WE ARE SOCIAL ASIA TUESDAY TUNE UP #278

Tuneup
kristie.neo

By Jeannette Tan, Jeremy Lim, Candice Novia, Vivian Tan

Platform Updates This Week: Facebook, Instagram and YouTube
Facebook: Facebook has announced that they will be taking additional steps to stamp out fake news from the social platform. To prevent Pages from making money from distributing misinformation, the social network will no longer let Pages that repeatedly share false stories advertise on the platform.

Instagram: Instagram has released an update for it’s multiple photos format. Users are now able to preserve the original aspect ratio for their photos in portrait or landscape orientation within a gallery. However, all photos and videos selected for the gallery must be in the same orientation.

Youtube: Youtube went through a major makeover recently, and it’s probably one of it’s biggest updates in recent Youtube history. Not seen it yet? View it here. They’ve refreshed their logo, typeface and colour scheme, and updated the functionality of the desktop site and mobile app among other things. Overall, the update highlights the company’s shift towards consumers who are visiting them on platforms beyond the desktop, which includes phones, game consoles and television sets.


Meet your voice doppelganger online
Lyrebird (Beta) is an app which allows you to create a digital copy of your voice. While the app’s artificial voice is in its infancy, it captures certain characteristics of your voice identity – introducing a whole new dimension of realism to artificial voices. How would this affect fake news and misinformation is anyone’s guess, but one thing’s for sure, a Siri that sounds just like you (or your mum) may not be a pipe dream after all.

Look what you made us do, Tay Tay!
No, we simply couldn’t resist. Love her or hate her, Taylor Swift is a marketing genius.
It’s just been a week, but people have been talking about her latest single, Look What You Made Me Do (just yesterday she released her 2nd single this year “… Ready For It?”) She probably occupied half of your newsfeed even if you refused to watch the music video or hear anything about her.
It all started when she wiped her social media pages clean and replaced it with teasers of snakes. Theories started to float around, speculating what it meant and more importantly who it’s about. We finally got our answers when she released her new single after 3 years followed by an epic music video that contains a ton of subtle references.



Of course, everyone jumped into analysing and uncovering what everything meant. You can read them all here, here, here and here…
And just like that, Taylor Swift has made history with the biggest 24-hour debut clinching 43.2 million views on the first day, and also broke the most played song on first day of release on Spotify. Perhaps there’s a thing or two we could learn from Tay Tay. Tease, Launch, Engage.