With Twitter has come under intense scrutiny and criticism in recent times, one of the platform’s biggest identified problems has been trolls and abuse, and the platform’s historic inaction to address such concerns. Twitter has acknowledged such, and made it a key focus, and over the last year they’ve introduced a range of tools to protect users and eliminate such behavior.

Those measures include collapsing or hiding potentially offensive tweets, the ability to mute certain words from your notifications, an update of the default egg avatar to encourage users to upload an actual photo, new transparency over reporting processes, placing warnings on potentially offensive profiles and tweets and a secondary ‘message requests’ DM inbox.

No doubt you've heard this before - video is the medium for social in 2017.

A quick recap:

• Online video is forecast to account for 74% of all web traffic in 2017
• More than 500 million people are watching Facebook videos every day, while 1.5 billion users log onto YouTube every month
• Year over year, the time people spend watching video on Instagram is up more than 80% 

With social media giving everyone a voice, employee advocacy – and expanding your marketing reach throughout your employees’ social networks – has become a much more significant consideration. LinkedIn is one of various platforms that have sought to tap into this trend, via their employee advocacy program ‘Elevate’, which aims to help encourage employee engagement on social in a way that helps boost your wider brand efforts.

According to LinkedIn, on average, employees have around 10x more connections on social than companies do, and through tools like Elevate, businesses can use this as a means to expand their reach.

Snapchat's augmented-reality hot dog has started an obsession.

It might not look like much, and its dance moves aren't even all that, but it is ahead of its time. It's so advanced, Snapchat hasn't even gotten around to selling the creature or building one for brands. It is the first character that uses the company's 3D "World Lens" technology, which renders the bopping brat as a fully formed creature inside the Snapchat camera. People can walk around it, filming it like it was really there.

The opportunity to drive sales with social media is huge, however the opportunity to waste a lot of time and money is equally as large if you don’t understand what consumers want from brands on social media.

This goes way beyond the type of content you publish - brands are always under a microscope and can sway buyers with a single post.