In social media news this week, Facebook goes the extra mile for fundraisers, Messenger announces the arrival of augmented reality for brands on the feature and Instagram welcomes video chat.
Facebook Helps Fundraisers
Facebook is helping fundraisers with their new, rightly-named Fundraiser features! The team at Facebook have created new updates that will help people get the support they need for causes and charities that they hold dear to them. Facebook originally created Fundraising pages for verified charities, and now has turned its attention to help individuals and groups achieve their goals.
One of the updates they’ve been working on is extending the categories that fundraising can take place in. For example, you can now pick from family, travel, community, medical and volunteering purposes as well as a whole bunch of other causes. You can now also match donations to non-profit organisations and Facebook hope that this will help charities make more money for their cause.
Brands Meets Messenger Meets AR
Still in the world of Facebook, the company have announced some updates that will soon be unveiled on Messenger. The most prominent and intriguing will be the new feature that will allow brands to integrate augmented reality into their Messenger with camera filters and effects. Much alike to Snapchat’s new feature for foodies, the idea is that you will be able to see and maybe even virtually try on a product before buying it. The AR feature would not only enhance the brand’s experience, but also the online shoppers time browsing too. When this new update gets released on a global scale, it’ll be interesting to see how it impacts the industry!
Instagram Says Hello to Video Chat
Instagram is finally introducing its inevitable video chat. It was quite clear that this was the direction the photo sharing app were moving into, as each feature got closer and closer to live video sharing to another person. Firstly, there was sharing videos as posts on your feed, then a messaging feature and finally Stories, which allowed users to broadcast videos live. It will be interesting to see the different features available in Video Chat. I can imagine it’ll be rather similar to other platforms’ video features, such as Messenger and Snapchat which allow for filters and effects on the camera.
