Social Media News: Periscope on Twitter, Peach stumbles and who’s got Facebook Overlap?
Every week we’ll be sharing the latest social media news. This week we’ve got updates about Periscope, Facebook, Peach and Twitter. Enjoy!
Periscope is now viewable in your Twitter feed
Periscope and Twitter have announced that from now on, Periscope can be streamed from within tweets; meaning that people will not have to open up the Periscope app separately to view live streamed videos. As the Periscope blog post says,“we’ve always wanted to make it as easy as possible to watch and broadcast live video. See the world through someone else’s eyes — that’s been our mission since day one”.
Periscope streams should have a far better reach now the whole Twitter has an easier access to them. This move should prompt not only an increase in Periscope users but also a rise in marketing usage for brands looking to grow their Periscope following. Currently this will only be available for Apple iPhone owners but plans are already underway for Android too.
Image credit: jonloomer.com
Facebook Overlap helps with audience targeting
Overlap is a new Facebook tool which has yet to be formally launched – so is not available to all of us yet – but looks really useful. Jon Loomer has written a great post about it which provides a really good overview.
According to Jon, “audience Overlap allows advertisers to take two or more audiences (up to five) and find the percentage of overlap between them”. In short, it gives you a good idea of other audiences you could/should be targeting and provides another tool for improving your returns from Facebook advertising.
— Jack (@jack) January 5, 2016
Will Twitter expand it’s character limit?
Will they or won’t they? Rumours have been flying around about whether Twitter would ditch it’s famous 140 character limit and potentially increase the limit to 10,000 characters. CEO, Jack Dorsey certainly added more fuel to the fire with this screenshot tweet (above). It remains uncertain whether this will actually happen and, if so, what a shift to long-form content would mean for the millions of celebrities and comedians who rely on Twitter to share pithy one-liners. It’s Twitter, so expect more drama!
Peach, the offspring of Facebook and Tumblr, rises and falls
To clarify, the Peach I’m talking about is a new social network which has just launched (not the deceptively aggressive pink princess who features in Mario kart). Peach has been described as the baby of Facebook and Tumblr: the layout of its feed is like Facebook and users can post updates with pictures and GIFs that are displayed in chronological order, leading CNET to describe it as “like a blog without all the effort”.
Peach has some handy little features such as “magic words” which make posting content of whole quicker and easier – but just days after the fanfare of it’s launch it dropped out of Apples’ Top Free App chart, causing some to declare it ‘dead’. If it’s still around at Easter, we’ll revisit it here.
Twitter launches Conversational ads
If you’re in a B2C business this will interest you: Twitter has launched a new ad format called conversational ads. Designed to encourage social sharing, this new ad format (above) enables advertisers to include one-click calls-to-action which launches a pre-written Tweet, which the user can then modify and publish. This should makes it much easier for consumers to share your Tweets and help to increase engagement levels.
We’ll be back with more social media news next week.
