social media round up
Social Media Round Up – #Olympicnan And Holiday Booking Bots
Adam Peaty became an Olympic hero last weekend, smashing a world record winning the first gold for Team GB and becoming the first British male swimmer to win Olympic gold for 28 years. However, it seems his 74-year-old grandmother, Mavis, has stolen some of his thunder! Despite not making it to Rio, Mavis has become a social media sensation with her tweets of support for her grandson gathering her quite a following. Known as #Olympicnan, after signing off all of her tweets with the hashtag, Mavis now has over 5,000 followers, and some of her tweets have been retweeted as many as 1,900 times! Let’s hope some more ‘Olympic Nan’s emerge to spur Team GB on to their most successful Olympics yet! Icelandair has become the first airline to offer bookings through Facebook Messenger after introducing a ‘Facebook Messenger Bot’. The new service allows people to book their flights by simply opening up a chat window with the company’s official Facebook page Icelandair and typing ‘Book a flight’. The ‘Messenger Bot’ also allows users to ask questions about visiting Iceland and book stopovers. According to Icelandair, the function has had an overwhelming reaction, so we’ll have to wait and see which airline will be next to introduce this quick and easy alternative to booking flights! This week Tesco turned a moment of grief and devastation into a joyful occasion with a series of humorous posts. When customer Wes Metcalfe returned home from his shop with a cucumber in hand to make a classic cucumber sandwich, he was shocked to see Tesco had also gifted him with a new pet worm. Unfortunately the worm (which he named William) didn’t survive which led to Wes expressing his disappointment to Tesco on Facebook and inviting them to William’s funeral. Tesco were unfortunately unable to attend the funeral so instead sent their most sincere apologies via a poem and a moving Oasis tribute about ‘Will the wonder worm’. The original post has over 45,000 likes and Tesco’s replies have been liked over 21,000 times, how about that for customer service. Last week we reported on the new Instagram feature ‘Instagram Stories’, which has been criticised for plagiarising Snapchat, and this week it has been announced that Twitter will also be following the Stories trend. Twitter’s story portal, ‘Moments’ has been live since 2015, but until now was only a platform for Twitter’s editorial team and limited media partners including BuzzFeed, Vogue and the New York Times. Found via the lightning bolt icon on a user’s homepage, the idea behind Moments is that users can follow a story itself rather than individual media outlets covering it. However, this week, Twitter revealed that the platform will now be open to more curators – brands and influencers, before opening it up to everyone later this year. Twitter’s Moments offers the ability to promote, and discuss events using multiple multimedia tools; however the content shared is not temporary, giving it a point of difference from Instagram and Snapchat’s Stories. If the feature takes off, it could provide a unique advertising tool for businesses.#OLYMPICNAN_
BOOKING WITH A BOT_
A CUCUMBER SANDWICH GONE WRONG_
TWITTER ON-BOARD WITH STORIES_
