There are so many interesting things happening all of the time in the world of social media, we thought we would start giving you a helping hand by rounding up the most important news each month, so you never miss a story again. Beginning with July, we will summarise everything worth knowing, adding our own commentary if the story comes from another site, because it’s one thing to know the news – and another to know what makes it significant. Without further ado, here are our top eight stories from July.

Twitter kills auto-follow

If you use any auto-following services for your Twitter account, you need to stop and start making other plans, as Twitter has finally decided to officially ban the practice. This move is supposed to resolve an ongoing problem with spam and buying fake followers. It will also stop Twitter users from using auto-following in order to rapidly, and therefore inauthentically gain a big number of followers. It is a big change which hopefully will be reflected in more genuine conversations and relationships within the Twitter-sphere, as from now on businesses who want to grow their follower numbers will have to attract them through good content and engagement.

Twitter is experimenting with auto translated Tweets

Twitter recently came up with a very creative idea to demonstrate its innovative thinking in helping social media users to reach people and news from all around the world. As political turmoil continues in Egypt, the micro-blogging site has introduced, as an “experiment”, the translation of tweets from leading Egyptians. This auto-translating tool uses Microsoft Bing translator, and can help non Arabic speakers to follow all the news and events from Egypt.

Twitter expands TV ad targeting to all national advertisers

Twitter is expanding a service that lets advertisers target viewers who tweet about shows while they’re watching them on television. More advertisers are able to access this service, which until now has been limited to a specific number of marketers. According to Twitter: “after watching coordinated ads on TV and Twitter, users were 58 percent more likely to purchase products and services and 27 percent more likely to mention brands such as Holiday Inns Inc. and Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc on the social site”.

Facebook delays video ads set to “kill TV”

Facebook video ads, which were announced back in April, have been delayed, and some sources say they could come as late as 2014. This new form of ad is supposed to appear without sound in users’ news feeds, and will begin to play again after the user turns on the sound. These ads are good news for marketers who plan to expand their presence further on Facebook through advertising as video gives another medium to utilise. This service is planned to become an alternative to TV advertising, and is allegedly supposed to start at low pricing; £20 per thousand views, cheaper than the current average cost of TV ads.

Instagram adds web embedding for videos and images

Following Vine’s introduction of an embed option in March, Instagram has introduced the same ability. Now, Instagram users can easily and quickly add any of their photos and videos to their websites by copying the code which users can find from their Instagram web profiles. Until now, embedding content from this network was causing a lot of problems to users, so this new feature will be welcomed especially by those who would like to reuse content from Instagram elsewhere on the web.

LinkedIn expands its advertising with sponsored stories

LinkedIn Company Page owners can pay now to promote their content to LinkedIn users who don’t follow their page, thanks to a new feature – Sponsored Updates. This new advertising unit can be used by marketers to target any segment of the LinkedIn audience. Sponsored Updates can be priced on either a CPM or CPC basis (i.e. based on impressions or on clicks), should be seen on desktop, smartphone, or tablet devices, and will be marked as “sponsored.”

As this feature is just rolling out, page admins may need to wait a few days until they can actually use it.

LinkedIn admins can comment and like status updates as company

A big obstacle to engagement has recently been abolished thanks to the new feature which allows Company Page Admins to comment and like as a brand. Please note that this new LinkedIn feature is being released gradually to admins and there may be some problems with using it initially.

YouTube introduces YouTube Pro

YouTube is planning to go beyond being the Web’s largest repository of video content, by encouraging even more original content and programming on its service. YouTube Pro is a video series that intends to help turn hobbyists into YouTube pros with help and guidance for everything from attracting advertisers to recording content series. The advice will come from seasoned YouTube pros who have been there and done it before.

By Kasia Piekut