5 Product Update Sourcing News Stories You have to Hear - 24th November

In the news this week:

Watch the video:

Facebook at Work’ site to take on LinkedIn and Google Drive

Yes, you read that headline correctly, Facebook are busy toiling away on a new product that will put it into direct competition with Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn.

“Facebook at Work“, is a new product designed to allow users to chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents. But wait. Doesn’t that type of functionality sound familiar? Yes, and that’s because it is. Facebook at Work’s functionality will challenge Google’s Drive, Gmail and GChat, Microsoft’s Outlook email service, Office software and Yammer, and of course, LinkedIn’s dominance in the online business networking sector.

So, what will this new all-encompassing site look like? Well, apparently it will look very much like Facebook as we know it – with a newsfeed and groups – but it will allow users to keep their personal profile (with its holiday snaps, silly videos and pet pictures) separate from their work identity.

Facebook’s employees have been using the site in their daily work for a long number of years, but the project to begin expanding it to other companies began in earnest during the past year and is now being tested with other companies as it’s launch draws closer. But as The Irish Times have brought up, “to become an integral part of office life, Facebook will need to win the trust of companies and organisations, which will expect to be able to conduct confidential conversations and share important information on the site, without it falling into the hands of rivals.” After all, many companies, concerned about falling productivity as employees spend work time checking personal messages and internet gossip, currently ban Facebook from the workplace. Will they now start encouraging their workers to use Facebook? Time will tell.

The company is unlikely to charge for the service initially, but as the site gathers most of it’s revenue from advertising, we believe workers should expect to see plenty on the new platform. And if that is the case, it could be another potential avenue for recruiters to go down when it comes to determine where to place job ads.

Meet the New LinkedIn Hiring Manager Experience

“Accelerate your time to hire with enhanced hiring team collaboration” is the tagline associated with LinkedIn’s latest update to the Recruiter product. Yes, LinkedIn have been busy beavering away to make it “easier than ever to collaborate with hiring managers, right from Recruiter“. New enhancements to the product now mean that your hiring team can easily evaluate prospects, understand strength and status of talent in the pipeline, and rank and recommend candidates who might be a fit.

In terms of what’s changed, every Recruiter seat you can give up to 23 Hiring Managers access to the following functionality for free:

• you can now share individual profiles for Hiring Managers to review from a project

• you can share an entire project with Hiring Managers and Hiring Managers on your contract from the search results page and the profile page

• when Hiring Managers sign in to their seats they can quickly see how many candidates have been shared with them for review and the ones they have already reviewed

• a new streamlined workflow makes it easier for Hiring Managers to review and rate candidates in the pipeline

• automatic email updates highlight important project activity to the Hiring managers you have added to your project

For a full explanation of the new layout, watch the video below:

Twitter Now Let’s You Share Tweets through Direct Messages

There’s now a new way to share tweets on Twitter – sharing them privately using Direct Messages. As of Thursday last week, Twitter users everywhere will be able to share a tweet privately with any of their followers, and do so from either the iOS or the Android mobile app.

To share a tweet via direct message on your mobile, all you have to do is long-press the Tweet in your timeline and choose Share via Direct Message from the pop-up menu (as the GIF below illustrates).

.For those of you using twitter.com or TweetDeck, tap the ‚¬¢‚¬¢‚¬¢ More icon and select Share via Direct Message. The person you share a tweet with will get a push notification, and the tweet will display directly in your conversation. Easy peasy.

Facebook is Cracking Down On Business Pages with Spammy, Aggressive Marketing Content

According to TechCrunch.com, Facebook are about to start punishing business Pages that publish “spammy, aggressive marketing posts” with the likes of “BUY NOW”, “INSTALL NOW and “COMPETITION” to the Newsfeed.

Yes, after a study of 500,000 users found that they wanted to see less promotional content in the form of organically displayed from Pages they Liked, and that the majority of posts that annoyed them weren’t actually ads, Facebook decided to re-write the rulebook. From January 2015, Facebook will be showing these types of posts far less, even if the Page has paid for ads to get those fans. Indeed, starting next year, some businesses will be forced to change their Page publishing strategies or see their organic reach and subsequent referral traffic drop dramatically.

But while the sanctions rate being brought in to improve the quality of the Newsfeed for everyone (yay!), Techcrunch.com believe that the “whole situation is a disturbing bait-and-switch”. In other words, they feel that for years Facebook pushed businesses to buy ads to gain Likes for their Pages so they can reach them for free via Newsfeed, and at no point did Facebook set any restrictions for what businesses could say in those posts. Now, they appear to be back peddling and punishing Page administrators for something they were never told they couldn’t do. For example, on Facebook for Business’s Pages page they state:

“When more people like your Facebook Page, it helps you build your reputation, stay connected with the people who support you and find new customers”. It even suggests you do so by creating “an ad to promote your Page“. Nowhere does Facebook mention that despite buying fans so it can stay connected with them, it will punish Pages for publishing posts like this:

Facebook says that:

According to people we surveyed, there are some consistent traits that make organic posts feel too promotional:

• Posts that solely push people to buy a product or install an app
• Posts that push people to enter promotions and sweepstakes with no real context
• Posts that reuse the exact same content from ads

Here is an example of a post that (under the new ‘rules’) Facebook would deem unacceptable, and slap sanctions on a Page for posting:

However, Facebook says that While Pages that post a lot of the content we mention above will see a significant decrease in distribution, the majority of Pages will not be impacted by this change. It also tells me that if a Page’s fans consistently Like or click on the spammy posts, Facebook will keep showing them the hard-sell marketing messages.

But in the end, what Facebook’s doing for users is the right move. It will make the feed more interesting, and teach brands to create far more compelling content than they currently do. The only problem lies in that Facebook essentially duped Page admins into buying Likes for years, but is now radically reducing the value of those Likes for some businesses. So along with TechCrunch.com, we reckon there could be a lawsuit just around the corner!

NEW: Create BEAUTIFUL Presentations on SlideShare

Most of you have probably had to make a PowerPoint presentation at some point in your career. So I’m guessing you can empathise and agree with me when I say that the vast majority of PowerPoint presentations that get presented by corporate professionals across the globe every day are dull, uninspiring and ultimately forgettable.  Most slides are clogged with words, bullet points, pie charts and trending graphs, devoid of any personality. Well, SlideShare is hoping to change all that! Because from now on, if you need to create a kick-ass presentation, SlideShare is the place to go!

“Introducing an easy way to create beautiful decks with Haiku Deck on SlideShare“, that’s the message on SlideShare’s latest email marketing campaign, and boy are these presentations beautiful! Check out this one for example: