Social Media

Are Twitter Stories Coming? The Company Buys Stories App Developer Chroma Labs

Twitter has acquired Chroma Labs, the company behind the Chroma Stories app — a short-form video and photo creation tool that offers Stories templates and filters for creating Stories on various social sites. Twitter confirmed the Chroma Labs team will join Twitter’s product, design, and engineering teams. “Their expertise in creative tools that help people connect and share completely align with our work to serve the public conversation,” said Twitter VP of Design and Research Dantly Davis in a Tweet.

For the full article click here 

Facebook Tests Easier Access to Chronological News Feed and Other Feed Sorting Options

Facebook’s infamous News Feed algorithm has helped the platform maximize engagement, and boost time spent in-app – but it’s also long been a major bugbear for many users. The complex algorithm, which aims to show users more content that they’re likely to be interested in, uses a range of factors in its equations, including when something is posted, how often you interact with the creator, what type of post it is, and more. That means that users generally see posts that are seeing higher levels of engagement appear closer to the top of their feeds. But is that a better experience?  Would you be better off just seeing a feed of all the posts from all the people and Pages that you’ve chosen to follow in reverse chronological order – ala Facebook pre-2013?

For the full article click here

Marketing

Google to Highlight Image Licensing Information in Image Search Results

Google is beta testing a way for sites to highlight licensing information about content that appears in image search results. The changes to image search results include a small badge indicating a particular image is “licensable.” After clicking on the image to expand it, Google will show where the image can be licensed from. These changes aren’t live yet, but sites can begin preparing their content for it ahead of time and ensure their images are eligible to display licensing information. In order for content to display licensing information in Google Images, the site must be utilizing image license metadata. Metadata should be added to each licensable image on a site. Site owners can add the required metadata either with structured data or IPTC photo metadata. Further instructions, and exact code snippets, can be found in Google’s official developer document.

For the full article click here

What You Need to Know About Walmart Marketplace’s Sponsored Products

Originally created for a handful of select sellers, the Walmart Marketplace is actually 10 years old. It has slowly grown from there to 33,000 sellers today – with 10,000 sellers added in the last year alone. (For comparison, Amazon has more than 3 million sellers today.) This means that technically, competition is much lower for sellers, and advertising. The first step being that seller piece. There is an application process and sellers must pass through a few gate checks on the way, but if you’re currently selling on Amazon or eBay, chances are you’re fairly set up for this. If you’re not, this isn’t something to enter in lightly. You must be able to meet seller standards, which means retail readiness – and that is a whole other, lengthy post. There are a lot of great seller guides out there for Walmart specifically and for multi-marketplace selling (if you’re already on Amazon) sellers if you want to expand your reach.

For the full article click here