Got a minute? Check out our quick update on what's new in the industry.

Instagram
Instagram quietly released a color-matching tool for Stories users recently. You may have noticed the teardrop-shaped tool appear the bottom left corner when you’re adding text to a Story. By dragging the tool around your image, you can pick out an existing color in your image to write or draw with. Sticking to the coordinating colors theme, Instagram also updated the look of the “Learn More” bar that appears at the bottom of Instagram ads. The bar now appears in a color that coordinates with the ad image. Unlike the Stories color-matching tool, though, users don’t yet have control of choosing which color will appear.

Our Take:

• As a marketing agency, we’re obsessed with brand image so little features like this get us excited!
• The color-matching tool means brands have the ability to customize their Stories even more to present a cohesive brand look – even down to the text color on their images.
• Although we wish we could control the colors that appear on the call-to-action bar in Instagram ads, we’re satisfied for now that Instagram is helping our ads look better.

Twitter
It’s official. Twitter has expanded their character count to 280, officially doubling the amount you can write in a single Tweet. Twitter says the longer character count will allow users to express their thoughts easier — especially users who tweet in languages like English, Spanish, Portuguese or French. Instead of numbers counting down when typing a tweet, users will now see a circle that gradually fills in as they approach the 280-character limit.

Our Take:

• Without the required brevity of 140 characters, Twitter users don’t have to be quite as to-the-point as before. We’re still deciding if this is a good or bad thing.
• In the grand scheme of things, 280 characters is still a short message. We’ll be watching to see if this change transforms the platform any or if all remains the same.

Facebook
We wrote about Instagram Stories new polling option a few weeks ago. Now, almost a month later, Facebook is rolling out the same feature to all profiles and Pages. They’re also giving users the ability to add GIFS and images to their polls.

Our Take:

• Polls aren’t a brand-new concept on Facebook. They’ve been available in Groups, event pages, and Messenger, but the added GIF capabilities and roll-out to all users makes them much more usable…and fun!
• These kinds of features can help brands generate even more attention in their audience’s newsfeeds by using polls for customer feedback and voting mechanisms.