How social media won summer 2014

The weather wasn’t the only thing heating up this summer! It was a season full of updates, changes and trends in the world of social media.

Best Moments

• The 2014 FIFA World Cup made history as the biggest social media event of all time. More than 300 million tweets related to the World Cup were sent out over the course of the event. During the championship match there were over 618,000 tweets sent out per minute (source: http://www.eyeflow.com/world-cup-social-media-statistics/). Check out more incredible stats about social media usage during the World Cup here: http://www.eyeflow.com/world-cup-social-media-statistics/.

• Social media was also a hit this summer with a craze known as the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. For this challenge, people were nominated to either donate $100 to ALS or dump a bucket of ice water on their head. Most people decided to both donate and receive the freezing shower while posting videos of it on social media. The Happy Medium team even took on the challenge! Check it out here: http://youtu.be/uhl4wDZjPzk. As of Sept. 5, over 2.4 million Ice Bucket Challenge videos have been uploaded to Facebook, and the ALS Association has received a 3,000% increase year-over-year during this same time period in donations because of the viral hit.

Trends

• Temporary messaging is becoming more and more popular through apps like Snapchat and Slingshot, which is a recently released app.

• The selfie trend is still incredibly popular, reaching new ridiculous heights this summer with several new phones and apps coming out that are designed to specifically help you take a better selfie. Looks like it will be a while until your news feed is selfie-free again!

Changes

• Giving social media marketers everywhere a reason to rejoice, Facebook finally updated their page manager app, allowing easier navigation and much quicker access. (http://marketingland.com/now-can-edit-posts-facebooks-pages-manager-app-88543)

• In a move that caused quite a bit of controversy, Facebook began requiring users to download a separate Facebook Messenger app to continue using its chatting features (http://mashable.com/2014/08/11/stop-freaking-out-about-facebook-messenger-app-permissions/). There was an immediate backlash over privacy fears and people were outraged about the change, but Facebook assured users there is no reason to worry.

• Now you can finally access your own personal Twitter insights! Twitter launched an analytics dashboard available to all users in August that allows you to view the performance of your tweets over time (http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/27/how-many-people-see-your-tweets-twitter-opens-its-nifty-analytics-dashboard-to-everyone/).

• One of the most talked about social media updates this summer came from Snapchat, when the app added disappearing texts and video calls to its features. News of the updates came out during school hours, which caused complete chaos in many classrooms after students learned they wouldn’t be able to see the new features until class was over (http://www.theverge.com/2014/5/2/5675264/teens-are-going-completely-bananas-for-the-new-snapchat).

It’s safe to say social media was the MVP of summer 2014, so now bring on fall!

--Katie