The week in social: Super Bowl LII, Instagram scheduled posts, and smarter bots

Business Pages on Instagram can now schedule their posts

A new feature on Instagram is making it easier for Page managers to operate their pages in the form of post scheduling. A feature available on other social networks and many 3rd party tools, Instagram is now allowing Business Pages to do the same. The feature has become part of the Instagram Graph API, and in order to access it, brands have to connect through Facebook Marketing Partners or Instagram partners.

Read more on Instagram Business Blog.

Facebook helps prioritize local content

Earlier in the month, Facebook announced that it was going to change the news feed to prioritize content from friends and personal connections in order to create a more engaging experience on the platform. In a further update to the feed, Mark Zuckerberg announced that in response to community commentary, more news from local sources will be prioritized. The post went on to correlate the amount of awareness on local news and information with an increase in civic-related action.

More information on Facebook Newsroom.

Twitter offers full archive search as a new premium service

As a way of helping brands and enterprises glean insights from the last 12 years of Twitter content, the company is offering a premium service that allows the entire archive of all Tweets be searched, all the way back to 2006 when Twitter was introduced to the world. The service is part of the Premium Search Tweets API, and it is the first time it’s available outside of annual enterprise contracts. Brands must fill out an application and be approved for Premium APIs.

Read more on Twitter Blog.

Instagram Stories now supports type-only posts

A feature requested by many users, Instagram Stories can now be created with text only, as opposed to photos and videos, the previous limitation. Users can add text in different fonts and styles, with colored backgrounds to make their posts more expressive. The new text styles are also available when adding text to a photo or video Story. The new feature is available both on iOS and Android mobile platforms.

Read more on Instagram Blog.

Twitter offers new features for the Super Bowl

Similar to what Twitter does for other big sporting and cultural events, the service has some fun features on offer to help drive engagement around the big game. For users who Tweet using hasthags either #SBLII, #FlyEaglesFly, or #GoPats, they will be treated to a matching emoji that appears next to the tag. On Twitter’s live-streaming platform Periscope, use of the same hashtags will trigger custom emoji to match as well.

Read more on AdWeek.

Facebook is creating bots with more conversational ability

As part of their efforts to create more conversation chat bots, Facebook is looking at deep learning techniques, whereby their chat bot AI looks at patterns in large sets of data to become more efficient at engaging users in dynamic ways. Facebook has built its own data-set to train new chat bots on, called Persona-Chat. The result is that Facebook’s chat bots are improving on their ability to make casual small talk, starting with consistency in conversation first. It remains to be seen in what way these efforts will make it into bots that are placed on the service.

More information on The Verge.

Carousel ad format is now available on Instagram Stories

Where it was previously only possible to create a sponsored Instagram Story with only one piece of media, the company has now expanded this, offering carousel-like functionality for advertisers and up to three pieces of media that can be placed on a Sponsored Story. Sponsored Stories behave in the same way as all of Stories content. Right now the feature is available to a small set of advertisers.

More information on Instagram Business Blog.