DIGITAL - Instagram Reaches 700 Million Monthly Users

After six-plus years many social media apps become a bit stagnant and growth slows.

Not so for Instagram who announced yesterday they now have 700 million monthly users.

It’s the quick bump in growth that is so impressive - the latest 100 million users signed up in just four months.

This announcement was right on the heels of a blog post which noted over 200 million people use Instagram Stories every day.

To put the growth of Instagram Stories into perspective - the feature was just launched last August, while Snapchat launched five years ago and has 161 million daily users.

Instagram is expanding on its international presence and sticking with its foundation as a visual communication medium.

According to TechCrunch here’s how long it took Instagram to add each 100 million users:

• October 6, 2010 – Launch
• February 26, 2013 – 100 million;  28 months
• March 25, 2014 – 200 million; 13 months
• December 10, 2014 – 300 million; 9 months
• September 22, 2015 – 400 million; 9 months
• June 21, 2016 – 500 million; 9 months
• December 15, 2016 – 600 million; 6 months
• April 26, 2017 – 700 million; 4 months

“Growth was driven by a number of factors, including our ability to better connect people with their friends on Instagram,” said a spokesperson. “We also took steps to simplify and improve our sign-up process, which helped bring in new people from all over the world.”

Instagram is now more than twice the size of Twitter.

DIGITAL - SnapChat Discover Takes on "Fake News"

SnapChat Discover is designed to be a premium source of news and entertainment, with content provided by publishers in the news, magazine, and television industries.

In a 2015 blog post, shortly after SnapChat Discover launched, Snap wrote, “Social media companies tell us what to read based on what’s most recent or most popular. We see it differently. We count on editors and artists, not clicks and shares, to determine what’s important.”

Two years later, Snap is following through on that promise by demanding more from Discover publishers and creators.

New guidelines have been released with the intent to counter the growing problem of “fake news” on social media.

Editors of Discover publishers will be expected to fact-check each of their publications – not only their own stories, but also any stories that they link.

An executive from Snap told The Guardian that these changes are intended to “empower our editorial partners to do their part to keep Snapchat an informative, factual and safe environment for everyone.”

There is a growing, and global, crisis of trust in a variety of established institutions – government, business, NGOs, and the media.

When it comes to the media, this distrust is fueled by perceptions that traditional news media is biased, and by the fact that fake news is running rampant across social media platforms.

According to Pew Research, 23% of adults say they have shared a fake news story either intentionally or accidentally, and 64% of adults say that fake news has caused significant confusion about basic facts.

The solution to the prevalence of fake news may be in moving away from automation and algorithms, and back to human engagement with curating content.

Better interface design, with a focus on making it easy to find and share good stories, and hard to spread false ones, is becoming more of a necessity.

Carl Alviani at Quark writes, “Every digital interaction encourages certain behaviors, and every media channel has limitations. Actively shaping those parameters to encourage civil, factual discussion isn’t only justifiable—it’s nearly an ethical necessity.”

SnapChat is actively engaging with that necessity, and it will likely prove good for the bottom line as well as for users ease of mind.

Their move to establish Discover as a highly-curated hub of reliable content has the potential to lend credibility to publishers who establish themselves on the platform, as well as benefiting the platform itself.

Discover needs this boost, since views were down in late 2016 as the company dealt with major competition from Instagram Stories, and struggled with how to monetize more effectively ahead of their upcoming IPO.

Tightening up their content guidelines, and investing in Discover Shows (with their new stream of ad revenue), looks like an effective way to place themselves ahead of other social media sites when it comes to reliability.

Since wealthy Americans are among those most concerned with fake news, this is a wise move.

The Washington Post is ready to take advantage of this opportunity.

They were at the head of the pack when it came to incorporating SnapChat into election coverage, and they’ve launched a daily Discover Edition which makes them the first prestige news outlet to offer multiple news updates throughout the day on that platform.

About Tiffany Sostar

Tiffany is a published academic, an editor with the Editors Association of Canada, an independent scholar and researcher, and a self-care and narrative coach. She is particularly interested in the intersection of technology and identity - how our tools shape our selves and change our stories, and in how the nature of work is changing as we incorporate more technology into our daily lives.

DIGITAL - Snapchat Offers New Advertising Features

In an effort to improve mobile commerce and lead generation marketing, Snapchat is testing deep-linking and auto-fill in their ads.

With deep-linking, consumers can swipe up and tap a link to be taken out of Snapchat and into a new app - to a playlist in a music app, or a product page in an ecommerce app.

Auto-fill allows viewers to fill out lead-generation forms with one tap on the screen after seeing an ad.

This time-saving feature addresses the challenge advertisers have getting consumers to take the time to fill out forms, particularly when they are using a smartphone with its small screen and keyboard.

"Snap's new features make its advertising platform more amenable to the type of direct response advertising that could make it a social commerce player," said eMarketer analyst Yory Wurmser. "Mobile retail above all is about relevant, compelling images and simplicity."

Other social networks already have these features so Snapchat is taking steps to catch up to them and stay on top of social commerce in general.

Some interesting statistics for businesses thinking about advertising on Snapchat:

• Over 100 million active daily users
• Snapchatters watch over 10 billion videos per day

• 58 percent of college students would be likely to purchase a brand’s product or service if they were sent a coupon on Snapchat.

DIGITAL - Facebook Launches Marketplace & Snapchat Rebrands

Changes in the digital world this week saw an expansion of services by Facebook and Snapchat.

Snapchat announced a corporate name change to Snap Inc. as they rebrand themselves as a digital lifestyle company.

The fun Snapchat app won’t be affected, but the change will allow the company to expand their offerings.

The same day as they announced the new name, Snap Inc. also introduced a new product - Spectacles.

The glasses are a totally new type of camera that records video. The video plays full screen on any device, in any orientation, and captures the human perspective with a 115 degree field of view.

Unlike smartphones, which record video in a rectangular format, video via Spectacles is circular, allowing the viewer to watch the content naturally, whether in portrait or landscape mode, the way the user “saw” it.

Spectacles bring back memories of the failed Google Glass and the company will have to overcome the association consumers may have.

Facebook launched Marketplace - a place to discover, buy and sell items such as clothes, jewelry, household items and even cars.

The company observed that in recent years more people have been using the digital media channel to buy and sell items.

In fact, more than 450 million people visit buy and sell groups on Facebook each month — from families in a local neighborhood to collectors around the world.

Marketplace opens with photos of items that people nearby have listed for sale.

Search is available to find something specific, and results can be filtered by location, category or price.

A variety of categories such as Household, Electronics and Apparel are available to browse through. 

Marketplace is rolling out to everyone over 18 years old in the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand on the Facebook app for iPhone and Android.

Facebook plans to extend the service to its desktop site and additional countries over the coming months.

Marketplace is seen as a major e-commerce push by Facebook and will be increased competition for sites such as Kijiji and craigslist.