Did you miss these summer 2015 social media updates?

September 16, 2015: Summer can be a slow time for many marketers, as consumers focus on their vacations and unplug from the social media world (except to share some vacation photos).

But social media hasn’t been quiet this past summer: quite the opposite. All the major platforms are racing ahead with new features, policies, tools, and updates. Here are a bunch of updates you might have missed (if for some reason you haven’t followed our Monday updates on tumblr):

Instagram

Instagram has been a busy bee this summer. First, a new “Explore” tab introduced users to trending tags and a cleaner, easier way to discover new pages. A game changing update in August expanded Instagram posts beyond the square, allowing full-bleed landscape and portrait photographs (without messing up your grid layout). Finally — and most recently — Instagram has announced the expansion and availability of its Ads program. Now, businesses of every size in 30 new countries can take advantage of the combined ad power of Instagram and its mother network, Facebook.

Facebook

Facebook’s summer has been full of sneaky testing of things that are sure to become features soon, including lots of goodies for Pages. We may see a resurrection of Facebook Notes, as well as the allowance of GIFs on Business Page posts. Facebook also introduced a more direct form of messaging between Pages and customers, including messaging using local awareness ads. It also introduced live-streaming for influencers (perhaps to challenge the quietly growing Periscope) and autoplay videos to battle YouTube. “Freebooting” has become a hot topic among creators and marketers, and it’ll be up to Facebook to address some of the content theft issues.

Twitter

Twitter cleaned up some of its old school features that were irrelevant in order to streamline. 140-character direct message limits are no longer in place, and the background image is a thing of the past. Twitter (along with Facebook and Instagram) also received a lot of complaints about content theft, which came to a head when influencer @FatJewish came under fire.

Tumblr

Ever the social media outcast, Tumblr and its mother company, Yahoo, have been making strides to prove they can deliver for both marketers and content creators. Tumblr improved its mobile appearance (much to the chagrin of users), analytics, and introduced native video ads.

Youtube

YouTube is adding some features to lure Creators back to Youtube. Comments, new link cards, app/mobile improvements, 360 degree videos, and creator community may help in this area.

LinkedIn quietly announced a direct messaging feature that I’m personally pretty happy about. No more old school e-mails! We also saw some Slideshare improvements.

Snapchat

While Snapchat’s “Discover” has yet to show it’s potential among many marketers, the network continues to experiment with updates and new features that may come to fruition soon. Yesterday, Snapchat announced new cool/terrifying filters as well as a paid option for replaying snaps. The new filters and paywall are a sign of things to come, as well as Snapchat’s capabilities in both technology and captivating it’s young demographic.

Periscope

After a period of substantial growth and updates, Periscope has survived the explosion of competition in the video marketing field and seems to be developing an Apple TV app. Meanwhile, Periscope competitors have sprung up, such as Blab and Facebook Mentions’ live streaming option for influencers, so it looks like live streaming continues to be a growing industry. While Twitter is feeling a lull in the market, it seems that Periscope may have been a very smart purchase for them.

Did you catch any additional social media news this summer? Tweet us suggestions @diditmarketing!

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