Tag Archive for: Mark Zuckerberg

Instagram Broadcast Channels Roll Out To All Users

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Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, revealed this week that Instagram Broadcast Channels will soon be available to all Instagram users around the world. 

Instagram Broadcast Channels are private, one-way messages to either your followers or paid subscribers, making them a new way to reach your followers with text, photos, videos, polls, and even voice messages no matter where they are in their busy lives. 

While the feature is coming to all worldwide users on the Instagram app, it will not be available on desktop devices using the web-based version of the platform. 

New Instagram Broadcast Channels Experimental Features

Along with the wide launch, Instagram announced a number of new experimental features such as:

  • Feedback prompts for ask-me-anything content or surveys
  • A new dedicated inbox tab for channels
  • Collaborators to invite new audiences to your broadcast channel
  • Expiration dates and times for broadcasts
  • The ability to add content moderators
  • Preview links to promote your broadcast channel
  • Send notifications to let followers know when you launch a broadcast channel

The wide launch of the feature occurred via the new Meta Channel on Instagram, but more information should be available as users get access.

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Facebook’s New TikTok-Inspired Feed Revamp Is Here

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Facebook’s revamped home feed is finally here after weeks of rumors and leaks.

The new home feed was announced by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on the social network and explained in further detail in a Facebook Newsroom post over the weekend.

The big revamp is made up of two changes to users’ feeds which aim to bridge the gap between what people have come to expect from Facebook and the video-heavy experience made popular by TikTok.

These changes are:

  • The Home tab will act as a “discovery engine” through personalized content recommendations, including an increased focus on Reels and Stories.
  • A new Feeds tab will showcase content from specific types of sources, including friends, groups, and Pages. This content will be in reverse-chronological order.

As Zuckerberg said in his announcement:

“One of the most requested features for Facebook is to make sure people don’t miss friends’ posts. So today we’re launching a Feeds tab where you can see posts from your friends, groups, Pages and more separately in chronological order. The app will still open to a personalized feed on the Home tab, where our discovery engine will recommend the content we think you’ll care most about. But the Feeds tab will give you a way to customize and control your experience further.”

Does This Affect Your Ads?

According to the information available, advertisers should be largely unaffected by the revamped home feed for now. Facebook ads will continue to appear in all feeds. It is, however, unclear how engagement might differ between these feeds and how this might influence future ad updates.

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Instagram Is Getting Into Local Search With New Map Features

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Instagram is making it easier to find nearby businesses and places using its interactive maps.

The feature was revealed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a post showcasing the new maps features:

In the past. Instagram’s maps were limited to strictly showing popular posts from users nearby. With this new update though, users can search or filter the maps to find local businesses similar to how Google Maps lets users search for local businesses.

What sets Instagram’s map features apart is how they function. 

Firstly, only businesses with a professional Instagram account are eligible to be included in Instagram’s maps, unlike the automatically populated maps found on Google.

Secondly, the feature is still focused on the social experience. Rather than giving users a wealth of contact information like Google Maps or Google Business Profiles, when users tap on a business they are given the option to visit the associated page. save the company’s page for later or immediately start following the brand’s Instagram account. 

Why Is Instagram Getting Into Local Search?

It might seem odd for a social network to be essentially establishing a local search engine, but trends indicate many are already using social media for this purpose. In fact, just recently Google Senior Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan addressed this exact trend at a conference, saying:

“In our studies, something like almost 40% of young people, when they’re looking for a place for lunch, they don’t go to Google Maps or Search. They go to TikTok or Instagram.”

With this in mind, it is clear Instagram is simply making it easier for users to do this with the introduction of its new map features.

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Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Apologize For and Explain Extended Outage

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For the few of you out there who don’t know, Facebook and the other platforms it owns (Instagram and WhatsApp) experienced an outage yesterday, October 4. The outage kept the sites offline for more than six hours after beginning around 10:30 AM Monday morning. 

Apparently, the problem was made even worse as Facebook’s own internal tools and communication systems went down at the same time, making it even harder for engineers to address and fix the problem.

Now, we are learning what caused the outages as Facebook and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, apologize for the interruption to its services.

Why Did Facebook Go Offline?

According to official statements from the company, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp went down Monday, October 4, 2021, due to an interruption in communication between the company’s data centers. 

This interruption was caused by configuration changes on the routers coordinating traffic between the data centers. These configuration changes brought about a disruption in network traffic that cascaded into a complete service shutdown.

As the company explained:

“Our services are now back online and we’re actively working to fully return them to regular operations. We want to make clear at this time we believe the root cause of this outage was a faulty configuration change.”

