Twitter celebrates your birthday, Facebook’s floating videos, IFTTT comes to Pinterest (Empower Mondays)

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Twitter Now Celebrates Your Birthday: You can now add your birthday to your Twitter profile, which will  be displayed on the upper-left-hand side of your profile page, under your profile photo and just beneath the line indicating when you joined Twitter. When someone’s birthdays comes around, you’ll even see an animated overlay of neon balloons briefly fly by. Might be a useful way of gifting your core fans or influencers a special Twitter gift on their birthday? Also expect to see a tool that tweets your followers a happy birthday automatically appear sometime in the very near future.

Facebook Updates Controls for News Feed: To help prioritise stories that appear in your news feed, you can now select which friends and Pages you would like to more from. Prioritised updated will appear with a star in the top right of their post so you know why they’re at the topThis will make it harder for Pages to be seen through the news feed, as people are more likely to add their friends than brands to the prioritised list. However, if you can encourage people to add your page to their priority list, then you may generate some extra organic reach. It’s a tough sell, but if you don’t ask you don’t get, right?

Facebook Floating Videos: Facebook now allows video to be popped out from the newsfeed so you can keep watching as you scroll. Think of it as the equivalent of two screening in one feed, where you may be loosely watching the video but your attention may be on the news feed looking for next update to catch your eye. This new feature might also a way for Facebook to stop people listening to music videos on YouTube in the background while also scrolling through Facebook, when they can now do both on Facebook instead?

Facebook Gifs In Messenger: Facebook is testing a dedicated GIF button which allows users to find and send moving images in two taps. The GIF button skims a number of trending GIFs from Giphy and Riffsy, and serves them up for easy sharing without the need to leave the Messenger app. Here’s a suitable GIF to celebrate this new feature:

Higher-Res Images On Instagram: Instagram is rolling out 1080 x 1080 resolution pictures across iOS and Android, up from its 640 x 640 pixel resolution requirement. That means Instagram photos are about to be bigger and more beautiful than ever – yay!

Pinterest Now Integrates with IFTT: If you use the fabulous time-saving tool IFTTT, you can now login with Pinterest and automatically save any photo you like on Instagram as a Pin. You can also save Polyvore collections and sets to Pinterest. Any fashion, beauty and home decor sets you make can be saved as Pins.