When Curalate, a visual analytics platform, set out to quantify the impact that different image qualities have on Instagram, it discovered that photos with blue as the main color got the most likes. Reds and oranges on the other hand tended to receive 24 percent less likes than blue-tinted shots. (Infographic)
Not just a trendy word anymore, social media marketing is fast becoming and in some cases already is a viable acquisition channel for most businesses. In fact, Hubspot reports that 70% of business-to-consumer marketers have acquired a customer through Facebook.
Something transpires in social media every minute. Whether that is a new like, a new connection, a tweet, or social networks gaining unique visitors, we are spending a lot of our minutes socializing in various forms on an array of social sites. 2012 showed us that we prefer to share images and our location, and that Facebook and Twitter both still remain leaders in the social media world.
At the end of 2012, Instagram changed its Terms of Service (ToS) and it has proved far more calamitous for the Facebook-owned Photo app than first imagined. According to new data, Instagram appears to have lost half of its active users in a month.
350 million plus users suffer from “Facebook addiction syndrome”
The social media landscape has been evolving at a rapid pace over the last few years. It has also become more fun with the addition of Instagram and Pinterest. (Infographic)
Of the world’s biggest 100 brands, 54 percent are now connecting with fans and customers on Instagram, and brand adoption on Instagram is growing faster than Google+ and Pinterest.
Well intended parents have been keeping their tweens off of Facebook but they have turned to Instagram, the photo sharing app, as a seemingly innocuous social-network workaround.
Most criticism toward Instagram borders on hatred.
Instagram is a simple service that lets people share their photos with others from a mobile device. They get a lot of criticism, bordering on hate. And it’s not just because the tiny startup is being acquired by Facebook recently for $1 billion, which will make all of its employees exceedingly rich — it’s because some people seem to believe that the ease with which amateur photographers can post photos to the service, and the filters Instagram provides in order to add special effects to them, are ruining photography. This isn’t really that surprising: it’s the same kind of criticism that has been made about blogging, citizen journalism and Twitter, among other things — and in each case the critics have been somewhat right, but mostly wrong.
Social networks have grown beyond what Facebook offers.
With the pending public offering of Facebook anticipated to be the largest tech IPO in history, it’s an interesting time to think about where we go from here. Some say “social is done,” Facebook is all the social media anyone would ever want or need. Unquestionably, as it nears one billion accounts, in the solar system of social media, Facebook is the Sun — the gravitational center around which everything social revolves.
But while some may pronounce that Facebook is all the social we’d ever need, users clearly haven’t gotten the memo. Instead, users are rapidly adopting new interest-based social networks such as Pinterest, Instagram, Thumb, Foodspotting, and even the very new Fitocracy…
Apple released its iTunes Rewind 2011 and App Store Rewind 2011 today, the company’s annual lists detailing of the top selling apps, music, TV shows, movies and podcasts for the year. This year, the biggest winner on the apps front was Angry Birds, which ran away with the number one spot on the iPhone and iPad -in all categories except top free iPhone app, which was awarded to Facebook.
Apple also selects its own favorite applications, and one of our preferred apps, Instagram, won the honor of being Apple’s “iPhone App of the Year.”
You’re at an outing or a dinner table with friends but itching to check your email or Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Google+ or whatever digital hit of serotonin you prefer. Have you ever ‘gone to the bathroom’ in order to check email or come up with a socially appropriate excuse to pull out your smartphone just so you can check your @ replies on Twitter?
Somewhere between yesterday afternoon and last night, Instagram hit 3 million users after only six months of existence. To put that into perspective, that’s like 1% of the population of the US using a service that currently only fully exists on a iPhone…