SOCIAL MEDIA ROUND-UP: Facebook Reaches the Daily One Billion Users Mark & Twitter Swaps Favourites for Emotions

November 9, 2015

In this week’s social media roundup, allergist we take a look at Facebook achieving a billion daily users and the impending new Facebook news app that is expected to launch this week.

We also dive into the ‘favourites’ battle that has occurred between stars and hearts on Twitter and Snapchat closing in on Facebook’s video supremacy.

Facebook has over one billion daily users

Facebook has released its third quarter earnings report and the headline news is that the social media platform has reached over one billion daily average users, viagra order | a 17% increase on the same period last year.

Facebook reported $4.5 billion in revenue and a profit of $1.46 billion, both of which are up over 40% and highlights the global success of the network.

Revenue continues to be dominated by mobile, which now accounts for 78% of all advertising revenue on the platform, up 12% from last year.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stressed: “We had a good quarter and got a lot done. We are focused on innovating and investing for the long term to serve our community and connect the entire world”.

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Source: http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/4/9671382/facebook-q3-third-quarter-2015-earnings-1-billion-active-users

Facebook to launch news app

Highlighting Zuckerberg’s desire to continue improving Facebook, the platform is to launch a standalone news app in their quest to become the go-to destination for news.

The ‘notify’ app will feature reports from news outlets such as The Washington Post, CBS and Vogue and users will receive alerts when articles are published.

The app is expected to enable quicker load time of news stories and is predicted to emerge this week. It will add to an increasing number of single-use apps that Facebook has produced in the past few years, such as Messenger, Poke, Groups and Pages.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/04/facebook-news-app-notify/

Twitter swaps favourites for hearts

Twitter has made a big UX change to its platform as it swaps the long-standing ‘favourites’ star icon for a heart icon to symbolise ‘likes’.

Twitter says the reasoning behind this was the platform’s desire to make the site easier to use and more attractive to newcomers.

Twitter believes it makes sense to select the heart symbol if you ‘like’ a post, rather than clicking the star to ‘favourite’ the content.

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However, there will always be those who react badly to change, with some users branding Twitter as Instagram…

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and others missing the star feature…

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If you are one of those who spend “time staring into the Twitter void and for whom the idea of clicking a heart is unappealing”, fear not! Google chrome has come to the rescue with their announcement that the following apps (all downloadable on the Chrome App Store) will revert the hearts back to stars:

– Twitter Star

– Twitter Favourite

– StarBack

– Stylish

– Fav Forever

Twitter’s genius idea for improving sharing of emotions may have actually created a feature to define and group their users instead.

Sources

https://blog.twitter.com/2015/hearts-on-twitter

http://www.wired.com/2015/11/how-to-get-the-twitter-star-back/

Snapchat video viewings are closing in on Facebook

Snapchat has reached new heights with its videos being viewed six billion times a day, that’s three times the number of video views from five months ago.

“If you simply compare the numbers (and don’t consider how each service measures a “view”), Snapchat is just 2 billion daily video views shy of Facebook’s 8 billion”

What makes Snapchat’s video views more significant is that they are all via mobile devices. With only just over 100 million monthly active users, 6 billion daily video views is some achievement!

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It is not possible to determine whether the views are coming mostly from user-generated videos, from Snapchat’s Discover section or from viewers watching the app’s live event streaming. However, the figures speak for themselves and advertisers who want to bring their campaigns to engaging mobile platforms should be paying close attention.

Source: http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/08/snapchat-says-6b-videos-viewed-daily-on-its-app-tripling-in-past-five-months

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