The social media world is always full of updates.

What’s new for this week? Here’s a summary of the latest updates across your favourite platforms. 

Facebook Adding Post Topics to More Groups, Helping to Better Organise Relevant Discussion

With Facebook group engagement rising, some groups are now truly massive, which can make it difficult to find posts on the topics you’re interested in. Sometimes you might also join a certain group to discuss specific elements, but have less interest in the general chatter.

In order to better cater to such usage, Facebook has this week announced that it’s expanding its post topics tags for groups, which will enable group members and admins to categorise group posts accordingly.

Facebook Testing New Photo Layout Options for Multi-Image Posts

Facebook is always experimenting with ways to make its visual elements more enticing, in order to drive higher engagement and keep people interested. For example, Facebook added coloured backgrounds for text updates in 2016, tested different coloured text and backgrounds for comments in 2017, and added video and 360 options for profile cover photos last year, among other updates.

And now, there may be a new visual consideration incoming on the social network. According to reverse engineering expert Jane Manchun Wong, Facebook is now experimenting with a new set of layout options for multi-image updates, which would enable users to choose different presentation styles for their images.

Instagram Updates its Stories Camera with New ‘Create’ Mode to Highlight Creative Options

Instagram is rolling out a new format for its Stories Camera, which will make the app’s various Stories tools – including GIFs, Countdown Stickers and Polls – easier to access and apply, direct from the main function bar.

The biggest change is the addition of a new ‘Create’ mode, which replaces the existing ‘Type’ option. In ‘Create’, you’ll be able to find all the various creative tools available, as opposed to having to add them through Stickers or other forms. 

By making these options easier to locate, and grouping them together in this way, it could encourage more use, while it may also enable Instagram to better highlight the app’s most popular creative features. 

It could help in your Stories creation efforts, ensuring that you’re utilising all the options available in order to improve engagement and performance.  

LinkedIn Launches New Tools to Help Better Target Your On-Platform Ad Campaigns

LinkedIn is giving advertisers some new options to help focus their campaigns on just the right audience subsets.

First off, LinkedIn has expanded on its audience forecasting tools within its ad creation flow, making it easier to see exactly who your campaign will reach, based on your entered parameters.

“You can customise the panel to surface specific professional characteristics, like top industries, years of experience, or company sizes for your audience. When combined with contacts you’ve uploaded to Matched Audiences, you can be sure that you’re not only serving ads to the specific prospects you’re trying to reach but that you’ll have the demographic insights to deliver the content and creative mix that will resonate with them.”

The extra insight will help to better focus your LinkedIn ad campaigns onto the people you most want to connect with – while as LinkedIn notes, with more knowledge of who you’re reaching, you can better target your ad messaging specifically to those audiences.

Another new feature you may have noted in the GIF example above is Boolean logic – i.e. using ‘and/or’ qualifiers to further refine your targeting. LinkedIn says this has been one of its most requested ad targeting additions and will enable advertisers to, again, further refine their outreach.

And finally, LinkedIn is also improving its demographic reporting options, providing more specific insight into who exactly is responding to your campaigns.

The more specific insights into actions taken will help you better understand your campaign performance, and refine as necessary, based on the results.

That’s all for this week!

Stay tuned to #SocialSpeak for more on the latest social media trends and updates every week!