instagram’s gift to social media managers

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Author

Matt Navarra
October 21, 2022

Hello, geeks

Well hello there! Welcome to this week’s edition of Geekout.

Switch your phone to Do Not Disturb. Get yourself comfy. It’s been a wild week in social media land. 

Before we get to the main course, here are a few fun social media appetisers:

Did you see…

Also….

I hit 30,000 followers on LinkedIn this week. I’m starting to spend a lot more time on LI lately. The organic reach is nuts right now!

I share a mix of hot social media news updates and insights, and social media career tips.  

Just tap ‘Follow’ on my profile to get my posts in your feed.

Okay… It’s time to geek out. Let's get into it.

These were the hottest headlines in the world of social this week:

🔥 GEEKOUT HOT 5

  1. Bytedance Accused of Plans to Use TikTok to Track U.S Citizens [ALARMING]

  2. Elon Musk Wants to Cut 75% of Twitter Workforce [WORRYING] 

  3. Facebook Forced to Sell GIF Platform Giphy [SURPRISING]

  4. Meta’s Messy Fight with The Wire Comes to a Dramatic End [CONFUSING]

  5. TikTok Raises Minimum Age for TikTok Live [REASSURING]

This is probably the most useful bit of Geekout to read each week! 

Here’s my speedy download of the most noteworthy new features and platform changes I spotted from 300+ updates I read this week:

Mark Zuckerberg really wants you to use WhatsApp, not Apple’s iMessage… Meta’s Horizon Worlds metaverse is struggling to keep users coming back… You might soon start seeing more Facebook content warning screens on posts.

Instagram has officially launched its Creator Portfolio feature….Instagram is going to start warning you to NOT post mean comments or nasty DMs… Instagram added two new awards to its Achievements feature (still being tested internally).

⚡️ FREE REPORT | WHAT’S YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA CUSTOMER SERVICE SCORE?

  • The most successful brands nail it when it comes to helping customers via their social channels.

  • The Emplifi CX Index reveals the brands delighting customers on social in 2022, and more!

  • Get your personalised Emplifi CX Index Report to help elevate your brand's social media strategy in 2023. 

Twitter Blue take-up hasn’t significantly increased since the addition of tweet editing…Twitter is working on a background music feature for Twitter Spaces (please no)… And Twitter is working on a new notification sound.

Snapchat+ subscribers got four new features to play with this week (the custom story expiry option is pretty neat)... YouTube is rolling out its shoppable links feature to more creators and brands… YouTube boosted support for podcast creators with expansion of audio ads, and more…And Pinterest is bringing popular music to its TikTok-style Idea Pins.

TikTok launched a clever new music remix… thing?!... called StemDrop (I like the look of this)...TikTok has also added new features and tools for TikTok Live… Meanwhile, there’s more evidence that TikTok wants to get into podcasting…And more leaks about TikTok’s plans for expanding TikTok Shops in the U.S.

And finally… LinkedIn has removed thousands of fake accounts of people claiming to work for Apple and Amazon.

DID YOU SEE… 👀

  • 🌟 EXCLUSIVE: The Invite-Only Geekout Group On Facebook [JOIN 30,000+ MEMBERS]

  • 👻 SPOOKY: Google’s Frightgeist Mini-Site for Halloween Trends [TAKE A LOOK]

  • ⚒️ NEW TOOLS: A List of Facebook’s New Features Group Admins [VIEW THREAD]

  • ✨ PRO-TIP: A Useful Instagram Story Highlights Hack [CHECK IT OUT]

Alrighty… Keep scrolling. My analysis of the biggest developments in social coming up next 👇

– Matt

P.S. The Geekout weekly debrief is back on Twitter Spaces TODAY at 4pm UK / 11am ET / 8am PT. We'll be chatting about all the week's biggest social media news. LISTEN LIVE / PLAY BACK

🚨 Everyone's talking about...

We knew that Elon Musk had plans to downsize Twitter's workforce when he takes control of the company, but documents seen by the Washington Post point to a cull of an eye-popping 75% (THREE QUARTERS!) of the company's staff. This would take the entire global headcount down to around just 2,000.

