Twitter’s feed has been living in the past in regard to visual content for years, but now it integrates previews of photos and Vines to bring something other than text and links to its primary means of presenting content. No longer will users have to click through blind links to see photos on the service. Certainly, this is a minor update that should have taken place long ago, but its effects could be felt in a big way as Twitter grows and begins to create a service closer in look and feel to more familiar social media formats.
Tag: instagram
Newspapers Test The Waters On Instagram
While visual brands have gained traction on Instagram, newspapers have been more reluctant on the platform that boasts over 150 million users. A lack of embedded links and no form of monetization are likely the detractors so see if Instagram will begin to support these on the brink of their advertising debut. For the time being, a host of publishers like the NY and LA Times are beginning to use it for their lifestyle stories supplementing with short form video.
Smirnoff Pushes Mixhibit App
In a world where brands are continuously looking to stand out, sometimes custom jobs yield the most impressive results. Such is the case with Smirnoff’s new app, Mixhibit. The Diageo-owned vodka purveyor is making a big global marketing push behind the app, which allows users to amalgamate Tweets, Facebook posts, and Instagram photos of themselves and their friends into a custom-made video, which includes a soundtrack. The videos are thereafter entirely portable, and can be shared across the social sphere. The goal is for the app to “do for video what Instagram has done for photos,” according to Smirnoff. Whether such lofty goals will be realized is certainly up for debate; nonetheless, it’s a nifty campaign that leverages a deep integration into the social sphere.
Instagram Announces Ads
Instagram announced that it will be bringing advertising to the platform within a few months; users should expect to see ads appearing natively in their feeds by the holidays. The idea is to coerce advertisers to use as natural an image as possible, to make it ‘fit’ into the feed without disrupting the flow that makes Instagram as widely used as it is. An example Coke ad shows a couple in the water while one of them is floating holding a can of Coke. If you don’t like an ad, you’ll be able to remove them with a click.
Instagram Preparing to Sell Ads
The coveted millennial demographic is elusive to advertisers due to its prevailing savvy that comes from being a digitally native generation. Much of the effort to reach these tough customers has been focused on social media, and another player is about to enter the game. Image sharing giant Instagram is on the path to monetization following its acquisition by Facebook last year, and director of business operations Emily White is ready to begin selling ad packages on the service. Brands are already using Instagram to run viral campaigns for free, but many have expressed an interest in more formal advertising options. There is fear that excessive advertising could drive users, especially millennials, away from the service, so there is explicit focus being placed on the development of Instagram’s ad program’s seamlessness. Only time will tell what shape this final presentation will take, but it could quite possibly shift how we think about ads in the app space, given Instagram’s oversimplified user interface which currently shows few obvious options for ad placement.
J.Crew Debuts Fall Catalog On Pinterest
For the first time, J.Crew’s at-home catalog subscribers won’t be the first to look at the brand’s September issue. This year, the first fall issue will appear to J.Crew’s Pinterest followers before the catalog reaches homes. For a company that didn’t have a social media department until a month ago, it’s a bold move; indeed, it’s the first clothing brand to debut its catalog on the social network, although many other brands debut their print and TV campaigns on Facebook and Youtube. In addition to Pinterest, J.Crew will release a short online film series on monogramming on August 21st, and it will also use Instagram to promote its in-store style sessions. The company has come a long way in its first year of social strategy.
Instagram Is Changing Music Festivals
Through partnerships with Instagram, several major festivals have displayed fans’ images on big screens around their events. Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo, and Outside Lands, for instance, showed social content on main stages, and Outside Lands will feature Instagram Video for the first time as well. Shots that were previously only accessible to outside friends can now reach massive audiences and can quite literally act as social megaphones. This radically increases engagement with the festivals, and takes their social reach from purely outgoing content to internally shared images.
YouTube Co-Founders Launch Video App
There’s a third hat in the video app ring: YouTube cofounders Chat Hurley and Steve Chen announced MixBit, an iPhone app that lets you record, edit, share, and mix video clips from other users to create your own movies. The videos are designed to be recorded and viewed horizontally, and it operates just like Vine and Instagram – tap-to-record and release to finish. Clips can be as long as 16 seconds, and finished can include as many as 256 clips in a single video, meaning that videos can last more than an hour. There are no filters, but you can rearrange, cut, and further edit clips before publishing. With the flexibility to post videos that are far more long-form than either Vine or Instagram allow, MixBit could be a potent new video capturing and editing app – and with YouTube’s powerful backing, it’s not too far fetched to guess that it will be an important third party in the Instagram and Vine-dominated world.
MTV VMA Nominees To Be Announced Via Vine And Instagram Video
Ahead of the MTV Video Music Awards on August 25th, MTV will reveal the nominees for the event via Instagram as well as Vine. The network hired Koha Phan, a popular stop-motion animator, to create eight pieces of VMAs-related content. The VMAs are the first award show to ever announce nominations via these video platforms, and will be distributed via the #RoadToTheVMAs campaign. The first video comes out at 8 a.m. EST on Wednesday, with one video released per hour thereafter. MTV was the first brand to reach 1 million followers on Instagram in November 2012, and now boasts 1.37 million Instagram followers and 117,000 Vine followers, so the videos are sure to be shared widely. Whichever video format proves more popular and sharable, of course, will have instant bragging rights.
Upcoming Film, Jobs Releases Trailer On Instagram Video
Jobs, the upcoming film on the life of the Apple pioneer has turned to Instagram Video to promote the movie which drops August 16th. The 15 second format was a perfect fit for movie trailers and also allows for easy viewing on Twitter. We’ve seen brands like Starbucks gain several hundred thousand followers on the platform and now the new feature will allow them to reach their audience with video. We’ll see if brands produce original video for the platform or simply use it as another distribution channel.
