We Are Social’s Tuesday Tune-Up #213
Snapchat is quickly growing to become the preferred social media platform of teenagers around the world, and it’s well on its way to social media dominance. Snapchat has now reached six billion daily views, which is triple the traffic it was getting in May 2015. In comparison, Facebook records 8 billion daily views, twice as many as they were recording in April 2015. Facebook’s video views, however, are across desktop AND mobile, so it’s pretty impressive that Snapchat is pulling in these kind of numbers solely on mobile.
Snapchat has, without a doubt, shaken up the way in which audiences are consuming content and what they are expecting from their content. The ephemeral nature of Snapchat content is what makes it so appealing, but it also makes it difficult to justify pouring big bucks into a video that is only going to be viewable for 24 hours. Similarly, Snapchat videos are viewed almost exclusively in portrait, an intentional decision by CEO Evan Spiegel, and they have a maximum length of 10 seconds.
eMarketer has predicted a 42% increase in digital video revenues this year (taking it to a whopping $7.5billion in the US alone), and with Snapchat becoming one of the big, if not the biggest, player in the sector, it looks like the game has well and truly been changed.
Facebook launches Music Stories
With the latest iOS app update, Facebook has integrated Music Stories into our Newsfeeds. Pulling in streams from Spotify and Apple Music users can sample 30 second clips of songs and albums without having to leave the app, with the end goal being for all users to be able to share entire playlists. Users don’t need to be subscribed to either service to be able to access the tunes, and there are capabilities to save favourite songs or purchase them directly from the iTunes store. With 900 million mobile users on Facebook every day, this is a definite win for the streaming industry. Unfortunately, it does mean that there is a chance you will be seeing significantly more of this guy…
Twitter shares the love
The stars are going out. Twitter has revamped the way users share positive sentiment towards one another, replacing the action of ‘favouriting’ a tweet with a star with ‘liking’ it with a little heart. The reason for the change, according to Product Manage Akarshan Kumar, is down to semantics:
“You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favourite. The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.”
With ‘likes’ already being used with great successes on Facebook and Pinterest, it’s pretty likely that this change will be a good thing for Twitter. The mechanic of liking will be exactly the same, the only real difference is the change of icon.
Finland immortalises National Pride in… Emojis?
Yep! That’s correct. The Finnish tourist board has just released a series of national emojis that they believe celebrate Finland and “reveal the weirdnesses and the strengths of the country and its people”.
Three of the eventual thirty have been released so far: a sauna, a headbanging rocker and a Nokia 3310. Guess that means the Finnish are hot, like to party, and are unbreakable.
Fortunately for Tourism Australia, we already have our national emoji:
YouTube moves into Virtual Reality
Say whaaaat? YouTube’s Android app now supports VR video, giving users realistic 360 degree perspectives of videos. To view, users simply have to get up a virtural reality app, enable VR mode and place their phone in Alphabet Inc’s “Cardboard” device. At the moment there are only a few VR compatible videos online, but the catalogue is slowly expanding as more and more people and companies experiment with the format – including the Hunger Games movies. A very exciting leap forward for technology – really exciting to see where this works and how it will change the way we currently consume media.
Facebook is dabbling in a ‘teleportation’ station set to launch by 2025
Well, kind of. Don’t go adding “Beam Me Up Siri” to your voice command centre just yet. After Facebook acquired Occulus Rift, they got straight to work on creating the technology to making a believable virtual world. The technology for beautiful virtual worlds already well and truly exists (hello Call of Duty), but making it believable is the struggle. Facebook is working on touch controllers that will trick your senses into believing that the virtual world you’re seeing is real. The aim is, according to Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer, to: “build a device that allows you to be anywhere you want, with anyone, regardless of geographic boundaries”.
This kind of tech would allow users to ‘meet up’ in online communities, for example coffee shops, and interact, as if they were doing so in real time. So not teleportation per se, but simulated teleportation. Brain me up, Siri!
You can now buy your fantasy Pinterest life
Similar to the buyable pins that were released a few months ago, Pinterest has just released Pinterest Shop, a marketplace of curated items picked by Pinterest editors and available for purchase. At the moment it is only on the mobile platform, but there are plans to expand it into desktop as well. Weddings throughout the world just got considerably more elaborate and photogenic.