What the new changes to Facebook and Twitter mean for your business

In a bid to fight back competition from Snapchat; Facebook and Twitter are releasing new features, which until now have been strictly reserved for big brands with even bigger budgets. 

With social media as noisy as it’s ever been, these features are giving small businesses a chance to rise above the parapets.

Let’s take a look at the changes in a little more detail.

Facebook reactions

The world has been reacting to Facebook reactions this week, as the social media platform released five new ways for people to interact with content. Until now, people could only ‘Like’ content as a way to endorse something.

But now, when you hover over the “like’ icon, you are greeted with new emoticons: ‘love’, ‘haha’, ‘wow’, ‘sad’ and ‘angry’.

What does it mean for your business?

Facebook reports need to catch up, but businesses will be able to better understand the sentiment of fans around individual pieces of content.

Twitter gifs and personalised timelines

Two years after adding support for GIFs, Twitter is officially adding a button to help you add GIFs to your tweets or direct messages without ever leaving the compose window.

Whenever you're composing a tweet or direct message, you can search and browse the gif library by keyword, or browse categories of different reactions to find the perfect animated graphic.

What does it mean for your business?

It’s a sign that social media sites are moving towards more animated content such as videos, so you definitely need to consider using this format in your next marketing campaign.

Businesses can search and use Twitter’s gif database as well, but it remains a grey area for legal reasons. For example, using a motion clip from a popular film could land you in hot water.

To be safe, we’d always recommend that you create your own custom gifs or videos.

Twitter users can also now opt to show only relevant content in their home feed, as opposed to showing every single tweet in real-time.

It isn’t clear how Twitter deems what makes one piece of content more relevant than another, but businesses will need to think about their audiences more and only put out the most relevant tweets to make it on the list.