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The week in social: Facebook Polls, YouTube Kids, and Etsy social selling

04 Nov 2017 Kevin Barnes

The week in social

Facebook debuts GIF-supported polls

Likely taking a cue off of the success of Instagram Stories polls, Facebook is introducing the poll feature with a slight twist in that they can be supported with GIFs, and served as status updates in the main news feed. The new feature is supported on iOS, Android, and the web. Users can create polls much in the same way as standard status updates, with the poll feature showing up as an option.

More information on The Verge.

YouTube Kids introduces new profile features

As YouTube Kids continues to grow its users, it has introduced new features to appeal to its audience, as well as offer more security for parents. Parents are now able to sign in with their own Google accounts and profiles can be created for kids that limit what type of content they can see. Presently YouTube Kids has more than 37 million active weekly users.

The World Series created massive social engagement

Twitter has always been a home for live conversation around sports, and the recent World Series of baseball was no exception, At the end of the World Series between the LA Dodgers and the Houston Astros (specifically the final out of the last inning) there were approximately 62 thousand tweets happening per minute on the service. Among top moments include when the Astros won, a home run in the bottom of the 7th inning, and the ending of game 5 in the series, a 13-12 win for the Astros.

More information on AdWeek.

Instagram adds new supported languages

Brand new to Instagram is support for three additional languages: Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew. The goal of new language introduction is to make the app more accessible to the global audience. Users are able to change the language of the app by going into the settings and the change will take place immediately.

YouTube had a brand new app specifically for big screen TVs

Although there have been YouTube TV apps before, none have been perfectly tuned to the big screen TV and that is changing with the latest YouTube TV app. YouTube TV is meant to be a replacement for cable or satellite service that integrates the social networks features into it and the latest app simplifies the browsing experience on the big screen by offering three key menu features including Home, Library, and Live. For ease of use, whenever the app is switched on, it will turn to the latest thing that was being watched by the user.

More information on Engadget.

Facebook ads now offer creative split testing

As a method of more concrete testing of specific creative variables, Facebook is now allowing users to do creative split testing, which isolates a particular portion of an ad, such as the visual asset. According to an official Facebook blog post, users might consider testing lengths of different videos, or whether animations perform better than static images. The feature is available to markers using the ads manager starting this month.

Etsy now has a new tool for social sharing

As of way of helping sellers on the platform reach more of their organic social audience, Etsy has introduced a social selling tool that lets them create posts out of new listing they have created and want to share. The tool is specifically available on the Sell on Etsy app, but will be available for the desktop site within the next two weeks. Users will have the option to share their listings from a single location on to multiple social networks, making cross-promotion much easier, in addition to other new minor features.