With 300 million daily users, Instagram Stories provides brands with immense potential to be discovered. However, up until now, Stories was simply an awareness-building tool, inspiring users and helping them stay up-to-date with their favorite brands and product announcements. This all changed last week with the introduction of shoppable Stories, allowing users to identify and purchase desired items directly from a Story. Combined with the release of shoppable posts in March, this latest update further champions Instagram’s vision to be a “place of action” – not just inspiration.
Instagram will soon show users how much time they spend on the app
Instagram is getting a new “Usage Insights” tool that helps users see how much time they’ve spent on the social platform. This unlaunched version the tool offers users a daily tally of minutes spent on the app, with the option to set a daily limit and a reminder if it is exceeded. So far however, Instagram doesn’t seem to have plans to block access to the app in the event that a user exceeds their daily limit.
This latest announcement from Instagram follows in the footsteps of giants like Google and parent company Facebook, who are starting to pay closer attention to how users are engaging with their platforms. Combined with Instagram’s “You’re all caught up” feature released last month, this update also further positions Instagram as a category leader in pushing for healthier app usage.
You can now read FIFA World Cup tweets from the foam of your beer
In case you haven’t heard, the 2018 FIFA World Cup kicked off last Thursday in Russia. It’s not just a good time for football (or soccer, if you prefer), but for Twitter as well, as fans flock to the platform to get updates, voice their opinions, express their frustrations, and everything else in between. As proven by the 2014 World Cup – the most tweeted event in history – Twitter and football pretty much go hand-in-hand. However, for Swedish brewery Norrlands Guld, all that scrolling through Twitter does is take your eyes off the beautiful game – which is why they’ve found a way to save viewers the trouble of constantly checking their phones. Using a printer with a special malt-based ink, the brewery is able to write tweets directly on the foam of their beers – all within seconds of their posting on Twitter. Unfortunately, you’ll have to scour selected Swedish bars just to find this unique pint dubbed “The Social Beer.” For the rest of us not living in Sweden, we’ll simply have to become experts at second-screening for now.
