Give your crush a good polling

Don’t slide into your crush’s DMs, poll them instead

Trying to work out numbers for your dinner party? Curious who your friends think will win the big game? Following the latest Instagram update, users can now send polls to specific people via group DM, also allowing all recipients to view the results of the poll and vote in real-time.

It functions in the same way one would normally add a poll sticker to their story, so no ground-breaking changes this time round.

Groups, groups and more groups

With over 500 million members, Linkedin has been pulling out all the stops to maintain maximum engagement with users. The most recent innovation is Groups, which LinkedIn had for a while, via a standalone app. Jumping from app to app wasn’t really the greatest UX experience within the LinkedIn ecosphere, so it flopped.

Groups can now be private, which is a big change. The idea behind this being to reduce spam and fraudulent posts.

Facebook moving image

With video content garnering the best responses across all realms of social media, Facebook has raised the bar with the introduction of moving images for ads, creating videos from still images.

This process combines two separate images to create a visually moving (not to be confused with emotionally moving; these are quite literally moving images, not moving images) ad. It’s very basic motion but it adds a dimensional element to your adverts, creating more engaging, interesting and appealing content. Possibly.

Facebook has listed the various ways the new process can be used:

• Basic motion: Animate your still image by adding one or two elements of motion in a few seconds and include a CTA at the end
• Brand in motion: Bring your brand or logo to life for a few seconds and then add a CTA card at the end
• Benefit in motion: Bring the key benefit or message of your ad to life. This could be a product benefit, a special offer or discount, a testimonial or product variety
• Demo in motion: Demonstrate how your service or product works. Again, you can include a CTA at the end to seamlessly take action right from your ad

Pinning the important stuff

Facebook group admins can now pin comments at the top of pages, in the hope that this will drive engagement.

With more than a billion Facebook users being members of groups, now is a good time to go all-guns-blazing to group development.