Social Media Sunday: Facebook's Numbers, Twitter's Diversity, and Pinterest Goes Shopping
This week in social media, Facebook dominated the headlines and Wall Street, as it showed how much it dominates the social media world. Meanwhile, an ex-Twitter engineer exposed the company's clunky attempts at diversity and Pinterest officially introduced a new feature that blends perfectly with the reasons people use its network.
It's time for Social Media Sunday!
Active User Base: 1/7th of Humanity
Facebook released its latest quarterly figures to investors this week and not only did the company surpass expectations, its numbers were so impressive that Facebook soon surpassed a long-running blue chip company in market value after the announcement.
The reason? Facebook now counts 1.55 billion active monthly users on its flagship platform. That means Facebook added 60 million new users in the last quarter. And it counts over 1 billion daily visitors as well.
And all of those incredible numbers were released after the company refined its user counting system to exclude anyone using Facebook through third-party apps, according to Re/Code.
Huge Revenues, Huge Value
Along with the news showing how dominant Facebook is across the world came some very healthy revenue figures, like a 41 percent climb from earlier in the year to $4.5 billion total, with net profits up 11 percent from the previous year to an incredible $896 million, according to the New York Times.
Facebook's stock soared after the report was released, surpassing blue chip titan General Electric by Thursday, according to USA Today. Facebook ended the week being worth more than $306.4 billion, while GE remained just under the $300 billion level.
Diversity Issues Behind Its Problem with Growth?
This week, an ex-Twitter engineer named Leslie Miley wrote a blog post explaining why he left the company, and singling out Twitter's blind spots regarding workplace diversity as a reason why the company has struggled to find and retain new users.
As Latin Post previously reported, Miley praised Twitter as a platform and expressed admiration for many of his former peers, but pointed to homogenous thinking -- from a leadership team with homogenous backgrounds and experiences -- as a reason why the company has had such a hard time maintaining growth and engagement.
"Twitter's issues with growth and engagement and the issues with internal diversity are somewhat related," said Miley. "Any change would be approved by people who all think alike," adding, "There was very little diversity in thought and almost no diversity in action."
Miley pointed out one person he worked with, engineering executive Alex Roetter, whose proposal to increase diversity by using a name-recognition algorithm on the applicant pool was the reason Miley ultimately left. Miley wrote that felt he could no longer, "in good conscience, continue to work in an organization where [Roetter] could see himself as a technology visionary and be so unaware of this blind spot in his understanding of diversity."
Roetter later issued a statement apologizing for doing a "poor job communicating" and agreeing that Twitter needs a strong focus on diversity, according to Re/code.
Hearts vs Stars
Speaking of huge controversies, this week Twitter decided to get rid of the "favorite" star, replacing it with a "like" heart. And as you could probably predict, the Internet practically exploded in fury.
As Latin Post reported, Twitter explained the change was to make the feature less confusing, which apparently the star was for some users. "The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones," said Twitter product manager Akarshan Kumar. "The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people."
Introducing an Obviously Good Idea: The Pinterest Shop
Many people who go to Pinterest are interested in digital window shopping, and now that Pinterest has already added a "buy" button for some pins earlier this summer, the network introduced the Pinterest Shop this week.
The Pinterest Shop is basically a section of Pinterest where all and only the pins with "buy" buttons are available for browsing or search. According to The Verge, the Pinterest Shop will be available on both its iOS and Android apps, though Pinterest hasn't expressed plans to take it to the web.
Pinterest announced it had over 60 buyable pins, double the amount since launching the feature, and will be rolling out the Pinterest Shop where you can find them all in the same place over the next couple of weeks.
Subscribe to Latin Post!
Sign up for our free newsletter for the Latest coverage!
