This week in social media, Facebook is still showing Snapchat envy with its latest startup acquisition. Meanwhile, the effectiveness of Snapchat advertising might actually be measurable, thanks to a new startup, and Twitter is giving out bonuses to keep employees from leaving the company.

It's time for Social Media Sunday!

Facebook

Cloning Snapchat Again, With Face Swap App Purchase

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows a promising product when he sees it. It's why he acquired Instagram for an unheard of (at the time) $1 billion when the company had only a handful of employees, and why he later tried to acquire Snapchat, only to be turned down.

And it's why Zuckerberg just acquired Masquerade, a hot app that lets users swap faces with each other while taking selfies or videos on their smartphones. If face swapping sounds familiar, it's because Snapchat's face swap filter has also become a hugely popular feature for the ephemeral messaging service.

Facebook hasn't implemented Masquerade's face swap technology into its app yet, and Zuckerberg's company says it plans to keep Masquerade as a standalone app. But don't be surprised if you see a face swapping feature showing up on your Facebook or Instagram app sometime soon.

Adding Spotify to Messenger

This week, Facebook continued to open up its messaging platform to third-party services and apps by adding a new Spotify integration to Facebook Messaging. According to Mashable, the new feature won't let you play music from Spotify within Messenger (or at least not yet), but you can share artists, tracks, and playlists while you're messaging people.

Facebook previously added support for Uber within Messenger, and plans to begin opening up the platform to many more third-party integrations so users can someday accomplish all of their smartphone tasks without ever leaving the app.

Twitter

Giving Bonuses Just to Keep Employees

Twitter has had a rough year and a half, with Wall Street investors remaining skeptical of the platform's future with every disappointing earnings call. The morale apparently isn't too high at Twitter's headquarters, either, as The Guardian is reporting the company has begun offering bonuses to employees who are searching for positions at other companies. Bribes to continue their work at Twitter, you might call them.

Twitter is reportedly offering payouts between $50,000 and $200,000 to employees that are shopping around for other jobs to keep them from leaving the company. The bonuses are being offered in the form of restricted stock, which allows Twitter to retain employees from between six months to a year.

Snapchat

New Startup "Cracks Code" for Snap Marketing?

Snapchat has been experimenting for a couple of years now on marketing integrations, advertising platforms, and other efforts to make the hugely popular, and highly funded, free app profitable -- eventually.

Now the Austin-based Gnack is launching a mobile app that it says will help advertisers track how many times their marketing campaigns get interactions from Snapchat users (and Instagram as well). According to AdWeek, the startup said it has cracked the Snapchat code, finding a way for brands to measure how many eyes their promotional snaps are actually seen by.

"There's a ton of value in everyday influencers, which can have three to five times the engagement rate than someone with 10,000 or more followers," said Chico Tirado, co-founder of Gnack, to AdWeek. "We wanted a way to automize the entire process." Now maybe it's just a matter of time before Snapchat snaps up this promising marketing startup.

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