Introduction
So your favorite apps and social media platforms are making a drastic change by the end of this year, as declared by Mark Zuckerberg himself during Facebook F8 2019 developer keynote in April. If you’ve been following these updates since before, you may already have a fair idea that Facebook was going to make a whole lot of changes to all its platform. And after this announcement, it’s pretty clear what to expect from the largest social network in the world.
What exactly are these changes that the whole world is talking about? Are these updates, for lack of a better word, really up to the MARK (pun intended)? Well, as the CEO clearly pointed all, they are redefining the concept of online socializing with these new updates. We believe that these updates are going to receive generally positive reviews given they’re expected to provide a more personalized platform from what we know so far.
Let’s discuss some of the key highlights of the show, one platform at a time.
Facebook Updates in 2019
1. Communities, Communities Everywhere
Facebook is known to emulate strategies of its potential rivals, and now it’s planning to target the world’s largest discussion platform, Reddit. What Facebook is essentially doing is making its feeding more and more community based rather than about checking out photos of your uncle’s third cousin’s children, which happen to be on your friend list for no other purpose than that.
Anyway, many users had already seen it coming, especially since Facebook had already begun pushing groups and discussion pages on everyone’s feed lately. With the new update, however, Facebook is expected to offer long discussion threats that keep users immensely engaged online, just like in the case of reddit.
This moves clearly takes its motivation from the fact that reddit out-striped Facebook to become the third most visited site last year. Let’s wait and see what the blue giant is preparing in its artillery.
2.Facebook For Dating
Yeah we know dating via Facebook already started last year, but that was only limited to The US in 2018. This year, Facebook is planning to expand this service to additional 14 countries.
This service will work on the concept of secret crush. You’ll be given an option to add a secret list of your crushes from your Facebook friend list. With this option available to everyone on your friend list, ones that happen to have secret crush on each other will get notified for the match. We know what you’re thinking, isn’t this very similar to what the dating app Tinder does? As we said, emulating rivals’ strategies.
3. More Private Than Ever
While Facebook is being promoted as a discussion platform on public level, it’s also making chats more and more private with this year. Your feed will remain more underscored towards community, but your chats and private video calls will now be available with end-to-end encryption, just as they are in the case of Whatsapp.
Also Check Out: Influencer Marketing in 2019 – How Micro-Influencers have an edge over Film Stars
Changes in Instagram
1. New Camera Features
Instagram is all set to become even friendlier than before with the introduction of the new creative features in its camera. And these features are not limited to photo and video editing (although the editing is also all set to give a tough fight to Snapchat), they’re also planning to make it more interactive than we have seen before. We’re not sure what those new additions will be, but we’re just as excited to know about it as you are.
2. No More Like Counts
We were all glad when Instagram didn’t add those horrible ‘react’ feature to it. It’s turning out to be a nightmare for many facebook users already, with trolls reacting with a ‘haha’ on literally everything, whether it’s supposed to be funny or not. This year, instagram is going to go a step further, by hiding likes count from followers completely. A trial run has already been initiated in a few countries, and if everything checks out in their favor, they’ll roll out a full update with everything permanent soon.
3. Business for Influencers
Instragram really loves its influencers, and its trying everything it can to make sure they don’t switch to other platforms. This year, they are planning to introduce an in-app checkout option for users to buy products directly from their favorite influencer’s pages. This is certainly a huge step for instagram. We bet they’re planning something even bigger in the coming years. Who knows, they might end up going toe-to-toe with Amazon some day?
New Updates on Whatsapp
1. WhatsApp for Local Businesses
Whatsapp is used around the world for local businesses to promote their products through broadcasting on different groups. To bolster these small enterprises, whatsapp’s new feature will turn it into a marketplace app where users can check out their entire catalogue through their whatsapp business accounts. This is going to especially great for businesses that have no other significant online presence, be it a website or an app, and are solely dependent on whatsapp all their online marketing.
In fact, let’s be very specific. This feature is specifically designed for local businesses in India. India has the highest number of whatsapp users in the world, and they even acknowledged it by showcasing an Indian business to client conversation (with transactions shown in Rupees rather than the standard dollar) in their F8 Keynote presentation.
It’s safe to say that most of the changes will certainly keep us even more engaged with the three platforms, although there may be a chance that added business promotions may lead to some level of dissatisfaction for the ones who aren’t really a fan of online shopping, or even worse, shopping in general.