📡 Less social media, less loneliness.
Welcome to this week’s Pulse!
Apparently, things don’t plan to slow down around here! Another hectic week I’m grateful about. Being busy is a lot better than having nothing to do, I think.
Big thanks to anyone who supported me by forwarding Pulse to a friend, and a big welcome to the new Pulse members. Hope you enjoy this week’s issue.
Now, let’s dive in.
- Ben
📰 News
Apple starts selling more products on Amazon. This will cause unauthorised and refurbished-sellers banned from Amazon.
LinkedIn begins testing events tool in New York and San Francisco. They plan to roll out the feature globally in the next few months.
Apple launched a pair of repair programs for some iPhone X and 13-inch MacBook Pro models. Some MacBook Pros have an issue with their solid-state drives, while some iPhone Xs have a faulty display module.
Facebook quietly launches a TikTok competitor app called Lasso. The ageing social media platform wishes to win teens over.
🧠Insights
Screen addiction - Credit: Robin Worrall on Unsplash
Social media use increases depression and loneliness
In the first experimental study of Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram use, psychologist Melissa G. Hunt showed a causal link between time spent on the platforms and decreased well-being.
Read more on PennToday.
📊 Statistics
Worldwide App Download Growth - Credit: SensorTower
Q3 2018 Top Apps by Worldwide Downloads
Worldwide app downloads totaled 27.1 billion in 3Q18, a 10.9% YoY increase. App Store downloads increased 3.1% to 7.6B while Google Play grew 14.3% to 19.5B.
Download the complete report from SensorTower.
Teens’ Favourite Social Platform: Snapchat vs Instagram
Snapchat has reigned supreme as teens’ favourite social platform for a couple of years now, according to Piper Jaffray’s semi-annual teen surveys. But Snapchat’s rise may be cooling off, and #Instagram may be seeing renewed interest from teens, latest results show.
Asked their favourite social media platform, 46% of the 8,600 teens surveyed (almost half) cited Snapchat. That was squarely in the range set in the past 2 surveys.
What’s different about this latest edition of the survey is the uptick in popularity for Instagram. 32% reported that Instagram is their favourite platform, up from 26% in the previous survey, and reaching the highest level in at least 3 years.
Interestingly, Instagram’s rising influence isn’t coming at the expense of Snapchat, but rather Facebook and Twitter. For example, just 5% of teens named Facebook their favourite social media platform, down from 8% in the previous survey. And Twitter didn’t fare much better, with its 6% share of the vote being down from 9% in the previous study.
Read more on MarketingCharts.
📱 Tools & Apps
Chartify: Create beautiful and fun Charts for your pitch-decks and export them in PNG.
PollsGo: Simple polls to share on social media (often for the ones that don’t have one built-in like Snapchat and WhatsApp)
🎮 Fun Stuff
Something more people should know about is:
Tech Etiquette Tip:
If you're about to give a presentation, and you use an Apple mac, go to the top right corner of your screen, hold down the OPTION key while clicking the icon, and it will turn off all of your notifications.
Retweet, because not enough people know about this https://t.co/UWWRtgcu1w
So less people end up in situations like
How did I end up here!?
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Ciao!