ASOS photo search, Facebook ads, Facebook Watch, Instagram live - Weekly Social Media News

ASOS adds photos to search bar

It’s about time really isn’t it! ASOS have now introduced the ability to search for clothes in their search bar by dragging images in to it.

The new update to the app allows iOS users to take photos of clothes and accessories on their phone or take an existing outfit from Instagram save it to their phone, and paste it in the search bar. It will then find similar fashion items that match the style of the ones in the image.

As with most app updates, android users will have this feature soon.

ASOS has stated that 80 per cent of their UK traffic comes from mobile devices and up to 70 per cent of their UK orders comes from them as well. So, it only makes sense to improve the app for mobile users.

Obviously, the new feature isn’t going to be able to find a perfect match for every piece of clothing as ASOS only has 85,000 searchable products, but picking up on similar styles and matching patterns is a pretty good start. What Asos is attempting to do is improve the search and discovery line for their clothes as the text searches are tedious when you don’t know the exact name of the item you’re looking for.

There’s one thing that I’m sure of and that is that this new feature will definitely work to both improve the experience that users get while using the site on mobile and to boost sales on hard to find items for the company.

Facebook removes unintentional clicks and impressions

Continuing the theme of updates to Facebook and its ads, it has upped its game to help advertisers further. Facebook has had some issues with charging for unintentional ad clicks and impressions, so they have brought out two new updates to provide more accurate results.

Firstly, unintentional clicks on ads in Audience Network will no longer be considered, or (more importantly) charged. Starting immediately, Facebook will measure the time spent on a landing page following the ad click, allowing it to establish whether the click was intentional or accidental. The current threshold is fixed at two seconds and if the user spends less time on the page than that then the click isn’t reported.

Secondly Facebook is adding two new metrics for advertisers to measure the results of their campaigns.

Gross impressions include both non-billable and billable impressions. Impressions are considered non-billable when they occur after the budget is spent, sent to the same person in a short period of time, or identified as fraudulent and auto-refresh impressions which provide impressions generated from right-hand side placements. Right hand column ads aren’t static on Facebook and regularly change and refresh. Auto-refresh impressions will tell you how many of your ad impressions are a result of a browser refresh.

With this it’s clear that Facebook is attempting to regain trust with advertisers, which is great, especially considering advertisers can’t afford to not promote ads on their platform.

Facebook launches its own TV watching platform

First, they copied Snapchat, now they’re taking on Netflix. Facebook has launched a new platform for users to watch their favourite shows on mobile, desktop, or TV.

It’s no revelation that video creates conversation, communities and brings in new audiences, and that’s why Facebook already does so well. Now they are taking a step up and offering ‘Watch’ where users can watch their favourite episodes and shows via the platform. If you are worried about missing an episode Watch has a Watchlist so you will never miss out. It’s also personalised and offers shows like ones that users already watch, very similar to Netflix if you ask me.

Along with this it looks like Facebook might be taking on YouTube with Watch too. Facebook has said that Watch is a place for creators and publishers too, allowing them to find and build audiences and communities and even monetise their work.

Instagram doubles up its stories

Instagram has introduced a go live with a friend feature. Coming to a device near you, users will now be able to go live on Instagram and a friend can join you on their own account. The best part about this is, if you get bored of them you can just get rid of them and invite another friend in. Along with this, a further update will allow users to save their live videos to their phones and share them on their Instagram stories.

It’s easy, all you have to do is tap the new icon that will appear in the bottom right, click add and then invite anyone who is watching your video.

Bonus!

Here’s a little bonus bit of info for you guys this week. Instagram on desktop is nowhere near as good as it is on mobile, I mean you can’t even post on desktop! But, a new update has allowed users to post on their desktops too!

And this is how you do it:

Use Google Chrome to visit your Instagram page, click the three-dot menu in the top right, go to more tools and click developer tools. Then just click on the device changer button on the left-hand side and your Instagram will change to the same format as the mobile version.

The only problem is that users still won’t be able to add filters and as this isn’t an intentional feature, it’s possible that it may be removed at any time.