26 New Things in Digital in February 2019

Feb­ru­ary was a month where we saw many plat­forms test­ing and plan­ning the fea­tures that they planned to roll out this year. From Insta­gram plan­ning to add the Direct Mes­sage fea­ture on Desk­tops, Face­book test­ing a new brand col­lab­o­ra­tion fea­ture, Tik Tok test­ing native videos, to Insta­gram try­ing their new Dona­tion Stick­er, LinkedIn launch­ing LinkedIn Live and Insta­gram try­ing to launch their own ver­sion of Pin­ter­est; Here are new things in Dig­i­tal in the month of February.

#1 Google adds voice input and spoken results to mobile web search

Now users will hear a spo­ken response on Android mobile web search­es rather than sim­ply get a set of “silent” results.

#2 Quora adds search-like keyword targeting, Auction Insights for advertisers

Key­word tar­get­ing offers the intent tar­get­ing of search and can be more gran­u­lar than top­ic targeting.

#3 Instagram is Testing Quiz Stickers on Stories

Insta­gram looks to be close to launch­ing a new ‘Quiz’ stick­er for Insta­gram Sto­ries, which would pro­vide addi­tion­al cre­ative options for boost­ing engage­ment via your Sto­ries efforts.

#4 WhatsApp is Testing a New ‘Authentication’ Feature to Open Messages

What­sApp is about to add a new fea­ture, only on iPhone at this point, which will allow the users to enable authen­ti­ca­tion before What­sApp opens and shows mes­sages. This is a sim­i­lar idea to many bank­ing apps, which require either Touch­ID or FaceID to allow access.

#5 Twitter Releases Image Editing Update for Desktop

Twit­ter has rolled out a new update which enables users to edit the images they upload on a desk­top, includ­ing easy re-siz­ing and crop­ping tools, and the abil­i­ty to zoom in on the image. This will come in handy for social media man­agers. The tools can be accessed by click­ing on the paint­brush icon at the bot­tom right of the uploaded image.

#6 Facebook Rolling Out Message Unsend Option on Messenger for All Users

Face­book is now rolling out its ‘unsend’ mes­sage option in Mes­sen­ger to all users, pro­vid­ing a way to retract pre­vi­ous­ly sent Mes­sen­ger com­mu­ni­ca­tions with­in a 10-minute window.

#7 Twitter Will Soon Allow You Edit A Tweet Within 30 secs After Tweeting

Twit­ter will soon roll out an option where you can edit your tweet with­in 30 secs of tweeting.

#8 Facebook Page Admins Can Now Respond to Instagram Messages from Page Inbox

Face­book has qui­et­ly tak­en anoth­er step towards the uni­fi­ca­tion of its mes­sag­ing apps with the announce­ment that Face­book Page admins will now be able to respond to Insta­gram Direct Mes­sages from their Face­book Page inbox.

#9 Instagram Rolls Out New IGTV Promotions in the Main Feed

A new form of IGTV pro­mos will now be shown in your main Insta­gram feed when­ev­er a pro­file you fol­low shares an IGTV video. The new pro­mo option will give IGTV broad­cast­ers a chance to share a clip from their lat­est con­tri­bu­tion with­in the main feed – users can then tap through if they want to see more. While it may feel a lit­tle intru­sive, it could have sig­nif­i­cant ben­e­fits for Insta­gram as it looks to encour­age more IGTV usage.

#10 Google Launches New Chrome Extension to Alert Users of Hacked Passwords

Intro­duc­tion of The new Pass­word Check­up Chrome exten­sion. When you use a pass­word online, will scan through the hacked data­bas­es and alert you if your pass­word is listed.

#11 Google Search Console Goes Live With a New Consolidated View

Google made a pre­view of the con­sol­i­dat­ed data view live ear­ly, go check it out now.

#12 Bing is now allowing us to submit 10,000 URLs/Day to its search engine for crawling and indexing

Do you have new or updat­ed con­tent you want Bing to dis­cov­er faster? Start using the new Bing URL Sub­mis­sion tool.

