Important June Social Media Updates
Social media, as always, is moving at a rapid pace. Updates left right and centre and new features come out before you have enough time to master the last feature. Working in Social Media is fast-paced and I learn new things every single day! Here are my latest findings and explanations of the most recent updates.
Instagram Updates:
Instagram Favourites Groups
Instagram has introduced yet another new feature to control who sees your posts. You can now share photos with a certain group of followers via the ‘Favourites’ section.
I noticed on my private account with 325 followers, I’ve been receiving small pop-ups encouraging me to make a new account to share with a smaller group of people. I thought this was super strange, normally the app is about expanding your account and over-sharing with everyone who follows you.
I feel like this is aimed to encourage more posting and activity within the app. This would be inviting users to share more because your boss won’t see, you don’t have to show that person who you guiltily had to accept, and if you’re a public profile - you can share just to your friends without making a whole new account.
Other users will know when they’re in your favourites list, and they’ll know when you remove them.
Apparently, only a small amount of users have access to this so far and it’ll roll out to all accounts within the next few months.
Replay Live Videos
The other Instagram update includes replaying your live videos! Now we can re-watch ourselves awkwardly and embarrassingly fumbling and trying to work out how to do a live post. At the end of your own live Instagram broadcast you can now add it to your story so more people can engage with it after the live posting time. Sounds like a good idea to reach more people and spread a message further!
You can only do this within 24 hours of the stream ending and will be posted among all the normal InstaStories at the top of the feed. If a replay is shared, the Story will show a ‘Play’ button. By selecting this, you can see the likes and comments from the actual live story. This also features the messaging option and a rewind of 15 seconds!
I honestly haven’t tried the Live feature just yet, it’s been around for about 9 months and I’m still too scared. I might leave this feature to the pros!
Snapchat Updates:
Snapchat Map
Snapchat updates have had me freaking out over the last few days. The newest Map feature seems stalky, unsafe and just plain unnecessary to me. The app now shares your location on a map with your Snapchat contacts list and displays you as a bitmoji character. If you haven’t made one in the bitmoji app, you'll show as an outline of a person on the map.
Be aware that this is not a Geofilter! I could see my contacts exact locations, right down to the block they were living at.
The Map is activated by pinching two fingers together on the screen while in “Selfie Mode”.
Luckily you can select to be in ‘Ghost Mode’ and hide your location from everyone while you can view everything else that’s public on the map. You can also allow your location to be only seen by friends or by everyone. Although I’m still unsure of how secure or safe these options are. Snapchat vaguely explains it here.
I think the idea of it is to collect localised Snapchat Stories and allow people to view Stories from all over the world on the map. I looked at the feature on the weekend and I could see snaps from a football game in Melbourne and a friends Snapchats from Hong Kong.
This seems quite cool, but for users like myself with hundreds or thousands of Snapchat contacts as a blogger or someone in the public eye - it’s not the safest of updates. I try and keep my personal life and my location as private as possible, there are so many Youtubers who have had their lives invaded by followers - it scares me! Even for people using the app normally, not everyone is super strict on who they have in their contacts list. You can never be sure who’s watching you on that map.
My best advice for this would be to go through your contacts list and remove everyone you’re not comfortable with knowing where you live! When you’re accessing the map mode, select ‘Ghost Mode’ in the initial set up or select only your closest friends to view you. If you want to activate Ghost Mode, select the gear settings in the top right corner of the Map to activate it.
Snapchat will show your location each time you open the app. This it so creepy to me as I travel around Perth a lot on my own, I leave work late at night and I leave the house pretty early in the morning! Someone could monitor me and access the house because they can see I’m not there. There are so many scenarios playing in my head. This feels like a terrible update.
The only bonus I can see with this is to track your own kid's location if they’re out and you’re worried, to make sure your friend, family member or partner get home or to work safe, or to make sure someone is safe overseas. This is only a bonus if no one else can access the info and it’s localised to your device only. Imagine if someone else was watching your child walk home from the bus stop? The Bitmoji figure moves almost with every single step.
Snapchat will broadcast locations exact to the street and location on the street every single time you open the app. If you don’t open the app within 8 hours, you apparently disappear from the map. It’s a little unclear on whether only your friends can see your additions to the Snap Map Stories, or whether this is accessible globally. How safe is this update? Is it hackable? How tried and tested in this tech?
After reading an article by The Verge, Snapchat has said that they “Will delete precise location data after a short period of time. Some more general location data may be retained a little longer”. Neither periods of time were specified.
I think I’ll be keeping my location services off for a little while.
More info from Snapchat: https://support.snapchat.com/en-US/a/location-snap-map
New Emojis:
There’s going to be 56 new Emojis hopefully launched by the end of the year! New people, fairy, chopsticks, a pretzel and dinosaurs. The details around the new emojis are sketchy, no release date as yet.
You can track the emoji updates here! https://emojipedia.org/new/
