Whilst conducting research on the various social media platforms for business this week, we noticed some exciting new changes peeps. Google, Facebook, Vine and Twitter are all making changes to their respective platforms, it must be something in the ether.
Changes to the Google SERPs
Google has changed the appearance of ads on their SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages). They are now white and appear with an exclamation mark over them and an “Ad” sign highlighted in yellow. This is far better for businesses as Google are obviously trying to deal with the fact that despite 720,000 people searching every minute, only 6% of searchers actually click on the ads that have the famous creamy yellow background. When we logged on it was difficult to tell where the ads were on the page, we think this will be a far better solution for businesses who choose to pay for advertising using Google Adwords. They are still to the top and right hand side but far more difficult to tell they are ads at first glance. Here’s how it looks now
Changes to VINE
Other news on the social media platforms front is from Vine. Vine received a major update this week. There is now an entire suite of new tools called Vine Messages – yeees! It’s basically a private messaging system that sits within the Vine App and it allows you to have private conversations in a similar fashion to snapchat, so it’s way more powerful than Twitters DM service and may end up doing Twitter a lot of damage. To play with it, you’ll need to download the Vine 2 app from either the App Store or the Google Play store for Android.
Changes to Facebook
Facebook is now officially a paid for social media platform for business which means you need to 
be very smart about how you use it. They haven’t given an official date yet but they are making changes to the timeline banner and Apps section. This means the Apps will now be limited to 3 slightly larger sized images which will be located on the left hand side of the screen. You will need to decide which 3 Apps you are going to use for conversions. Other things to think about include resizing your timeline banner logos.
Changes to Twitter
By far the most exciting social media platform change this week is the announcement from Twitter that they’re rolling out a major redesign of user profiles, starting next Tuesday. The new look adds a lot more user information and several new features. It will now make your most popular tweets look slightly larger than the rest. It looks similar to Facebook’s user profiles with a larger user photo and customizable header image so get designing #creative peeps.
The team at Twitter was also very busy this month with the introduction of tagging to your uploaded photos. At the moment it’s only available to users of the iPhone but they promise they are working on the android version (anyone tired of being treated like a second class citizen fairies?). In fairness though, this is a really cool little tool as it allows you to make collages and you can do fun things like take weird photos of yourself in odd positions and then put them altogether so it looks like you magically moved from one location to another (okay – I know we have too much time on our hands – back to work!). Tell us what your favourite change was or if you noticed any.
