Facebook Debuts Its First Dedicated Virtual Reality App: What’s Hot in Social Media

March 10, 2017

As we’ve covered on the podcast recently, virtual reality is a popular topic that will make big strides in the near future. This week, Facebook debuted its first dedicated virtual reality app, Facebook 360. Advertisers are sure to be hungry to tap into the experience as Facebook’s enormous user base watches their friends’ and favorite celebs’ 360 videos. In other news, Instagram continues to close the feature gap on Snapchat as Instagram Stories launched their own take on Geostickers.

More details on why this matters, and what else is happening in social media below.

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Facebook Debuts Its First Dedicated Virtual Reality App, Facebook 360

Virtual reality continues to rise in popularity as the real and virtual world collide. Social media is no different. Facebook released its first dedicated app dubbed Facebook 360. The app will serve as a hub for the 360 video and photo content published to the site. At launch, the app will be available only for the Gear VR mobile headset.
Why does this matter?
Facebook continues to push forward into the future of social media to show relevance and add value to a platform that seems to have run somewhat stale in innovation. The app will allow users to post reactions to content. More social features are on the way for the app.

Instagram Stories Launches Geostickers

Instagram is closing the feature gap with Snapchat. The platform released their take on location-based stickers this week. The first round of geostickers allows users to add and arrange illustrations to their Stories posts.
Why does this matter?
Snapchat launched its own geofilters back in 2014, which can’t be rearranged or resized. In August 2016, Snapchat updated the feature to allow for more user customization. The last big Snapchat feature missing from Instagram Stories is augmented reality selfie lenses. 

Facebook Updates Lead Ads, Adds Integrations

Facebook released an update to its Lead Ads feature recently that includes a couple highly requested features. Lead ads provide a streamlined way to request email addresses or contact information from the people who click on your ad. The collector can use the sign-ups for newsletters, price quotes, follow-up calls and information.
Why does this matter?
Two main feature additions were included in the update. First, advertisers can now run lead ads on Instagram. The Instagram ad can run in sync with Facebook lead ads and can be managed through Ads Manager. Additionally, lead ads can be integrated with existing marketing tools such as email marketing or consumer relationship management (CRM) tools that automatically download leads for quicker follow-up.

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