The week in social: Paper shuts down, Twitter Dashboard, and Pinterest shopping

Pinterest introduces new ways to shop

After the introduction of buyable pins a year ago, Pinterest has taken learnings on board and applied them to a set of new offerings to help make it even easier for users to purchase goods straight off the platform. Chief among these is Merchant Profiles, which act like digital storefronts straight on Pinterest, allowing users to browse products with prices from specific vendors. Search has also been further improved, and users can now tap the visual search on any pin to bring up listing for similar items. Lastly, the shopping bag has been overhauled, syncing between platforms with a single log-in, and multiple products can be added from different merchants, positioning Pinterest as a potentially dominant social commerce leader.

Facebook makes big change to News Feed

Changes to the Facebook News Feed are common, but the company announced earlier this week that it is going to be making changes that will further prioritize content from friends and family connections over businesses and publishers. News from connections will now appear higher up in the feed, and this likely means that users will see less content from publishers, causing a decline in impressions and referral traffic. This also indirectly means that Facebook becomes more of the pay-to-play platform it has been transforming into over the past several years, where publishers need to use boosted posts and ads on the platform to reach their total audiences.

More information on Facebook Newsroom.

Twitter Dashboard gets released

Teased out over the previous few weeks, Twitter has finally released the Twitter Dashboard for businesses who are looking to find better way to connect to their users on the service. The Dashboard app is a companion to the core Twitter app, and it helps businesses by identifying key engagements from influencers, or showing when the best time to post is based on audience active times. In addition, the app provides brand new tweet tips, which are suggestions to engage users specifically tailored for businesses. The app is meant to be a solution to businesses that are time and resource strapped, and is available on web and iOS in beta for all US-based businesses.

Facebook updates its social sharing plugins

In an effort to modernize its embedded sharing offerings for websites, Facebook has updated its social share “Like” button, something viewed by people online 10 billion times per day. The “Like” button now removed the mobile Facebook logo, or “F”, and replaces it with the thumbs up, and the “Like” with the number of users who like the content all contained within the blue button. Facebook believes that more people will recognize the thumbs up than the logo, part of the reason for the change. Along with this change comes updates and new sharing buttons that let users directly share, save, and follow on Facebook without having the site or the app open, so long as they are logged in.

Twitter adds stickers to photos

Rumored for weeks, Twitter has just officially sticker functionality, a feature that has been popular on top messaging apps and other social networks for years. When a user takes a photo on Twitter, they are able to add one or more stickers from a constantly rotating list to the photo before they upload it. When another user sees the post, they are able to tap the sticker in order to search for other content that is utilizing it. The feature is rolling out over the next few weeks for iOS and Android app users.

More information on Twitter Blog.

Snapchat attracts more new users than Instagram

According to an infographic breaking down growth of Instagram and Snapchat, it seems that the latter is attracting more users, and growth of the former is hitting a plateau in key regions. Snapchat is generating 25% more new users that Instagram, and in the US, UK, Brazil, France, and Germany, the service has grown by 63% and 76% in 2016. In the US specifically, Snapchat has a 3% increase in growth over Instagram, represented by non-millennial users, outside of the networks widely-considered core demographic.

Tumblr now allows for comment deletion

As a way of giving users more control over what comments appear on the content they post, Tumblr has now given the ability for users to delete inappropriate or negative comments from their content stream. If a comment is not on the user’s own original post, they are given the option to report it to Tumblr staff using the same function.

More information on Tumblr Staff Blog.

Adult Swim debuts new animated show on Vine

Recently Twitter announced that select publishers would be able to create videos on either Twitter or Vine that extended past their normal parameters of us to 10 minutes long, with all regular users being able to post videos up to 140 seconds long. Adult Swim, a programming block owned by Cartoon Network, is one of the first to take advantage of this, as the first episode of the new show Harg Nallin’ Sclopio Peepio will appear on Vine before it is put on broadcast TV. There is no data presently available on unique Vine views versus broadcast views, and it remains to be seen if this is a trend that will expand with video content creators.

More information on Social Times.

Facebook is shutting down standalone Paper app

Facebook Paper, a standalone app that was focused on giving users a design-heavy curated experience to consume content, is being shut down on July 29th. The app received positive critical praise, but never had high usage numbers, a problem that beleaguers many standalone Facebook apps. Although the application itself is being shut down, features like Instant Articles originated on it and have since been carried over onto the core Facebook app. Although the app will be functional until the end of July, it is no longer available to download on the App Store, and was never available for Android.

More information on The Verge.

Pinterest launches new instructional videos

Pinterest has created a series of videos to help businesses better understand how users are accessing the service, and what they can do to better connect to them. The videos, featured on YouTube, cover subjects such as why businesses matter on Pinterest, Pinterest products for businesses, making pins that build brand awareness, and more. The company is planning to release additional videos in the near future.