Tuminds Newsflash – August
At the beginning of the year, Instagram was crowned the fastest growing social media network, with over half of all young adults (aged 18-29) in the US alone choosing to post their images on the platform all day long … It can be addictive.
The draw of Instagram has recently been heightened with the company now choosing to support both landscape and portrait modes for both images and video content. For the avid Instagram user, this really is life changing.
Until now, Instagram only allowed square-shaped photos and videos to be posted, meaning that images originally captured in portrait or landscape (which are the two most common photo orientations) would have to be cropped, often leaving users either frustrated at losing part of their content or equally annoyed at the alternative option; to create a landscape or portrait collage which is time consuming and by no means the perfect solution.
Instagram have thankfully realised the error of their ways and appeased the Insta-loving community, although the social platform clearly still champions the square by only allowing content shot from within the app to be done so in the square format. Still, this is major progress.
Instagram is popular this month; not only is it going up the ranks in the usability stakes, but it is also now being welcomed into the Hootsuite family. Users of the social media management tool can now integrate their Instagram account into their dashboard and schedule push notifications to publish content and monitor engagement via the platform.
This allows marketers and avid social users to be much more efficient in using multiple social channels as they will no longer have to switch between the app on their phone and the dashboard on their laptop to manage and track all aspects of a campaign.
Google may still be the most viewed website and biggest search engine in the world, but Facebook is winning when it comes to driving traffic to media outlets.
According to recent statistics release by analytics firm Parse.ly, Google drives only 38% of its traffic to media sites, whilst Facebook is responsible for sending nearly 43% of its traffic to a network of media sites. This network includes over 400 outlets, which range from Reuters and The BBC to Mashable.
These statistics are reflective of Facebook’s increasing role in generating online media traffic. This has become dramatically more apparent over the last 18 months, with Facebook driving only 20% of its traffic to media outlets in January 2014.
Google is still considered the top referral source for overall web traffic, but Facebook leads in referral to media sites, which is reflective of CEO, Mark Zuckerberg’s, long-term goal for the social network; “to become the perfect personalised newspaper for every person in the world”.
I was initially going to leave it blank after the “…” in the headline above, but thought that would be too mean. So no, Twitter are not erasing the 140 character limit from their tweets, just direct messaging. The DM feature previously had to adhere to the same rule as tweets, but now has no limit at all and users can happily type and type and type until they’ve said everything they need to say. The idea of Twitter is still to be concise and to the point, but it allows a degree of flexibility when it comes to messaging people who you would like more of a personal or private connection with.
Twitter are focusing heavily on making improvements to direct messaging at the moment as the rumour mill is sent into overdrive with hints being dropped about a possible independent direct messaging app … I feel a Twitter/Facebook messaging battle heating up!
