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Facebook is bringing reactions and mentions, two key features of its flagship social media platform, to the Messenger app.

Designed for use in group chats, reactions will work much the same way they currently do in your Facebook News Feed. Tapping and holding any message in a chat will bring up a selection of emoji similar to those that appear when you hover your mouse over the "like" button on a post on Facebook.

Messenger reactions will also include the thumbs up and thumbs down emoji, which might come in handy to accept or reject the restaurant that someone in the chat suggests for dinner, for example. Reactions also work in one-on-one conversations, and they'll show up on any message, including text, stickers, videos, and GIFs. They can even be used on other emoji (in other words, if your group texts are anything like ours, you'll need to get ready for even more emoji overload).

The other classic Facebook feature arriving on Messenger is the ability to directly notify someone when they've been mentioned in a conversation. As you would when you're composing a Facebook post or status update, mention someone in a Messages conversation by typing the "@" symbol or the first few letters of his or her name.

Everyone in the group chat will get a notification when you send the message, but the person you mention will get a different notification that tells them they were called out.

Facebook says the new mention and reaction features will be rolling out to Messenger users worldwide in the next few days, as well as users of the Chat app for Facebook Workplace.

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Reactions, Mentions Arrive on Facebook Messenger - PCMag India

Snap (SNAP) received a buy rating and is said to have replaced Twitter (TWTR) as the No. 2 social networking platform among advertisers, but it faces a formidable rival in Facebook (FB), according to two analyst reports released Wednesday.

The buy rating came from Drexel Hamilton, while the viewpoint that Snap has moved above Twitter came from a report by Needham analyst Laura Martin.

Martin says she met with and quoted the CEO of a company that represents large brands that want to spend ad dollars on social media platforms. Though unnamed in the report, Martin said he's an expert who's worked with all social ad platforms and has spent "hundreds of millions of dollars" on social networking sites.

In the battle for dominance in social networking platforms, it's Facebook's game to lose, Martin's report said.

"Their data superiority, targeting capability, and myriad ad inventory options across four sites makes Facebook the go-to scale player for brands," she said.Martin maintained an underperform rating on Snap.

Snap is the operator of Snapchat, a mobile messaging platform used for sending photos and videos to other Snapchat users. The images disappear in under 10 seconds or can last for 24 hours, depending on user discretion. Facebook has copied many of the most popular features of Snapchat.

Drexel Hamilton analyst Brian White put a buy rating on Snap in a report Wednesday, with a price target of 30.

Snap completed its initial public offering on March 2 but has been hit mostly with a series of sell ratings. White was the second to issue a buy rating.

Snap stock was up 7.1% to close at 21.82 on the stock market today.

IBD'S TAKE: IPOs are a seedbed of innovation and can be huge stock winners, but they can also reverse quickly. IBD focuses on the best-performing IPOs of the past three years in itsIPO Leaders column.

White referred to Snap as a company with "high risk" but also with "explosive growth potential." But the company, which startedcommercial operations in 2011, did not start to monetize the site until 2015.

"The company's new business model is still unproven and Snap operates at a significant loss," White wrote. "As such, the company is still a little rough around the edges in its development and business model. However, this is one of the reasons we like Snap as an investment as we see the potential but it is not yet reflected in the stock price."

Snap competes against a number of companies. These include Facebook, with its Messenger and WhatsApp platform, the Google and YouTube outfits of Alphabet (GOOGL), Line Corp. (LN) and Twitter.

"Although other social messaging platforms enjoy a much higher user base, we believe Snapchat has a cachet with millennials that will be difficult for other platforms to garner," White wrote.

Snap ended 2016 with 158 million Snapchat users. Snapchat is one of the most popular mobile applications with millennials, a group highly sought after by advertisers.

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Snap Passes Twitter Among Advertisers, Gets Buy Rating - Investor's Business Daily

Considerations for youth and social networking Part 4: Sharing photos Helping youth make decisions about photos they share online.

