Pinterest’s New Board Sticker Is Designed To Drive Traffic From Users’ Idea Pins

Pinterest definitely appears to be on a roll as the company was recently seen adding another innovative means through which users can help drive in more traffic for the app.

The new update comprises the launch of a method that drives traffic from users’ Idea Pins, which is another name given to the app’s Stories option. Hence, you can best envision it as a sticker feature that allows users to highlight specific boards through their Idea Pins seen on the Pinterest app.

Thanks to marketing analyst and renowned creator Lindsey Gamble, we’ve got some more information on what users can expect with the new Pinterest feature. She put up displays of the board sticker which has already been rolled out for quite a few users. And in case you still haven’t been able to get your hands on it, well, stay tuned.

More on 'Board Stickers'

- Creators can add up to 5 board stickers per page & 20 board stickers max in an Idea Pin

- Creators can tag any public board they own (they cannot tag private boards or other creators' boards)

- Board stickers are currently only available on iOS pic.twitter.com/OdGBePJihu

— Lindsey Gamble (@LindseyGamble_) August 8, 2022

The tool is available for use inside the app’s Sticker Tray that’s located within the creative flow process for Idea Pins. To avail, simply click on it and you’ll soon be able to select from several boards in existence through which you can directly link.

This is all thanks to different display layouts that are seen access the board sticker, that users would be allowed to include into their frame. With the new sticker at hand, users will get the option to link directly to any topic board that they love. This will help in putting content that they love on display through the app, not to mention the great amount of traffic being referred to, thanks to the direct linking feature.

On average, each creator gets around 5 board stickers to include per picture. And that’s around 20 board stickers as a whole inside their Idea Pin. This way, no one is bound to use just one sole sticker for their whole frame, which we find to be a creative and great idea.

After doing so, creators will get the chance to go on tagging any board that’s on public display which they manage. However, boards that have limited access, or should we say those that are private won’t be allowed to be linked such as those designed by others app users.

We feel this is a wonderful way to put particular products on display, especially with the help of direct links that relate back to bigger Pin displays. What better to highlight a user’s offerings than this?

For now, it’s not available to all users but it’s definitely on its way. And with the holiday season fast approaching, we feel there couldn’t be any other perfect time for a launch than this.

Read next: Pinterest Showed No Growth In Active Users And Lower Revenue Intake During Q2 Of 2022
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

New WhatsApp Features Are Just A Few Weeks Away To Become A Part Of This App

WhatsApp is introducing its new features and users are going to love them. The first feature is the deletion of messages. This feature is not new but now WhatsApp is giving its users 48 hours to delete a message. That means the users can delete a message that they send within 48 hours. Although this feature is not new, initially the duration for deleting a message was less. This duration used to frustrate the users to no end but now Whatsapp has listened to the user's demands and is now introducing a feature that will be a favorite.

This deletion feature was just available for one hour but now you can use it for up to 2 days. Using it is very easy too. You just have to hold onto the message you want to delete. An option will come on your screen. You have to tap on 'Delete for everyone and the message will be deleted if only less than 48 hours have passed after you have sent that message.

If you do not have this feature, you have to check if you are using the latest version of Whatsapp. If not, then you can update your app by going to the app store.

Another feature that is under development is the communities tab on the desktop, as spotted by Wabetainfo. WhatsApp Beta for Android is all set to release this feature after it announced hiding phone numbers in Whatsapp communities. WhatsApp has not shared many details about this feature but what we can know is that a communities tab will be available on the desktop of the WhatsApp app, along with the tabs for status, new messages, and calls. You will also have a search header at the top of the desktop. This new feature will change the whole layout of the WhatsApp desktop and make it brand new.

We do not know when this feature will be up for public use. Only WhatsApp beta testers have a hold on this feature. But whenever this feature is ready to use, we know that it is going to bring a nice change to the app.

Read next: WhatsApp Has Once Again Added Some New Features In WhatsApp Beta For Android 2.22.17.23 and 2.22.17.24
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Snapchat Announces New Updates Including Product Stickers And Planned Advances For The Metaverse Shift

Snapchat is following in the lead of many other apps that are trying to make the most of the current economic uncertainty that has affected the digital world adversely. By this, we mean shifts to greater revenue generation through venturing into the realm of eCommerce.

The company is currently busy taking part in a series of tests that would help determine the outcome of an in-stream commerce initiative. This comes at a time when Snap has outlined how its shift into the eCommerce world is slow but steady.

These new tests will entail purchasing and displaying products in a manner that’s never been observed on the app yet. And to make sure things go right according to plan, well, the experiments have begun.