The impact of such layoffs would likely be immediately felt by millions of users, said Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI. He said that while he believed Twitter was overstaffed, the cuts Musk proposed were "unimaginable" and would put Twitter’s users at risk of hacks and exposure to offensive material such as child pornography. "It would be a cascading effect," he said, "where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves."

Washington Post

Twitter has told staff not to worry about media reports about cuts as there are no confirmed plans about what will happen if the deal closes. But the deal now seems close to completion, and could be sealed before next Friday - the deadline to stop the whole mess going to court. 

But even if Musk doesn't take control, the Washington Post reports that huge job cuts will still be necessary at Twitter.

From a business point of view, this might be correct, but as the quote above shows, it could have a serious effect not just on the morale of the remaining staff but on the quality of the product itself. Even Musk's biggest fans might not be too keen on a buggier, less secure version of Twitter that does less to moderate users' behaviour.

Whoever owns it by the time November rolls around, there are some tough times ahead at Twitter and a big question is whether users stick around.

If one billionaire buying a social media platform wasn't enough, here comes Ye (the artist formerly known as Kayne West) with a deal to buy 'free speech' network Parler.

Parler has been overshadowed by rivals like Gab and Truth Social in recent times, so it looks like its owners have got a dream deal in offloading the platform to someone perhaps less bothered about business fundamentals than other potential acquirers. 

The Verge reported that Parler had been shopping itself around for a while with little success. "One prospective buyer described the asking price for the platform as wildly inflated, and said they were stunned by the site’s low number of DAUs".

Ye, fresh from being suspended from Twitter and Instagram for antisemitism, seems to be more interested in keeping up with his friend Elon Musk in owning a social media platform, and one he can't get 'cancelled' from. 

As TechCrunch put it, the "billionaire tantrum" is a new exit path for struggling social media companies.

With this deal, Ye seems to have made Parler's official stance that antisemitism is A-OK. If that results in any changes to moderation rules, expect Apple and Google to take another look at its app store position.

This is likely to be "a big, expensive vanity project," as  I was quoted by Australia's ABC News this week. Parler has a reputation for shoddy operations, and is struggling against its rivals in the right-wing echo chamber market. Ye might be courting Trump to join what will soon be his platform, but from a business point of view, he might be due a big dose of buyer's remorse. 

American politicians already baying for TikTok's blood will have been excited to see what looked like a smoking gun yesterday: a Forbes report stating that ByteDance wanted to use TikTok as a way to track the physical location of specific US citizens.

The specific team involved in the reported plan was the one that investigates possible wrongdoing by current and former employees, so it's easy to imagine that they would be using it in that regard, although Forbes is deliberately vague on the specifics.

TikTok has issued a strongly worded rebuttal in a Twitter thread, pointing out that the TikTok app can't even collect precise location details. It adds that "any use of internal audit resources as alleged by Forbes would be grounds for immediate dismissal of company personnel."

Still, it's likely that lawmakers will want to dig into these allegations in more detail, as a deal to allow the app to continue to operate securely in the US continues to progress towards completion. As a bonus concern, Bloomberg reported that the deal might still leave an opening for some data to leak back to China.

📈 Going viral

Liz Truss' record-breaking resignation as UK Prime Minister yesterday was perfect  fodder for pithy tweets and lettuce-themed memes.

Check the replies to my tweet for some of the best brand reactions:

🗣 Industry chatter

TikTok introduced a new ad-revenue sharing deal for creators this week:

...and it raised some high-profile eyebrows from the YouTuber community, who thought it appears to sell creators short:

❓ Question of the week

As the Musk-Twitter deal nears completion and those eye-popping job cuts could be on the horizon, this question is maybe an important one to think about. LinkedIn is a clear fave among the replies. Get involved 👇

🌟 New platform alert

Look out for Gas. This app is a hit with US teens and is topping App Store charts despite being only available in a few states so far. 

