Where digital meets travel + lifestyle … A collection of can’t-miss news from this week. Sign up to get the TURNER Weekly Download in your inbox every Friday.
Over the last six years, Instagram has grown enormously. The company announced this week it has a user base of 600 million, and in the last six months alone, Insta accounts have increased by 100 million. The Facebook-owned company said in a blog post “that much has changed this year, but the Instagram community and the diversity of expression it provides has remained consistent." The company isn’t resting on its laurels, however. Every month, the company rolls out new features to keep everyone ‘gram-ing.
This holiday season, retailers jumped on a fresh way to communicate with their consumers: Facebook Messenger. The feature has been used in two different ways: as a facilitator for a live chat with a concierge, or an AI-powered chatbot programmed with predictive suggestions that follow pre-determined prompts. Recently, Burberry used Facebook Messenger to share more information about a campaign, posting video content on their page that directed viewers to Facebook Messenger to learn more about the products shared in the video. To make a purchase, customers were directed out of the chat and onto Burberry’s product page.
Twitter has changed how users search on its platform. The app no longer allows users to show what’s new in its search results. It now prioritizes tweets that performed best. The change was made back in September, but wasn’t publicly announced until Monday. “We can train machine learning models that predict how likely a Tweet is to be engaged with (Retweets, likes and replies),” said Lisa Huang, senior software engineer for Twitter's search quality team. “We can then use these models as scoring functions for ranking by treating the probability of engagement as a surrogate for the relevance of Tweets.”
Last year, it was announced that Expedia Inc. rival Booking.com’s agreement with TripAdvisor’s Instant Booking appeared to have exclusivity provisions. This week, Expedia Inc. has announced they are joining the bandwagon and becoming a booking partner with TripAdvisor. “Adding Expedia to the Instant Booking platform nicely complements TripAdvisor’s existing hotel inventory and helps users shop for a great deal on a hotel,” said Robin Ingle, TripAdvisor’s senior vice president for global sales. It’s time book those getaways, folks!
Meowy Christmas and Happy Holidays!