Instagram Stories reaches 250m daily users

Instagram Stories celebrated its first birthday at the beginning of the month, taking the opportunity to announce that 250m people are now using Stories every day.

As well as surpassing Snapchat’s 166m daily users, Instagram Stories has also contributed to an overall rise in users on the platform, with people naturally taking to sharing disappearing content.

Users under the age of 25 are now said to spend more than 32 minutes a day on Instagram, while users aged 25 and older spend more than 24 minutes a day.

Obama’s response to Charlottesville becomes most-liked tweet in history

In the wake of the tragic violence in Charlottesville Virginia, Barack Obama responded with a tweet that has gone on to become the most-liked in history. Quoting Nelson Mandela alongside a photo of himself greeting children, the tweet generated over 2m likes in just a few days.

Currently, it stands at 4,571,083, surpassing Ariana Grande’s tweet in response to the Manchester bombings.

Ikea’s ASMR video

Ikea is the latest brand to jump on board the weirdly enjoyable phenomenon that is ASMR. As part of its ‘Oddly Ikea’ campaign, it created a 25-minute video promoting its new range of ‘back to school’ items for college and university accommodation.

The video involves a woman narrator gently caressing pillows and delicately grazing her nails over a lamp, all the while explaining the products’ various features.

If you’re a fan of ASMR, you’re bound to enjoy it – just don’t blame us if you start purchasing Ikea bedding in your sleep.

National Lottery’s #Represent campaign backfires

The UK National Lottery obviously didn’t learn anything from Walker’s spectacular Twitter fail earlier this year. Its recent social media campaign, #Represent, suffered exactly the same fate thanks to an almost identical spate of pranks.

The idea was that people would leave messages of support for the British Athletics team, which would then be incorporated into images featuring the athletes. Instead, users recognised that the tweets would be automatically generated, and took the opportunity to leave a series of offensive messages and slogans – just like they did with Gary Lineker.

Seriously, do people have nothing better to do?

CNN starts daily streaming on Snapchat

CNN premiered The Update on Snapchat Discover in August – a new daily news show featuring breaking stories and reports from around the world.

The decision comes hot on the heels of NBC’s Stay Tuned program, as well as publishers like Buzzfeed, the New York Times, and Vice, who also post breaking news content on the platform.

CNN is hoping that the show will resonate with millennials looking for bite-sized and reliable news content on mobile.

Facebook adds logos to links to fight fake news

Facebook has taken another step towards fighting fake news, announcing that it is to add brand logos next to article links in Trending and Search. The decision is a result of research that found a large percentage of users are unable to determine the original source of news, as well as whether or not it is reputable.

Only approved publisher Pages will be able to upload their own logos, which means that unreliable or deliberately fake news publishers will be kept at bay.

Trivago ads spook Londoners

Despite a number of fun and creative ads around in August, there’s only one that’s been standing out to Londoners – and not for the right reasons.

Trivago has taken to plastering its posters all over the city’s tube stations, so much so that the Trivago lady (you know her, she wants to find your ideal hotel for the best price) has been haunting people’s dreams.

According to reports, she’s also been filming a number of Trivago TV adverts in recent months, which means we’re far from rid of her yet.

Always #LikeAGirl campaign tells us to keep going

Procter & Gamble resurrected its ‘Like a Girl’ campaign in August, this time basing it around a startling new statistic – that 50% of girls feel paralysed by fear of failure during puberty, while 75% of girls agree that social media contributes to this fear.

Always’ new campaign ‘Keep Going’ sends the message that failure is okay, because it helps people to learn and to grow.

Alongside an 80-second video, the campaign has also involved work with UK influencers talking about their own experiences of failure, including Hannah Witton and Alesha Dixon.

Match.com creates male model pop-up

Match.com launched its very own ‘Model Male’ pop-up shop in August, allowing women to browse a selection of its male members in 3D model form.

Apparently the initiative was meant to encourage women to make the first move, and to counteract negative dating traits including ‘ghosting’ and ‘breadcrumbing’. In other words, to represent Match.com’s commitment to forging long-lasting relationships.

(In case you’re wondering, breadcrumbing doesn’t refer to when a partner eats biscuits in bed, but when a person deliberately leads someone on).

YouTube introduces ‘Breaking News’ feed

August also saw YouTube introduce a ‘breaking news’ carousel to its homepage and mobile app, suggesting that the platform wants to offer users a different way of browsing.

It also indicates that the platform wants to edge into Twitter’s territory, following on from the latter positioning itself as a place to come for breaking news.

YouTube has not yet indicated whether or not its news section will be curated or determined by its algorithm, however, it’s bound to be an interesting development for 24-hour news broadcasters who already publish content on the site.

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