News Bytes and Blogs _

Young leaders are partnering with social media for business expansion, mentoring and work management with LinkedIn and Whatsapp taking the cake. They say social media brings out a humane, authentic touch to the business. Social platforms bring forth the opportunity for leaders to broadcast their perspective as well as listen, connect and engage with individuals at an extensive scale.

Instagram is making a few changes these days with the speculation of ‘Likes’ count becoming invisible to the audience in the months to come. For now, Instagram did make a minor change that lets users save an image shot using the Instagram Stories camera to one week. Before, you could shoot a pic and keep it for as long as you want till you close the app. Now you can now save it for seven days and make it live any time before it gets expired. This is more convenient for creators, users and can be beneficial for brands to curate their content and post best Stories instead of random content.

To bring in a new generation of creators and artists from India, YouTube is inviting entries for NextUp 2019 and is bringing three new editions NextUp for Artists, NextUp Women To Watch and NextUp for Gamers. The NextUp program gives creators an opportunity to be mentored by production and channel development experts and learn new production techniques to enhance their content. It opens the doors for creators to collaborate with other talented creators.

Influencer marketing is one of the most powerful tools of brand visibility today. Influencer marketing helps build a better presence, higher visibility and a connection with the audience. Authentic engagement rise due to original and real-life content brings forward an empathetic connects with the audience. The advantage of great ROI due to lower Investment for influencers over celebrities is an added benefit. Their fun, engaging and catchy ways add great value with less investment and great results.

Digital payments platforms are catching up fast as more people are shifting to cashless. A new study found that PhonePe, UPI app, was the second most downloaded app in the world in the finance category. PhonePe had above 4.7 million downloads in with the majority of the installs being from India at 99.4 per cent.