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Week in social: instagram checkout, lookalike audiences, and #inaworldwithnotwitter

25 Mar 2019 Cassandra Megraw

#InAWorldWithNoTwitter trends on Twitter

If you were out living your IRL life on Saturday you probably wouldn’t have noticed that #InAWorldWithNoTwitter was trending on Twitter. And that’s ok, because now you know.

The tweets were funny mixed with kinda depressing mixed with sad by true. Apparently, #InAWorldWithNoTwitter people wouldn’t know what to be outraged about, they would use ‘there’, ‘their’, and ‘they’re’ incorrectly their whole lives without anyone correcting them, and their time in the restroom would be significantly shorter. But we must remember… in a world with no Twitter #InAWorldWithNoTwitter would never trend on Twitter… and that’d would be a bit of a loss, don’t you think?

Shop without ever leaving the comfort of the Instagram app

Instagram’s just-announced checkout feature lets online shoppers (that may not have even known they were online shoppers until the posts popped up) buy goods from brands without ever leaving Instagram. Still in its testing phase, select early adopters of the feature include Kylie Cosmetics, Nike, Adidas, Revolve, Zara and H&M. Product Manager for Instagram Shopping, Layla Amjadi says the ultimate vision is to have checkout be available to all the businesses on Instagram, fulfilling one of the biggest asks the platform has had since Instagram Shopping’s inception. Shopping and checkout features are not available in ads and can only appear in unpaid posts and Stories.

LinkedIn launches lookalike audiences

LinkedIn announced on Wednesday that it was rolling out lookalike audiences, a feature that allows advertisers to target users with similar traits to existing brands and customers. While the platform acknowledges that it’s late to the game (Facebook and Google have been choo-chooing the lookalike train for a while now), it says that B2B marketing is in a league of its own. LinkedIn’s director of product, Abhishek Shrivastava said that while LinkedIn can mine daily activity like shares, comments, interests or likes of individuals, companies take fewer actions meaning information needs to be harvested in different ways to inform a lookalike audience of similar brands. “It’s a related challenge in terms of how to do the expansion, but it requires a different type of mindset to develop the tool. We don’t just want to build me-too products – we want to build products that work for these types of advertisers.”

You’ll soon be able to subscribe to conversations on Twitter

Twitter recently confirmed it’s developing a feature that will allow users to subscribe to tweets of interest and receive notifications on the conversation without having to like or reply (mild creep vibes, but we’re here for it). In response to the user who stealthily spotted the not-yet-released feature, Twitter said it is part of the work to make its platform “more conversational.” There’s no telling when it will be rolled out, but with better conversations being at the top of Twitter’s current list of goals, it could be pretty soon.

Facebook Messenger adds quoted replies to group chats

Step aside, reaction emojis – Facebook has rolled out a new feature to its Messenger platform that allows users to respond with text, GIF, video, emoji and photos to specific messages within a group chat. Sure, it’s not a groundbreaking addition to the platform, but it’s still a nice little feature that will make group chatting that much easier to follow. The feature has been released on both iOS and Android but if you can’t see it yet, don’t fret – Facebook often rolls out features like this in waves.