Umpf / Blog / Friday Social: Twitter Crackdown, Reddit Reinvents Chatrooms, Instagram’s ‘Remove Follower’ Function and Snapchat!

Friday Social: Twitter Crackdown, Reddit Reinvents Chatrooms, Instagram’s ‘Remove Follower’ Function and Snapchat!

  • 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 / @daniiyk

Twitter Crackdown

Some of the world’s biggest celebrities have lost millions of Twitter followers after the company has cracked down on ‘locked’ accounts.

Katy Perry, the most-followed user on Twitter, and Lady Gaga have lost about 2.5 million followers each, with Barack Obama’s following going down by 2.1 million.

KP

The new measures mean that any user whose account is ‘locked’ for unusual activity – such as being blocked or publishing unusual volumes of Tweets – and who did not respond to a prompt to verify their identity would be excluded from Twitter follower counts. The initiative aims to prevent fake followers, and build trust that follower counts are accurate.

Instagram’s new ‘remove follower’ function

Instagram is reportedly trying to give users a little more power over their audience, and has started more widely testing the ability to manually remove followers with just a few taps.

Users (currently on Android) are seeing the ‘remove follower’ function – an icon with three vertical dots to the far right of a user’s name under ‘followers’ – allowing those who have a public profile quick access to remove unknown or annoying followers. Instagram also notes that those you choose to remove aren’t notified about the action, avoiding any awkwardness.

Instagram has been working to expand the public’s control over their experience, including the ‘You’re all caught up’ notification, choices to mute people you follow, and an experimental ‘Do not disturb’ feature.

Snapchat’s new partnership

Journalists rejoice! Snapchat has partnered with four news discovery platforms (NewsWhip, Storyful, SAM Desk, and TagBoard) to help uncover Snap pictures and videos during breaking news.

As more and more people are turning to social media and messaging for news, platforms are under increased pressure to create symbolic relationships with publishers and journalists.

Ultimately, the new tool allows news organisations to better mine the billions of public videos and photos shared daily on the channel, bringing a never-before-seen look into Snapchat’s content right to their fingertips (the same way they have access to publicity-available Facebook and Twitter data).

Insights include:
Official Accounts: tap into what celebs, politicians and official accounts are doing
Snapchat Stories: real-time tracking of the stop Snapchat Stories, from breaking incidents to concerts and sporting events from around the world
Snapchat Search: search all public snaps to see how the public is reacting to a given topic, event or trend.

Reddit reinvents the chatroom

Reddit is looking to bring back an era where strangers from all over the globe can meet in a chat room. Having rolled out the community-based chat rooms with a select number of users, they have finally made it more public with the aim to allow redditors to get to know each other.

reddit

Chats are opt-in for subreddits, meaning that every community doesn’t have one yet, but there are already rooms for everything from Game of Thrones to cats.

Reddit is monitoring these chatrooms and promises to continue to take feedback in an effort to improve it.

And finally…

Football fever isn’t over yet! Cristinano Ronaldo’s Instagram announcement, confirming that he has completed his move from Real Madrid to Juventus for a total of £100million, has become the fifth most-liked Instagram picture of all time – accumulating more than 11.3 million likes.

CR