#13 LinkedIn Launches its Own Version of Live-Streaming Called ‘LinkedIn Live

LinkedIn’s new live video tool – called ‘LinkedIn Live’ – will pro­vide anoth­er option for video con­tent on the plat­form. LinkedIn Live will give reg­u­lar mem­bers and busi­ness­es addi­tion­al, the imme­di­ate capac­i­ty to share from con­fer­ences, prod­uct announce­ments, con­duct Q&As and more.

#14 Twitter’s Search Icon Changed From Magnifying Glass To A Hash Symbol

Twit­ter has launched a cou­ple of new fea­tures this week and one of them is chang­ing the search icon from a mag­ni­fy­ing glass to a hash symbol

#15 Instagram is Developing Direct Messages Option on Desktop

Amid dis­cus­sion of Facebook’s planned mes­sag­ing merg­er, Insta­gram is now test­ing the capa­bil­i­ty for users to access their direct mes­sages from the web ver­sion of its app.

#16 Instagram is Testing an Account Linking Feature to Simplify Multiple Account Management

Fol­low­ing its recent launch of mul­ti-account post­ing, Insta­gram is now devel­op­ing a new option to con­nect sev­er­al accounts to a sin­gle log-in, enabling you to more eas­i­ly man­age your var­i­ous Insta­gram accounts. The new option would give Insta­gram users a range of account man­age­ment options, which would extend beyond sim­ply being able to more eas­i­ly man­age addi­tion­al, busi­ness-relat­ed accounts.

#17 Facebook is Testing A New Brand Collaboration Feature on Groups

Face­book is look­ing to test a new brand col­lab­o­ra­tion options for groups, which will enable asso­ci­at­ed groups to offer rel­e­vant deals and/or part­ner with pro­fes­sion­als for more spe­cif­ic indus­try insight and assistance.

#18 Product Card Buttons Pop up on desktop Google Search

Google Shop­ping prod­uct pan­el adds for “details”, “reviews” and “stores” options.

#19 New script to find the best text for new ads using an n‑gram analysis

This script ana­lyzes the per­for­mance of com­mon­ly found word sequences to deliv­er addi­tion­al insights about his­tor­i­cal ad performance

#20 Instagram is Working on New Updates for IGTV, Public Collections

After recent­ly rolling out IGTV pro­mos in the main feed, Insta­gram has now also launched a new IGTV lay­out, includ­ing improved search capac­i­ty, sug­gest­ed chan­nels and an updat­ed pro­file layout.

#21 Instagram Tests ‘Donation’ Sticker in Stories

The Face­book-owned pho­to and mes­sag­ing social app is report­ed­ly test­ing a dona­tion stick­er on Sto­ries as a fundrais­ing tool for orga­ni­za­tions and per­son­al caus­es. Users can search and choose a non­prof­it of their lik­ing and when post­ed on their sto­ry, view­ers will be able to click through to a donate page.

#22 TikTok tests native video ads that point to websites

Tik­Tok is test­ing spon­sored videos that direct users of the video-shar­ing app to an advertiser’s web­site. The video & music clip will be labeled ‘Spon­sored’.

#23 Instagram’s new feature competes with Pinterest’s Pin Boards by allowing users to create public albums

Insta­gram for Android app hints that the Face­book-owned pho­to-shar­ing ser­vice is work­ing on a pub­lic “Col­lec­tions” fea­ture. With this fea­ture, users can orga­nize their favorite, saved Insta­gram posts into groups and share them with others.

Col­lec­tion own­ers would even be able to even grant per­mis­sion for oth­er Insta­gram users to con­tribute to their pub­lic collections.

#24 Canva can now integrate with social media to import and edit pictures directly and also features a schedule option.

Can­va now lets you pub­lish, sched­ule and man­age posts on social media with Can­va Schedule.

#25 Google Will Let You Create Better Responsive Display Ads with the Ad Strength Scorecard

Cre­at­ing rel­e­vant and help­ful dis­play ads is at the top of every advertiser’s mind. Using the ad strength score­card, you can ensure your respon­sive dis­play ads are set up for suc­cess before they start to show.

Google Ads will check that you have the opti­mal num­ber of unique head­lines, images, and descrip­tions. To improve your ad strength, try tak­ing the “Next steps” high­light­ed in the scorecard.

#26 Google Ads has Two Chart Types in the Report Editor

Google Ads has added 2 more new types of charts in the report editor.

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