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The week in social: Facebook Spaces, LinkedIn mentors, and Twitter trolls

16 Jul 2017 Kevin Barnes

The week in social

LinkedIn has a new mentor matching feature in testing

LinkedIn has a new way to help connect professionals who are both seeking professional help, and those who want to provide it. Still in testing, the feature adds a section under a user’s profile called ‘your dashboard’ where a career advice hub will appear, and will let users offer professional help, or seek it. The hub shows off the functionality of the feature, and details out the benefits for both parties. People who are seeking a mentor can seek them based off a set criteria, such as job function, school, region, etc. From there, LinkedIn has an algorithm that will suggest other professionals, and when the user chooses someone, that person receives a message of interest and the conversation can be taken forward from there.

More information on Fast Company.

Facebook adds live video to Spaces

Facebook’s virtual reality app called Spaces now has live video streaming, from an update made to the app earlier this week. The way it works is that users can stream live video from the Spaces app into the core Facebook app, letting general users get a glimpse of Facebook’s social VR effort. Users get a virtual camera when streaming live from Spaces that they can put anywhere in their virtual space, and they can broadcast in 360 as well. As part of the announcement, Facebook further pushed its Oculus VR sets.

Twitter provides for features for muting users

A big problem at Twitter is fake and new bot user accounts messaging users and setting off their notifications, but Twitter has come up with a brand new fix for this. There is now an option to ban notifications from brand new Twitter users, and from users that are unknown and not followed. What this does is prevent a user from getting spammed with notifications from users that are likely bots, trolls, or spam accounts. The options can be found in Advanced Filters under the Settings menu.

Facebook rumored to be offering publisher subscriptions through Instant Articles

A new rumor has emerged that says Facebook will add the option for users to subscribe to publications through Instant Articles, the fast-loading content feature on the platform. Subscriptions would be offered to publications that have costs for their content, or a freemium model, which is increasing in popularity. Details of the feature have not been ironed out yet, such as how the exact pricing model would work, and what Facebook’s cut of the profit would be. Facebook is likely to test the feature with a few publishers before the end of this year and roll it out more qidely in 2018.

More information on DigiDay.

India now sees more Facebook usage that the United States

India has just becomes Facebook’s biggest active usage market, inching out the United States in Facebook’s latest numbers, 241 million to 240 million. To underscore this, India has gained 50 million active users in the last 6 months, a 27% increase. Total social use per capita in India is still much lower in the United States however, due to its much larger population. Male users represent 3/4 of active Facebook users in India.

More information on The Next Web.

LinkedIn has a brand new campaign manager

LinkedIn debuted a brand new campaign manager earlier this week in an effort to attract new advertisers, and improve the experience for current advertisers. The new campaign manager promises several things, chief among them more relevant recommendations, easier feature discovery, and better organization of campaign content. LinkedIn also announced that with the debut of the new campaign manager they plan to introduce other brand new features throughout the rest of the year.