Your favorite social media platforms were hard at work for the past month and keeping up with the constant updates could be a headache. You are not alone! The Transeo editorial team understands where you’re coming from and our Social Media Month in Review series aims to tone down your FOMO on social media updates!

Relax and read on as we deliver the most relevant social media news and updates for the past 30 days.

Twitter and Google are now bffs on desktop

Last February, Twitter’s Dick Costolo announced that the platform will be partnering with Google on future integrations for the rest of 2015. Last week, Google announced through a tweet that users can now search and view real-time tweets on the Google search results page through desktop. You can now even search with hashtags! Type in #content and search results will reveal trending tweets for the particular hashtag.

Instagram has made it possible to post in Portrait and Landscape formats

In a press release, Instagram declared that users can go beyond the platform’s square format and post photographs using either landscape or portrait formatting. This update was made after finding out that nearly one in five Instagram content aren’t in the square format. “The visual story you’re trying to tell should always come first, and we want to make it simple and fun for you to share moments just the way you want to,” Instragram explained.

Facebook outdid Google as source of traffic for news and media

Latest figures by traffic analytics firm Parse.ly reveal that major new outlets get their traffic more in Facebook than Google. The company’s latest estimates reveal that social-media sources (in which Facebook holds the largest portion) accounted for about 43 percent of the traffic to 40 major news sites such as Reuters and The Daily Telegraph while Google’s was at 38 percent.

The 140-character limit on Twitter’s DMs may have resulted to thousands of well-meaning messages that weren’t interpreted as such, leading to fewer users relying on DMs. Twitter has finally realized that it’s about time they lift the 140-character limit and provide users the ultimate freedom of speech through direct messages. “Today’s change is another big step towards making the private side of Twitter even more powerful and fun,” explains Twitter’s Sachin Agarwal.

Tumblr has landed in Australian shores (commercially that is)

Australia has an estimated 4.6 million users on Tumblr, half of which are estimated to be within the 18-35 age demographic. With these numbers in mind, the blogging platform collaborated with Australia’s Yahoo7, making the country the first non-American market of Tumblr’s commercialization efforts. This development allows Yahoo 7 to incorporate Tumblr in their sponsorship packages.

Facebook and Twitter released their Q2 data

Both social networks released their figures for the second quarter of the year. Facebook revealed that they have now 1.49 billion monthly active users, up by 3.47 percent from the first quarter.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s Q2 earnings has jumped 63 percent on year for the quarter, resulting to a total revenue of $502 million. Our Q2 results show good progress in monetization, but we are not satisfied with our growth in audience," interim CEO Jack Dorsey said during the announcement. "In order to realize Twitter's full potential, we must improve in three key areas: ensure more disciplined execution, simplify our service to deliver Twitter's value faster, and better communicate that value."

Australia is Facebook’s testing ground for its new Buy and Sell feature

Selling something in Facebook almost always involved sharing a direct link of your Buy & Sell page or posting a photo of the item on your timeline. Recently, Facebook soft launched their Buy and Sell function amongst Australian users. The new feature includes a description box, price, location, and a function designating that the item has been sold. This new feature makes it incredibly easy to share your goods to friends and family.

Facebook adds gifs and live streaming to a select few

Facebook earlier added gifs to individual users in May. It has now extended the feature to select business pages. User reactions will be monitored before the social media giant rolls it out to all businesses. Additionally, a select few such as celebrities is also currently enjoying Facebook’s live streaming feature, which many speculate, is Facebook’s response to Twitter’s Periscope.

Did we miss major social media updates that you think should be in the blog post? Share in the comments below!

About the Author

 

About Kyjean Tomboc

Kyjean likes to think of herself as an online content machine but her love for all things feline makes her human after all! She writes mainly about health, science, social media, and online content marketing. If she’s not writing, she’s either scaling mountains or taming tardigrades. Follow her tardigrade taming attempts at Twitter - @autodidactikai