Friday Social: Instagram Ads, Google #Hashtag Search and The Faces of Facebook

1. Instagram intends to start selling adverts within the next year. Enjoying more than 150 million monthly users, Instagram’s management are now aiming to make revenue in the long-term. According to Instagram’s director of business operations, Emily White, the main challenge will be to find a way of introducing adverts without damaging its “cool factor” and compromising the app’s distinct, clean layout. If the rumours are to be believed, Instagram is considering this promotional content around its Discover feature and search function. Speaking at an interview with the Wall Street Journal, White said that some retailers have expressed interest in pictures of their products becoming clickable to their own websites, mirroring the powerful traffic-driving features of Pinterest.

2. Typo ruin your social media masterpiece? We’ve all been there. That’s why it’s welcome news yesterday that Facebook will now allow you to edit your posts on the web and on Android, with iOS soon to follow. Simply click the ‘edit post’ option, fix your mistake and click ‘finished editing’, without having to go through the sometimes near heart-breaking process of deleting your post, losing all your likes, comments and shares and reposting.

Currently this is only available on personal profiles and has not yet been rolled out to business pages. Unfortunately for the time being, community managers will have to continue weeping over that misplaced apostrophe…

3. Finally it has happened. I have received my first price alert from Pinterest, and now I am powerless in the face of such helpful persuasiveness.  A new service iterating on its previously released “pin price” feature, Pinterest now actually monitors those pin prices for changes and will alert pinners via email. In order to not overload users’ email inboxes, Pinterest has explained that it will always aim to combine these notifications into as few emails as possible. Users can control these alerts within their settings.

4. From this week, you can now see more meaningful and integrated results for #hashtag searches in Google. This new feature to its engine now fetches and displays Google+ posts on result pages, meaning anyone searching for a specific hashtag will be presented with a list of relevant public Google+ posts to the right of regular search results.
Links also to hashtag results from rivals Facebook and Twitter will also appear in a separate area at the bottom of the search results page.engine now fetches and displays Google+ posts on result pages, meaning anyone searching for a specific hashtag will be presented with a list of relevant public Google+ posts to the right of regular search results.

5. Got approximately 36 years to spare? That’s how long it would take you to scroll through all 1,258,244,934 (and counting) Facebook users from around the world, combined into one page as “The Faces of Facebook”. Created by freelance technologist Natalia Rojas, the project organises every profile picture into chronological registration order (starting with Mark Zuckerberg, naturally), which when combined, appears as a pixelated mosaic showcasing a diverse community of users.

Interestingly, you can also see where you fit into the picture and find out where you rank depending on when you signed-up to the site. Click here to see which number you are.

In other big news this week, The Drum released their 30 under 30 list of the best of the next generation of digital leaders, featuring none other than Umpf’s own Account Manager Amy Byard! Give her some well-deserved congratulations and/or give her a follow over on Twitter @amyinleeds. Read the full list here.

Have any comments on this week’s blog? Let us know your thoughts and feedback on Twitter @Umpf/@EllieHallsworth