Instagram Focus, Twitter bots and the London Marathon

This week in 60 seconds…

  • You may remember that we spoke about Instagram ‘hiding’ a potential portrait feature within its code a few weeks back. Well, it’s here, it’s called Focus and it works for both photo and video formats
  • The platform has also shown that a leopard can’t change its spots by copying Snapchat yet again. This time Instagram’s poaching Snapcodes under the guise of Nametags
  • In more positive Snapchat developments, the platform has partnered with broadcaster Tegna to bring Snapchat content to its local news broadcasts – a big step for any social media company
  • Not one to rest on its laurels, the little white ghost has also begun testing a commerce function with a few Snapchat Discover publishers
  • Now, if you’re going to be Tweeting any of the above links after you’ve read this, be prepared to be lost in a sea of bot activity as it’s been revealed that 67% of real news articles on Twitter are from bots

A final thought…

Think about how you can use Focus in Instagram Stories for our own social campaigns. The fact that it blurs the background while keeping someone’s face sharp, means it could be ideal for vox pop style features at events, for example.

 

SHARE News

If you’re running the London Marathon in a few weeks then let us help you. Now we won’t be there to help you train the distance or mop your fevered brow on the day, but we can give you some tactics to help you get those final donations in advance of the 22nd. Have a look at some of these recommendations of how you can use social to encourage contributions from your network.

Data Dose

It’s a strange world where a social media platform has less humans on it than bots. Strange, but not surprising. The breakdown of bot linking is also incredibly interesting with 90% of adult content-related tweets posted by bots, 76% of sports-related links tweeted by bots, and 66% of tweets about news and current affairs shared by bots.