The week in social: Facebook birthday videos, Tumblr ads, and Twitter sports

Facebook rolling out new birthday videos for users

Facebook is already an extremely popular platform for users wishing each other a happy birthday, and the company is leveraging this common action, by offering users a 45 second video that will recap all their friends wishes to them. The feature is rolling out slowly so not all users may see it immediately. Before the actual video gets shown in the feed, a user who has received one can review it or remove specific posts from it if they wish.

Twitter to livestream more sports, starting with MLB

As a continuation of what Twitter has done with Wimbledon and the NFL, the company is going to bring on several other sporting organizations to broadcast live games right in the feed, starting with MLB and NHL. Users will be able to watch these games for free, regardless of whether or not they are in the traditional broadcast market for the games. Users also will not have to be logged into Twitter to watch the content. In order to monetize the streaming content, Twitter will be selling ads.

More information on TechCrunch.

Tour de France drives massive social conversation

Tour de France has generated massive social conversation in 2016, not the least of which took place on Twitter. Through an official blog post, Twitter analyzed the most talked about moments, riders, and teams. Between July 2nd and July 24th, 3.7 million tweets were posted, that were seen a total of 4.1 billion times, both directly on the service, and embedded throughout the web. The top most talked about rider was Chris Froome, the eventual winner of the entire tour.

Twitter adds a nighttime mode to its Android application

Twitter has created a new option for its Android users, something that is presently available on many other apps and mobile OS interfaces: a night mode. The implementation is simple, and replaces the largely bright white interface with dark blue colors, and is intended to make it easier to use the service at nighttime. There is presently no date set for when or if the feature will become available on iOS.

More information on The Verge.

Facebook adds new filter options for custom audiences

Facebook custom audiences are targeting groups that can be created for ads on the platform out of a CRM system or a list of email addresses that associate to Facebook accounts, and the service has added a new filter to this to target by amount of time that user has spent on the advertiser’s website. Ways that this individual filter can be customized include the days to go back in terms of last visit, and by the percentile of top visitors.

Tumblr to introduce ads on blogs

As a way of helping to monetize the platform for its users, Tumblr is planning to launch ads for individual blogs. Bloggers who drive large amounts of traffic to their Tumblr pages will be able to reap some of the benefits of this by taking a portion of the ad revenue generated. The feature is not compulsory, and users have the option to opt out of the program. Tumblr announced through an official blog post that they are still working out some of the particulars of the new feature and that future announcements would be confirmed on their blog.

More information on Tumblr Staff Blog.

Updated Yahoo Messenger now available on more platforms

Yahoo Messenger, a mobile messaging service, saw a revamped version come out in December of last year, and now the same version is available for both Windows and Mac. Some unique features of Yahoo Messenger include sending GIFs, and the ability to retract a sent message. Users of the old app on their desktop platforms will need to update, as the old version will cease to work after August 5th.

More information on Yahoo Blog.

Twitter Stickers now available to all users

Announced back in June, the Twitter Stickers feature, which function as visual, searchable tags, are available for all users. At the same time as release, Twitter launched a #StickTogether campaign, meant to bring further awareness to the feature in hopes of fast adoption.

Reddit now allows brands to sponsor user posts

A way to help both users get noticed and for brands to sponsor organic content, Reddit is launching ads in the form of sponsored units. Reddit announced the new option in a new thread specifically about ads and detailed how the process works, whereby the brand notifies Reddit’s sales team about its interest in sponsoring the user content. Part of the process involves Reddit acquiring permission from the user to have their post sponsored, so as to make sure they are comfortable with the brand promoting them. The option will become available next week on August 4th.

More information on Reddit.