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Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news.
To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What's New This Week?
Facebook Introduces Riff, a Creative Tool to Make Videos With Friends: “Anyone can start by creating a video. All you have to do is give it a topic, like #AprilFools, then your friends can view it and choose to add their own clips on that topic.”
Twitter Publicly Launches Curator: Now available, “Curator was built to allow media publishers to search, filter and curate Twitter content that can then be displayed on web, mobile and TV.”
Vine Rolls Out a Beautiful New High-Quality Format: Vine has been “working on technical upgrades that support vines in higher quality.”
Pinterest Improves Pinning: “Now when you pin something you found on the web, or you save a pin on Pinterest, all it takes is a couple of clicks and it's saved. It's also easier than ever to find (or create) the board you want to save your pin on.”
Facebook's LiveRail Will Soon Support Display Ads in Mobile Apps: This update “will allow publishers to manage and optimize yield across all of their advertising opportunities, including ads directly sold to advertisers and ads from programmatic sources like demand side platforms (DSPs), ad networks and agency trading desks.”
Other social media news worth following:
Facebook Introduces Analytics for Apps: This free tool from Facebook is “designed to help developers and marketers understand their app's audience, measure how people use their app and grow their businesses by running better ads.”
Facebook Adds Subscribe Button for Event Pages: Facebook “added an Events Subscribe button to the Events section of all pages on desktop and mobile. Once clicked, you'll get a Facebook notification when that page hosts an event near where you live.”
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Some interesting studies to note:
U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015: Pew Research Center teamed up with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to study smartphone usage in the U.S. and found that 64% of adults own smartphones, up from 35% in 2011. Smartphone ownership is especially high among younger Americans, as well as those with relatively high income and education levels. Ninety-one percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 used their smartphone to access social networks at least once over the course of the study period, compared to 55% of respondents 50 and older.
Messaging Apps Outperform Other Apps: Yahoo-owned mobile app analytics platform Flurry tracked the retention rates for Facebook Messenger and similar messaging apps and found them to be 5.6 times greater than rates for the average app. Messaging apps have a retention rate of 60% a year after install, compared to only 11% for the average app. Messaging apps also have a daily use that's 4.7 times higher than the average app. The average daily use of an app across all categories is 1.9 times, whereas messaging apps are used, on average, almost 9 times per day.
Pinterest for Marketers: Driving Meaningful Engagement: Networked Insights analyzed approximately 10 million social shares across the web that linked to Pinterest to determine how valuable Pinterest really is and how to use it strategically. The study found that users share branded links to Pinterest content 1.5 times more frequently than general branded content on the social web. More specifically, pins in the Home and Garden, Style and Fashion, Real Estate and Food and Drink categories are shared more than average when compared to categories in general conversation.
Who Follows Brands on Twitter: New research from Simply Measured studied the most recent 100,000 Twitter followers for each of the “ten most-followed brands” on the Interbrand Top 100 Global Brands list. The study found that 25% of users following top brands average at least one tweet per day over the lifetime of their account, showing  high engagement for this group. Fourteen percent of the users analyzed follow more than one of the ten brands; for example, 26% of Burberry's followers also follow Louis Vuitton. This overlap is attributed to how closely each brand's customers mirror one another.
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