Have you heard all the social media buzz? As the fall season descends upon us with its much-anticipated football, Uggs, and Pumpkin Spice Lattes, the social media sphere is blossoming with news and updates galore. Here’s an update of what’s been happening with some of the major networks.

LinkedIn Tracking

The professional social network recently introduced conversion tracking which offers “a set of capabilities built directly into LinkedIn Campaign Manager that lets you easily measure how many leads, sign-ups, content downloads, purchases and other specific results you’re getting from your Sponsored Content and Text Ads campaigns.”

Basically, the new capabilities offer brands a way to measure how many users took action, purchased products, or signed up for services after viewing ads or watching sponsored content on the network, without having to rely on third-party services. The new tool should help brands generate more leads, acquire new customers, and as expected, raise the engagement bar with customers.

Twitter News

In an attempt to make its stagnating platform more appealing to content creators, Twitter has announced it will allow users to share in any advertising revenue it generates. Normally only accessible to large companies, the program is now available to individual content creators after a quick application process. This switch follows the trend toward live streaming where both Facebook and YouTube have already seen success, with YouTube reporting an 80% increase in live video views in the last year.

Instagram Improvements

The photo-sharing app is now making it easier to shoo those pesky trolls from commenting on your content. The new feature allows users to filter out offensive comments from their posts, but Instagram is hush-hush on the specific words or phrases used when the filter is enabled, obviously so trolls don’t find out their algorithm.

To enable the feature, go to Settings, scroll down to Comments, and then enable Hide Inappropriate Comments. You can also choose to hide any custom keywords, hashtags and emojis that you do not want included in your comment feed. The user commenting with blocked words will see their comment on their end, but to the rest of Instagram land, the comment will be hidden from view.

In other Instagram news, the app introduced a business profile with a contact button populated with your email, website or location. Businesses can now create ads within the app and discover native Instagram analytics without using a third party app. 

Photo Bombers Beware! 🙂

Last but not least, Instagram has rolled out a long-awaited zoom feature for photos and videos. Up until now, there was no option to zoom in on photos, even though most of us use it on our smartphones everyday.

If you use Instagram for business, you’re always looking for ways to increase visibility, get more followers, and drive engagement.  The Instagrowth program is one of our favorites.

Instagram has certainly made a lot of positive changes this last year. Which update is your favorite?