Category: Social Media

Is growing your business on Instagram worth the effort?


Did you know we have an online conference about digital marketing coming up? Re:Brand will share strategies on how brands can still succeed in these unprecedented times. Many people think that growing their Instagram account is an important and necessary part of life on social media, but very few of us have stopped to ask ourselves, “Is my Instagram account actually worth growing?” At its core, growing an Instagram does one thing: it increases the number of people who visit your Instagram account or, in other words, it generates additional traffic to your Instagram account. Additional traffic can be potentially…

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Automating your social media posts could hurt your startup’s online presence


It’s the 21st century and automation sits on the brim of just about everything in business — customer service, development, and of course, marketing. But is more automation always a good thing?  Social media automation helps social media managers be more efficient in their job. You can bulk-schedule your content. You can cross-post quickly and easily. With a bit of code, you can probably do a whole lot more. But while you can do all this, it is important to avoid overreliance on automation tools. If you want to grow on social media, your strategy cannot simply consist of creating…

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Instagram now makes it easy to delete troll comments in bulk


Instagram today revealed a series of changes that makes it easier to moderate content on your account. Including, at long last, the ability to delete comments in bulk. While the company has been experimenting with the option for some time, today it’s rolling out to users in general. In order to use the bulk-delete comments on iOS, tap on a comment, and then the dotted icon on the top right. Tap ‘manage comments‘ and pick up to 25 comments to delete at once, or tap ‘more options’ to block or restrict accounts. On Android, you can simply tap and hold to…

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How the soap and crown emoji subtly communicate fears and advice about coronavirus


In digital communication, where visual information often conveys key ideas in memorable, pithy and fun ways, emoji is king. And as our world has changed due to COVID-19, new ways of deploying emoji have sprung up in response. While the microbe emoji was first approved in 2018, different technology providers render it in strikingly different ways. For instance, the Apple version most clearly resembles a virus, while the Microsoft version is blue and resembles a bacterium.According to data from the website Emojipedia, common ways of representing COVID-19 include the microbe emoji 🦠 and more generally the face with medical mask…

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Democrats counter Trump’s fake coronavirus news with AI that fought ISIS propaganda


An anti-Trump political organization is using AI originally designed to tackle Islamic State propaganda to counter coronavirus disinformation spread by the president. The system has been repurposed to spot comments from Trump that are about to go viral. It will then identify the most popular counter-narratives, and invite a network of more than 3.4 million influencers “to share these highly visual and emotional narratives from real people in unison and at scale.” The initiative is being led by Defeat Disinfo, a political action committee (PAC) advised by retired general Stanley McChrystal, who commanded US and NATO forces during the Afghanistan war. The PAC claims that it won’t use any…

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‘Strava Wankers’ pokes fun at the worst people in society — tryhards


Welcome to Riding Nerdy, TNW’s fortnightly dive into bicycle-based tech, where we go into too much detail and geek out on all things related to pedal-powered gadgets. Since lockdown measures around the world have forced gyms and health clubs to close, many more people are exercising outside, where it’s free. The side effect is that everyone has seemingly pivoted to fitness tracking app, Strava. Seriously, the amount of notifications telling me my Facebook friends have just joined Strava has been kind of surprising. Not because I don’t have any friends, but because I don’t really expect this kind of behavior…

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Psychologist explains why people TikTok themselves licking food in supermarkets


There have been numerous reports of people deliberately licking products and surfaces in supermarkets and filming it. These “licking videos” are then often posted on social media sites like TikTok, Snapchat, or YouTube for all to see. Deliberately licking and coughing on things in this way, during a pandemic, spreads fear and disgust, along with the health risks. This is what’s known as “consumer terrorism” where dangerous substances are introduced to food or other consumer products, that put people’s health at risk. Sometimes done just for fun, and sometimes with criminal intent or even extortion, in extreme cases threats of…

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Trump’s ‘disinfectant injections’ idea comes straight from internet conspiracy theories


US President Donald Trump yesterday sent the mainstream media and partisan social media into a Godzilla-sized tizzy after floating the idea of treating COVID-19 patients with UV lights and “disinfectants.” The president claimed he’d gotten his information during a briefing with medical experts and said it would be “interesting” for doctors to “check that.” But it’s painfully obvious that he’s conflating actual science with online conspiracy theories. Trump’s comments during the briefing provoked instant rebukes from the medical community at large and all but the most partisan right-wing pundits. Per the usual, the president’s defenders claimed those attacking his words were…

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AI study of Twitter bots reveals boredom is what separates us from machines


Our horrible attention spans distinguish us from bots, according to a new study of human and fake accounts on Twitter. Researchers from the University of Southern California made the discovery after analyzing activity patterns in two Twitter datasets. The first was a set of posts about the 2017 French presidential election. The second was a collection of tweets by bots and human accounts that had already been hand-labeled. They chose these two datasets because they complement each other: The human-labeled accounts reliably differentiated between humans and bots, while the French election tweets offered more contextual insights. [Read: Facebook bots are abusing the platform in a parallel social…

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WhatsApp teams up with the WHO to release 21 new stickers about quarantine life


The coronavirus pandemic may mean that we won’t get any new emoji until 2022, but stickers a thing people use, right? To acknowledge the reality of our new stay-at-home lives, WhatsApp partnered with the World Health Organization to create 21 stickers you can share with friends and family. Officially dubbed the ‘Together at Home’ sticker pack, the collection highlights a few aspects of our new normal, including working in pajamas, washing our hands, keeping social distance, or acknowledging that medical workers are our heroes. That said, WhatsApp says it also hopes the stickers will be useful once the crisis is…

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