Every two weeks, Vanguard distills hundreds of digital media headlines into the best “byte”- sized pieces of useful information. Each edition has news ranging from the latest Facebook algorithm changes to best practices for email marketing. Share Digital Bytes with your organization to keep your digital strategies ahead of the pack.

Digital Bytes

Twitter has been in the news lately – making major leadership changes, enhancing political ad transparency and “scrambling” to calm Republican nerves about liberal bias. It also received a glowing BuzzFeed longform read about its recent surge in popularity.

In thinking about Twitter’s rise in importance in today’s news cycle, I think it has become a refuge for reporters and people on all sides of the aisle to publicly air grievances and discuss both superficial and profound fears and anxieties about the current political landscape. This is also happening on YouTube and Reddit to some degree, but Twitter has been the platform of choice because you can also interact directly with reporters breaking the news and you don’t need a video (YouTube) or reliance on upvotes (Reddit).

In other news …

• Look out Europe, California passed tough online privacy laws that mimic GDPR regulations.
• Facebook is introducing a 30-day “keyword snooze” for its News Feed. The intended use is to give users a break from content ranging from TV spoilers to political news.
• Another day, another privacy breach. This time, a quiz app has exposed data of 120 million Facebook users.
• Instagram launched its own video app, IGTV, last week. It’s been characterized as a direct threat to YouTube, but we’ll need to give the platform several months to see if users will take to it or whether it will become another Vine (R.I.P.).
• In other Instagram news, its Story feature now has 400 million daily active users, twice the volume of Snapchat. If your organization hasn’t already, it’s time to think of both static images and stories as essential to your Instagram strategy.

Fun Resource

Facebook has launched a “Brand Collabs Manager” with the sole purpose of connecting brands to online influencers. (Yes, I hear your groans). Sign up for the waitlist! If you are a regular reader of Digital Bytes, you may remember a piece from The Atlantic a few weeks back discussing how influencers have impacted the hotel industry.

Finally …

We all know that laptops and other devices aren’t the cleanest things we own. The New York Times breaks down the best ways to clean your “filthy” laptop!