If you’ve been paying attention to the news these last few weeks you’ve seen some pretty big shifts in social media. New platforms, high profile accounts being hacked, spying, updates and more. That’s a lot! Here’s a brief overview of what’s going on with social media and how it may impact your company.

Here’s what you can expect to read about in today’s blog:

• Facebook Updates
• What is Parler?
• LinkedIn Spying Debacle
• Twitter HACKED

Facebook Updates

Here are some Facebook updates you can expect to see on Facebook:

• Advance Racial Injustice
• Shifting Commerce Eligibility Requirements
• Collections lists are now sharable publicly

Advancing Racial Injustice

The news is filled with articles relating to Black Lives Matter, racial injustice, defunding the police, etc. Many companies, such as Facebook, are seeking ways to advance racial injustice. Some of the steps that Facebook is taking to advance racial injustice include:

• Improving policies, products and programs by investing in people and technology designed to “proactively detect and remove hate speech and other content in violation of Facebook standards.” At the same time, they’ll also be working to amplify black voices and ensuring their own teams have more diversity.
• Investing in communities of color. Facebook has stated they’ll be investing over $1 billion to support Black and other minority communities and suppliers in the U.S. Specifically mentioned, Facebook plans to invest an additional $200 million to Black-owned businesses, creators and organizations.
• New Destination called “Lift Black Voices” which is designed to amplify Black voices on the social platform, in addition to sharing educational resources and storytelling through fundraising measures.

Shifting Commerce Eligibility Requirements

Instagram (owned by Facebook) recently announced that they’re shifting their commerce eligibility requirements. Facebook businesses can expect to see this filter down the pipeline soon after Instagram as well. Instagram says they’re expanding access to Instagram Shopping and increasing the transparency for both buyers and sellers.

What does this mean for companies looking to sell products on Instagram? It means that any eligible business or creator account will be able to use shopping features and tags if they have even one eligible product listed. Prior to this update, sellers would need to set up a Facebook store and wait for approval on both platforms.

Collections Now Publicly Available

Here’s a feature of Facebook that many may not even be aware of… Facebook allows users to create collections of photos, videos, posts, etc. and until this update, those collections were only able to be viewed by the individual who created them.

These lists are now going to be publicly shareable, allowing users the ability to control who can see the content (i.e. yourself, contributors, friends or even the public). This functionality could be great for businesses – especially those considering working with influencers on Facebook.

How might Facebook Collections benefit your business? Consider this. Local businesses could compile a list of local companies providing services to benefit others. After the stock market crashed with COVID-19, many were left with questions about their portfolios and retirement accounts. Compiling a list of resources that could help those in that situation would be great exposure for companies like financial advisors and wealth managers. You could create lists to showcase items, real estate tips and properties, etc. There are quite a number of possibilities. Partnering up with an influencer who has a large audience can be beneficial as well. If they include your product or service in their list they share with their large following, that creates a significant amount of exposure for your company.

What is Parler?

Not to be confused with Parlor (a dating app), Parler (pronounced par-lay) is the latest social media platform to take off. Shrouded with controversy, users who feel they’ve been unfairly censored or banned from other social sites such as Facebook and Twitter have taken to using Parler. Most notably (and arguably most controversially) Donald Trump has taken to using the social platform.

History of Parler

Launched in August of 2018 by John Matze Jr. and Jared Thomson, the platform states they are a non-biased free speech social network and alternative to Twitter. Matze, a libertarian software developer in Nevada, created the platform out of frustration for censorship, fact-checking and moderation. The free speech platform claims that its content is moderated based on the FCC and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Who is Using Parler?

Claiming to have an estimated 1.5 million users, the social platform has gained increased visibility and continues to see a spike in growth these last few months. Why the sudden popularity? After facing their own censorship and moderation – some even being banned from Twitter – celebrities and political figures joined the platform and began generating visibility for it. It has also attracted the likes of Donald Trump who claims it as his new favorite platform in addition to his supporters. Talk about some major social media updates!

The platform is a favorite of those banned from mainstream social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and YouTube.

LinkedIn Spying Debacle

Moving along in some major social media updates… That’s right, the social networking platform for professionals has been spying on Apple users. Apple recently rolled out a new iOS 14 privacy feature to developers. The new feature alerts users when text copied to their Apple clipboard is accessed by other apps on their device. Microsoft’s platform LinkedIn isn’t the only one caught copying clipboard data and spying on Apple users. Just a week prior Tik Tok was called out for exactly the same thing. The difference? Tik Tok was found to be grabbing clipboard data every few keystrokes whereas LinkedIn was caught grabbing content every keystroke.

LinkedIn’s vice president of engineering, Erran Berger, quickly responded to the scandal saying that it came down to a code path that “only does an equality check” of the clipboard and content typed into a LinkedIn text box. Berger sought to assure users that LinkedIn does not “store or transmit the clipboard contents” and that a fix was due to go live, but no date was provided.

Twitter HACKED

On Wednesday, July 15th, 2020, high profile Twitter users such as Bill Gates, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Kim Kardashian and more had their profiles hacked by Bitcoin scammers. While the outcome could have been much worse than it was, the scam reached about 350 million people and generated approximately $110,000 in the short time the scams were up.

A Promise to Double Bitcoin Cryptocurrency

On Wednesday, high profile accounts were hacked with messages saying the celebrity would double the amount in Bitcoins sent to them under the guise of giving back to the community. Obviously, this was a social engineering scam designed to fleece people out of their Bitcoins. The posts were up for just over an hour before being taken down.

Twitter’s Response

Twitter stated that once they became aware of the incident, they immediately locked down the accounts that had been affected and removed any Tweets posted by the attackers. They are continuing to investigate the incident and have taken some additional internal measures as well, limiting access to systems and tools while the investigation is pending.

Social Media Marketing in Times of Uncertainty

It’s easy to look at the headlines and wonder if social media marketing is really worth it. The short answer is yes. There will always be risks involved in everything that you do. It’s all about staying on top of the updates and pertinent information that can help you remain both effective and competitive in your social media marketing strategies.

Pendragon Consulting can help take your organization to new heights with our proven social media marketing strategies. Our team of experts remains current on all updates and controversies surrounding social media to best advise you and help shape your marketing efforts to expand your reach into new pools of customers. To schedule your free consultation, send us a secure message via our website or give us a call at 443-343-2313.