🤦 Fail of the week

Google slipped on a classic Twitter banana skin this week...

💡 New feature spotlight

Facebook professional mode has been around for a while in the US, but now it's popping up in the UK, and perhaps elsewhere...

📄 Report of the week

Adobe released its Future of Creativity study this week. It's packed with insights like: 

  • 48% of creators say income from their creator work is 50%+ of their total income

  • 77% of creators said they only started monetising their activity in the past year

👀 Read of the week

What are all these gradient accounts? Unravelling Twitter’s most mysterious new phenomenon...

😮 WTF?!

This feature has been popping up and confusing the hell out of people this week:

😮 Did you know?

Here's a worrying development... 

💡 New feature spotlight

Instagram is the new Myspace! Code found this week points to a feature that will let you add a song to your profile.

💬 You can quote me on that

When I'm quoted in the news, you'll find it here:

Insider asked for my thoughts on Elon Musk's plan to turn Twitter into a 'super app'.

What Elon Musk has said publicly — and in private texts — about X, his idea for an 'everything app'

Elon Musk has dropped several hints regarding his plans to shake up the social media world. Here's everything we know about his plans for "X."

Also:

📈 Charts of the week

Here's an interesting nugget from the Adobe report I mentioned above...

Plus:

📊 Stats of the week

BeReal quietly raised an additional $60m in investment earlier this year, and TechCrunch reports how it's faring on the all-important daily active users metric:

Also:

  • BeReal clone TikTok Now has hit 10 million downloads, but BeReal still beat it for downloads in September

😆 LOL tweet

Meta News

Meta has said it will comply with the Competition and Market Authority's ruling, which means Giphy is going up for sale.

  • Indian news outlet The Wire pulled its stories about Meta allegedly allowing a government official to directly remove content after evidence increasingly points to a hoax. [The Verge]

  • Horizon Worlds is struggling to retain and engage users, Meta documents show. [Wall Street Journal $$$]

  • Meta is ending support for its Instant Articles format on Facebook. The format was once widely hyped as a commercial risk for news publishers. [Axios]

  • Meta says most Facebook users are members of at least 15 groups, and there are more than 100 million group joins per day. [Meta Newsroom]

  • Meta's Oversight Board has a new power: to apply warning screens on sensitive content. [Reuters $$$]

  • Meta continues to push WhatsApp as a money-making opportunity for the company. [Insider $$$]

  • Meta paid big US newspapers between $14m and $21m in licensing fees it has now dropped, according to a new Semafor report. [@Jessicalessin]

  • Meta has developed A.I. to translate languages that are mainly spoken rather than written. [Meta Newsroom]

  • Antivaxers are using emoji to avoid Facebook moderation. [Bloomberg $$$]

  • Meta has been accused of hiding its lobbying activities in the EU. [Bloomberg $$$]

  • A key exec behind Meta's Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus acquistions has left the company. [Bloomberg $$$]

Insights to give you an edge at work:

  • Remember: Meta will ban new ads targeting the US and linked to social issues, elections, and politics for the first eight days on November due to the Midterm elections. [Search Engine Land]

  • How might the metaverse improve inclusion and opportunity? Meta has some ideas in a new report. [Social Media Today]

New features and tests:

Facebook:

  • Facebook now offers a ‘create another profile’ button. [@MattNavarra]

  • Facebook Groups are getting a bunch of new features, including Reels, view-only chats, and custom 'about me' profile text for Groups. [@MattNavarra]

  • Facebook and Instagram are expanding NFT support to 100 more countries. [@MetaforCreators]

  • Facebook has been spotted offering a 'blocklist filter' setting. [@TechnicalGulab]

  • Facebook on iOS has a new share post composer. A focus on private sharing in Messenger is the most noteworthy change. [@MattNavarra]

  • Facebook is testing a new layout for posts that contain links. [@oriolsalvador]

Instagram:

  • Instagram is testing the ability to schedule posts directly from the app. [Mashable]

  • Instagram will soon test new creator tools including a portfolio section and easier access to sponsorship opportunities. [Insider $$$]

