Ello
Ello is a new social media tool created by a collective of artists and designers with the added bonus of it being ad-free. Most social media tools gain revenue from advertising and are run by advertisers, however, Ello is aimed at protecting its users which is why it is ad free and it doesn’t sell any user data to third parties. Ello collect details about how users interact with the social media tool but claim to only use this information to enhance the user experience moving forward.
Ello has a slick interface, which has been compared to the likes of Tumblr and it has a growing network of over 160,000 users. The platform is currently only accessible by invite only, either by users already on the network or alternatively you can request an invitation from the Ello homepage.
This year Instagram saw a huge increase in the number of users and has now reached over 300 million users. Brands now have Instagram to the forefront of their social media strategies as visual content becomes more influential than ever. Depending on how creative you are with your content strategy Instagram offers the platform to sell a lifestyle to users. We’ve seen this with various brands such as Mercedes Benz and Nike. Selling lifestyle choices via products will become mainstream in 2015 and Instagram is just one of the platforms to deliver this new style of product selling especially as Instagram ads become more mainstream.
Twitter – Castaround
You can now search for Tweets by location with a new app called Castround(currently only available on Android, sorry iOS users!) – it allows you to search for tweets through a map interface which will pull your location and show matching and trending tweets in your area – definitely worth checking out if you are at an event and want to pick up on tweets which haven’t been hashtagged!
YouTube releases ‘Music Key’
As mentioned in our ‘Tech News for November’ post, Music key is set to be the new competitor for Spotify, it is the newest service to allow you to listen to music on all your devices. Similar to Spotify, as a ‘premium service’ it has ad-free music, offline play options and to pip the post – a six month free trial to users in the UK. Once the trial has been used, it will then be £9.99 per month and with this users will receive access to Google’s play Music library.
Twitter integrates with video
Sick of uploading your videos to YouTube in order to tweet them? We are too! Well fret no more – Twitter is set to integrate better with video – Halleluiah! With the explosion of video content in 2014 this feature is set to come into effect in 2015 and we can’t wait!