The week in social: Google Allo, LinkedIn overhaul, and YouTube Heroes

Twitter officially lifts its 140 character limit for media

Rumored for a long time, and even officially announced by Twitter recently, the character count limit has been lifted when it comes to adding media to a post, announced in a Tweet as of September 19th. Media that now longer counts towards the 140 limit includes photos, videos, GIFs, polls, and quoted Tweets. However, users can only unload a limited number of media for each post.

LinkedIn overhauls its experience

As part of a blog post earlier this week, LinkedIn announced a host of new changes and updates to its platform, as well as introducing a new tool. LinkedIn is bringing the experience of its mobile app to the desktop, starting with a preview to journalists, with an official launch to all users to be announced. In addition, LinkedIn is introducing bots into messaging to help with things such as scheduling meetings. Lastly, utilizing data from LinkedIn and content from Lynda (an online learning tool), the company has introduced LinkedIn Learning, a tool meant to help professionals identify gaps in skills and fill them with educational courses.

Facebook is testing a new way to show reactions

As part of the ongoing tests that Facebook quietly does with smaller sets of users, they are now replacing the count of likes and reactions on a post, with the profile photos of those who are reacting. There has been no official news on the feature, and Facebook said in a statement to Social Times that there are no plans to roll it out more widely.

Facebook Messenger now allows group polling

A popular feature across social networks, Facebook has added polling to its Messenger product, so users can gather opinions within closed groups. The feature is being positioned as a way to help make decisions with friends. The feature is presently available in the US on iOS and Android, and users have to be on the latest version of the app to use it.

Tumblr now supports Live Photos on the web

Announced on the Tumblr staff blog earlier this week, Tumblr now supports life video on the web. Live videos are shown as a still thumbnail, but when pressed (or clicked) and held, they show several frames of animation or video. Tumblr has made the code available on GitHub and npm, and they stated they are working on an Android version to come out soon.

More information on Tumblr.

Twitter getting help from users in tweaking its algorithm

In an effort to help deliver better Tweets to its users, Twitter is introducing a new feature that lets users say “I don’t like this Tweet”. The feature is a button on the iOS mobile application only, and will apply to the Advanced Timeline feature only. The feature is not live on desktop, or Android yet. Twitter has been making news for its content stream styling ever since it announced that it would introduce ways to algorithmically serve content to users, much like Facebook and Instagram currently do.

More information on The Next Web.

Google releases new messaging app Allo

The new messaging app from Google, called Allo, is a messaging app with a twist; it introduces a smart assistant into the chats themselves, to help create more context in the conversations and help users to make decisions. Google positions that app as helping users to be able to make plans with friends, get answers such as news and weather, and have fun, meaning to get clips from YouTube, or play games inside the chat itself. The new app comes at a time when many messaging applications are create more dynamic ways for users to interact as they spend more times in messaging apps that other platforms.

YouTube introduces YouTube Heroes

YouTube has introduced an official, organized community for those who want to help flag inappropriate content, add captions to videos, sharing knowledge on the YouTube forums, and more. Called YouTube Heroes, the community allows its users to get special rewards for their contributions. The program is available across all locations and platforms that YouTube is present in. Among the rewards users can receive include invitations to workshops and sneak peaks of new products. The program is currently in beta and appears to be open to all users.

More information on Google Support.

More advertisers than ever are using Instagram

Instagram has recently hit a new milestone of 500,000 active advertisers on the platform. The blog post announcing the news went on to highlight that the most advertisers are coming from the US, Brazil, UK, Australia, and Canada. A few additional stats that the company highlighted include that over half of all users follow at least one business on the platform, and on top of that, 60% of all users learn more about a product they are interested on.

More information on Instagram Business Blog.

Twitter debuts native ads for app download objectives

For advertisers who are running mobile app install campaign on Twitter, using the Twitter Audience platform, they can now do so with a native ads format. The potential audience size for advertisers now according to Twitter is over 800 million, made up of Twitter itself and thousands of other apps. Through an official blog post, Twitter noted that users would not have to change their creative, as the assets they have will work across all platforms they will be served on. The new format is available globally to all advertisers.

More information on Twitter Blog.