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

It’s a good week for Twitter. With Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp down on Wednesday, people going through social media withdrawal flocked to Twitter to vent their frustrations. Twitter also rolled out a new in-app camera editor to make it easier to add hashtags and location information to photos and videos.

In Other News …

• Facebook is under investigation in New York for its data sharing deals with companies like Apple and Amazon. This comes as Mark Zuckerberg announced the company is going to focus more on private messaging instead of its more publicly accessible features.
• The internet turned 30 earlier this week and Tim Berners-Lee wrote a piece reckoning with the positive and negative implications of the web.
• If you read about TikTok in the last Digital Bytes but are still unsure what the heck it is, the New York Times has a great primer.
• Well, duh. Instagram finally admitted it stole the highly popular Instagram Stories concept from Snapchat.

Fun Resources

• What makes a great nonprofit website? The RAD Campaign breaks down the trends you need to know – from personalization to micro-interactions.
• If your website is slow to load, Google will reduce its search ranking. Make sure your site’s speed is up to par with Google’s Test My Site tool.
• Social Media Today shared 10 tips to fight the decline in organic social media reach. There are some great principles in here for quality social media content management – from posting consistency to influencer marketing.

Finally …

How do you archive a digital movement? That’s the question The New Yorker explored this week as librarians and archivists try to capture conversations around #MeToo.