We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #234

Mashup
nick.mulligan

Facebook brings back the nineties with Rooms
Remember the nineties? Queen Victoria, William Gladstone, the two Franco-Dahomean Wars. Oh, the NINETEEN nineties? They were good, too. Facebook’s harking back to the era of quasi-anonymous internet chatrooms with its new iPhone app, Rooms. Users can chat about different subjects depending on the Room, and won’t need an email address to sign up; anonymity in social has been big news recently, and it seems Facebook is taking it seriously.

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Facebook page admins can save and backdate posts
Facebook is letting its page admins create drafts of posts, which they can either save for later or backdate. Remember, admins: with great power comes great responsibility. If that’s good enough advice for Spiderman, it’s good enough for us all.

Twitter creates Fabric
Twitter has created its own mobile-app platform called Fabric, which it hopes will lure developers and their dollars. Twitter CEO, Dick Costolo, has called it “the future of mobile software development”. Of course, he would say that.

Twitter’s Buy button set for general release
Twitter is planning to roll out its mobile Buy button to everybody who wants it some time during Q1 2015. So far, it’s only available to a select number of partners, one of which you can see below.

twitter-buy-button

New iOS Vine app
The Vine app for iPhone/iPad has been updated. Now you can follow channels and post straight from the app. If you’re lucky enough to have iOS8, it will look all new and shiny for you, too.

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Foursquare downloads are up or down or maybe around the same
Foursquare is doing brilliantly/terribly, depending on who you believe. The network itself is saying that, in the ‘post-Swarm era’ (as historians will call it) they’ve increased their user base to 55 million, a 54% lift in users compared to the same month in 2013. Very good. However, other research suggests that, after initial uplift, the numbers are actually in decline. The below graph looks particularly bad, with all its downward lines; note that Swarm downloads peaked in August, and have been dropping since.

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Build your own Mercedes on Instagram
Mercedes has gone all clever on Instagram, using thousands of different images across hundreds of linked accounts to let people customise their own car through the network.

HP makes TV ad from Vine videos
To promote its Pavilion x360 laptop, HP created a set of around 30 different clips from different Vine influencers, producing 950,000 engagements and 50m organic views. It’s now turning the campaign into a 30 second TV commercial – the first of its kind. We’re sure you’ll want to watch it over and over again. Hahaha, a joke about the looping Vine format! Whatever next?!

JBL #CordFail
JBL headphones has created a cordless range, and is promoting it using Vine star, Paul Logan. He’ll be creating a series of videos, including some based on stories sent in using #CordFail. JBL wants to hear about the worst things that have happened because of a wire. Say, for example, you dropped your phone just as the doors of a lift closed, and found yourself suspended by your earphones. Something like that.

IHOP and hip hop
Pancakes have always been the hip hop lover’s breakfast food of choice. At least, that seems to be the message from pancake chain IHOP’s new Twitter tone of voice, which has seen massive results in terms of engagement. It raises a question about alienating certain other audience segments, but the RT figures suggest that people are loving it so far.

The Instagram vending machine
A vending machine that can’t swallow your change! Nice one, IHeartRadio. The radio station has sent its invention around college campuses, selling T-shirts in exchange for Instagram photos. So far, the campaign’s seen 5.7m impressions.

iheartradio-instagram-01-2014

Her majesty tweets
Last week, another celebrity tweeted for the first time. Not just any old celeb, though. This one is the constitutional monarch of 16 of the 53 member states in the Commonwealth of Nations (thanks, Wikipedia). Here’s what she sent, and a couple of the best responses.