Social Media Notes
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!
- Big update for Snapchat this week, with its Chat 2.0 and other Story features – lots of fun for users (chat stickers, in-chat video replies and calling, to name a few). The update is a big move against Facebook – trying to offer users an all-in-one platform.
- The chat stickers that are in Snapchat’s Chat 2.0 update are really cute and fun, and are tied to Snapchat’s $100 purchase of Bitstrips. I want them to be categorized in an easier to use way (instead of scrolling forever to find the one you want in the category you want).
- Lots of people/companies have been making use of Snapchat’s on-demand geofilters for their events, but this is a creative use of it: finding interns! An agency is creating geofilters for college campuses to get in front of potential interns. “Rather than asking students to come to us, we thought it would be much better to target them where they already are.”
- Twitter’s upping its accessibility – allowing users to add a description (up to 420 characters) to photos you upload.
- Wow, April Fool’s can always be tricky for companies but it looks like Gmail made a big mistake with their ‘Send + Mic Drop’ button. Apparently it got a lot of people in trouble.
- I thought Iconosquare’s April Fool’s joke about Instagram limiting the number of selfies people can upload was pretty good!
- Here’s an interesting read on how an increasing number of brands are trademarking social media hashtags! Companies trying to protect their brands by taking control of hashtags. I can see this making sense for hashtags that have the company’s name in it, but wonder whether other hashtags without obvious connections to a brand could be trademarked.
- In related news: more brands are also getting custom Twitter emojis for their big events including the Canadian Juno Music Awards. Price tag? $1 million (at least, that was the price when brands wanted to custom emoji Super Bowl-related tags).
- This is great insight into the 27-year-old running Bernie Sanders’ Twitter account. I’m surprised he’s able to post opinions/jokes on so many things without getting it approved first. Also raises questions about how authentic the account is (since this digital media directory basically purports to be Bernie Sanders online).
- If living in North Korea wasn’t awful before… it looks like they’ve now officially blocked Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
- A new study says social media use is contributing to sleep deprivation. In related news: what do you think of Apple’s new Night Shift feature? It allows you to set a time frame when your phone screen changes colours to help you sleep better.
- I’ve heard of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) but these are new to me (and apparently a growing problem) – FOBO – Fear of Being Offline and NoMo – No Mobile. Psychologists say there is a rising anxiety causing the urge to check social media (resulting in teen brain burnout).
- Lol. So remember Microsoft’s artificial intelligent chatting robot who was corrupted by the Internet so they had to shut her down? Well, they brought her back and once again, the Internet ruined her. Sheesh.
- New numbers suggest social media may not be that valuable for company sales – about only 1.5% of retailers’ click e-commerce transactions come from social, instead search, email, affiliate marketing and impulse buys drive sales.
- You can now record up to 60 seconds of video for Instagram. You can also upload and stitch together multiple video clips from your camera roll into the app.
- Pinterest is expanding its DIY uses, with new step-by-step How-to pins from more than 25 brands, meant to keep users on the site/app longer.
- Freebooting is such an interesting concept (basically, when people take other people’s videos/work and re-upload online pretending it’s theirs/with no credit back to the original poster). This is a good read at the creators of the popular ‘Instagram Husband’ video and how they experienced freebooting. This quote stuck out for me: “The truth is that when you put anything out there digitally, it’s yours, but it’s also everyone else’s now. That reality reflects the best and worst of what the internet has made possible.”
- Here’s the week’s Cat Saturday photos! My favourites are 1, 8, 9, 11, 16, and 29!
Thoughts on these stories? Tweet @ me or leave a comment below!
Linda