The company is testing Snap Product Stickers that serve as guides for users, linking them directly to pages where they can make an immediate purchase, as spotted by @peplm.

In April of this year, we heard about the app going public with its plans for new tools that allow for better product discovery and put due emphasis on shopping and related eCommerce tools.

There was talk about the tool called Dress Up that was very similar in design to Instagram’s famous shop tab. The only difference was that you’ll get an AR kick with a range of products that can be relayed into the real world.

This way, you can actually check to see how a particular product appears in your home, right before you end up making a purchase. Now, the product stickers are another way to see how the Dress Up tool works in its entirety, including ways to include digital items into your content as well.

Most of the stickers on demand have been related to clothing stores and accessory brands. All you need to do is click on the product and include them in a Snap frame. After tapping on it, you can learn so much about it or simply go on to make purchases as well.

As of now, it’s on offer to many users but that will hopefully be changing soon as the app has plans to expand to the masses.

Next up, Snapchat is working on making new advances in the world of virtual creation. This appears to be a part of the company’s plans to accelerate into the Metaverse, with many tech experts calling it a true changer.

The platform went public today with one of its recently published research papers. This shed light on a brand new way to produce three-dimensional assets through images and video footage of certain objects arising from sources like Google.

Snap hopes the new update would eliminate the need for pictures to get photographed and made up inside classic film studios. This is a difficult move when it comes to capturing 3D objects in today’s time.

Now, Snap hopes creators would be able to make the most of AR and VR technology, where they can simply look for items on the Google search bar, and pick out relevant pictures that are captured from various angles.

Any gaps left to be filled would be done so by the system, without the need of carrying out scanning and allowing for 3D creation with ease.

Snap mentioned through one of its recent blog posts how it plans on getting on board with the project that would enable AR and VR creators and developers to digitize anything they see in this world, provided relevant images are found online.



We see the initiative as a major move on Snapchat’s part in regards to its high ambitions for AR and a possible shift to the Metaverse with the best digital translation.

The ideas will be presented in a paper this week at Vancouver’s SIGGRAPH 2022.

Read next: Snapchat Is Launching A New Supervision Tool That Allows Parents To Keep Tabs On Their Kids
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

The Role of a Digital Adoption Platform in The Digital Transformation Era

For certain, we are in the digital transformation era; every business knows how important it is to digitally transform its processes. There is an urgent need to integrate new technologies, revamp legacy systems, and everybody is seeing the need to make organizational cultures as flexible as possible.

While every business is taking digital transformation very seriously, it’s frightening to realize, according to a report, that 73% of organizations that embarked on digital transformation failed to add value to their operations. What is also very surprising about this revelation is that though there are a lot of factors that can contribute to this whopping figure, the human factor is the most outstanding; after all, 70% of digital transformation programs were reported to have failed due to resistance from employees.

This should not be the case since we have digital adoption platforms that have come to ease the burden of integrating digital transformation processes.

What is a digital adoption platform?

According to WalkMe, a digital adoption platform (DAP) is a software platform that can enable your organization to measure, drive, and act to ultimately maximize the impact of your digital transformation initiatives and quickly increase the return on your software investment. This ability comes from DAP being able to seamlessly facilitate software learning by employees in a very simple process, making your employees more proficient on any software platform, app, and website.

Why do you need a digital transformation platform?

The essence of embarking on digital transformation is to enhance your business in such a way that you can effectively increase customer experience and your ROI on software investments.

This is not quite an easy endeavor, especially with hundreds of apps or even more, you may need to incorporate into your business processes based on your need to digitally transform and fit into the new business setting. When doing this, you will have to contend with a lot of resistance from employees across boards.

Jumping from one app to another, especially if you take their complexities into account, you may experience employee burnout, dissatisfaction, and performance that is below par. The need to seamlessly streamline digital transformation and ensure that you don’t encounter these problems that can hinder your progress are exactly why you need a digital adoption platform.

Incidentally, technological advancements in the process of reshaping the IT industry, have ensured that digital adoption platforms are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, forcing a dramatic rethink of strategies; to this extent, it is relatively easy for you to personalize a digital adoption platform to address any specific needs. By integrating AI and machine learning into DAPs you can use the insights you gather to identify an employee’s shortcomings and provide tailored guidance in real-time that will ease the friction that occurs due to biases employees have to re-training.

Frictions and resistance occur when employees find it difficult to adopt any new technology and as a fundamental aspect of digital transformation, this can greatly hurt the project. Successful businesses in the world, today, know the importance of data and large volumes of data.

