Social Media News Roundup: Facebook Creates a Messenger Bot Analytics Tool

James Allen runs through the latest social media news and advice, including Facebook’s new Messenger bot analytics tool, Twitter’s new abusive tweet prevention, Pinterest’s autoplay video ads, and more.

Facebook Creates Analytics Tool for Messenger Bots

Facebook has created an analytics tool that is designed to show marketers and bot managers how people are reacting to their bots.

As of November 2016 – seven months after the initial launch – there are 34,000 bots on Facebook Messenger. Facebook is now bringing bot makers a tool that allows them to monitor the effectiveness of their bots in order to improve user experience.

The new platform will allow bot makers to track user conversation with bots, and see how bots are being interacted with. Interaction tracking can be setup specifically, so bot makers can choose between tracking certain types of messages, individual messages, or content categories.

The arrival of Facebook’s Messenger Bot tracking tool does not take away the ability to monitor bot interactions with third party tools, instead just offering a new option. Much like Facebook’s other analytics tools, bot makers will have access to this for free.

An official date for the roll out of the Facebook Messenger Bot monitoring tool is yet to be confirmed.

Twitter adds New Features to Help Users Police Abusive Tweets

Twitter has added a new feature that gives users the improved ability to police the tweets they see.Despite its popularity, Twitter has had an issue with abusive tweets and harassment for many years, as there is no real way to manually monitor and prevent abusive, offensive conversations or messages. For this reason, Twitter will implement a new feature that allows users to block any tweets that contain specific keywords or other items – including emojis, phrases, usernames and hashtags.

Twitter has also updated the process of reporting tweets that violate the brand’s Hateful Conduct Policy. Now, when the report button is clicked, a menu is presented to the user that asks how the content they’ve reported is abusive, and whether the offense is targeted at the person reporting, or someone else.

Although the new keyword blocking feature will prevent blocked tweets from showing up in Twitter’s notification tab, tweets that contain any blocked characters will still be visible in other areas on the site, including search results and timeline.

Instagram Stories Gets Updated

Instagram has updated its stories feature.

Instagram stories were hugely popular when they launched earlier this year, and they now have over 100 million active users. On 10 November, Instagram updated its stories, adding a few new features.

New features include being able to tag others in your Instagram story, linking to stories, and the ability to use the Boomerang App to create small looping videos.

Pinterest Prepares Autoplay Video Ads

Pinterest is running tests on its social media platform for autoplay adverts.

The new feature sees the addition of video ads that automatically play, without having to be clicked. Pinterest’s autoplay adverts are only in testing at the moment, with adverts running for The Home Depot, Macy’s and Sony Pictures.

The autoplay video adverts are only currently featured in the new Explore section of the platform. It is unclear at present if the autoplay ads will roll out to other areas of the Pinterest after the test phase is complete.

At present, Pinterest reportedly has not released information on whether or not it has received payment from its current autoplay advertisers.

More Social Media Marketing News & Advice

Read last week’s social media marketing news: Ads Arrive In Facebook Messenger

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