Umpf / Blog / Friday Social: Twitter tries some new features, Facebook brings in more music options and have you ever wondered when the best time to post on social media might be?

Friday Social: Twitter tries some new features, Facebook brings in more music options and have you ever wondered when the best time to post on social media might be?

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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

Twitter 2.0

What’s the best way to please your audience? Ask them exactly what it is that they want, of course! This week Twitter has been asking its users to suggest new features that they think would make the platform better as well as testing out a couple of its own ideas.

The News Camera lets you add location details and colour overlays onto photos, videos or live streams,  and the pop-up mini profile comes into use when clicking on something e.g a person’s profile, that would take you away from the page you’re currently on. This way you don’t have to lose your place in that thread or your news feed.

Play that funky music, Facebook

We’ve already seen the addition of music into Instagram Stories, where you can add a song as part of an update to portray a certain mood or feeling – but now we’re beginning to see the roll out of more music inclusive functions on Facebook, too.

The platform has chosen to do this by launching music on Facebook Stories, expanding Lip Sync Live and making it possible to add songs to your profile to give an insight into your music taste.

Great effort from Facebook having another go at making its Stories relevant, but not everyone is pleased about it…

The best time to post on social media

Sprout Social has created a guide to the best times to post on social media across the most popular platforms, based on 2018 industry research. So, if you’d like to know the optimum times to receive more likes on that selfie on Instagram, or more responses to your poll on Twitter then take a look below at the stand out findings.

It turns out the best times to post on Facebook are Wednesday at noon and 2pm, as well as Thursday at 1pm and 2pm. Surprisingly, engagement levels tend to drop around the weekends when more users are offline.

Instagram is pretty much an open goal. Recommendations are to post Tuesday through to Friday, 9am to 6pm, but weekends are good too.

When it comes to tweeting, this is a lot more audience dependent, but the consensus is that weekdays have a stronger performance rate than the weekend, with 3pm or the 5-6pm slot popular times for retweets and clickthroughs.

 

Phones Are Good this Valentine’s Day

I’m sure we’ve all caught a glimpse of Three’s recent Phones Are Good campaign. It’s been tailored for Valentine’s Day this week, and ads are dedicated to those who they say we love the most – our phones.

A touch of humour is added as the campaign that shows how mobiles, smartphones, iPads etc have taken over almost every aspect of our modern day lives, even our relationships.

Take a look at the range of ads here.

V Day stunts

And now, just because it’s Valentine’s week, we’ll share some light-hearted brand activity that we’ve spotted this week while we just pop out to KFC…

Twitter stuck with the ‘if it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ approach and gave the people what they wanted: a love heart animation when we like V-day related tweets.

 

KFC unveiled its ‘Bouquet de Poulet’ to please our loved ones. It combines red roses with Hot Wings, Popcorn Chicken and Tender Fillets presented in a KFC bucket. However, this is not something that you could go out and buy, the creation was designed with the idea of people replicating it for themselves and just released a picture of the finished piece to public.

And finally, Frankie & Benny’s pulled on all of the heart strings when they recreated scenes from romantic movies and posted them on Instagram, our favourite being Lady & the Tramp.