Snapchat Says ‘No’ to Facebook

Two-year old photo-messaging application Snapchat has rebuffed a buyout offer worth $3 billion from social media giant Facebook. Early this year, Facebook is said to have made an offer of $1 billion to acquire the company. That is twice the amount it paid for Instagram.

Hashtag Comes to Facebook!

One of the most popular features on Twitter – the hashtag, is now on Facebook. Although Facebook and Twitter are bitter rivals, it hasn’t stopped Facebook from capitalizing on the popularity of the hashtag. Facebook is not the only website to adopt the hashtag. A few months back, popular image sharing website – Pinterest, made the hashtag official on its website. Now Pinterest users can use hashtags to categorize and optimize their pins or images better on the website. Hashtags also allow people to find images much more efficiently on Pinterest.

Create Effective International Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Most social media marketers and companies stick to Facebook and Twitter for all their social media and content marketing campaigns. In this global economy where valuable customers and leads need to be found from all countries to expand companies, these social media channels are not enough. With over a billion active users and because it is the top social networking platform in many countries, Facebook is the safe choice but there are many other social networks that you have probably never heard of that are more popular than Facebook in quite a few countries.

Instagram Faces the Music!

This comes as no surprise that Instagram has angered many of its users with the new Terms of Service. One Instagram user has decided to take legal action against the photo-sharing platform over its new terms of service. Lucy Funes has filed a class action lawsuit in the San Francisco federal court, against the photo-sharing service, last week. This California resident has accused the website, among other things, of breach of contract and claims that she is acting on behalf of other Instagram users and herself.

Will Instagram’s New Policies Spell its Death?

Just when Instagram started becoming an essential tool for online and social media marketers, the enforcement of new policies could see it vanish into obscurity. As many social media experts are calling it, the new policies that come into effect from 16th January, 2013, could be Instagram’s “suicide note”. These terms and policies indicate that the business model of Instagram is changing. It is now making users the product instead of the service.

Instagram Shuts Down Twitter Integration!

Facebook has been trying to capture the image-sharing market in the social networking world and as a result, recently bought Instagram. As a clear indication of the social network war going on between Facebook, Instagram and Twitter; Instagram has stopped allowing its pictures to be displayed in Twitter timelines. Kevin Systrom – co-founder of Instagram, announced in the first week of December that his company will be dropping support for Twitter cards completely in some time. This change means that Instagram photos will not be displayed in Tweets or photo galleries of users.

Use Instagram to Boost your Social Media Marketing Strategy – Part 1

Instagram is the new player in the social networking world. The user base of this simple photo sharing application has exploded in recent times and has gained a lot of attention from social media marketers. It was originally created to allow Apple device users to add filters to images and to share them with other Instagram users. People immediately latched on to this product as it allowed them to transform photos to look like old acetate film based photos and Polaroids. It is now available on Android devices and currently boasts over 80 million registered users. If you could reach out to such a large market base, imagine the effect it would have on your business.