What’s Good in Social — 03.08.18

Published in

thesocialnerd

4 min readMar 8, 2018

We are finally here. Back in the day when there were only two channels or so on television, you couldn’t do much to avoid ads (other than turn off the TV). Then came the rise of digital and ads were any and everywhere. Targeting you in ways that you never thought possible. Then came the ad blocker. Now, advertisers need to recognize that people really don’t give a sh*t since they’re exposed to so much content in a day. The only things that are going to resonate are the ones that make them feel an emotional connection (happiness, sadness, pain, anger, humor, etc.). All in all, stop making bullsh*t ads that will “win the next Cannes” and make sh*t that wins the hearts and minds of people.

Now that I have that little rant out of the way, let’s dig into What’s Good in Social.

#HobbyLobbyChallenge: Find a store like Hobby Lobby. Pose in the aisles in front of some of the products. Add some filtering. There you have it. (WeRSM)
First Mocking Spongebob, Now Evil Patrick: The internet has once again taken a children’s show character and turned it into something hilarious. This time it’s Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants. (What’s Trending)

McDonald’s for International Women’s Day: Mickey Dees decided to flip their “M” to make a “W” at some restaurants in honor of International Women’s Day. They also (like Pringles, Dreamworks, Bic, and others) made a switch to all of their social profiles as well. (What’s Trending)

PLATFORM UPDATES

Facebook

Removing Unhelpful Ad Metrics: Facebook announced that they are removing 20 ad metrics that were found to be unhelpful to advertisers. The purpose is to ensure that advertisers have a much more clear view of the metrics that matter to them and how they’re calculated. (Facebook)

No “Explore” Feed After All: After testing putting brands into a separate feed called “Explore”, Facebook announced that they were nixing it. While Facebook will still focus on content from friends and family, at least brands won’t have to worry about being isolated entirely *cough* Snapchat *cough*. (TechCrunch)
Voice Clip Updates: Certain users in India have seen the option to test uploading voice clips as their status updates. My question is… if people rarely stop and turn the sound on videos, why would they listen to voice clips? Don’t listen to me though, I’m just someone who hates checking his voicemail. (Social Media Today)

Instagram

4 Unreleased Features: After digging through some Instagram coding by developers, they discovered some pretty dope unreleased features: Portrait Mode, Cinemagraphs, “Start” Chats, and the ability to download your data. (WeRSM)

Twitter

Bookmarking Feature Unveiled: Twitter finally rolled out a bookmarking feature. Now instead of having all of your articles live on via your “liked” content, users can bookmark a tweet and come back to view it later. And it’s all private to the user. Not saying what you should or shouldn’t use it for… just saying no one will know. Almost like private browsing *insert winking emoji*. (Mashable)

Snapchat

Spectacles 2.0: Snap Inc. is rolling out new versions of their Spectacles product despite the fact that they did not sell as well as the brand anticipated last year. The newer versions have updated cameras that allow viewing videos in 3D depth. At $300, who won’t be rushing to buy them (do you feel the sarcasm?). I wonder if anyone thought about Google Glasses when pricing these… (Digital Trends)
Snap Analytics: Snap rolled out an insights view for Official Stories and users that have a large following. I guess I don’t have enough followers I can’t see it, but nonetheless, this should come in handy (and it’s long overdue). (@Social Media Examiner)

COOL A$$ APPS

Vero Closing in on 3 Million Users: The app that has been dubbed (by who, Idk) the “Instagram Killer” is seeing a surge in popularity. This is of course after being on the app store market for years and only having a little over 150K downloads. Let’s see if it’s here to stay. In the meantime, I made myself an account just to be sure. (The Verge)

All-in-One Messenger: I absolutely love this. Combines my Slack, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, TweetDeck & GroupMe all in one window. Convenient af! (CNET)