Handling these large volumes of data is not an easy task if you want to do it manually; hence, you need to integrate AI and machine learning to sort out some knotty issues. When employees find it difficult to grasp the relevant training required to understand the workings of the new technology, they tend to resist your change initiative.

You end up with missed revenue and employee turnover. Traditionally, your IT team should be responsible for handling employees’ surface key training and the requisite knowledge for onboarding; this places a lot of burden on IT, hence limiting effectiveness in the more serious areas of enhancing productivity and ensuring customer satisfaction.

This is the area a digital adoption platform can help to address with the digital adoption software. The problem, however, is, do you have a digital adoption strategy?

What is a digital adoption strategy?

A digital adoption strategy is a process you need to create a plan to seamlessly adopt any digital transformation initiative. It enables you to optimize the process, sideline frictions, and resistance, and create a roadmap that seamlessly supports your organization's goal.

If you go about optimizing your legacy system, that may not be a bad initiative, but you need to ensure that you also have a plan in place to remove any resistance. Once you leave room for resistance to crop up, you will have created problems.

To enable a resistance-free digital transformation, you must have a digital adoption strategy, which a digital adoption platform will enhance. The digital transformation vision comes from the CEO which is then relayed to the C-suite and the middle managers, even where everybody in the organization buys into the vision, if it’s not backed up with an appropriate strategy, it will be just wishful thinking; it can never work.

The strategy is the most important thing that will make your vision work. Employees come up with resistance when they don’t understand your strategy; because of the simplicity of a digital adoption platform, your strategy becomes readily understandable due to the strategic guidance it gives to employees.

Your end goal becomes achievable without any iota of confusion. DAP enables you to save time and all other unnecessary conflicts you may have come across in your digital transformation project.

DAP ensures that you can effectively embark on your digital transformation initiatives by:

• Automating all aspects of an employee or customer onboarding
• Providing in-app software training and guidance
• Collecting and analyzing usage data
• Providing proactive support to solve any challenge your employees may encounter

Conclusion

The role of a digital adoption platform in the digital transformation era borders on benefits you can derive for your business; every business focuses on how to improve customer experience and hence, increase ROI. The digital adoption platform helps to reduce onboarding time, the burden on IT support, resistance from employees on new software technology, friction from employees, and builds higher morale across departments.

It enables you to understand what works and what does not work in real-time based on the insight you get from the integration of AI and machine learning.

Featured illustration: Freepik / Rawpixel

by Web Desk via Digital Information World

Fake Followers And Social Media, How Authentic Are The World’s Biggest Influencers?

Whether you like it or not, fake followers have become a part of the social media industry. Today, so many accounts are forced to suffer from the reality that not everyone following them is real. And that goes for some of the world’s biggest apps in today’s digital market.

We all have made social media an integral part of our daily routine. It’s a race to reach the top and some people are willing to do everything to get there. After all, that feeling of fame that you see some of your favorite influencers bounce around with can be enticing.

Everyone wants to have their audiences engage with them, share their experiences, and get on board with high follower counts too. But little do many of us know that there’s a price to pay and seeing isn’t always believing. Just because the number of followers is huge doesn’t mean they’re all authentic.

We thought it would be interesting to see some of the world’s popular social media apps and put things into perspective to better understand the concept of fake followers and their growing presence. Thanks to the good folks at PostBeyond who have done some research on this topic, here's what they found.

For starters, let’s begin with Instagram. More often than not, we see the app being criticized for having fake or spam accounts. Also, it’s deemed shady for offering users a simple way to purchase followers too.

The situation really got out of hand and in the end, Instagram really had to launch measures to ensure its accounts were authentic.

But when you glance over some of the biggest profiles on the app and by that we mean through their follower count, you’ll be amazed to learn that they’ve got over one billion un-authentic accounts.

And if we were to name the profile that had the biggest fake fan following, well, it’s none other than leading sports brand Nike whose 65 million accounts are fake. How’s that for a huge wake-up call?

Next up are the Kardashian family who may seem to be growing in popularity as are their number of followers on Instagram. But did you know that the sisters each have millions of fake fans that simply don’t exist? This is especially true for Kourtney and Khloe but we must give Kylie Jenner credit for being more authentic than her siblings.

Let's look at Twitter now, considering the fact that Elon Musk continually raises questions about its account authenticity. Twitter says it only has 2.1% fake accounts or bot accounts. And while the figure may appear small, well, that’s around 2 million un-authentic profiles.

The person with the most real account on the app happens to be the Indian Prime Minister who interestingly tied with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Both had just 2% fake followers while the celeb with the biggest spam account following was actually Taylor Swift. Her followers were 8% fake.

