Technology Matrix: Facebook Automates Video Subtitle Captions: This Week in Social Media

social media research Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news.

To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.

Facebook Extends Automated Video Captioning Tools to Pages: Facebook released an automated captioning tool for video ads last year. Over the past few months, Facebook has been gradually rolling out access to this feature to videos published to Facebook pages. This free tool is powered entirely by voice recognition software and the video captions are automatically generated. However, page admins have the option to review the subtitles "snippet by snippet" and manually enter corrections before saving the captions to the video. This tool is currently only available to U.S. Facebook pages written in English.

Facebook extends automated video captioning to U.S. Facebook pages in English.

Vine Shuts Down Vine App on January 17: Vine recently announced plans to shut down its network and pare down the looping video app to a simpler Vine Camera app. In an update this week, the company confirmed that this transition will take place on January 17 and asked all users to download their content before this date. Vine provides instructions on how to download Vines to a phone or have them sent as an archive via email, as well as other details on an FAQ page on its site.

Update – the Vine app will become the Vine Camera on Jan 17. Please download your Vines before then! More here: https://t.co/zrE1oDTx48
— Vine (@vine) January 4, 2017

In this week's show from Friday, January 6, 2017, Michael Stelzner and guests discuss the top news in social media. Topics include rollouts of Periscope360 Live Video and Facebook Live Audio (3:15), the new Group Video Chat feature on Facebook Messenger (21:06), and new enhancements to Instagram Stories (26:19). Subscribe to future shows here.

Periscope360 waitlist mentioned by Joel Comm.

Facebook Live Reports Worldwide Record-breaking Usage on New Year's Eve: Facebook announced that on New Year's Eve, "millions of people around the world used Facebook Live to broadcast their celebrations" and this peak usage culminated into its "biggest night since [its] launch." Facebook shares that live-streaming on its platform reached record-breaking levels all over the world on that night.

Facebook Live broke usage records worldwide on New Year's Eve.

Instagram Rolls Out Enhancements for iOS Users: TechCrunch reports that "Instagram on iPhone 7 and 7 Plus now supports wide color capture and display" and the ability to convert Apple Live Photos into Boomerang videos, which can then be shared to Instagram Stories. These new features were initially announced last September at the devices' unveiling and are now "almost fully rolled out" to all iPhone 7 and 7 Plus users.

If you're on an iPhone 7 or 7 Plus, Instagram now supports wide color capture and display throughout the app—writing an eng blog on it soon
— Mike Krieger (@mikeyk) January 5, 2017

Facebook Tests Linking and Messaging Prompts in Recommendations Tool: Facebook is currently testing in-stream messaging prompts within its new Recommendations tool. With each new recommendation, Facebook prompts the recommender to link to the specific business's Facebook page. This option "makes it easy for the user to get more info in one click… [and] take action on specific recommendations" within the comments.

Facebook now shows a CTA button to message other users when they are mentioned in comments pic.twitter.com/uzGn0vAf6u
— Matt Navarra™? (@MattNavarra) January 3, 2017

Twitter Considers Edit Button for Tweets: Engadget reports that Twitter is "thinking a lot" about adding the ability to edit tweets that have been sent. Upon asking users what improvements they would most like to see in 2017, the company founder shared that an Edit button is the platform's "most requested feature" to date and the company is actively considering the best way to develop and implement this tool. Other user requests include a way to bookmark favorite tweets and more safety and reporting options.

This is our most requested feature (today & always). Mostly to quickly fix mistakes. Anything beyond would need to show revision history https://t.co/fHtGNjkuEx
— jack (@jack) December 29, 2016

Medium Moves Away From Ad-supported Publishing Model: Medium announced plans to move from the "ad-driven publishing model" and will roll out a new compensation model for its writers and creators "based on the value they're creating for people." This update is motivated by a shift in the company's focus to drive more quality content and away from "ad-driven media" on its platform.

Q3 2016 Internet Ad Revenues: The latest advertising revenue figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that U.S. advertisers invested $17.6 billion in digital advertising in the third quarter of 2016. The trade organization reports that this was "the highest third quarter for digital advertising spending on record, and represents a 20% increase over the same time period in 2015," and represents a 4.3% sequential increase over Q2 2016. The "momentum of advertising in mobile, digital video and other innovative formats" has contributed to "these record-setting third quarter revenue figures" and is expected to lead to greater investment in digital advertising in the future.

2016 Social Commerce Survey: A new consumer study from Sumo Heavy, a digital commerce strategy, design, and development consulting firm, presents new data on the influence of social media on the online shopping experience. The report examines how social media can be an "effective and profitable eCommerce channel for brands and retailers" and offers insights on how increased social media usage influences purchasing decisions and digital commerce. It also addresses the rise of commerce-enabled chatbots and other opportunities to deliver more purchases on social media.

Facebook Video Advertising Rewind: Benchmarks and Trends From 2016: Nanigans published a new report on Facebook video advertising benchmarks and trends for 2016 as compared to 2015. The research provides exclusive insights into the overall growth of video ad shares and spending on Facebook and Facebook Audience Network video ad spend growth. This report also examines how video growth on Facebook extends to Instagram.

Marketing Executives Reveal Their 2017 Marketing Strategy: New research from Conductor revealed that 70% of marketing executives plan to spend more on marketing technology in 2017 and a third intend to hire more SEO and content professionals. Although marketers recognize the importance of tracking metrics and performance, 67% of respondents felt that they had to depend upon "too many different dashboards and reports" to get insights into their marketing efforts. These findings are based on survey data of 387 senior marketing executives at both B2C and B2B organizations.

Q3 2016 CPG Social Index: Brandwatch Analytics collected data from "millions of online sources" worldwide and ranked them along five key areas (social visibility, general visibility, sentiment, reach, and engagement) to determine the top 50 CPG brands on social media. Brandwatch offers insights on how the leading brands approach social media. The report also offers an in-depth look at how the retail industry and changing consumer preferences affect CPG markets and how the leading CPG companies are leveraging social data to enhance their businesses.

What do you think of the option to add captions to your Facebook page videos? Have you downloaded your content from Vine? Please share your comments below.