A lot happened this week in social media: Even if Twitter's IPO ends up flopping, the sensational book describing the invention of the social media servicemay get a movie deal. Meanwhile, Instagram begins annoying its users with advertising and Facebook just isn't cool anymore.
It's Social Media Saturday. Let's dive in.
Instagram began running its first advertisements on Friday, starting with a promotional photo for fashion label Michael Kors.
The photo is quite beautiful and rather "Instagram-y," even if Michael Kors' ad agency opted out of using one of those ubiquitous Instagram filters in the shot. Under the photo of a watch from Michael Kors' "Timeless" collection read the caption "5:15 PM: Pampered in Paris."
The photo will show up on users feeds, even if they don't follow the brand on Instagram, and with a label denoting the photo as "sponsored" content. Users will be able to hide the image or provide angry feedback, which some have already begun doing: "By the way, the time on the watch is wrong it's showing 5:11 (instead of 5:15 as mentioned in the post)," wrote one Instagram user. Another, angrier, Instagrammer's post was obviously directed at both the Michael Kors brand and Instagram, itself: "...And honestly? Just had some more money off the app? Something I like about this was that I didn't have to sit through shit like pandora or YouTube. Man everyone is selling out. Fuck this shit."
According to the AFP, the image had been "liked" over 181,000 times by Friday night, even though some Instagram users weren't too pleased with the idea of corporations officially invading their photo feeds.
Facebook is officially losing its cool. After a Pew Study was released earlier this year basically showing that Facebook was becoming too parent-ridden for teens and another survey published in late Oct. by financial firm Piper Jaffray found a similar trend, Facebook's chief financial officer, David Ebersman, finally admitted on Facebook's Q3 earnings call on Wednesday that teens are using the service less.
"Our best analysis of youth engagement in the U.S. reveals that usage of Facebook among U.S. teens overall was stable," Ebersman said, putting the best face on the situation that he could and noting that teens notoriously lie about their age, making accurate statistics rather hard to come by. But then he admitted, "we did see a decrease in daily users specifically among younger teens."
The Piper Jaffray survey of teens found the situation to be a little direr than Ebersman lets on, showing Facebook's popularity with teens plummeting over 20 percent over the past year. After crashing through the year, Facebook and its subsidiary Instagram are now tied for second place after Twitter.
Another visualization of the Piper Jaffray results show Facebook's precipitous drop and the rise of the "other" category, going from just 2 percent to 17 percent in a year.
"Other" likely includes the rising popularity of Twitter's six-second video service, Vine, along with other young-user-focused social media sites like Snapchat.
Nick Bilton's new book "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal," has gotten lots of attention, due to the sensational details involving the drama behind the founding of the company, even thought the book is not officially on sale yet. (It's slated to hit the bookshelves on Nov. 5, perfect timing, as it's a day before Twitter's expected IPO on Nov. 6.)
The book has even gotten the attention of Sony and other major studios, who are reportedly interested in turning the book into a Netflix or HBO series, or a feature film. Sony's Columbia pictures, notes TechCrunch, produced the Oscar-winning tale about the founding of Facebook, The Social Network.
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