The week in social: Hype, Vines on GIPHY, and Kickstarter goes live

Business influencers have new resources at Facebook

This year on Halloween, Facebook introduced a new set of resources for business influencers to help them reach and make better use of their audience. Announced through a post on the Facebook media site, the resources include a purpose-driven guide, that includes sections on how to grow an audience, how best to use Instagram, content ideas, and more. The post from Facebook promised to update the tools regularly to host case studies, new information, and other useful materials.

More information on Facebook Media.

GIPHY offers a solution for the end of Vine

As Vine has announced that it will be shutting down in the coming months, many other content sharing networks have stepped in to help be a replacement, and to migrate the community over. One of these networks is GIPHY, the GIF creation and search site. GIPHY has just created a tool that when linked with a user’s Vine account, can transfer over every loop created so that nothing gets lost when the network closes shortly.

New comment features now available to YouTube creators

Several new features have become available for comment moderation to creators of YouTube videos. Some of the highlights among these include pinned comments that work much like pinned social posts on other social networks and creator hearts, which allow the video’s creator to like a specific comment and make it more obvious to the viewing audience. The post from YouTube also went on to reiterate comment features that were introduced previously, including blacklisting words from comments, and holding comments for review before they are published.

More information on YouTube Creators Blog.

Kickstarter partners with Huzza to create Kickstarter Live

Kickstarter is the latest community-based network to introduce live video, but they are doing it a little bit differently. The purpose of Kickstarter Live is to show parts of the journey to launch of products, giving community members a deeper inside look at the process. Kickstarter partnered with a Canada-based startup called Huzza to bring the technology to their platform. Although the new feature was announced earlier this week, it has been in beta-test with several creators for several months.

Twitter adds new features to direct messaging

In order to help businesses manage their direct relationships with customer better on the platform, Twitter is introducing two new ways to make the direct message exchange more meaningful. The first is welcome messages, which is a feature that lets the account owner create a series of default message to send users when a director message is initiated, and can deep link onto a website or other experience. Quick replies are a feature that allow the business to prompt users with specific types of responses to make the exchange of information more seamless. The goal of both features, which have started to roll out, are to reduce wait time for users who want to engage with a business.

More information on Twitter Blog.

Instagram is testing shopping tags on posts

Shared on an official blog post, Instagram is testing ways to make the shopping experience on their network more seamless and easy. Supported by statistics such as how 84% of smartphone users are utilizing their device to find information on products and service, Instagram is working with 20 retail business partners to help append tags to products featured in posts when a user taps a ‘tap to view’ icon on the bottom left of the post. When a particular tag is tapped, users can see more information about the given product. Users who will be able to see the tagged content include a group on iOS within the United States. There is no official word on when the features will roll out more widely.

Vine’s co-founders are making a new live-streaming app, Hype

In nearly the same week that Twitter announced it was going to shut down Vine, the original creators of the looping video app announced that they are launching a new live-streaming platform, called Hype. Although there are many players in the live-streaming space presently, Hype has launched with several features which its creators hope will help it stand out among the pack, including adding multimedia to their broadcast, such as photos and video from the creator’s camera roll. Additional features include highlighting user comments, adding emojis, and including music. The app is currently available on iOS, with an Android version coming soon.

More information on TechCrunch.

LinkedIn introduces feature to save sponsored content

A new feature added to the iOS and Android versions of the LinkedIn mobile app, users now have the ability to save sponsored content for consumption at a later time. According to a LinkedIn blog post, this has been an in-demand feature for some time, and it provides a boon to both users who want to save the content for later, and marketers who want to see the long-tail of their sponsored content performance. According to data from LinkedIn, more than one third of millennials want to be able to share a mobile ad that they see.