Instagram Brings Search To The Web

Last week, Instagram added search to its desktop experience. Users can now search hashtags, profiles and locations on instagram.com in a viewing experience that is beginning to grow much more congruous with the Instagram mobile app where content is still created on.

“While Instagram.com is designed to be complementary to the mobile apps, it’s important to the global conversations that happen on Instagram,” an Instagram spokesperson said.

Twitter Launches Its Mobile Ads Manager

Yesterday Twitter officially announced the launch of its new mobile Ads Manager, which allows users of Twitter’s smartphone applications to track their ad campaigns’ performance – including their impressions, engagements, spend, cost per engagement, and engagement rate – while on the go.

The button was recently spotted in the wild, ahead of a formal announcement from the company, and not everyone was pleased with the addition.

10 Great Instagram Tools Every Business Should Know

Instagram is a highly popular photo sharing website which is increasing in popularity every month. With over 300 million monthly active users and over 55 million photos being shared every day, Instagram should be a vital part of your social media marketing strategy.

That’s not all. The number of people who join Instagram increases with every passing day, and soon, Instagram will become a core part of the world’s social media life. Instagram has a huge audience that you can tap into, and is relatively easy to generate interest on.

Twitter unveils 'Project Lightning' to bring live events to life

Twitter is going live. After years of attempting to compete with market leader Facebook on its own turf, Twitter is poised to embrace the key aspect that differentiates the two social networks with a new feature, the code-named Project Lightning, which will allow users to follow live events through curated streams of tweets, photos and videos. Those events could be organised events such as the World Cup final or Eurovision, or breaking news events such as natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

Yahoo unveils makeover for Flickr

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer, maintaining that her ambition was to make Flickr “awesome again,” said the new site will showcase “bigger images” and create a user experience that is “more immersive, more expressive.

” Mayer’s announcement of the Flickr makeover came only hours after the company announced it was buying Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Referring to Tumblr, Yahoo promised “not to screw it up.” Mayer, a Google veteran who joined Yahoo as chief executive last summer, Monday referred to Flickr as a once-shining acquisition “that didn't fare so well” and vowed that Tumblr would not follow a similar path.

Twitter announces new filter and tighter rules

A report published recently in top UK newspapers, according to that Twitter has announced a crackdown on abuse on its network, unveiling a new filter designed to automatically prevent users from seeing threatening messages.

Every user’s notifications - the timeline of messages directed at them - will be filtered for the first time, in an effort to prevent people from being confronted by abusive messages.

The social media company is also banning indirect threats of violence, and will introduce temporary suspensions for accounts that fall foul of its policies.

Facebook starts integrating Whatsapp for Android App

After taking over mobile messaging app WhatsApp for more than a year, Facebook has started to test its new feature for the Android app which will be having integration with WhatsApp.

The users will now be able to send any post shared on Facebook to the Whatsapp as the social networking site is about to add ‘Send’ button with the renowned WhatsApp icon along with other status actions buttons including ‘like’, ‘comment, and ‘share’, that appear below each status update.

Now You Can Create Your Own Private Social Network by Neobase

People enjoy all of the things they love about social networks while shifting the balance of control and privacy back to users. That’s why we created the Neobase - the world’s first Private Network Device.

Online social networks are great fun to use but bring concerns to users over privacy and the uncertainty of what is actually happening to all their personal data.

Instagram Introducing Carousel Ads

Instagram app service reached its peak in 2012 when Facebook paid almost 1 billion dollars to acquire it, at the same time leaving no doubts to anyone whether it had any revenue potential.  

At that time, it had over 200 million activeInstagramers worldwide using the app every month. Given its popularity, especially amongst the younger generation, let’s take a look at its marketing potential. 

Similar to Facebook’s multi-product ads, advertisers can now showcase multiple photos at once in a sponsored Instagram post. Last Wednesday Instagram announced the launch of carousel ads, allowing users to swipe through a series of photos in one click-able ad.

Connect Raises $10.3M To Help You With Social Media App

At the beginning of this year, Ryan Allis launched a new app called Connect, which syncs up with the major social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, LinkedIn and email — to create a "living" address book of your contacts across platforms.

It also maps out the locations of your friends' homes and places they've posted from. "What we see is a lot of these applications are just trying to do one thing, splitting into various applications," he told. "What we actually think what users want is one single place for interactions with friends."

Facebook, WhatsApp Survey Report from Singapore

About 55 per cent of respondents here said they use WhatsApp, while more than nine in 10 Internet users in Singapore have a Facebook account. Coming in just after online dating, social networking is the second-fastest growing online activity across the world over the last five years, according to research firm GlobalWebIndex (GWI), citing a 187 per cent rise globally and 242 per cent rise in Asia Pacific. And over the last two years, mobile networking has also seen a boom, with four in 10 global internet users using mobile messaging applications.

This rises to 46 per cent in Asia Pacific. Here are some social and mobile networking insights, according to GWI’s latest research, which covers 32 countries representing 89 per cent of the global Internet population. More than nine in 10 Internet users here have a Facebook account, ahead of the global average of near seven in 10. YouTube and Google+ are also among the top three social networking sites in Singapore (69 per cent and 64 per cent respectively) and globally (51 per cent and 55 per cent, respectively). Yet, have user’s behaviours changed and are more just passively consuming content on their social networks? GWI’s data showed a steady decline in users who have “messaged a friend in the last month” on Facebook, from 512 million in the first quarter of last year, to 313 million in Q3 this year.

In Singapore, about a quarter of Facebook, Twitter and Google+ members said they have “logged in to see what’s happening without posting/commenting on anything myself”. GWI’s Head of Trends, Mr Jason Mander, attributed this to “certain direct behaviours shift(ing) to other platforms”. For instance, conversations are shifting to mobile chat apps. As of the third quarter of this year, four in 10 respondents have made use of mobile messaging. This worked out to 616 million users globally, and is a 6 percentage point increase from the fourth quarter of 2012.. The figure is higher in Asia Pacific, with 46 per cent saying they use mobile messaging. The main motivations, according to respondents globally:

The applications are free, it’s quicker than using social networks or text message, and lots of their friends are using them. Mobile messaging application WeChat has come up tops globally and in Asia Pacific among the chat apps, with healthy growth between last year and this year. This is chiefly because it has “a huge active audience in China”, impacting strongly in the rankings. In Singapore, specifically though, WeChat trailed at third place – with just 18 per cent of respondents saying they used the app – together with Skype, and ahead of Line and Viber. Nonetheless, WeChat has seen an impressive near 500 per cent growth in user numbers between 2013 and 2014 in the Republic. Skype, in comparison, saw just 38 per cent growth.