Mark Zuckerberg himself posted a brief personal apology, which states:

“Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger are coming back online now. Sorry for the disruption today — I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”

Was Any User Data Compromised?

Throughout the outage, rumors swirled that the disruption was the result of hackers, DDoS attacks, and numerous other causes. This inevitably also led to speculation that user data had been compromised during the situation.

Despite the rumors, Facebook denied any such issues:

“We also have no evidence that user data was compromised as a result of this downtime.”

How Advertisers Are Effected

Since the outage also made it impossible to actually run any ads across the company’s platforms, Facebook says it will not charge advertisers for any campaigns running during the outage time.

Now that services are back online, the company says ads should be running as normal. In some situations, the company may even enable accelerated delivery to make up for potential lost reach.

What Can Be Learned

Obviously, outages like this are entirely out of most of our hands. Still, there is one thing we can take away from the Great Facebook Outage of 2021: diversify your online presence. 

Brands who exclusively or primarily drive traffic through their Facebook and Instagram pages found themselves almost entirely at a loss for most of yesterday. Those who were already established on multiple platforms, however, were able to pivot their focus and even take advantage of the service disruption.

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Facebook Hits Milestone With One Billion Active Daily Users

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Facebook hit a milestone for both its company and the internet as a whole this past Monday, August 24th. According to an announcement from CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg on the network, Facebook recorded one billion daily active users on Monday.

As Zuckerberg said in the announcement, “We just passed an important milestone. For the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day. On Monday, 1 in 7 people on Earth used Facebook to connect with their friends and family.”

He continued:

When we talk about our financials, we use average numbers, but this is different. This was the first time we reached this milestone, and it’s just the beginning of connecting the whole world.

I’m so proud of our community for the progress we’ve made. Our community stands for giving every person a voice, for promoting understanding and for including everyone in the opportunities of our modern world.

A more open and connected world is a better world. It brings stronger relationships with those you love, a stronger economy with more opportunities, and a stronger society that reflects all of our values.

Thank you for being part of our community and for everything you’ve done to help us reach this milestone. I’m looking forward to seeing what we accomplish together.

To put in context just how huge this is, Twitter reaches approximately 100 million users every day, while Instagram recently celebrated receiving 300 million daily users.

You can also consider that approximately 3.1 billion people use the internet every day, meaning a third of those people also used Facebook at some point Monday.

While it is likely that Google, who processes around 6 billion searches every day, sees more active daily users than the social media site, it is still remarkable to think that a single site was able to connect so many people around the entire globe on a single day.

The milestone is a great cause for celebration for Facebook, who will almost certainly see even greater milestones in the future.

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Facebook Video Reached 4 Billion Daily Views

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If it seems like your Facebook feed is becoming flooded with videos, it is no coincidence. Since Facebook video launched, it has rapidly become a staple of the staple of the social network and it shows no sign of slowing down in the future.

The service hit a new milestone recently, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook now serves more than 4 billion video views every day, adding a full billion views to the stats announced in January.

It is no surprise that Facebook video is such a hit, as the platform offers the perfect opportunity for users to view and share video without having to leave the network. With the latest numbers many are suggesting Facebook video may pose a real threat to YouTube in the near future.

YouTube reported reaching 4 billion daily views the last time it reported those statistics in January 2012, but they have likely added a fair number of views since then. However, actually comparing the views across either service is complicated because the two services count views differently. Facebook counts any playing three seconds on its autoplay videos as a view, while YouTube has a higher duration requirement to be included in its count.

During the company’s first quarter earnings call, COO Sheryl Sandberg also pointed out that a vast majority of Facebook’s video views come from mobile, and the ubiquity of videos on the service has primed users for video ads. “We’ve always believed that the format of our ads should follow the format of what consumers are doing on Facebook,” she said.

Sandberg also said brands are already taking advantage of Facebook video.

“Brand marketers particularly but I think all marketers have the opportunity to do video,” she said. “And that’s pretty exciting, even SMBs who never would be able to hire a film crew and buy a TV ad. Over 1 million SMBs have posted videos and done really small ad buys around them. And that’s pretty cool because I don’t think there are 1 million advertisers who have bought TV ads in that same period of time.”

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Facebook Shifting Focus to Mobile and Search

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Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference last week that his company “burned two years not working on mobile.” As Carly Page reports, he even went as far as to say “Now we are a mobile company” and “we are going to make a lot more money than on desktop.”

Zuckerberg, however, dispelled rumors that Facebook would move into the hardware game by releasing their own mobile phone.

There could be a search function implemented into Facebook in the near future though. Facebook is currently seeing about a billion search queries per day, which is understandably enough to make even a wealthy man like Zuckerberg take notice.

 

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