Friday Social: InstaKea, Emojli, Vine Loop and more!

  • Social Media

Our #FridaySocial is a weekly round-up of the key social media news stories from the previous seven days. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter – @Umpf @TomScott1

1.Most tweeted moment tweeted on twitter

The 2014 World Cup in Brazil has been momentous for Twitter, the site has seen records tumble as the drama in matches cause a surge in tweet volume. When the hosts Brazil played Chile last week, it went down to a dramatic penalty shootout, Chile player Gonzalo Jara missed a crucial penalty to send his team out of the tournament, causing 389,000 tweets per minute. That volume of posts made it the single most tweeted moment ever, beating the previous record held by Percy Harvin’s Super Bowl touchdown.  The World Cup still has a week to go and the games will undoubtedly gain more viewers and tweets as the stakes increase, so we may well see the record broken again.

2.Instakea

Swedish flat pack furniture and poorly laid out instruction specialists IKEA, have created a website using Instagram. The campaign is to promote their latest PS 2014 collection. Search for the account ikea_ps_2014 on your phone and it will display 12 images positioned to resemble a website. Users can click through from benches, tables, storage, light, textiles and ideas. Clicking on these categories will take you to a tagged image which allows you to click further in to the product range, essentially this is an online interactive catalogue, on instagram. All in all, a very clever campaign which uses only the free tools already available on the platform.

3.Facebook has upset some people …on purpose

Facebook has caused a bit of a stir after it was discovered they recently experimented with the type of content that gets pushed on to some user’s timelines in order to influence their mood. Facebook wanted to see that if tinkering with their algorithm to push either more positive or negative stories on to the timeline would affect the nature of those users’ future posts. An interesting idea, no?

Legally Facebook did nothing wrong, the user agreement (that thing you have never read) gives them permission. What do you think? Are you concerned that Facebook might be trying to manipulate your newsfeed? Let us know in the comments below.

4.We need to talk about Emojli

Emojli follows hot on the footsteps of YO as the latest app to get people talking, the premise behind the idea is to remove all of the spam and pointless #tagging on social media sites and replace it with a platform on which you can only communicate in emojis. A problem springs to mind, if you can’t type in emojis (which is basically like learning to type in wing-dings) then it is going to be extremely slow to have any form of meaningful dialogue.  If you are intrigued, you can reserve you username now, and yes your username has to be an emoji.

5.Vine loop count

Vine has taken a welcome step by introducing a loop count, this has gone down well with users who can now see just how popular their videos really are, not just judged on re-vines and comments but on a play count. The numbers update in real time, a nice feature which will further demonstrates how popular some posts are as the counter goes round.  Twitter announced that they have been measuring loop information since April 3rd, anything watched before that will not be counted.

6. Twitter introduces ‘Buy Now’ button

Twitter appears to be experimenting with a new form of advert, some users will have noticed a ‘Buy Now’ button in their timeline this week. Twitter is known to frequently experiment with additional features and it would make sense for them to look at adding a direct sales link from brand to consumer. We will keep a watchful eye out for this being rolled out permanently, and we will be hiding our credit cards!