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Friday Social: 400 Million on Instagram, Twitter Polls and #PigGate

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Our #FridaySocial is a weekly round-up of the key social media news stories from the previous seven days. Let us know your thoughts in the comments or via Twitter – @Umpf / @EllieHallsworth

1. Instagram’s 400 million

Instagram has reported to have reached 400 million users, via an official blog post. An amazing feat for the company, placing it firmly in the social media ‘big three’, alongside Facebook and YouTube. Interestingly, Twitter has been nudged out of this category, as it struggles to maintain its user growth.

Now valued at around $35 billion, Instagram is seen as the next big thing in social media marketing, with a huge potential audience to capitalise on. Facebook paid close to $1 billion for the platform back in 2012, which had close to 30 million users at the time.

Instagrammers are posting more than 80 million photos every day, with 75% of the app’s users outside the US. “Among the last 100 million to join, more than half live in Europe and Asia. The countries that added the most Instagrammers include Brazil, Japan and Indonesia.”

Instagram_400M_Users_11

2. #ShareaCoke Emoji

Coca-Cola has become the first brand to pay for a custom embedded Twitter emoji, that automatically appears within a tweet when a certain hashtag is used (previously called hashflags). Twitter’s brand strategy team worked together with Coca-Cola and creative agency W+K to design and create the new emoji – two Coke bottles being clinked together.

According to senior director of global brand strategy at Twitter, Ross Hoffman, the company will continue to test this ad unit before determining the future of custom emojis as a product.

Used as part of a campaign to set the record for the “World’s Largest Cheers”, the emoji helped bank up more than 170,500 mentions globally. Read more about the campaign on the Coca-Cola blog here.

3. Nescafé on Tumblr

Nescafé, the biggest of the Nestlé brands, is moving all of its global and local websites to Tumblr, in a hope to engage a younger generation of coffee drinkers. The move is also thought to be a boost to its SEO status and will make its content more mobile friendly.

The move will begin with the sites for the UK and Mexico in the upcoming weeks. Nescafé’s head of global integrated marketing, Michael Chrisment, said “We’re actually moving everything to Tumblr but consumer data. Tumblr is unique. It’s an agile, responsive, connected platform, the fastest-growing platform, and a fantastic way to connect with younger people.”

Tumblr’s brand strategist Armand Khatri explained that an advantage of the platform is that brands own their own code, domain and followers. It does not have an algorithm that decides what brand content followers view.

4. Twitter Polls

A new experimental feature has hit some Twitter feeds this week on both mobile and desktop, allowing users to poll their followers without the need for a third party app.

Normally the poll feature is delivered through Cards using HTML to embed rich content within a tweet, leaving behind a URL showing the source of the Card.

A first look at the new feature shows that the poll is native, due to the lack of URL:

poll

Twitter has confirmed the experimentation, but declined to give further details. At the moment, it’s unclear if this will be rolled out widely or will be restricted to verified accounts.

5. Brands on #PigGate

This week, social media was buzzing with sensational claims regarding what Prime Minister David Cameron got up to at university. The #PigGate hashtag dominated Twitter for most of Monday after allegations Cameron participated in an obscene act with a dead pig. Here’s a quick round-up of how brands reacted to the conversation…