Written by Yeo Yong Lun, Fu You Quan and Lee Ai Yun.
Are Viral AR Filters The New Way to Build a Following on Instagram?
Noticed all your friends posting these roulette-styled “personality quizzes” on Instagram Stories? Ranging from Disney to Pokémon, these simple yet creative AR filters have caught fire on Instagram. The idea is straightforward: when you start recording with the filter, a roulette-wheel graphic begins to spin. Whether or not you agree with the result, your reaction adds to the appeal of the trend.
While these “personality quizzes” are far from being a novelty (they’ve been popular on Facebook for a long time), creators found an innovative way to adapt and simplify these quizzes on Instagram with the use of AR. Now, they’re reaping their rewards – Arno Partissimo, who made ‘Which Disney Are You?’, saw a 600k jump in followers after his filter took flight. Filippo Soccini (‘2020 Predictions’) saw a growth of over 100k in under a week!
AR filters could be the next big thing for brands, influencers and creators to improve their Instagram following. The best thing about it is that Facebook’s Spark AR Studio is readily available for anyone who wishes to learn and create AR filters. It might just be the easiest way to fast-track your follower count presently.
P/S: We haven’t seen a filter for ‘Which Friends/Game of Thrones Character Are You?’, so it’s not too late to start making these AR filters and go viral!
In an attempt to stay relevant in the market, Instagram has released a new update that adds much-needed effects to improve Boomerang. While these features are new for Instagram, Snapchat or TikTok users might find it rather familiar to what they have seen. That said, the addition to the new effects should give you more reasons to be excited to use Boomerang.
Here are the new effects as described by TechCrunch:
SlowMo — Reduces Boomerangs to half-speed so they play for two seconds in each direction instead of one second.
Echo — Adds a motion blur effect so a translucent trail appears behind anything that is moving, almost like you’re drunk or tripping
Duo — Rapidly rewinds or speeds up the clip with a glitchy, digitized look.
Trimming (Editing Feature) — Shorten your Boomerang with similar controls to iPhone’s camera roll or the Instagram feed video composer.
These new features might not be much, but hopefully, it gives users an extra creative edge while making Boomerang. For example, instead of taking multiple takes for the perfect boomerang, video trimming can now save users the time and effort.
Japanese RPG ‘Fate/Grand Order’ The Most Tweeted-About Game in 2019
Japan had dominated the video games conversation on Twitter last year, boasting the most active video game community on the app. In Twitter’s announcement of over 1.2 billion gaming-related tweets shared in 2019, Japan led the conversation around ‘Fate/Grand Order’ with Fornite coming in second and Final Fantasy third.
The Japanese are known for topping Twitter metrics over the years. Back in 2011, Japanese users tweeted so fervently about a classic appearing on TV that it surpassed Beyonce’s pregnancy announcement as the app’s most tweeted-about event. To no one’s surprise, Japan topped the list as the number one country tweeting most about gaming in 2019.
