Successful Social Media

  • Dating apps have been hot topics over the past year, and the quirky ways in which people have used them. A Chinese blogger has topped them all.
  • Using the forum Tian Ya Yi Dy, a woman called Xiaoli befriended and formed relationships with 20 different men and in order to keep talking to them, she requested that they each buy her an iPhone 7.
  • Xiaoli sold every single phone to a mobile phone recycling site, like Mazuma, and used the 120,000 Chinese yuan she received to put a down-payment on a house in the countryside. Genius.

In other social media news…

Bank accounts be warned – Instagram shopping is rolling out

  • Instagram are introducing mini shops to the app, allowing consumers to buy the featured products.
  • Rolling out this month with 20 mini stores in the states, images will feature a ‘Shop Now’ button which in turn loads a checkout webpage within Instagram, the user can then carry on scrolling through their feed without any interruption.
  • This is designed to close the gap between their current adverts that have shopping buttons where a user may get side-tracked along the way to completing the transaction.

BBC Outreach ‘Emoldjis’

  • Emojis are fast becoming cited as our universal ‘lingua franca’ – after all, a picture says 1,000 words. One grandma decided she felt a bit left out and, as part of an outreach programme run by BBC Coventry, has created ‘emoldjis’
  • The icons have been designed in order to reflect the everyday activities and struggles of the over 50s and include a bingo, back pain, spending your kids’ inheritance, and something we possible all need sometimes – a disapproving look.
  • Their design is underway, but even if they are approve by Unicode it’ll be at least a year before they’re included with the current selection.