Posted on March 16, 2017 by Christine Heverly, Michigan State University Extension

According to a 2015 Pew Research, 92 percent of teenagers 13-17 years old report going online daily and 71 percent are using at least one social networking site. With this high usage of social networking and teenagers going online, there are many factors adults should consider when helping youth navigate their usage of social networking sites. This article specifically looks at helping youth with the photos they share online. Adults need to help youth understand the different outcomes of sharing a photo online and to others.

Youth should consider the following two major factors.

Disappearing doesnt mean gone forever. With youth using disappearing apps like Snapchat, they need to understand that photo isnt necessarily gone. Once a youth sends the photo to another person, that person can easily share the photo with others. One should never assume your content is 100 percent safe from other people taking the information and sharing with someone else.

Youth could lose out on opportunities. The pictures one chooses to share online help paint a picture for others to make judgements about that youth. Potential jobs, college admission officers, scholarship selection committees, etc. could possibly see the photos that are being shared online. That could mean a youth may miss out on a job, scholarship or another opportunity.

To help adults educate youth about taking time to consider the outcomes of sharing photos online, Michigan State University Extension has some questions parents or other adults should share with youth:

Youth enjoy sharing photos through social media tools, so it is extremely important to help them understand what they share online can be seen by others, even if that wasnt the original intent. Adults should help youth understand that every picture that is shared with others paints a picture of that youth. Others can use this information to make assumptions about the youth or even locate a youth.

Technology changes, apps come and go, and the next wave in social media platforms will come about, but that doesnt change the guidelines youth should consider around the photos they are sharing. Adults should continually be reminding youth they need to take a few moments to think before sharing a photo.

Check out this previous articles in this series below, and watch for future articles that will continue to explore different areas of sharing information on social networks.

This article was published by Michigan State University Extension. For more information, visit http://www.msue.msu.edu. To have a digest of information delivered straight to your email inbox, visit http://www.msue.msu.edu/newsletters. To contact an expert in your area, visit http://expert.msue.msu.edu, or call 888-MSUE4MI (888-678-3464).

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Considerations for youth and social networking Part 4: Sharing photos - Michigan State University Extension

One of the topics that generates strong feelings in the online world is adblocking. Many users love it, but many publishers hate it. That's a big problem, because advertising has turned into the main way of funding what appears on the Internet. As adblockers become more common, so the advertising revenue available to pay for creating articles, images, sound and video diminishes. Some want to ban adblockers, but that's hardly a solution: forcing visitors to your site to view ads they hate is not a good way to foster a long-term business relationship. Improving ads seems a better approach, but that's easier said than done, and may come too late now that so many people have installed adblockers.

The other obvious solution is to charge people to view online material. There's been a certain reluctance to try that approach, partly because of the misleading slogan "information wants to be free", and partly because historically it hasn't worked in general. But it seems that major online players in China are now starting to roll out the paid-for model, perhaps in part because adblockers are widely used there, as in the West. Here's what the biggest online service, WeChat, with a billion accounts created, and at least 700 million active users, is trying, as reported by technode:

WeChat, Tencent Holdings Ltd.'s social networking and chat app, will roll out paid services for the content offered by official accounts, an authority at the Chinese internet giant told Yicai Global.

WeChat invited selected official accounts to trial its paid content function, which is not open to general users for the time being.

As their name suggests, WeChat's "official" accounts are a step up from personal ones. They can be be verified for a fee, and allow services to be offered. A few years ago, there were 8 million such accounts; the number today is likely to be higher. The same technode article reports on research carried out by WeChat's parent company Tencent:

A survey of more than 1,700 netizens conducted by a Tencent research unit found 55 percent of respondents had paid for professional knowledge or advice, including paid content and documents in the past year. Over 50 percent of Chinese netizens have paid or are willing to pay for contents, compared with only 30 percent two years ago, an iResearch report found.

Another established Chinese company that hopes it can get its users to pay for online material is Douban, an upmarket social network focusing on the arts, with around 200 million users. China Film Insider has news about Douban Time, a new paid-for service:

Douban Time will feature curated texts, images and sound from experts and writers in different fields. Catering to its audience, Douban Times first offering is a 102-episode poetry review program which will invite poets and critics to give lessons in poetry appreciation.