  • Instagram has announced new safety tools, including nudges and an update to blocking. [TechCrunch]

  • Instagram has been spotted offering a 'React' button for Reels. [@WFBrother]

  • Instagram seems to be testing a very different interface to some users in Turkey. [@yousufortaccom]

  • ...and Instagram has been spotted testing new UI icons. [@hammodoh1]

  • Instagram is testing changing 'likes' to 'reactions' for Reels. [@hammodoh1]

  • Instagram can now help you find a similar audio to any Reel. [@ahmedghanem]

  • Instagram has been spotted offering an option for close-friends only Reels. [@binnyshahpatel]

  • Instagram could soon let you add a song to your profile. [@alex193a]

  • Instagram's 'achievements' feature is still in development. New elements have been spotted in code. [@alex193a]

  • Instagram's 'quiet mode' has been spotted in the wild. [@jonah_manzano]

  • Instagram is working on image editing tools for carousel posts. [@alex193a]

  • Instagram looks close to launched end-to-end encrypted chat. [@hammodoh1]

  • Instagram could soon let you search for popular Reels in the Explore section. [@alex193a]

  • Instagram is working on a 'Roll call' feature. [@alex193a]

  • Instagram could soon encourage users to write alt text for posts to impove accessibility. [@alex193a]

  • Looks like video and music replies are on their way for the Instagram question sticker. [@bookoisseur]

Messenger:

WhatsApp:

  • WhatsApp's new call links feature is now available more widely. [Android Police]

The rest: Creator Studio/adtech/Quest and more:

  • Creator Studio users are being notified that they'll be moved over to Business Suite from Monday 7 November. [@jonah_manzano]

  • Meta's Quest Store now lets developers offer 15-30 minute trials. [UploadVR]

  • You'll soon be able to watch YouTube videos with friends in Horizon Home. [Road to VR]

  • Meta now lets you subscribe to track ad spend and number of ads published of up to 10 advertisers of social, electoral, and political ads. [@MattNavarra]

  • Meta has called on Marlon Wayans to host a show forcing celebrities to face their fears in VR, and viewers can experience them too. [Variety]

  • Meta has launched new VR horror experiences for Halloween. [Social Media Today]

Twitter News

Looks like the edit button isn't encouraging many users to start paying for Twitter Blue.

  • Twitter is testing 'suggested videos' in the main feed. [@TaylorLorenz]

  • Elon Musk will have absolute control over Twitter if his acquisition deal closes, with other investors have no say. [The Information $$$]

  • ...and Musk said this week he's "excited about the Twitter situation" and thinks the platform has "incredible potential". [Insider]

  • Google's Pixel marketing efforts on Twitter fell foul of the old 'sent from an iPhone' mistake. [9to5Mac]

New features and tests:

  • Twitter could soon let you add background music to Spaces. [@alex193a]

  • Twitter could soon let you 'spotlight' your Community in your profile. [@nima_owji]

  • Twitter's Super Follow creator dashboard is now available on the web. [@SuperFollows]

  • Twitter is working on a new notification sound. [@wongmjane]

  • Twitter is readying scheduling for Community Spaces. [@alex193a]

  • Apple has launched a #TakeNote Twitter hashflag relating to its new iPads. [MacRumors]

TikTok News

More details emerged this week about TikTok's big shopping plans for the USA.

  • TikTok will raise the minimum age for going live to 18 from 23 November. It's also introducing adult-only streams. [The Verge]

  • TikTok's ads offering is gaining momentum as Meta struggles. [The Information $$$]

  • Simon Cowell has teamed up with TikTok and Universal Music for a music incubator called StemDrop. [Variety]

  • TiKTok's CEO made a rare public appearance in the US this week. [The Verge]

  • TikTok has announced a global gaming showcase even on 2 November. [Social Media Today]

  • TikTok's head of content partnerships has left to join Spotify. [Hollywood Reporter]

  • ESPN has turned to TikTok to attract younger fans to its ice hockey coverage. [Digiday $$$]

