Welcome to 5in5

Welcome to this week’s 5in5. In this post we look at how EU Law is influencing social media for teenagers. Twitter introduces Moments to users, Facebook is adding live streaming and creating a Facebook for work without the games! Finally some social media trends for 2016.

EU Countries to decide their own social media policy for children.

European member states will be allowed to set th eir own social media policy for children as the European parliament could not agree.

As you can imagine technology companies lobbied against such law. There had been a proposal to ban Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other services from processing personal data belonging to under-16s unless their parents had given consent. EU Members cannot scrap the directive completely but can choose to serve content between the ages of 13-16. The news was welcomed by Conservative MEP Timothy Kirkhope, who said: “Concerns have been listened to and the UK’s age of consent will not be forced to change.” The new draft law, allowing countries to set their own social media age limit, is set to be confirmed by a vote in the European Parliament’s civil liberties committee on Thursday (17th Dec 2015) and then by a full parliament vote next year.

Facebook adds live video streaming to iOS app to challenge Twitter’s Periscope.

Facebook is starting to roll out live video streaming to its iOS app, in a bid to challenge the Twitter-owned Periscope app in the live streaming arena. The company is rolling the feature out slowly, only allowing a limited number of US users to broadcast live video streams from their iPhones as a Facebook post at first. To broadcast their activities, users simply touch a Live Video icon on their iOS smartphones, write a short description of their live video and select who they wish to broadcast it to.

When the broadcast begins, users will be able to see in real-time who has tuned in and any comments being made by the viewers. Once the broadcast is finished it is also saved as a normal user video and added to Facebook as a post.

Twitter launches new service called Moments.

The whole idea around moments is to collect and base tweets around topics and trending hastags. The UK is the first country in Europe to get the new feature, after it launched in America. The service will be gradually made available to the more than 15m UK users from Tuesday afternoon. Selecting them lets you scroll through a series of tweets, along with images, videos and GIFs included within them, around the topic. For example, a moment about the Star Wars premiere includes tweets from showbiz and culture publications, and actors from the film. Users can also browse different areas, including news, sports and entertainment to see moments about those subjects.

Other moments include “10 tweets to start your day”, “Meat Free Monday dinner inspiration” and “Tourist for a day: Amalfi Coast”, which display a series of tweets around a subject, rather than a particular news event.

Facebook will finally launch its social network for using at work.

The service is almost ready to be made available to businesses – but will block people from playing games. Facebook at Work, Facebook’s professional version of its social network, is expected to launch in the coming months, after spending a year in tests, a company executive said.

The new service geared towards workplace collaboration, is nearly identical to its ubiquitous social network, with a scrolling news feed, “likes” and a chat service. Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships at Facebook, said almost everything on Facebook at Work is the same as the regular Facebook social network, with some minor exceptions. “You cannot play Candy Crush on Facebook at Work,” he told Reuters. “I would say 95 per cent of what we developed for Facebook is also adopted for Facebook at Work.”

Social Media Trends for 2016.

I think that video is going to be very big in 2016, due to the nature of visual marketing. Facebook will continue to be the top goto social platform and embracing the pay to play models for all the big six. Visual marketing will continue to grow but inspiration and emotional branding will come to the for. Continuing to understand how users experience your brand listening carefully to audiences, readers, listeners, community and customers in 2016. The development of Mobile apps must be a priority this has been a requirement for several years.

Happy Christmas and have a fabulous new year.

Mark