Tuminds Newsflash – June
A round up of the latest social media news and updates…
The biggest social media platform in the world recently announced that it would allow users who don’t have a Facebook account to sign up and use their Messenger app. This broadens the app’s reach and now makes it a standalone platform. The latest update means that new users opening the Messenger app will be prompted with an option saying “Not on Facebook?” and they can then choose to sign up with their name, phone number and photo, as opposed to their Facebook login. This new feature is set to increase the current 700 million users that the Messenger app currently has.
Instagram has had a busy month launching both the new Layout app and introducing a new and improved website interface, as well as adding additional search tools, improving the mobile app’s usability.
The Layout app allows users to create photo collages and combine multiple shots into a single image which can then be posted not only to Instagram, but also on Facebook and Twitter. The app enables users to take photos from their camera roll/photo stream and there is also a “Faces” tab which only shows images of people. The app claims to give complete artistic control to the user as photos can be dragged and dropped, pinched and zoomed, flipped and rotated. One of the key benefits of using Layout is the guarantee that any images created on this platform will fit perfectly with Instagram’s dimensions as opposed to the many other photo editing apps which produce images that are then cropped by Instagram. The app is available for both iOS and android phones.
Additionally, both the desktop and mobile version of Instagram has significantly improved with photos now appearing bigger and the rest of the page kept very simple. Instead of five images in a row being displayed, there are now only three with no borders or rounded edges. In the “Discover” section of the mobile app, there are also additional search filters which can be used to find people, tags (hashtags) and places, depending on users’ interests.
These improved changes and widening of their product portfolio is reflective of Instagram’s increasing popularity amongst social media users. With 300 million monthly active users, 200 million of which log in every day and the average user spending 21 minutes per day uploading photos and scrolling through images, Instagram is only set to get bigger.
The photo-pinning platform is taking more of a commercial approach to being social with the introduction of a “buy button”. This will allow its 70 million active users to actually purchase what they are pinning and liking. Pinterest is currently trying to expand its ecommerce functionality and are encouraging brands to create virtual storefronts on their accounts, thus driving more traffic to the social platform and also providing brands with an additional touchpoint that can be easily measured and linked back to sales.
The latest app to hit the market is (as the name suggests) one for foodies. Branded as the “Instagram for food”, users can share what they are eating and where they are eating it with their followers, and just like Instagram, the app supplies users with pre-set filters to make their meals even more attractive and enviable. As well as liking other photos, Wine’ n Dine also allows you to save other users’ images that you find the most mouth-watering by adding them to your “Want To Try” list. This added feature provides similar qualities with that of Trip Advisor, as people can tag restaurants with dishes and select a star rating to let others know what they thought of it. For avid food lovers searching for the best restaurants and recipe ideas, this makes life a lot easier and provides smaller restaurants, which are not necessarily in the tourist/restaurant guide books, with a platform.
