social media round up
Social Media Round Up – Eddie Saves Twitter, Instasneakers And Pirates (Oh My)!
When you think of work experience, you probably think of a bit of filing, some light admin and doing general dogsbody tasks, not becoming a national hero overnight! The biggest social media story of the week by far was the news that Southern Rail put its Twitter feed in the hands of a 15 year old called Eddie. Usually the portal for beleaguered commuters to vent their frustration at Southern’s ongoing industrial strife, Eddie’s tenure as chief twitterer has gone down a storm. Instead of the usual stream of complaints and abuse, customers sent in questions about what they should have for dinner (Chicken Fajitas) and the highly philosophical, ‘would you rather fight one horse sized duck or 100 duck sized horses?’ (100 duck sized horses, obvs). Nike has announced that it will start selling its products through Instagram and will be one of the first brands to use this platform to sell goods. You may remember that the e-commerce feature was introduced to the photo sharing platform in November and since then brands have experimented with ‘shoppable’ tags, but Nike will soon be taking the plunge to actually sell its products. We are still waiting for full details of how Nike will use Instagram to sell its product but watch this space for more info – we know we’ll love the feature but not sure our wallets will! It has been reported this week, that stream-ripping has become the fastest growing form of music piracy in the UK. Certain stream-ripping sites enable users of services like Spotify or YouTube the opportunity to capture audio from streamed music and save it as a permanent file (the Millennial equivalent of sitting with your fingers poised on the record button on your cassette player to perfectly capture that week’s number one – yes, we’re oldskool). These sites were used nearly half-a-million times in a month last year (compare that to the 23,000 times BitTorrent was used to illegally share songs in the same period). We’ve already seen in the past that artists like Taylor Swift refused to put their music on Spotify (although she did relent); will the proliferation of music theft see more artists withdraw their music from streaming sites and, maybe more worryingly, will it discourage the record industry from investing in new talent? Time will tell. It feels like recently a lot of our social media news has been a bit gloomy, so here’s another piece of lovely Twitter news… Back in 2014, Lila Apostolou sent a light-hearted tweet about needing a date for her sister’s wedding asking, “Are you a man? Can I borrow you for a wedding next weekend? Bonus points if you can source a baby that I can pretend to be mine.” Little was she expecting someone to take her up on the offer, but that’s exactly what Phil Gibson did, even promising to wear a suit (what a gent). Whilst they didn’t actually go to the wedding together, they did meet up, and… Skip forward three years to last week and Lila and Phil got married!!! Congratulations from Siren towers. Did it! Here's me and my wife @Llia on the way back from the registry office. pic.twitter.com/Q117Rx1XE2EDDIE, WE SALUTE YOU!_
Southern may not be up to scratch in running trains at the moment, but kudos to whoever let Eddie have free reign over the Southern Twitter feed. Inspired!SHOP WITH INSTAGRAM_
YO HO, STREAM RIPPING AHOY!_
LOVE BIRDS A-TWEETING_
