Social Media in April 2016

Full of developments, April has been a fairly quiet but significant month for social media. In the background huge changes are taking place which will alter how we all use our favourite platforms. How has your month on social media been?

Over half the major developments are video related which shows a trend we predicted earlier in the year. Read our other blog: Need To Know Social Media Predictions for 2016.

LinkedIn Student App

Helping recent graduates get jobs is the new ambition of LinkedIn in the US. The launch of a new app called "LinkedIn Students" assists those who have recently graduated to find useful information quickly.

In brief, LinkedIn Student will deliver the following:

- Available job roles relevant to their course

- Data about the companies that hire from their school graduates

- Access to the profiles of those who graduated from the same course

- Published articles relevant to their career development

This will be a handy tool for those just graduating from schools in the US as well as a savvy step by LinkedIn to win new users as they enter the professional world. LinkedIn has its roots in HR and the hiring of new staff and this app looks only to strengthen the core offering of LinkedIn. 

More live videos on Facebook

This month has seen Facebook substantially up its live video offering. Not only have they developed the live video experience but they have added loads of extra new features. Now you can live stream from your personal profile, page, groups and events! These developments are hugely exciting.

Imagine having a private group with an audience you have selected. They could be family members, key customers or even staff in your business. Now you can live broadcast to them and only them via a private group.

As the live broadcast happens, you can react in real time and comment. When the broadcast is over you will be able to play back the video with comments and reactions recorded onto the broadcast as they happened. It is essentially a lot like Periscope. In fact, there is even now a live broadcast map so you can find any public broadcast... just like Periscope. Take a look for yourself here: www.facebook.com/livemap

Share tweets in messages

Now you can move your conversation into private messages with one click. Find the new private message button on the tab below tweets on your timeline. Simply click on any tweet to see these extra options.

This is a great update for customer service teams and also when collaborating on work. Want to know what someone said? Simply embed it into the actual private chat.

360 live steaming on YouTube

YouTube are calling this development "one step closer to reality," and we would have to agree. We think 360-degree videos puts the power back in the user's hands. They choose what to look at within the video rather like you choose what to look at in regular life.

This development is exceptional. Live 360-degree video is a fantastic idea. YouTube hint at the software development that is taking place in the background to make this technology work and we think it will certainly be worth it. It seems YouTube are very excited too with this quote;

"Students can now experience news events in the classroom as they unfold. Travelers can experience faraway sites and explorers can deep-sea dive, all without the physical constraints of the real world."

Longer videos on Instagram

Instagram announced that video watching on their app had increased more than 40% in the last six months. It is a no brainer that they are planning to increase maximum length of videos on Instagram to 60 seconds.

With this development also comes the iOS ability to make videos from multiple clips from the camera roll. This is a feature they removed some time back. The time scale for the roll-out of longer videos is a few months so hopefully it will be available to all very soon. Are you excited for this development?

New Pinterest app on iPhone and iPad

Pinterest boasts 100 million users and has an extremely loyal fan base. It is a favorite for those collating ideas and making mood boards. To keep these fans happy, they are now rolling out some essential improvements to its core mobile platform.

The new and improved app consists of a new look and 31 languages making it usable in more countries. The major development, however, is the improved speed. Apparently the app will be 3 times faster!

The only drawback? It is only available on iOS and it seems they are yet to even begin work on updating the Android app. Are you looking forward to these updates?

Which of the above developments are you looking forward to the most? We think the live 360 videos will be massive.

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