Twitter's DMs, Pinterest on the up and Google smartwatch nigh? The week in social media

Twitter plans to let users opt in to receive DMs from anyone, regardless of whether that person follows you or not.

Reactions ranged from ‘meh’ to serious outrage, but hopefully it means we will see less of the ‘Can you follow me so I can DM you’ tweets. PHEW.

Google smartwatch almost ready?

Word on the street is that the release of a Google smartwatch might be closer than anticipated.

Longer battery life and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity are just two of the smartwatch’s features that have been rumoured ahead of the 31 October launch date that has been bandied about.

The fact that Google has been pretty schtum about it surely means that it won’t be being released soon?! Remember the hype with Google Glass?

I won’t be holding my breath for a launch anytime soon, but it will certainly be interesting to read the reviews of the smartwatch when it does come out.

Twitter ads scheduled tweets for advertisers

Twitter announced on Monday that all marketers using its ad products will now be able to schedule organic or promoted tweets for specific dates and times, up to a year in advance of when they want to go out.

So Twitter has essentially installed its own version of Hootsuite.

It’s comforting to know that now, not only will spammy tweets not be relevant, they will also be out of date. Hurrah! Being able to schedule up to a year in advance is pretty impressive though.

Path forced to lay off employees

Path has been forced to cull a fifth of its work force after a disappointing roll-out of its new subscription model. Nightmare.

It’s perhaps not all that surprising to hear that Path is having to make people redundant though, as we’re hearing less and less about them in the news. It’s all ‘Facebook this’ and ‘Twitter that’ these days.

Social media users are so fickle.

Pinterest drives more traffic

Of all the social networks driving traffic to publishers, the second highest is Pinterest. This doesn’t seem like that much of a big deal, but when you think about the fact that it drives THREE TIMES as much traffic as Twitter, it makes you start to realise that it’s kind of a big deal.

The data released from Shareaholic also revealed that Pinterest’s share of overall visits increased by 66 per cent year-on-year, more than any other social network and the site now drives more traffic to publishers than Twitter, LinkedIn, Reddit and Google+ combined.

Wowzers. Seems like those wedding boards are proving to be pretty successful.

Snapchats

I know a lot of people think Snapchat is redundant, and the rest just use it to send pictures of their private parts to each other, but I thought I would share two of my favourites.

Mainly because this week’s article is a bit dull on the news front, so I thought this might give you an incentive to see it through to the end.