Got a minute? Check out our quick update on what's happening in the industry.

Facebook
Facebook's user count has declined by 700,000 daily active users. Facebook has just started executing the big News Feed changes that it announced earlier this month, intended to reduce mindless browsing, video and news consumption in favor of more interactions with close friends. According to Mark Zuckerberg: "Our focus in 2018 is making sure Facebook isn't just fun, but also good for people's well-being and for society. We're doing this by encouraging meaningful connections between people rather than passive consumption of content."

Our Take:

• Ultimately, Facebook's changes are prioritizing interactions and connections over viral content. This means having a social strategy that prompts engagement is more important than ever when it comes to Facebook.
• For Facebook advertisers, less active users could correlate to fewer ad impressions. However, Facebook's new goal is to prevent people from mindlessly scrolling through their News Feed and actually engage with meaningful content. If that theory plays out then fewer ad impressions wouldn't hurt advertisers that much since the end result would be more meaningful engagements.

Instagram
Instagram has confirmed they are testing out a new feature that's basically the equivalent of a Retweet button. Users would be able to share other people's public Instagram posts to their own Story. Instagram has assured users that the original poster's details will remain with the re-used post to give proper credit. All users would have the option to enable or disable this feature in their Settings. 

Our Take:

• Stories has become a huge focus for Instagram as it continues to grow in terms of usage. Being able to include posts in Stories is just another example of how much people are opting to watch Stories over scrolling through their feeds.
• Personally, we're not opposed to the repost functionality but we think it's important for businesses to continue posting engaging Story content and fit this functionality in where it is applicable to their strategy.