This week in social media:
YouTube Removes Ability to Share to Twitter
This week, YouTube announced that it will be removing the ability to automatically share on-platform updates to Google+ and Twitter. Previously users were able to auto-post their actions to Twitter whenever they added a new video, added a video to a playlist, or when a playlist was saved. Additionally, users could auto cross-post their comments on YouTube to Twitter. Here is the announcement they released about the change:
“Many years ago, we introduced the option to automatically post your public YouTube activity with your social media followers on both Twitter and Google+. Since then, we’ve found that social sharing works better when the message is more customized and takes advantage of social media features, such as @mentions. Overall, this provides a better experience for both you and your followers vs automatically generated posts.”
Twitter Announces New Partnership With The NBA
Within the terms of the new deal, Twitter will live-stream the second half of 20 NBA games this year, using a different camera angle. The camera will actually follow a single player around the court throughout the duration of the stream. Twitter fans will have the option to vote for which player they would like to see each game.
The new stream will begin at the All-Star Game and will continue through the first round of the finals.
Google Adds More Ways Display Product Information
Google has announced a new set of options which will allow business to add their own product information within material search results. 
This will run through Google Manufacturer Center and will allow users to add custom product information within the search results with a “From the Manufacturer” panel.
They have also released a new Analytics center to better track these metrics. 
According to the release, the analytics will include:
- Performance trends like top performing product groups and significant changes in performance or price
- Insights on product variants like top search terms for your products and average price trends
- Product group stats like which competitor’s brands and products appear most often with yours
LinkedIn Updates Help Center
LinkedIn has turned to Contextual Prompts to help streamline their Help Center. As explained in a company release this week:
“Despite having a wealth of customized [Help Center] content, members are still faced with a problem when they need help: they must stop what they’re doing and go to the Help Center to find an answer. To address this problem, we gave ourselves a challenge: Can we bring the Help Center to members instead of bringing members to the Help Center?”
Now, the help center will provide the most common issues associated with the part of the platform you are seeking assistance with.
The prompts will take you through ‘bite-sized’ help articles, hopefully speeding up the help process.
