Here’s this week’s round-up of social media (& sometimes tech) news. Come back weekly for what I hope to be a fun & informative blog post on social stories that caught my eye throughout the week! 

• There’s been a lot of changes and new features for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat lately. This is a nice round-up of some of those changes.

• This is ridiculous: selfie deaths are now more common than death by shark attack.

• These new Macbook selfie sticks also likely won’t help the death count.

• This is a fascinating read on #freebooting (the practice of downloading, then re-uploading original videos without getting permission from or even crediting the original poster).

• Snapchat is doing such a great job making money off of brands. That’s just going to get better now that they’ve reached a deal with Nielsen to measure video ads independently.

• Last week Snapchat announced you could create on-demand custom geofilters. Here’s a great Techcrunch walkthrough of what it’s like to set it up!

• The future is now – ‘Shazam for Plants’ will identify any plant from a picture.

• A Reddit user is turning people’s regular photos into movie posters and it’s awesome.

• You can now engage with Facebook posts in more than just a “Like” – Facebook rolled out their Reactions feature meaning you can express love, laughter, sadness, anger, and surprise, at someone’s Facebook post.

• Facebook is encouraging users to send their friends happy birthday videos with its new birthday feature.

• You can also get custom Snapchat filter/lenses for your birthday now! 

• Yikes. Snapchat is apologizing for an employee payroll data leak, and changing its training programsrelated to privacy/security.

• Can you believe it’s been one year after ‘The Dress?’ I don’t think the latest garment that’s getting people arguing over what colour they’re seeing – ‘The Jacket’ – is as polarizing.

• Instagram says there are now 200,000 monthly active advertisers (compared to Facebook’s 2 million, and Twitter’s 130,000).

• This is really neat. LinkedIn’s first TV ad shows that 3 million LinkedIn users are qualified to become NASA astronauts! Great way to highlight the platform and its users.

• I thought this was interesting: 28 memorable social media quotes.

• I like this round-up of things Buzzfeed does better than anyone else on social media.

• Oooh this is bad. A Beauty website mixed up Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey at the Oscars, tweeted about it, and of course, Twitter wasted no time pointing out their mistake.

• Here’s the week’s Cat Saturday photos! My favourites are 2, 3, 4, 7, 22, and 24!

Thoughts on these stories? Tweet @ me or leave a comment below!

Linda

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