Social Media Notes
Here’s this week’s round-up of social media (& tech) news. Come by each week for what I hope to be a fun & informative blog post on social stories that caught my eye throughout the week!
- Perhaps the biggest social network change of the past week was Twitter’s decision to kill the ‘favourite’/star and turn it into a ‘like’/heart, in an effort to appease casual/new/non-users. It’s pretty disappointing, as Verge puts it, “for all its faults, the favourite was unique to Twitter, and part of what makes the service distinctive. Most people may never have understood the multivalent power of the fav, but those who did found it surprisingly elegant and powerful. In this, the fav was a microcosm of Twitter itself: a bit of work up front, in exchange for a social experience as rich and surprising as anything in the world.” Do you miss the favourite button?
- As a side note: there is a Chrome extension that automatically turns hearts/likes back in stars/favs, lol, if you’re really hating the new heart button.
- Proving it’s still the top social network, Facebook now no longer counts third party app membership, and still has 1.55 billion monthly active users.
- Facebook Videos are so in right now – it now sees 8 billion average daily video views from 500 million users – that’s up from 4 billion video views in April. Though the stat isn’t all that accurate as Facebook counts just 3 seconds of watching as a view.
- Despite those figures, looks like Snapchat is taking on Facebook for video views. Snapchat now get six billion daily video views – a stat far more impressive than Facebook’s if you consider its 100 million user base compared to Facebook’s 1.55 billion.
- I’m always torn between the use of vertical video – but it’s becoming the norm now thanks to apps like Snapchat, which says vertical content and vertical ad consumption is strong among its millennial user base.
- You can now get news feed updates on search terms in Tumblr.
- I thought this story of an Instagram model who announced she’s quitting social media – then went ahead and edited captions of her old photos to show more truth in the posts, was pretty interesting and really highlights how curated/staged/perfectly crafted so many social media posts can be today. An example of her edited captions: One photo of her wearing a bikini once said ‘things are getting pretty wild at my house. Maths B and English in the sun” now says “see how relatable my captions were – stomach sucked in, strategic pose, pushed up boobs. I just want younger girls to know this isn’t candid life, or cool or inspirational. It’s contrived perfection made to get attention.”
- Taco Bell has got to be one of my favourite companies on social media. They do fantastic work time and time again – this time is no different, as they unveiled their ‘Taco Emoji Engine’ to celebrate the release of the new taco emoji. The engine churns out 600 photos/GIFs related to tacos. Just tweet @TacoBell with the taco emoji + another emoji, and they’ll tweet back a funny mashup image of the two. You go, Taco Bell!
- Have you noticed some of your friends are ‘interested’ in going to certain events now, instead of ‘maybe’ going? Facebook has changed the Maybe button on Event Pages with Interested. This will indicate to the Event organizer that you’re interested, but can’t decide, but you will receive notifications and updates from the event unlike with maybe, which was way more ambigious, I guess. It certainly puts a more positive spin on Event pages!
- I thought this story on a ‘new breed of paparazzi’ was interesting (sad and also scary). It talks about how paparazzi monitor Twitter/Instagram/even Snapchat for posts that might indicate a celebrity’s location so they can track them down and get their photo. Really that can apply to anyone – you should be mindful of when/where/what you’re posting even if you’re not a celebrity.
- Does social media distract you while driving? This study out of the UK reports that driver distraction is a bigger problem than it was three years ago, listing text messaging and social media as the 2 biggest factors threatening personal safety.
- Interesting: Pinterest’s new ‘visual search’ tool helps users search for items using images, instead of words. You can literally zoom in on a certain object in an image and Pinterest will search its database for similar results.
- Did you see this week’s Cat Saturday photos?!
Thoughts on these stories? Tweet @ me or leave a comment below!
Linda