New API, Twitter Updates, Alexa’s Music, and More — Digital Roundup | # 24
Updates, releases, customer care—with so much going on it may seem hard to keep up. Never fear, we got you covered.
Instagram API
To support the way businesses interact on Instagram, they’ve upped the platform’s API. You might be wondering, what is an API? It stands for application program interface, and it’s basically a set of protocols to specify how software components should interact.
Businesses rely heavily on insights to view content metrics and see how people are interacting with their brand. Now, business accounts will have the ability to check these insights thanks to the Instagram API updates.
Using third party applications such as Keyhole, Agorapulse, and more (any analytics tracker), you’ll now get a better, more comprehensive understanding of your organic traffic performs with your demo.
Spotify With Friends
Spotify hopped on board with Facebook Messenger, and the results are pretty neat.
Spotify officially introduced Group Playlists for Messenger, which allows friends to create their own Spotify playlist within their Messenger chat.
You can make new playlists to be shared amongst everyone in a chat right from Messenger by opening up the extension. This creates a more social way to share music with friends, and makes collaborating on the perfect playlist easier than ever.
You can get started with your own playlist at http://m.me/Spotify.
Promoted Tweets
Twitter may have struck a balance for consistent advertisers on their platform. Automatic promoted tweets for a flat $99 monthly fee—keep reading, I’ll explain.
For brands or avid users (think: big time bloggers) this could be a game changer if Twitter is one of their main ad platforms.
The service will automatically amplify your tweets and profile for a 30-day period (which basically means they’ll be boosted and reach a larger audience than just your followers). Your profile as well as all of your content would be boosted as opposed to just one or a few posts that you would decide to put money behind. The package includes analytics as well, so you can see the additional reach, engagements, etc. that the campaign is driving to your posts.
Interested? The service is currently in beta, so it’s invite-only. But the details released (to invitees) are 30-days free before the first payment, and users can cancel at any time. Stay tuned, we’ll let you know when it officially rolls out.
Alexa’s New Trick
Smart-home systems keep getting smarter—so Amazon’s Alexa is stepping up it’s game as well.
The update is all about music, as apparently a lot of people use their smart-home speakers as actual speakers. You could always ask Alexa to play a certain song, or a specific genre, but now it gets more fine-tuned.
Ask Alexa to “play music to focus to”, or “play music to nap to”… or run, meditate, cook to. A popularly unique one is “baby making jazz music”. So, as you can see, you can now ask for music that pairs with your activities. There are over 500 voice command activities available so you can say “play pop music for cooking” or any other combination of music and activity.
The service works through Amazon’s free streaming service—Prime Music, so no worries if you don’t pay for a third-party music service.
Ever-Changing Twitter
Twitter unleashed another new update that users don’t seem too thrilled about. Have you checked your Twitter notifications tab lately? There’s probably some more stuff in there than before.
The notifications tab includes news about popular things people are tweeting about, Twitter trends, or links to a popular new article.
Some have said the update now offers them “a bunch of random junk I don’t care about.”
Twitter was always able to send users notifications about what other people are doing—but those could be turned off. Now every time a user signs into their Twitter account on desktop or mobile they’ll see what other people they don’t know are doing and interested in. The goal is to help users stay “in the know.” Let us know how you feel about the new feature.
That’s all for this week’s digital roundup. Be sure to catch up on last week’s if you haven’t yet, and we’ll have more for you next time!
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