My weekly social media blog is back after a work and travel-related (above photo from temporary office at the Thompson Hotel in Playa del Carmen, Mexico!) hiatus. Below are the top social media and digital stories from February 12th through 27th!
Facebook Introduces Canvas, an Immersive, Full-Screen Mobile Ad Unit
Canvas is currently available to all advertisers, via an easy-to-user, self-service tool in Power Editor, and it creates News Feed ads for users with iOS and Android phones. Read about it on SocialTimes
Facebook Live Video is Finally Making its Way to Android
Now that the live video trend has died down, Facebook finally gives Android users access to Live Video. Read about it on Daily Dot
Facebook Reactions Launches Globally
Facebook announced the global launch of theReactions extension to its like button via Android, iOS, desktop and mobile Web. Read about it on SocialTimes
Starbucks Tops Facebook in Micro-Influencer Engagement (Report)
Starbucks was followed by Coca-Cola and MTV on the Average Influencer Index from the micro-influencer marketing platform, which also introduced a free tool, Fan Grader, to analyze brands’ Facebook pages and determine and engage with those pages’ top 100 micro-influencers. Read about it on SocialTimes
Facebook Debuts Birthday Video Cam for iOS
Facebook said in an email that it launched a birthday video cam feature, allowing users to record 15-second birthday videos for their friends, and it explained how the feature works. Read about it on Social Times
Now You Can Invite Non-Facebook Users to Facebook Events via Email
Facebook users can apparently, finally now invite non-Facebook users to events via their email addresses, and the social network is also prompting users to invite friends to events via personalized messages on its Messenger application. Read about it on SocialTimes
Which Instagram Photo Filters Are the Most Popular? (Study)
Clarendon is, by far, the most-used Instagram photo filter, both in the U.S. and worldwide, according to a new study by graphic-design program Canva. Read about it on SocialTimes
Instagram Tops 200,000 Advertisers
Instagram said in an Instagram for Business blog post that 60 percent of its users learn about products and services on Instagram and 75 percent will take actions after viewing Instagram posts, including visiting websites, searching, shopping or sharing with friends. Read about it on SocialTimes
Meet Fabric, Twitter’s New Mobile App Built Specifically for Developers
Twitter Fabric is a mainstay for developers who want to build better apps, but has been limited to a Web-based interface. Read about it on The Next Web
Snapchat
Snapchat Now Lets You Create Your Own Geofilters for Parties and Events
Now Snapchat is letting anyone pay to create On-Demand Geofilters for others to use. Read about it on The Next Web
Pinterest Adds Movie, Recipe Data to Billions of Pins
For recipe Pins, Pinterest is adding rich data such as ingredients, cooking times and servings to the Pins—doubling the number of recipe Pins in the system to 4 billion. Read about it on SocialTimes
Only 17% of the Fortune 500 are Active on Pinterest (Study)
Berlin-based competitive intelligence platform Rivalfox found that while 38 percent of the Fortune 500 have some kind of Pinterest presence, only 17 percent use Pinterest regularly (posting at least once every two months). Read about it on Social Times
YouTube
YouTube Now Lets You Blur Any Part of Your Video for Maximum Anonymity
YouTube wants to help fix that by letting you blur any part of the video before it makes it to the public Web. Read about it on The Next Web
Vimeo
Vimeo Partners With Wipster to Offer a Video Collaboration Tool for Creators
Vimeo has teamed with Wipster to incorporate its video review and approval tools into the media platform’s creator toolset. Read about it on VentureBeat