E-sports to Bolster Twitter
Twitter has been struggling to find a clear path into live video. For a channel that relies on the here and now to accelerate news and conversations, this has been rather surprising. It already has a deal to stream NFL games, but Twitter's user-led live option hasn't taken off with the same level of interest as its rivals. It recently signed a deal with ESL and Dreamhack to stream e-sports and related content. Perhaps tapping into major niches that their demographics are keen to talk about will work best, rather than a blanket live option.
Explore Facebook
Taking its lead from Instagram's successful explore page, Facebook have been testing an explore page via their Android beta app. "At Facebook we've been able to utilise Android's flexibility to innovate in ways that aren't possible on other platforms," said Ragavan Srinivasan, a product manager for AI products at Facebook. This explore page could provide ample opportunity for Facebook to expand it's advertising media space within a tried and tested framework. From an organic point of view, this is fantastic news as businesses and individuals will have a greater opportunity to be noticed on Facebook by people interested in similar things.
High School Rich
When Snapchat was barely a twinkle in the general public's eye, it was being used keenly by youths all over America. The kids of Barry Eggers, founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners introduced him to the app as it being one of three apps everyone has on their phone (the other two being Instagram and Angry Birds). After discussions with Lightspeed director Jeremy Liew, and a meeting with Snap CEO Evan Spiegel (which was organised via Facebook), Lightspeed decided to invest $485,000. Eggers gave his daughters school, Saint Francis, which had set up a startup investment fund, the option to push the investment to $0.5 million - which they gladly took as a small investment. Snapchat was valued at 4.25 million back then in 2012, but with its recent IPO on the NYSE, it is now worth $33 billion. That is 7750 times the 2012 valuation. We'll let you work out just how much that initial investment is worth now!
Member Power
LinkedIn's recent redesign caused a major headache for recruiters. Losing the ability to tag non premium members, sort companies by connection, search by postcode, radius based search, and the ability to use 'AND' and 'NOT' in Boolean searches was all a bit too much to handle. Mark Jury, a recruitment manager at Parkway Engineering Services started a petition. Boosted by Recruiter.co.uk's coverage which has been shared over 1000 times, LinkedIn contacted Jury to confirm that most of the missing features would make a return. Well done to LinkedIn for being flexible and listening to a key audience.
Anti-Social - The bad side of social media.
Anti-social: We thought it best we kick this feature off with someone who believes their beliefs take President over everyone else's. You can probably guess who we're talking about by now. As he tried to flip the Russian ties coin over to Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic Leader, he did his best to sound official and assertive, but ended up incurring the wrath of Twitter's spellcheckers. He had misspelt 'hereby' twice! It was particularly bad timing as he was due to visit a school to shine some light on hid education policy. Mr. Precedent, we suggest you extend that school visit a little longer...