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!
- Snapchat’s been building out its content team for awhile and made its first entry into social / breaking news with the San Bernardino shootings – creating a ‘California Shooting’ Live Story filled with photos and videos that the Snapchat team collected from users experiencing the effects of the shooting. Just a taste of what’s to come from them I’m sure.
- Shaming people to not be assholes: People who are posting racist tweets are now seeing those posts appear on billboards near their homes in Brazil. Though they still hide the actual identity of the poster (I think if they’re going to be posting these publicly, reveal everything!)
- Now that we’ve had a few weeks to get accustomed to Twitter polls (perhaps the most pointless Twitter function? lol), there’s now this interesting write-up about what Twitter actually does with your polls. Bigger picture: Information used to give to advertisers? Interesting insights into trends? Building out more in-depth user profiles?
- I didn’t realize the founder of anonymous social networking app Kik was Canadian! Here’s a Globe and Mail piece on his plans to ‘dethrone’ Facebook (I don’t think that’ll be happening anytime soon but, good for him for trying lol, plus I didn’t realize until this article how big Kik actually is – at least in terms of investors and type of investors, lots of heavy-hitters).
- What do you think happens when you have a robot say anything that’s tweeted (with a specific hashtag?) Lol. As much inappropriate stuff as you might guess. Local design agency Paper Leaf built a robot that would say anything marked with #hugorobot hashtag. There was a cool livestream but eventually, lots of profane, offensive, and racist posts. Still, pretty cool that it was an Edmonton agency – that got lots of attention world wide – with at its peak – 400 tweets coming in per hour.
- Expect to see more of these in the coming weeks – year-end lists! Here’s the definitive guide to the most important memes of 2015. My personal favourite is Left Shark during the Super Bowl Halftime show!! Gets me giggling every time, LOL.
- I can’t say I’m surprised and I actually think some of these names sound pretty nice, lol but apparently this was a big year for naming babies after Instagram filters. Juno, Amaro, Valencia, Willow, Reyes, and Lux, for example, parents love the filters so much they’re naming their babies out of them.
- This video subscription service called Vessel is trying to compete with YouTube – launching “threads” (video responses) to encourage more video producer/audience engagement – after YouTube turned off the video response feature back in 2013.
- Back up Periscope/Meerkat, Facebook is now rolling out live-streaming to all users. They’d been testing it with celebrities in the last few months. It’s one less app to be on / to follow someone on, so might make more sense for people to watch livestreams via Facebook since they’re likely already in that space to begin with.
- Lol interesting: Twitter is trying to trademark ‘subtweet’ – which is when you tweet about someone without actually including their username. Begs the question: Why? Twitter tried to trademark ‘tweet’ in the past but lost that battle because the term had been in use for far too long. I’d argue subtweeting has also been used by too many for too long too, but we’ll see.
- Yahoo isn’t giving up yet: They’ve revamped Yahoo Messenger to allow users to pull and share GIFs and other images quickly & easily, intergaring with Flickr, Tumblr, etc. I still won’t use it but, lol nice to see companies are recognizing that GIFs rule.
- Hmm… I’ve personally noticed a big dip in reach and engagement for posts from my work Facebook accounts, and wondered if something had changed. It looks like Facebook is making adjustments to allow users to ignore certain types of viral posts that may appear in their feeds. People are being surveyed to let Facebook know what type of content they like to see in their News Feed. If the majority of survey-takers respond unfavourably towards a story, the story would appear lower (even if it has lots of likes and shares). So far this article just touches on story posts, but I wonder if it would apply for regular company/business page post stoo.
- She also interviewed me for her Seen and Heard podcast! Listen to our chat here.
- Did you see this week’s Cat Saturday photos?!
Thoughts on these stories? Tweet @ me or leave a comment below!
Linda