What comes next: Social platform edition - October
The latest developments from all the social platforms, in one place, to help you identify what comes next in social
The past month has been relatively quiet when it comes to meaningful platform updates, with Meta being the exception.
Across updates, one theme emerged: the challenging tightrope platforms are walking between leveraging AI to make things simpler and swifter, while sustaining real human interaction.
During a quiet overall month, Meta was the most active platform. Outside of their products, Meta continued to find itself caught up in lawsuits. Following on from child safety concerns, Facebook was accused of misleading its users regarding privacy protections
The platform has rolled out an AI agent you can talk to, known as Muse. You can have a long, in-depth conversation with it - think of it as your own personal assistant. That being said, it is not yet available in the UK, and requires observation on whether it’s successful and worth implementing for brands
Meta’s second announcement was Meta One (starting from $14.99/month for businesses) - a new subscription service with professional content creation tools, but only available in the US at the moment. There are a few interesting features hidden behind the paywall, from links in posts to feed previews: we will wait and see if reception is strong enough for it to cross the pond to the UK and Europe
Meta’s new Creator Marketing Hub facilitates brand-creator partnerships, with discovery filters supposedly making it easier for brands to find creators to work with. This update to the previous iteration of Creator Marketing Hub sounds good on paper, but the reality is a relatively weak update to an already poor tool, with a lack of creators signing up and therefore limited utility
TikTok adds new commenting features to drive up engagement and community-building opportunities, as well as implementing child safety measures in the US
The platform now gives users the option to comment voice notes and image carousels under posts. It’s a small change, but one to consider when planning content, especially where engagement is a core objective
Additionally, brands can now add polls on posts for viewers to engage with. This is another relatively minor change, which works in a similar way to Instagram and Facebook where we have so far seen relatively strong engagement
LinkedIn continues to prioritise trust between real humans, expanding its user verification system and trialling a ‘Network’ tab for users to engage with their connections
The platform is expanding its verification system, to ensure that users are being truthful about their employment history and status. The user verification process now will include a step that allows for internal verifications from users’ past colleagues. Company pages can also remove people who have listed themselves as employees. This is still in the testing phase, but should offer brands more control to police rogue actors in the future
The platform is also testing an alternative feed, in order to help users find more relevant conversations to engage with. They trialled a ‘Network’ tab, showing posts from your connections and people you follow, rather than potentially irrelevant posts your connections have engaged with, as is the current status of the ‘Home’ tab. This is unsurprising as LinkedIn is making efforts to balance its AI tools with ensuring humans remain at the forefront of the platform, prioritising ‘real connection with real people’. If this trial is successful and becomes the norm, it’ll become even more important for brands to maintain high viewer-follower conversion rates, as having more followers and connections will be more valuable to maintain relevance
It’s been a very quiet month for Instagram, except for a profile grid update and tightening restrictions on teenage activity on the platform
You now have the option to include your tagged posts in your profile grid. As collaborator posts already exist, this update doesn’t meaningfully impact things for brands; tagged posts will appear only on your profile grid and won’t get pushed to followers’ home feeds. It is worth focusing more on the existing collaborator feature, as this is the one that actually lands content in front of new audiences
There have been no major updates for YouTube within the month, however, their annual ‘Made on YouTube’ event has offered some insight into where the platform is heading, and some interesting features to watch out for
Starting from next year, brands will have the option to A/B test parts of their long-form videos, mirroring the concept behind Instagram’s trial reels. If you’re wondering which hooks resonate better with viewers, this will be your chance to test, making it an interesting feature to trial when it comes out next year
The testing doesn't stop there… There will also be the option to test different thumbnails - helpful for grabbing attention in the explore page, and a Shorts Testing feature, allowing you to test your video against different criteria. Unlike the long-form content, the Shorts feature isn’t an A/B test, instead it’s YouTube giving their feedback on what will and won’t work
Further on Shorts updates, there will now be the option to group Shorts into seasons. This is a bit like creating a playlist (which is already available on TikTok for pages with over 10,000 followers), and can be useful for collating campaigns or recurring video formats
YouTube also introduced dynamic tags that will adjust the visibility of tagged products based on how viewers interact with them. This means that tags will only remain on a video if users have actively engaged with it, otherwise it moves to the video description. This would have an impact on brands already doing commerce via YouTube, otherwise it carries nothing of note?
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