16% of Social Media Users in the World Based Out of Europe

A new survey conducted by social media agency We Are Social pegs Europe’s share of social media usage at 16 percent globally. The survey also reveals that 19 per cent of all internet users are based out of the continent. Almost 540 million people in Europe go online while 300m have an active social media presence. More than half of Europe’s social media users access social networks on their mobile devices.

Facebook’s News Feed Tweak Aimed at Delivering Quality News

Back in August, Facebook implemented an algorithm update aimed at encouraging managers to provide better-targeted updates and less low-value material. The social media giant seems to have made it a priority to limit low-quality posts from news feeds. This week, it announced an update to its news feed ranking, which will put more emphasis on shared news posts as opposed to memes and the like, which are popularly shared on the site.

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.

Pinterest and LinkedIn Hot on the Heels of Facebook and Twitter in Content Sharing

That 75% of all online content is shared on Twitter and Facebook may not come as a big surprise to anyone. But here’s the big news: two well-known players are making rapid inroads into the content-sharing space. LinkedIn and Pinterest have reported robust sharing numbers; the world’s largest professional sharing network saw its content sharing rise by over 19% while the photo-sharing website posted a 15% growth in sharing. Facebook moved at a relatively slow pace, recording a growth of just under 15% while Twitter declined 8%.

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.

Facebook is Now Testing New Link Formats and Icons in News Feeds

Facebook appears to be adding new changes to the news feed and timeline frequently to be able to give users the best possible user experience. It is obvious that visual content is more interesting and eye-catching than plain textual content and the social networking giant is making a push towards improving the prominence of pictures in news feeds and timelines of users. Facebook is testing two link formats – both of which are geared towards increasing the prominence of the images associated with links.

Music App from Twitter Not too Far Away

After acquiring the music service We Are Hunted, Twitter is looking to launch its own standalone music app for its users. So far, users have been able to open the page music.twitter.com and have been able to see the Twitter logo, a #music hashtag, a sign in button and a message that says that the app will be released soon. On clicking the sign in button, users are taken to an authorization page but signing in to this app still hasn’t been enabled as users are met with a server error when they try to sign in.

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.

Hashtag Feature Now in Flickr

Along with Instagram, Flickr is one of the most popular image sharing platforms with millions of active users. In an effort to stave off stiff competition from Instagram and Pinterest, Flickr has released a new update for its iOS app that adds hashtag support to the mobile version of Flickr. The hashtag feature will make it easier to categorize images and pick out popular trends. This new feature could improve the user experience of Flickr and could expand the user base of this photo sharing platform.