Let’s now turn our attention to TikTok. The popular short-form video format app is leading the pack in terms of being the most loved app by the newer generation. But how authentic is it really in terms of its followers?

The app has outlined from the start how it follows a rather different format in terms of taking account authenticity into consideration. They have assigned a score that’s based on the following: credibility factor, audience involved, how engaging it is, and the creator involved.

The TikTok account scored 90, proving how authentic it is. Meanwhile, top influencers who are a part of the most followed accounts like Kimberly Loaiza also ranked at 90. Other popular TikTok stars like sister duo Charli & Dixie D’Amelio scored 80.

And renowned superstar Khaby Lame scored 73 for his authenticity. So that means, the app isn’t too bad in terms of fake fan following, unlike other archrivals.

Read next: Instagram Reels Trends and Performance Insights For 2022
by Dr. Hura Anwar via Digital Information World

Report shows 1 in 3 organizations now reply weekly ransomware attacks

Being secure while on the internet is the foremost priority of every company that has a website and handles transactions online. However, cyber-attacks are still prominent and can damage a company beyond compensation. These malicious attacks can come from any direction in any form, and sometimes they can also come from inside the company as well.

The most common form of Cyber-attacks is Ransomware, which is exactly like its name suggests, the data stored in the hacked device is blocked off to the owner until they pay a decided amount of money to the hacker. While personal laptops and computers are the usual targets for this kind of attack, it wasn’t long before people started targeting businesses in hopes of getting more money.

According to new research published by Menlo Security, a third of businesses are facing Ransomware attacks at least once a week, with a tenth of them saying that they experience Ransomware attacks more than one time per day.

The research which was conducted with more than 500 IT decision makers from organizations in the UK and the U.S. which have more than 1000 employees sheds some light on what the effect of these attacks is on the mental well-being of the people responsible for the security of the company. When asked about why they stay awake at night overthinking, most of them replied that the majority of their worries are that somehow a Ransomware attack will develop more than the skills and the capabilities of their team and the company will face a huge loss. In addition to this 395 security experts worry that a Ransomware attack will grow into something that is way beyond their company’s security protections.

However, that is not their biggest concern; the biggest concern of tech security experts is that their employees, despite being given warnings, will click on to unsecure links for no reason thus inviting hackers into their database with 46% expressing this as their main concern.

Respondents worry about this happening more than they worry about losing their job with only 26% saying that they worry about losing their job.

The report also states that around 61% of companies from the U.S. and 44% from the UK have been the victims of successful Ransomware attacks in the past 18 months with prospects and consumers being the largest and most likely point of origin of the attack.

Read next: Most of the machinery that is hacked is from America and China
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World

Metaverse Employees Are Worried About Their Privacy If Meta Decides New Workplace Settings

Right now, Metaverse is ruling the world, in technical as well as cultural aspects. You can make your avatars, find some friends and even real-life fashion brands are styling clothes for those avatars. It is safe to say that Metaverse is the most important thing to the whole Meta company. But what type of work environment Metaverse is given to their employees? With the pandemic, a lot of things changed and the idea of workplaces did too. Now, Meta is offering its employees to work virtually by generating a Metaverse Office where they won't have to be physically available 24/7.

ExpressVPN decided to ask the 1500 employees of Metaverse about their thoughts on that virtual office. Here's what they said about this measure:

Less than 2% of employees said that they work in a Metaverse environment. 6% of them said that they are willing to work there and 12% of employees said that working in a Metaverse environment is part of their plans, but not right now. The percentage of the people who prefer working in the metaverse office is 77%, which is higher than the ones who said that they are not willing to work there, 57%. Some people said that they will work at the metaverse office but under some conditions. 45% of them said that they need a flexible opportunity to work from home and 36% said that they want to work with their coworkers easily without any problems if Meta wants them to work at the virtual office. 33% said they need more work opportunities and a permit to travel virtually. 32% of them said that they want more social interactions in their workplace and 31% want another alternative other than Zoom Conference Calls. 29%, 25%, 24%, 24%, 23%, and 17% want more opportunities, fewer physical limitations, permission to make avatars, less work traveling, and use of cryptocurrency respectively.

Most employees are worried about their privacy if they decide to work in the Metaverse Office. 63% of them are worried that employers will gain access to their data and as a result, their privacy will be neglected. They think they would be under surveillance and their location, screen time, visited websites, social interactions, biometrics, etc. will be tracked. Employers also admitted that this is a genuine problem because they have to record the screen time, location, social interactions, apo usage, etc to keep an eye on their employees.

Read next: Gen Z is the most likely to ditch a brand, study reveals
by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World