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! 

• The biggest social media news of the week: Microsoft’s announcement that it’s purchasing LinkedIn for $26 billion in cash. A merger between “the world’s largest professional social network and the world’s leading professional cloud.” I’m curious to see what changes will come from this deal!

• Twitter has introduced a few new ways to embed tweets onto your blog or website

• There was some news last week of a potential hack of more than 32 million Twitter accounts, leading the platform to lock accounts and send email notices to those who may have been affected. The craziest thing of this news is that apparent user passwords ranged from ‘password’ to ‘123456’ STILL – after everything sites do to try to encourage you to make your password hard to hack – still people are using ‘password’ as their password. lol sigh

• Oh. I guess video ads are coming to Snapchat – it will play between user stories

• This stat surprises me – Snapchat says two-thirds of its users watch videos with the volume up which totally goes against what we’ve learned of how Facebook video consumption is typically done volume off. Unless this is specifically talking about paid brand posts, which I can maybe see more people viewing with sound on

• You know those videos on YouTube where people unwrap product packages and do reviews/first look/opinions? It looks like ‘unboxing’ is now coming to Snapchat

• 2016 is supposed to be the year of video – now Facebook is letting users reply to posts with video attachments

• You can also now upload 360-degree photos to Facebook (though I tried and it doesn’t work for me – yet)

• Apparently Pinterest is not a social network – according to its co-founder. It’s more a “catalogue of ideas”

• Also apparently there are more than 2 billion searches on Pinterest each month

• A new report suggests your FOMO – ‘Fear of Missing Out’ is causing Canadians to spend more (than what they have) in an effort to highlight the cool things they’re doing or things they have on social media

• Social media posts encourage people to buy more booze, according to a new report

• I’ve long thought the period in texts, social media posts, digital conversations make a person sound upset (or annoyed, etc.) A new confirms this is how many young people feel!

• It looks like advertisers are turning to Instagram – not Twitter – to get their paid messages out to the masses. Unsurprising, as every other photo on your Instagram feed now appears to be an ad :-(

• A new report says social media users are spending less time than they used to on platforms – with users spending the least amount of time on Twitter. Note – the study only looked at Android users

• Here’s what was announced in Apple’s WWDC16 – including iOS 10 updates like updated Messages, Maps, Apple Pay coming to the Web, voicemail transcription and more!

• The SocialWest social/digital media marketing conference takes place in Calgary this week. Follow along as I tweet what I learn!

• Here’s the week’s Cat Saturday photos! My favourites are 1, 4, 9, 14, 24, and 27!

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

Linda

Follow @lindork