Privacy, safety, and security are all critical components of a trusted digital environment. They also offer a tremendous opportunity to innovate and build our businesses around private sharing and group culture that today’s audiences crave. By tuning into this important inflection point in our industry, we can begin to create a more human element to marketing.
Let’s take a look at some recent updates from four major platforms that are paving the way for a more permission-based future where users choose who they’re engaging with, how their information is shared, and have some say in the curation of their feeds:
Twitter Topics
As reported by The Verge, starting next week Twitter is offering the ability to follow topics in an approach to make the platform more accessible and approachable for newcomers and enhance the discovery of conversations and accounts for veteran users.
“We know that the main reason that people come to Twitter is to keep up on the things that they’re interested in,” said Rob Bishop who leads the company’s Topics team. “The challenge is that it’s really quite difficult to do that on Twitter day to day.”
With this feature, you can select from a variety of over 300 topics across sports, entertainment, and gaming that match your interests and are made clearly visible amidst the clutter of other conversations occurring.
Unlike the concept behind Twitter moments, there is a human element to the vetting with this update targeted to guarantee that topic streams remain relevant and stay on track. Above all, the goal is to emphasize the human behind the Twitter experience,
To follow a topic, simply follow the prompts from your Home timeline and enter the subject in the search bar. Tap the ‘Follow’ button and you’ll then be notified via a badge on tweets in your timeline that are being populated based on the topic you chose. You can unfollow topics at any time and make your account private if you don’t want anyone outside of your followers see your posts or what you’re sharing.
Facebook Messenger’s Privacy Hub
“We believe it’s critical to have spaces for private conversations where you have the freedom to be yourself and shared with loved ones,” Jay Sullivan, Director of Product Management for Messenger Privacy and Integrity stated in a blog post announcing a new privacy hub for Messenger.
The primary goal of this update is providing users with detail around their privacy settings and features including “Secret Conversations,” or end-to-end encrypted messages.
To make it simpler for users to avoid unwanted interactions, the site also provides detailed instructions for blocking accounts and reporting issues including people impersonating a friend or celebrity. In a similar vein, details for protecting your account from hackers via login alerts and safer browsing to avoid malware are also outlined.
Lastly, the platform is sharing the behind the scenes processes of removing reported accounts and how emerging tech like artificial intelligence is employed to identify harmful or inappropriate content and prevent the spread of misinformation.
WhatsApp Groups
WhatsApp has introduced an overhaul to its privacy settings and group and invite system to help users personalize their groups.
Here’s a breakdown of the new options:
- Everyone: Any WhatsApp user is able to add you to a group.
- My Contacts: Anyone in your phone’s contacts can add you to a group. If a user is not included in this list, they will not be able to add you to a group.
- My Contacts Except: Anyone in your phone’s contact list can add you to a group with the exception of designated contacts that you specifically choose to exclude.
“As people turn to groups for important conversations, users have asked for more control over their experience,” the company shared in the official announcement.
LinkedIn Recommended Group Posts
After originally removing the messaging feature due to complaints around spam, LinkedIn introduced recommended group posts — a way for groups, owners, managers to share top content to keep everyone up to speed without the headache of sifting through unrelated content.
The steps to recommend are few and simple: navigate to your group’s homepage, click ‘More’ at the top of the post you’d like to recommend, then lastly, hit ‘Recommend this post.’ A quick disclaimer: you’ll get an error message if someone else in the group has beat you to the punch in recommending that given post or if you suggest a post too early. Only one post can be recommended per group every seven days — a LinkedIn rule to minimize notifications and focus them on the most value-adding content.
Learn more about Privacy Matters as part of our 2020 global theme: HUMAN.X and help us establish a human-first, experience-driven approach to digital marketing. Secure your early-bird discount today to save 30% on your full-conference pass to #SMWNYC (May 5-7, 2020).