From Fleets to Reels, here's all the social media buzz that happened in 2020

Back in 2013, Snapchat was the first social media platform to introduce the 'Stories' feature. After its success, many others -- WhatsApp and Instagram -- also adopted it on their platforms. This year, LinkedIn Stories and Twitter Stories a.k.a Fleets were rolled out globally. 

Due to the mass layoffs and company closures following the coronavirus pandemic, people started heading to LinkedIn for job hunting. Taking its advantage, the platform launched Stories and other product updates.

Twitter started testing its 'Fleets' in India and some other countries in March and has now globally launched the feature.

Security-wise, it hasn't been such a great year for Twitter. In July, the official Twitter accounts of Apple, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and others were compromised by scammers in a massive hack. In September, the Twitter account of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s website was targeted by hackers. Both the news made front-page headlines and turned out to be a major embarrassment for the social media giant.

While most of the world was adapting to quarantine in March, another major trend was seen on social media where people started taking up cooking and posting recipes/dishes online.

But, the stars of this quarantine cooking were banana bread and Dalgona coffee. With the lockdowns snatching any opportunity to stock up on fancy food items, these recipes came easy to cooking enthusiasts. Just a handful of ingredients, and, voila!, these two spiced up our social media feeds.

Twitter and Facebook introduced a labeling system, putting a warning on posts that contained disputed or misleading information. The platforms used these labels to tackle fake news during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic regarding its diagnosis, effects and solutions. It also came in handy in dealing with political misinformation around voting and results during the US presidential elections.

The researchers also found that those who were surveyed found memes with animals in them cuter than those featuring humans.

TikTok

As soon as the government of India banned TikTok, people started looking for alternate 'desi' versions of the app. This resulted in a spike in search and downloads of apps like Chingari, Roposo and many more.

Around November, even the desi version of Twitter, called ‘Tooter’, made an entry into the market. A copycat version of Twitter, the app has an identical design as well as layout. It appears to be seen how the platform plans to verify some of its users and attach a ‘blue tick’.

'WhatsApp Pay' was a recent addition to the crowded market of online payment services in India. Even though its testing began as early as 2018, it got stuck with some non-compliance issues. The two-year-long wait finally came to an end in November this year, after the popular messaging app, owned by Facebook, received a nod from the National Payments Corporation of India to roll out the services in a phased manner.

To leave you with some good news, all those people who have been waiting patiently for a blue tick on their Twitter profile, next year might be it. Twitter has announced that it will be re-launching its verification policy in early 2021.