Weekly Notes: Say Hello To The New Emojis!

Facepalm, avocados, crossed fingers, shaka and more – it’s time for new emojis! Just in three weeks, a set of new emojis will be added to our messengers (both on Android and iOS).

1

New emojis from June 21st

For those of you who use emojis, but have little knowledge about who really owns them and how are they created, this short article will answer some of your questions. All 72 new emojis will be made available with the release of Unicode 9. It is a standard adopted by Unicode – an organization which is in charge of making sure a consistent and correct encoding of text is adopted in the computing industry. The release is scheduled for the 21st of June.

There will be more breakfast choices added (e.g. croissants), animals and sports. Jeremy Burge, the founder of Emojipedia, said searches of his online resource had been “overwhelmingly” for the shrug and the fingers crossed. Both of them will be added to the new emojis release. 

New 72 emojis will be added to the existing 1,601 emojis that are already available in our messenger apps. Apple, Google and Microsoft have already planned the official rollout for the 21st, which means you will be able to use new emojis in Whatsapp, Apple messenger, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and many more. See a post from Facebook.

2

Snapchat overtakes Twitter in # of daily users

Although it’s not officially confirmed, Snapchat Inc. has now 150 million people using the service each day (rising from 110 million daily users in December). That makes the four-year-old messaging app more popular than Twitter Inc. by daily active users. Twitter, which was founded in 2006, has less than 140 million users interacting with the service daily, according to an average of analysts’ estimates surveyed by Bloomberg.

You might have also heard about recent changes to Snapchat Discover section of the app. As many of the daily active users omit the entire Discover page, the changes might take place even next week (June 7th) to ensure the higher usability of this content.

Instead of the current media logo icons, the design will change to bringing on magazine-like cover images to entice readers to the content.

More on that topic soon!

3

Instagram boosted posts, business accounts and new algorithm go live

A lot is happening on Instagram this week. First of all, Instagram has announced an official rollout of business accounts in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. This means, the first accounts will have access to the analytics piece of the social network. Big minus for Instagram on that, as the rest of the world (European folks only) need to wait “until end of 2016”.

With so many companies using Instagram, and many people on the platform interacting with them, there was a desire from our business community to do more. So we listened.

– Instagram.

I mentioned few of the new features onhow a business accout would looklike here, however one of the most important one is the new contact button next to the follow button – this will allow businesses get more leads, also from Instagram.

With this announcement, comes the second one – Instagram will allow post boosts.

The ability to promote lets you turn well-performing posts into ads right within the app—helping you connect with even more customers. Simply pick a post you’ve already shared on Instagram and add a button encouraging people to take action. You can select a target audience or allow Instagram to suggest targeting for you.

– Instagram.

Post boosts will be probably just available for business pages instead of public accounts, just like on Facebook.

And now the third update – the new Instagram algorithm is going live. This means within the next few weeks every user will see posts sorted according to their interests and what they like and not as before – according to time the posts were shared.

If brands are not posting content that users engage with, their posts could be buried further down in users’ feeds as of now.

– Instagram.

4

Goodbye “Pin it” button

I wrote about new Facebook ad formats and placements here, however this time Facebook is really getting serious about broadening their Audience Network. This means, Facebook will work with other external big publishers to enable its own advertisers buy advertising space there.

As many of marketeers who are active on Facebook advertising notice, the CPM prices start to rise in many countries, as advertising on social media becomes very popular. This means the demand increases quicker than what the supply is (placement on Facebook is limited, especially on mobile). Therefore, Facebook has come up with a solution to extend the space to outside of Facebook.

This means, you will not have to be logged in or registered as a Facebook user to see an ad. There will be a “Why am I seeing this ad?” option available, so users can edit their display preferences. Facebook will be also able to measure all conversions happening outside of Facebook – whether clicks or conversions, it will be all trackable in the Facebook Ads Manager dashboard.