In an attempt to make self promotion less awkward, social networking giant Facebook today announced a new set of features as well as an increase in the bandwidth of users for its Mentions app. Mentions, if you didn’t know already, was a service released in July 2014.
It enabled Verified Pages like news outlets and popular bands to get a better perspective of managing likes, interactions and comments. While the app was all well and good, the only unique feature about it was the Q&A feature.
Today, the social networking giant announced that Mentions will now allow even Verified Profiles to take advantage of the Mentions app. This is great news for the likes of journalists as we no longer need to share our work to all our friends (and annoy the hell out of them). Instead we could choose the audience to be just our followers. While the posts will remain public, they will only appear on the Timeline of your followers.
Using the Mentions app, if you try to upload a status update, you will now get the option to share your content only with your followers, if your profile has been verified.
That’s not all, the app will also allow Verified Profiles to hold Reddit AMA-style Q&A with their followers. This feature was only accessible to Verified Pages until now. Another amazing feature is the ability to livestream broadcasts, a service released last month under Mentions dubbed as ‘Live’.
The service completes with the likes of Periscope and Meerkat but there is one feature that differentiates it from its competition. While streams on Meerkat evaporate instantaneously and the ones of Periscope expire after 24 hours, Live allows users to save the streams and share them with their followers for future references.
While the app is currently only available on iOS, Verified Profiles will be allowed to log in to Mentions. According to Facebook, new accounts are being added to the Mentions ‘elite’ zone as we speak, thousands already registered. If you come under the category of journalists, celebrities or public figures, you can apply to be verified here.
