social media round up
Social Media Round Up – Instagram Introduces Stories
This week photo sharing platform, Instagram, introduced ‘Instagram Stories’. As the makers say, it allows users to “share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep on your profile”. Users can also edit their photos with text, drawings and emoji characters before posting and posts are only visible for 24 hours. Criticism quickly arose as many likened this new feature to Snapchat, and justifiably so. The limited lifespan of posts was Snapchat’s original USP – although we think it’s fair to say most of us now use it more for the fun selfie filters. It’s an interesting move, and while we can see why this feature would work on Instagram – there are fun photos that we’d love to share with our followers but are not perfect enough to live on our feeds forever – perhaps a few more tweaks (and a different name!) would have led to fewer accusations of ripping off another popular platform. Almost everyone will have Googled themselves at some point to see what the search results deliver, whether out of curiosity or concern. The web giant’s new ‘Stay in the Loop’ feature will keep you posted without having to continually search. Essentially setting up a Google Alert for yourself (and with our cynical hats on, this is probably just a way of encouraging more people to use a feature that has been around since 2003) you’ll receive real-time emails with links to the articles that mention you. Should you want to set yours up, simply search your name while logged into Google, scroll to the bottom of the search results page and click on ‘Stay in the loop’. You’ll then have options for how often you’d like to be updated (as it happens? once a day?), where you’d like to see results from etc. Are you brave enough? For the past year, Josh Coombes, an inspiring hairdresser from London, has been giving free haircuts to homeless people to lift their spirits. After transforming people’s hair Josh shares the result along with a moving background story of his clients on his Instagram page. The page now has over 149,000 followers and has encouraged Josh and friends Matt Spracklen and Dave Burt (@London founder) to start the #DoSomethingforNothing campaign. The campaign aims to encourage people to help other people in any way they can and share their stories on YouTube and Instagram. This week Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, announced a record month for the company’s App Store. Sharing the news via Twitter, Cook wrote, ‘July was a record-breaker for the @AppStore! Highest-ever monthly billings and money paid to developers’. Having taken the world by storm, we suspect Pokémon GO had quite a bit to do with this success. Whatever the source of the boom in downloads one thing’s for sure, it goes directly against those shouting that ‘the app is dead’.INSTAGRAM STORIES_
DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S SAID ABOUT YOU ONLINE?_
EDWARD SCISSORHANDS OF LONDON_
APPLE CONTINUES TO BREAK RECORDS_
