Weekly social news roundup! #2

AI maps, mean tweets, new Facebook UI, and more…

Welcome to the AnalogFolk weekly social news roundup, a weekly collection of the best social news of the week, compiled by our Junior Community Manager Imogen Hunter.

Pinterest hits 265 million monthly users

Ahead of their IPO, Pinterest has announced that the platform has had an increase in user growth, which now stands at more than 265 million active users. The platform added 51 million users in the past year alone, specifically internationally. Pinterest isn’t always at the front of many marketer’s minds, but according to the platform, 90% of weekly Pinners use the platform to make purchase decisions. It may not offer the scale and potential reach of other social networks, but it could offer more actionable potential due to the way in which consumers use the platform to find products.

However, with the introduction of Instagram’s ‘checkout’ feature, will this sway the interest, consideration and purchase mindset of users from Pinterest to Instagram?

Full story here

Facebook is testing a new UI that would see Stories and News Feed posts combined as one

As Facebook looks to evolve in line with user behaviors, and meet rising demand for new formats, Facebook is testing a new News Feed layout which would enable users to side-scroll through the posts in their feed, the same as how they can through Stories.

This test could be the end of endless, passive scrolling, and change the news feed forever.

Full story here

Carlsberg read out mean tweets

Taking a leaf out of KFC’s playbook, the team at Carlsberg have recently been promoting customer tweets across Twitter to gather mean tweets about their lager… which most people aren’t a fan of (as are Carlsberg, apparently). So in a bid to promote their newly named Carlsberg Danish Pilsner, launched last month, Carlsberg unleashed these tweets to their staff to read out. Let the laughs ensue…

Full story here

Facebook creates incredible maps using AI

Something a bit cool for you now. Facebook’s AI team has completed mapping the population of the African continent, all 1.3 billion living there. The team matches census data with structure data from satellite imagery to create a much more detailed picture of where people live on the vast continent. This isn’t the first time Facebook has done this, they’ve mapped out other countries using the same technique. As technology advances, this practice of creating detailed maps can benefit everyone from local governments to aid organisations.

Full story here

And that’s all folks!