Good afternoon everyone and rejoice – not because the sun is finally here, but because it’s time for our world-famous social media Tune Up, where we bring you up to speed with all of the week’s breaking social media news:
Positive tweets directly linked to sales
A study presented by Deloitte at last week’s Twitter4Brands event in London found that Twitter has a huge impact in terms of driving sales. Particular drivers were positive tweets and word of mouth user endorsements. One case study really stood out though: that of EA Games and its world-famous title ‘FIFA 13′, which concluded that a 30% increase in positive tweets was more effective in driving sales than a 30% increase in above-the-line advertising. By tweeting about major events they were able to get people talking about the game at the same time as football in general. In one case, they launched a giveaway under #86messi when the Argentinian star’s 86th goal broke the record for most times scored in a year, and saw the hashtag mentioned over 50,000 times.
WhatsApp is bigger than Twitter
According to WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum, the service now has more than 200million users, making it a larger network than Twitter. Moreover, it is being employed heavily by those users, with 8 billion inbound and 12 billion outbound messages being dispatched every day and no reported drop off since its decision to charge £0.99 per year. With competition growing from Chinese rival WeChat and its 300 million users, of whom 40 million live outside of China, it will be interesting to see how WhatsApp’s growth continues going forward.
New Facebook app update for iPhone and iPad
Facebook has launched its new app update for iPhone and iPad. New features include stickers, chat heads, an updated news feed and some changes to photos. As expected, stickers are essentially large emoticons to be used as expressive alternatives to speech. These are currently free but may not be for long given the recently announced ‘sticker store’ – another potentially lucrative scheme devised by Facebook. Chat heads, previously announced in ‘Facebook Home’ for Android, will allow users to keep on top of chats wherever they are in the app. The updated news feed allows users to organise what they see depending on whether it was posted by certain friends or people they follow. Also, Facebook has added some photo filters along with a ‘shared photos’ album containing images you have sent to particular friends.
Snapchat CEO: users taking 150M images a day
Even after Facebook’s release of a simulated, or rather ‘copycat’ of its service, Snapchat is continuing to grow. Snapchat’s CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel said that users are uploading 150 million images every day – that’s up from 20 million per day in October, and more thanInstagram’s 40 million per day. The hallmark of Snapchat is, of course, the transitory nature of its images: 10 seconds after an image is viewed by the recipient, it’s deleted from Snapchat’s servers, Spiegel said. We haven’t a clue what most people use the service for – but we could guess.
New LinkedIn app for iPhone and Android
For the first time in nearly two years, LinkedIn has implemented some key updates to its iPhone and Android apps, with a vast overhaul of the activity stream and navigation systems, as well as the introduction of ads. The personalised activity stream is now sleeker, with more visual content, much like the updates that have been made to recent Facebook mobile apps. From here, users can simply swipe the left side of the screen to navigate around the app, creating a more well-rounded overall experience. Adverts will see the network attempt to monetise its success on mobile, in the form of sponsored content within the stream.
To keep up to date with all of Diffusion’s exciting news, please check the blog regularly; follow us on Twitter and ‘like’ us on Facebook!
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