblr, LiveJournal, and Reddit showing high growth

In a new infographic released from Bitly, online communities LiveJournal, Reddit, and Tumblr are showing significant growth in Q1. Bitly analyzes 600 million links and eight billion clicks, and used this information to analyze the traffic of these sites for Q1. Tumblr experienced a 128% growth in traffic for the quarter year over year, while Reddit experienced a 42% increase, and LiveJournal experienced a 58% increase. LiveJournal’s scenario is particularly striking, because many users migrated away from the service once other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter became more popular.

Read more on Social Times.

Facebook launches a preferred friend option for news feed

Amid many other news feed and algorithm updates from Facebook recently, the company announced that it will now let users choose several friends pages whose content they would like to have appear on top of their news feed. This has not been released for all users, but for those whom it has, they will see a dialog box with an animated dog pop up that prompts the user to, “see more of what you love”. From there, the user has to choose friends, and content from these pages will be prioritized above the algorithm. It remains to be seen if this will be rolled out to all users in the US, or even worldwide in the near future.

Read more on Social Times.

Google Plus finally sends its first ever tweet

Four years ago, Google+ created a Twitter account. And this past week, it sent its first ever tweet. The account was created in 2011, and the first tweet, when sent, said, “Hello Twitterverse! Can we get some love for our #firstTweet?”. The news of its first tweet is particularly interesting, because Google recently announced that Google+ would be split up into two products, streams, and photos. It is strongly considered that by sending a tweet, that Google Plus is positioning itself not as a social network anymore, but that it will still have a strong presence in the digital sphere.

Read more on Mashable.

Facebook encourages users to upload native video

Facebook video has been developing into a significant rival for other services such as YouTube, with general users and marketers alike starting to upload video directly onto the service instead of linking to somewhere else. Facebook has started serving some users a notification encouraging them to upload to Facebook directly, citing that native uploads get more engagement, and statistics can be tracked through Page insights. The notification is not popping up for all users, but irrespective, it may reduce in incidence as more users become aware of native upload capabilities on Facebook.

Read more on Social Times.

Facebook users contribute $10 million to Nepal relief efforts

Facebook has used the “donate now” button for several good causes over the last several years, and the latest of these worthy efforts is to gather donations for relief of victims of the Nepal earthquake on April 25th. The button appears on the top of the news feed, and within two days of it being up, over half a million users donated $10 million to relief efforts. Facebook announced that it would match donations made by users, and it also donated an additional two million on top after reaching the first milestone. Other examples of Facebook gathering donations for a cause included during the Ebola crisis in 2014, and the for the Philippines typhoons in 2013.

Read more on Mashable.