Facebook's Mentions app for famous people updated with new features

If you’re an actor, an athlete, a journalist, or otherwise a public figure with a verified account on Facebook, then you’ll be glad to know that the social networking giant has just introduced several enhancements to its celebrities-only app, Facebook Mentions.

Launched in July 2014, Facebook Mentions has just been updated to version 4.0 with improvements to its live broadcast, Mentions feed and messaging aspects.

In August last year, Facebook Mentions added a live broadcasting feature apparently in response to the rising popularity of Periscope and Meerkat. Now, the app has gained a couple of improvements to this feature.

First off, you can now capture live video in either landscape or portrait mode. Note, though, that the video will still be rendered in a square aspect ratio regardless of the orientation. This improvement simply allows you to broadcast in the orientation that’s convenient to you.

Second, you can now save your video to your camera roll as well as upload your video posts in a new high quality option.

In February last year, Facebook Mentions added support for topics, allowing users to add topics that they’re interested in, including hashtags and other people, to their Mentions feed, and enabling them to see public posts about those topics, in addition to posts that mention them.

This time, the app has gained support for filters, letting you see only posts that you want to see by filtering posts in your potentially noisy Mentions feed by topic or by source. “For example, if you only want to see posts from media outlets, you can select ‘Media Sources’ from the dropdown at the top of your Mentions feed,” Facebook explains. “Or if you only want to see posts about your band or sports team, just choose that topic from the top of your feed.”

Finally, the latest update to Facebook Mentions gets rid of the inconvenience of having to switch to Messenger to reply to messages sent to your profile or page. Now, you can just go to the Notifications tab in Facebook Mentions and then tap the Messaging icon to reply to messages.

Optimized for iPhone and iPod touch running iOS 7.0 or later, Facebook Mentions 4.0 is available now on the App Store for free.

To reiterate: Facebook Mentions is available to verified public figures only.

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