New features and tests:

  • TikTok has launched its 'Pulse' ad revenue sharing programme for creators. [@juleserpak]

  • TikTok now lets you edit captions after you upload your video. [@jonah_manzano]

  • TikTok has added a QR code icon on your profile, letting you quickly view your profile's QR code. [@MattNavarra]

  • TikTok is changing its terms of service on November 23. You must accept them to continue using the app. [@MattNavarra]

  • TikTok has launched ‘Smart Performance Campaigns’ that use machine learning Tech to boost ad performance. [Social Media Today]

💥 More social media news and updates

The price of YouTube Premium is going up around the world.

  • Twitter spinout Bluesky has announced its decentalised social media protocol is ready, and opened a waitlist for its beta app. [Decrypt]

  • Snapchat added 16m extra DAUs in the last quarter, but Snap suffered slower grwoth to its ad business. [Social Media Today]

  • LinkedIn has removed hundreds of thousands of fake accounts claiming to work at large companies like Apple and Amazon. [Insider $$$]

  • Investment into live shopping is still high in the US, despite setbacks. [Wall Street Journal $$$]

  • Walmart has announced a platform for influencers to enlist their help in boosting sales. [Bloomberg $$$]

  • Livestreams of mass killings should be banned, New York's attorney general has said. [The Verge]

  • UK regulator Ofcom has shared its view of how well online video platforms perform at protecting users. [TechCrunch]

  • ...and Snap and Twitch have been warned by Ofcom that they need to do more to protect users. [Bloomberg $$$]

  • Social platforms should have separate versions for kids, a UK coroner has recommended in the wake of the inquest into Molly Russell's death. [The Guardian]

  • Smugglers are using Snapchat and Tiktok to recruit Americans to drive migrants into the U.S. [Wall Street Journal $$$]

  • Reddit users have created 3 million crypto wallets with the platform's own tools, the company's chief product offer says. [TechCrunch]

  • Telegram has been fined more than €5 million for failing to comply with German law around reporting illegal content. [Android Central]

  • Apple has restored Russian social network VKontakte to the App Store. [The Verge]

Insights to give you an edge at work:

New features and tests:

  • YouTube is expanding access to its social shopping tools. They're rolling out to Partner Program members in the US, UK, Brazil, and India with at least 20,000 subscribers. [Insider $$$]

  • YouTube has launched an iOS homescreen widgets, letting you add shortcuts to your subscriptions and YouTube search. [9to5Google]

  • Snapchat has added four new features for Snapchat+ subscribers, including customer story expiration and custom notification sounds. [TechCrunch]

  • Snapchat has added Halloween-themed custom app icons for Snapchat+ subscribers. [@ahmedghanem]

  • LinkedIn is launching auto-captions and other new accessibility features. [AdWeek $$$]

  • LinkedIn is testing a 'Demonstrate transferable skills”' feature for people considering a new career. [@oncescuradu]

  • LinkedIn is testing an 'add thoughts' when you tap the share button. [@oncescuradu]

  • Discord has added YouTube integration, a new $2.99 Nitro Basic subscription, and an bot directory. [The Verge]

  • Discord will soon not require a phone for voice chat on Xbox. [The Verge]

  • Pinterest has boosted the capabilities of its Pinterest Trends tool capabilities and launched a new Conversions API. [AdWeek $$$]

  • Pinterest has partnered with major record labels to bring music to its TikTok-like Idea Pins. [TechCrunch]

💲 Advertise in Geekout

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You should advertise in Geekout! Get in touch: [email protected]

📖 Weekend reading

"Burned out on dating apps, singles are turning to a not-so-hip social media platform to find romantic connections."

😳 And finally...

I mean... just... no.

📅 Back next week...

…And that’s everything you need to know this week.

Geekout. Done! ✅

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Okay. It really is time to leave. 

You’re just hanging around here awkwardly now. I’ve got nothing else for you. 

Get the hell outta here. :)

Goodbye, geeks!

– Matt 

_______

This newsletter is edited by Martin SFP Bryant

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