The week in social media news curated by your friends at Fandom Marketing. Whisper targets adults, Facebook’s privacy updates, Maya Angelou’s Twitter leaves behind her best poem, what Scott Monty’s departure means to Ford, and new social media stats you don’t want to miss.
Whisper Redesigns App to Reach Older Audience
May 19, 2014
Until now, using Whisper, the app that lets people anonymously share secrets and gossip, could sometimes feel as if you were driving a car through a maze. When you ran out of things to see on the service, you were forced to turn around and start over. On Monday the company announced that it was releasing an updated version of its app, hoping to help people find more things to engage with on the service. The updates are also meant to make the product more useful for an older audience — and when I say “older,” I mean people not in the late teens or early 20s.
Full story NYT Bits
If Whisper Wants To Grow Past Youth, It Will Need A Lot Of Lonely Adults
May 20, 2014
Loneliness also is a major driver of voyeurism, which is likely key to Whisper’s massive readership numbers. That’s not to say that Whisper, or any other confessional app, could not be used in healthy, positive ways. (As long as people understand it’s not really completely anonymous.) Nor am I saying that the need to mask yourself now and then is naturally bad. My colleague Dan Munro, for instance, makes a case for anonymity in health communication that makes sense. But for Whisper to scale to the level some are beginning to predict (ala Twitter), it likely means that a lot of lonely people of all ages are finding a new outlet. At some point, as a culture, the question might need to turn from how this helps start-ups.
Full story on Forbes
Facebook Changes New User Default Privacy Setting To Friends Only — Adds Privacy Checkup
May 22, 2014
Facebook is changing the default for new users so that, going forward, the default setting is Friends. The change will have no impact on existing users. The first time someone posts, they will see a reminder to choose an audience for that post and if they don’t make a choice it defaults to Friends.
Scott Monty Leaves Ford: What it Means to Social Media
May 22, 2014
Scott Monty is leaving Ford Motors after six years as head of its social media group. This is a great loss for Ford, in my view. It also heightens my growing fears about how big brands will handle social media in the coming years. Monty has long been a champion of using social media to humanize large organizations by scaling conversations and ultimately building and reinforcing brand trust. This is in direct conflict with traditional marketing’s approach of treating social media tools as new arrows in the old outbound marketing quiver.
Full story on Forbes
Twitter’s Global User Base Estimates, Through 2018
May 28, 2014
Twitter’s global user base will grow at a double-digit rate each year through 2018, though the pace of that growth will slow during the forecast period, per eMarketer. The researchers expect the number of Twitter users around the world to grow by 24.4% this year from 182.9 to 227.5 million, excluding China, where the site is banned. Despite China’s exclusion, eMarketer predicts that by 2018, the Asia-Pacific region will account for 40% of Twitter’s 387 million users.
Full story on MarketingCharts
30% of “Socially Active” Brands Said to be on Instagram
May 29, 2014
It’s still early days for brands on Instagram, according to data shared in a comScore and Shareablee webinar, although some 30% of socially active brands have an Instagram profile as of March 2014, per Shareablee Social Loyalty Platform data. Predictably, some industry categories have been quicker to include Instagram in their marketing mix than others: leading the pack are luxury retail and luxury auto, with 67% and 60% penetration among socially active brands, respectively.
Full story on MarketingCharts
Is Some Tech Too Addictive?
May 30, 2014
Addiction can be a difficult thing to see. From outward appearances, Dr. Zoe Chance looked fine. A professor at the Yale School of Management with a doctorate from Harvard, Chance’s pedigree made what she revealed in front of a crowded TEDx audience all the more shocking. “I’m coming clean today telling this story for the very first time in its raw ugly detail,” she said. “In March of 2012 … I purchased a device that would slowly begin to ruin my life.”
What We’re Watching
This week the world suffered a great loss with the passing of Maya Angelou. She famously wrote that it’s not what you say, but how you make people feel that will be remembered. She certainly touched the hearts of many and this was apparent on Twitter where her final Tweet was shared 86,000 times followed by over 150,000 Tweets in 24 hours(source). Many of them with memes containing quotes from her poetry and from her Twitter account, now hailed as the best poem she ever wrote. Sometimes social media can be the source of beautiful things. Here’s a shot of inspiration in remembrance of the great Maya Angelou.
~ Melonie
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