We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #370

Mashup
ross.mctaggart
Instagram hits 800m users & sees in-app video creation quadruple
The last five months of user growth have been the fastest of Instagram’s existence, with 100 million users signing up between April and September. Interestingly, production of videos within the app has quadrupled in the last year and of the 800 million user base, 250 million actively create Stories.

Twitter to trial 280 character count limit
Despite ongoing issues with trolls and hate speech, Twitter has decided to let users say even more by doubling its character count. The company wants to stop users cramming their thoughts into the 140 character format. So what does 280 characters look like? Clue’s in this post 😉

Snap rolls out trippy Sky Filters
Having successfully improved our looks with its face filters, Snap has now decided it wants to overhaul the weather – and quite right too. Its new range of ‘Sky Filters’ allow users to add specific filters (rainbows, sunsets, storm clouds etc) to photos where the sky can be detected. This is the latest feature from the company which adds an AR layer to our surrounding environment.



Brands can now sponsor Snap’s 3D World Lenses
Who’d have thought a dancing hot dog could change the world? Well, that little fella may have played a part in encouraging Snap to roll out its 3D World Lenses to advertisers. The Lenses use the phone’s front camera to overlay animated characters onto real-life settings and data has shown that Sponsored Lenses can result in a 6.4 point increase in brand awareness. One of the first brands to trial the news Lens is Warner Bros, who have created a Lens featuring the ‘Spinner’ car from the new Blade Runner film.

WhatsApp now completely blocked in China
All functionality of the messaging platform WhatsApp has now been blocked in China. Users had been experiencing disruption to image and video sharing on the app, but it seems that even text functions have been shut down by the Chinese government’s firewall.

Chipotle achieves 79% completion rate with Instagram competition
How many pictures of a cheese dip does it take to affect contest completion rates? The answer is a nice round 100, if a recent campaign by Chipotle is anything to go by. Chipotle responded to mixed reviews of its Queso dip on Twitter with a campaign which used the Instagram Story format to test people’s appetite for pictures of the cheese and chilli dipping sauce. The brand created a story with 100 images featuring Queso and rewarded customers who clicked all the way through with a code that entered them into a competition to win a year’s supply of Queso. The result? Around 70-75% completion rate. We’ll dip a chip to that.