Instagram Goes All-In on Shoppable Posts: Just in time for holiday shopping, Instagram added three shopping features to help users complete a purchase in-app – including shoppable videos and a shop tab on business pages. These new features help position Instagram more directly against more shoppable-driven platforms like Pinterest and Wish.
Learn With Facebook: This week Facebook launched Learn With Facebook, a career development site that “focuses on both the hard and soft skills people need to advance in today’s digital workforce.” Facebook is also updating its Mentorship tool, which helps connect people in groups who are looking for a mentor in their community.
Snap Introduces Bitmoji Merch: This week Snap made a number of announcements, including “friendship profiles” to capture all the shared media you’ve exchanged with friends and groups in a single place, a Bitmoji cartoon that appears in your Discover feed, and selling Bitmoji merchandise. Bitmoji Merch will take avatars from you and your friends and put them on stuff like shirts, mugs, shower curtains, and phone cases. Finally!
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Instagram Insights! This week Facebook began rolling out analytics for Instagram accounts and expanded FB Page analytics. Instagram Insights will feature deeper levels of engagement metrics, including retention rates and lifetime value of users who interact with your Instagram content. Plus, the ability to create segments around engaged audiences and see the overlap among users who have downloaded a brand’s app, visited its website or engaged with its Facebook Page. Facebook says both of these betas will be rolling out over the next several months – you’ll get a notification in your dashboard along with an email when the new data becomes available.
Other stories worth skimming this week…
- Facebook quietly released a new app called Lasso for creating and watching short-form videos, similar to TikTok and Vine.
- Linked re-created its Company Pages experience from scratch, and it feels a lot like Facebook Pages.
- This new Facebook patent would use your family photos to target ads.
- This Reply-All podcast on the history of Gritty, FBI investigations and Hipster Coffee Shops from a random tweet is so deep and niche and funny we literally LOL’d three times.
- We’re testing out this new app called Endel that uses any inputs you give it (location, heart rate, etc) to create different algorithm-driven music depending on your mood, vitals, etc. It’s like Spotify’s Mood but run by your body! Get it here on iOS.
GREG SWAN 