10 Yetis Insight - Social Media Round-Up blog - Facebook partnership, Twitter trolls, Pinterest updates & Snapchat purchases Vurb

This week's blog is from Billy!

Welcome back to the 10 Yetis Digital Social Media Round Up, this week we look at the ever growing Facebook, the ever improving Twitter, the ever developing Pinterest, and the ever brilliant Snapchat.

Facebook and Unity sitting in a tree…

Throughout my teenage years, my mother would incessantly invite me to play games on Facebook. This, thankfully, has now stopped, partly due to me having a stern word, and partly due to the trend of playing games on Facebook slowing down.

Facebook have announced that they are working with game engine Unity to build a downloadable desktop gaming platform. The social networking giant are hoping this will allow them to compete with Valve’s Steam gaming marketplace.

After purchasing Oculus Rift, Facebook will need a marketplace for their Oculus Rift VR games, which will clearly happen at some point. It’s exciting to see where this is heading and there seems to be no reason why Facebook can’t break into the blockbuster gaming market.

Twitter Quality Control

Twitter are making strides to help rid the twitter-sphere of abusive users and tweets. The platform has been developing the quality filter for more than a year and have been inviting selected verified users to preview the tool.

The tool uses an AI-powered algorithm to seek out potentially abusive tweets and will filter out repeated tweets, in order to remove excess junk from your feed. This announcement comes just a week after the Police in the UK announced a £1.7m “Twitter Squad”, which will search out offensive comments.

Nearly all of us have experienced online bullying, as we get older many of us are able to shake off online trolls. However, as internet enabled devices are now an integral part of young people’s lives, anything that a platform can do to rid the world of abusive content is a good thing.

Pinterest Updates

Now, being able to message users on Pinterest isn’t a new thing, but previously you had to be following each other. This is now no longer the case, as users are able to send pins and board invitations to users they aren’t following.

In a move to help boost the number of users, the social platform has made it easier to share pins with non-users too, allowing you to share via WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.

In March, Pinterest announced that they had 110 million monthly users, and has since set the ambitious target to bring £2.3 billion in annual revenue by the end of 2018.

Whether they will hit that target or not, we don’t know, but their user base is growing, and they are implementing new ad methods. One of their new features is “picked for you”, and it’s exactly what it sounds like, Pinterest will suggest boards for you to follow. It’s only a mater of time before we will see sponsored brands featuring in this section.

Snapchat has bought Vurb

A 10 Yetis Digital Social Media Round Up isn’t complete without talking about Snapchat. This week they have been shopping, snapping up Vurb, the start-up mobile search app, for a mere $200 million.

Vurb app is all about integration, if you search for cinema times, it’ll show you directions from Google Maps, give you an Uber quote, show you what restaurants are around, and it can give you Yelp reviews, all inside the app. Adding all these capabilities could make Snapchat unstoppable.

However, there are rumours that half of the $200 million will be going towards retaining the staff. The team behind the app is really want Snapchat want!

And that’s that for this week.

@_Billy_Ward