With the events of the football world cup attracting lots of comments and banter, social media has never been as busy. Social media is playing a more important role in our personal and business lives on a daily basis, so what’s new this month?

Slingshot makes visuals more social

Another new apps and another new way to share photos and videos, or a whole batch at once. As they admit though, there’s a catch… Your posts can’t be seen until they send something back. the latest photo / video sharing app really is putting the social back into social media. With far too many people ‘ripping off’ content from others and many more simply just re-posting old stuff from other sources rather than getting into the true spirit and also creating some of their own, could this re-adjust our brains? Possibly, those who have joined the growing app user-base certainly appear to be big fans. Of course, its initial success is already coming from the younger generation of smartphone users but has the potential to be far more than that. Coming from the Facebook stable as their answer to SnapChat it comes as an iOS or Android app and is fast becoming the biggest timewaster on many users smartphones.

Twitter testing new features 

Reports from Fast Company magazine suggests Twitter is testing a new feature that will allow you to cram more text into a retweet. Could this see the 140 character limit become less restricting? It looks likely that i implemented the function to “retweet with comment” could replace “quote tweet” which at present needs you to truncate the original tweet in order to squeeze under the 140 limit. The suggestion is the new functionality would allow you to share an original tweet from somebody else and STILL use your full 140-characters on top of that to add your points of view. The idea is that more conversations will be possible on Twitter providing better context when building a thread. The interesting thing will be whether Twitter keeps the functionality for its in-house apps only or rolls it out into its API for third-party apps to use.

Social media does not influence consumers says Gallup poll

Most consumers  are not influenced by social media according to a recent Gallup Poll. So forget elaborate campaigns and a push for likes, it seems social for the consumer is all about the banter, so its quality over quantity. The study was based on US respondents but the vast majority said they only use social media to connect with friends and family with a chopping 62% saying that social media has no influence at all on their purchasing decisions.

YouTube Contract could change our listening habits again

Many independent record labels have been in dispute with YouTube over a proposed variation in contract with the content giant. The contract at the centre of the disagreement was published online and contains a clause that video site is requesting smaller labels automatically give up their royalty rate if a major label agrees to something lower. this has led to some independent labels refusing to sign and looking to negotiate a better deal, but YouTube has already said it will start scraping its video platform of content that doesn’t meet its new terms, which could leave the channel devoid of some of the brightest new talents in global music.

Facebook Alters News Feed Ranking on videos

Facebook is changing the news feed again with a revamp of the way it ranks videos. The key focus will now be on if users watched videos and for how long – although only or uploaded videos and not links to videos, which already get this treatment. the popular ones, then are more likely to feature in streams of others. So effectively, if you’ve watched a similar video before you are more likely to see it pop up in your stream.  “People who tend to watch more video in News Feed should expect to see more videos near the top of their Feed,” Facebook said. Critics are worried this will lead to a very samey timeline without the variety that Facebook has for so long excelled at.