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The week in social: TikTok GIFs, Twitter weirdness, and Facebook branding

04 Aug 2019 Vincent Varney

The week in social

TikTok gets Giphy support

We already have Tiktok to thank for many of today’s most esteemed memes, and now some of its finest content is being immortalized in the halls of Giphy. A new partnership between the two companies will see popular TikTok clips published on Giphy as GIF Stickers, found using #tiktok, and shareable on the likes of Slack and Instagram – nowhere will be safe from its dank reaches. These same GIF Stickers (among others) can now also be placed on TikTok content, allowing for delicious, multi-layered memes.

Instagram and WhatsApp adding “from Facebook” to their names

Facebook is making it clearer that Instagram and WhatsApp are part of the fam. Both of the latter services will be adding “from Facebook” to the ends of their names as part of a rebranding effort, with the updated titles to be visible on the splash screens that appear upon launching their respective apps. It’s not an unprecedented change – Oculus is already sporting its own “from Facebook” – but it’s a tad unexpected considering Instagram and WhatsApp have always been branded independently. Then again, with a unified messaging service between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp on the horizon, the relationship is set to become much tighter.

Spotify adds activity-based targeting

Sunday afternoon meal prep? There’s an ad for that, because Spotify is giving advertisers new ways to reach free subscribers. Real-Time Context Targeting will allow brands to advertise to listeners depending on what they’re doing in that exact moment, such as studying or working out, presumably based on the kind of playlist they’re pumping. Interest Targeting, on the other hand, reaches listeners based on – you guessed it – their interests, informed by factors such as their podcast preferences.

Apple to allow data transferring with other tech giants

Getting your data out of (or into) Apple’s ecosystem may soon become much easier. The company has joined the Data Transfer Project, an initiative already backed by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, aiming to make a user’s data easily moveable between platforms. While still a work-in-progress, the end result will allow users to send their data from one service to another without compatibility issues – for example, moving all your pics from Apple Photos to Facebook, or vice versa – making it easier for consumers to switch between competing products.

Twitter wants you to know it as the weirdest social network

LinkedIn is for being professional, Instagram is for being polished, and Twitter is for being your weirdest – or at least, that’s how Twitter is branding itself, based on its recent out-of-home ads. In New York City and San Francisco, the company is showcasing real tweets from users who admit that the social network is where they let out their wild side. And in its own show of strangeness, the official Twitter account ditched everyone it used to follow – including CEO Jack Dorsey – and is now only following those who were lucky enough to have their tweets exhibited IRL.