Although 102 episodes on poetry appreciation might sound like something of a specialized offering, it is probably well-suited to Douban's sophisticated user base. And perhaps it will turn out that the solution to finding alternative business models for online publishing is precisely this kind of niche approach, rather than the current advertising system based on volume, that is now struggling badly.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Is This The Future Of Online Publishing? Leading Chinese Social ... - Techdirt

We all know that good information is the requisite ingredient for effective analysis and investment decision-making. The ability to gather analytical inputs or tradable information about a company or security in advance of the market can enhance investment returns.

In the past, when information moved slowly and was difficult to come by, analysts who could find and incorporate relevant and usable data about companies, securities, or the capital markets had a distinct edge.

Mining Reputable Data in the Social Media Revolution

Today with the democratization of data and the social media revolution, access is no longer such an advantage. Countless information sources for investments are available online, and data can be easily accessed and shared across social networks with the click of a mouse.

According to a survey conducted by The Pew Research Center, 62% of U.S. adults now get their news from social media. The reasons are simple: By the time a news organization gets hold of a story for us to read on their traditional platforms, its already old news. And thanks to fancy algorithms, our social networks know what news we want and feed it to us in a more timely fashion.

For better or worse, social media can yield investment information just as it can disseminate the news. But harnessing the gathering power of social media is a daunting task. For most individual investors, even following a single social media platform, like Twitter, for a sense of user sentiment or to form an investment outlook can be like drinking from a fire hose.

When information is so readily found, access has little value. In fact, we have access to too much data. What has become more valuable today is being able to distinguish and differentiate usable and reputable signals from all the noise.

With new technologies that pair Big Data and Machine Learning, there may be ways to channel the deluge.

During the Super Bowl for example, LikeFolio used its social data technology to collect and process millions of tweets to measure the effectiveness of the ad campaigns and rate how well the sponsoring company leveraged its advertising spend, Forbes reported.

Similar technology can transform social data into analytical inputs or investment decisions, and create practical insights from massive amounts of social data. Though these tools are not yet readily accessible or available at a reasonable price point for individual investors, given the demand, it wont be long before they are.

Fake News vs. Trusted Networks

Sifting through social media data is only one factor.

What about the trust issue?

How do we know whether the data shared across social media is reputable? Unfortunately, fake news and other misinformation proliferate online, and people looking to influence the pricing of assets or securities may resort to it.

Social networks designed specifically for traders and investors have the potential to mitigate much of this trust problem.

Those interested in trading the market can join eToro, ZuluTrade, Collective2, and Scutify to access and emulate numerous traders and their trades. Members can follow individual traders and make investment decisions based on those transactions, and some of these networks even feature high performers or rate traders according to their investment track record. Although pricing varies by platform, these sites offer similar services and are organized along similar lines.

Other social networks -- TradingView, for example -- are forums where investors can exchange trading ideas, information and place live orders.

These platforms offer a variety of content articles, commentary, investment information, etc. that are developed and shared just like on other social networks, and can feature analytical input and education on investment topics.

There are two traditional ways that people learn the principles and best practices of investment management. One is to emulate the strategies and tactics of successful investors. The other is to identity common investor mistakes and avoid them.

The power of investor-focused social networks is that they help investors do both.

These platforms are moving in the right direction and already provide value for short-term traders. That said, they have yet to fully harness the power of social communities for all investors.

As more longer-term investors grow comfortable sharing their profiles, investment ideas, and performance histories, these networks will generate usable statistics not only about investors, but about what strategies and tactics work and dont work in various market scenarios.

Just as consumer products are evaluated today, new investment ideas will be discussed, tested over time, and then subjected to peer review through economic cycles. To all that, add new tools that can compile sentiment and other usable data from the output of other social networks. The combination of those inputs could be the catalyst for a comprehensive, expert, and market driven approach to investment analysis.

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Investing in the Age of Social Networking - Huffington Post