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4 Important Things That Happened to Social Media in 2015

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably now that Facebook reached the milestone of having 1 billion users logged into the site in one day in August. This is a huge thing for the social networking giant (founder Mark Zuckerberg even made a special post for it), but take note that it’s not the only big thing that happened to social media this year. If you take a close look, you’ll see that 2015 has been a great year for social media, with many improvements taking place and more people using it for communication, entertainment, and even shopping. Here are some of the biggest changes that happened in 2015:

 

1. Facebook now lets people shop and sell inside the site.

Facebook has been criticized for wanting to create a walled garden and prevent people from getting off the site, but you can’t deny that they have come up with some impressive innovations in 2015. One of these is the Facebook Store, which allows merchants to create a page that’s dedicated to their products and lets users to buy items directly on Facebook. This is favorable for both groups of people: sellers can reach more people and increase their sales, while shoppers can save time since they no longer have to go through many hoops to buy what they want.

 

2. Twitter has improved their retail strategies, too.

Twitter, which seemingly doesn’t want to be upstaged by Facebook, went ahead and integrated shopping in their site through the “Buy Now” feature. The microblogging site, with the help of technology company Stripe, partnered with e-commerce platforms like Shopify to let both big and small brands sell their products on Twitter.

 

To buy from these retailers, shoppers only have to click the “Buy” button that appears with the companies’ product tweets. Once they do, they can choose the size or color they want (if applicable), type in their billing and shipping details, and confirm their purchase.

 

3. Tweets now show up in Google search results.

When you search for a celebrity, a brand, or any other entity on Google, the search engine giant will now include tweets from that person or organization. The same principle applies when you do a search about popular topics. This feature is available both in mobile and desktop and is available for all English language searches around the world. It’s a significant development since it recognizes the ubiquity of Twitter and emphasizes the need for businesses to be active on the microblogging site.

 

4. Instagram has updated Direct

If you’re an avid Instagrammer, you probably thought of Instagram Direct more as a privacy setting than an actual usable feature. But this has changed when Instagram updated its messaging service, which now shows threaded conversations and allows users to start group chats. It’s a great way to communicate with people, not just to give and read comments about photos.

 

Social media has gone through a lot of changes in 2015. But this isn’t the end; in fact, it’s only the beginning, and both users and marketers should expect to see more improvements when 2016 rolls around.