social media round up
Social Media Round Up – Looking Back On 2016
As we approach mid-December, social media platforms are already in year-in-review mode. YouTube released YouTube Rewind, its roundup that comes in the form of a video (obviously) “celebrating the videos, people, music and moves that made 2016”. Uploaded on Wednesday this week, it’s already had over 70 million views. Twitter revealed its annual top trends this week and topping the global trends list was #Rio2016 with #Election2016 and #PokemonGo completing the top three. Unsurprisingly, #Brexit and #Trump also make the top ten. #RIP made its way to ninth in the global trends list due to the number of high profile personalities who passed away this year. The single biggest moment that caused us Brits to flock to Twitter was England’s Euro 2016 exit and shock defeat to Iceland. But what surprised us most in the trends stats was The Great British Bake Off being beaten (see what we did there?) to the top spot of trending TV shows by Celebrity Big Brother. Facebook also revealed similar stats and any users who have logged in over the past few days will have been greeted by their year in review compilation video. Similarly, the time has come for Instagram users to show off their #bestnine2016 – a compilation of their posts that attracted the most likes throughout the year. 2016’s almost over folks, hold on in there. A story that tugged at our heart stings this week was of seven-year-old Bana from East Aleppo. She has dominated the headlines as with the help of her mother, Bana has been tweeting her experiences of war from Syria. Shortly after a Tweet saying the army was capturing them, the Twitter account disappeared. Many feared the worst. JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books has also been involved. She had previously sent Bana the entire series of Harry Potter to read and when Bana’s Twitter account went silent, Rowling tweeted asking for information of the girl and her family. #Whereisbana was trending and there was widespread relief when the account was reactivated. The feed rounded off the week with a photo of the smiling girl announcing, like many other children her age, that she’d lost two more teeth. Instagram has introduced a new feature that allows people to like and reply directly to comments on photos. Similar to Facebook, the new update lets you tap a heart icon next to a comment, which the social platform’s CEO says ‘encourages positivity”. The feature was welcomed by Instagram users who took to Twitter to congratulate the image sharing platform on ‘finally introducing the new icon’, however some people criticised it for copying Facebook (which owns Instagram). To continue spreading positivity with the new feature, Instagram has also now given users the ability to ‘turn off’ comments on individual posts. Essentially, if you are getting negative comments on a particular post, you can stop people from being able to post on a particular photo all together. This is the latest in a long line of recent updates from the platform, we’re keeping a close an eye on what might be next… We are all guilty of a little snooze on the train but this week, one commuter’s selfie went viral as the photo shows a woman who had fallen asleep on young man, Euan McMillian’s shoulder. The 20 year old commuter from Glasgow managed to take multiple selfies of the sleepy passenger draped across his shoulders and chest, along with the caption “somebody want to collect their maw? Been sleeping on me for 15 mins on the subway”. In later Tweets, McMillian commented on how the woman was accompanied by friends who didn’t acknowledge her strange behaviour, stating “Her pals were just allowing it as if it was normal” and “I couldn’t believe it, she was about 45”. As the selfie went viral, social media users from all over the UK appeared amused as comments included: “She had a mad night out”, “hahaha that’s amazing” and “Oh man. She must have had a fun night!”#2016TRENDS_
#WHEREISBANA_
TIME TO GET LIKING_
THE SUBWAY’S SLEEPING BEAUTY_
