Social Media Platform News and Updates for April 2023
Hey there! Trust you are keeping up with the Joneses in your social media marketing efforts. A lot has happened in the last month in the social media space, and as always, we are glad to share updates that can affect your marketing projects, content, and campaigns.
Some features and tools have been introduced, some permanently buried for various reasons, some paused, some tweaked, and some resurrected. Below are news snippets curated from major social platforms for your perusal and reasonable use.
Social media updates for Meta
In the ShopTalk section, Meta highlights new ad tools in testing and celebrates advertiser success to help retailers achieve performance and connect with new customers. The new tools are; Managed Partner Ads Lite and Local inventory ads.
In another development, Meta has begun experimenting with a new way for users to authenticate their accounts via missed calls. This will be possible after you grant permission to your call logs and call management.
With Reels Advertising on Facebook and Instagram, Meta is assisting companies in maximizing outcomes with a recent update. Those most likely to start a conversation with a business on WhatsApp, Messenger, or Instagram are typically shown Click to Messenger advertising. With this upgrade, marketers who add a "Send Message" button to their Facebook Reels ads using the Sales, Engagement, or Traffic objectives will now allow users to start a WhatsApp discussion from the ad directly.
Social media updates for LinkedIn
Every social media platform is now working to optimize DM sharing and offer more ways to lean into more private engagement behavior. LinkedIn is not left out; it introduces a new option to simultaneously send posts to multiple members. This is because more social media interactions are shifting to DMs.
Yet another new feature from LinkedIn allows invitees to contribute their wealth of experience to conversations that others might benefit from. LinkedIn claims that by doing this,10 billion years of knowledge are unleashed!
LinkedIn also launched two other tools: The post scheduling tool, which helps you organize and share material at the ideal time and precise date for your Page posts to go live, all within the platform, and the LinkedIn Audio Events, which are intended to be a flexible, informal, and simple method to connect with your audience in a genuine and low-pressure setting.
Social media updates for Facebook
Tom Alison, the head of Facebook, has outlined plans for reintegrating Messenger into the main app. This fact, among other improvements and changes, is outlined here.
Facebook introduced account verification, and you can activate your Meta Verified subscription for USD 14.99 per month (iOS/Android) or USD 11.99 per month on the web (Facebook only). For those who are 18 years of age or older, it is presently available in the US, Australia, and New Zealand. It is not yet accessible everywhere or to corporations.
Facebook group topics will no longer be available from April 3, 2023. As a result, admins won't be able to edit the list of group hashtags or add hashtags to other users' postings. Although anyone can still add hashtags to their group postings, doing so will display all Facebook posts that use that hashtag.
Meta Verified, currently being tested in Australia and New Zealand, can fix Facebook account difficulties and offers additional benefits not provided to other users. This article has a narrative with a helpful illustration. Good news, I must say!
Social media updates for Instagram
With a new experiment that shows some Reels playing for their maximum duration of 60 seconds within the Stories flow, Instagram is working on a new approach to connect Stories and Reels.
Instagram has introduced two new marketing offerings, reminder advertising and ads in search results, to give businesses more opportunities to get seen and create lasting relationships. The first goal is to make it simpler for companies to publicize, remind, and inform consumers about upcoming events or product releases in which they might be interested. The second goal is to connect with people actively looking for specific companies, goods, or content. When someone taps on a post from the search results, ads will appear in the feed they can peruse.
The "Save Posts with Friends" feature is a new option on Instagram to capitalize on its transition and ensure that it remains the top platform for one-on-one engagement. With this, more sharing activity is shifting to direct messages (DMs) rather than social feeds.
Social media updates for Pinterest
To help retailers make the most of their opportunities within the app, Pinterest has announced some new updates. These include allowing users to shop via creations within its separate Shuffles app, expanded availability for its "Premiere Spotlight" ads, and catalog display via product feed ingestion.
Dotdash Meredith and Pinterest have announced a partnership that would provide over 200 unique videos to the platform at key yearly events that matter to viewers, like the wedding season and the holidays.
Social media updates for Twitter
Drastic situations call for extreme measures, and this is true for our dear Elon Musk as he announces that from April 15, 2023, only Twitter Blue subscribers will have their tweets shown in the main feed! Business is not going well, huh?
According to Elon Musk's announcement, users anticipate an increase in long-form tweet characters to a whopping 10,000; It seems to be a primer on microblogging.
As part of Twitter's effort to increase its verified subscribers and expand to other regions, Twitter stipulates that any organization that purchases a subscription to Verified Organizations will receive a gold checkmark and square avatar if they are a business or non-profit or a grey checkmark and circular avatar if they are a governmental or multilateral organization.
Social media updates for TikTok
TikTok is offering "Effect House Branded Effects," a new service that enables businesses to collaborate directly with TikTok effect makers to create unique Branded Effects, encourage inventive storytelling further, and increase creative possibilities for brands on TikTok.
TikTok offers Series, a new revenue stream that enables creators to share their works as premium content while strengthening their bonds with the TikTok community.
You may now learn more about the keywords/phrases performing best in TikTok advertising using the new keyword analytics that TikTok offers.
Social media updates for Reddit
Reddit has implemented a few product and design upgrades to make it easier and more efficient for individuals to find, join, and contribute to communities (post, vote, and comment) and ways to participate in discussions and content. The following new features are among them:
-A comment search feature.
-Recent feeds, such as Read and Watch.
-A clean user interface.
Reddit's new "Simple Create" option, which streamlines the marketing campaign setup process, aims to simplify businesses' participation in Reddit advertisements.
Using Easy Create, you can create an advert campaign in three easy steps:
-Add your originality by including images or videos.
-Choose your audience: You may choose from "Broad" or "Customized" audiences.
-Choose cost, and then enter your cost information.
Reddit has discontinued Reddit Talk, a popular social audio tool available in various forms on many social platforms. They claimed they could not continue supporting it and instead wanted to concentrate on developing other, more viable infrastructure that might ultimately include audio.
Social media updates for Snapchat
For businesses, Snapchat is introducing AR Enterprise Services (ARES). In conjunction with the launch, Snap is providing businesses with a "Shopping Suite" that can increase client traffic.
Snapchat is sharing its Content Guidelines for the first time, which give detailed information on how it screens and modifies content in both Stories and Spotlight, in addition to the Content Control option under the Family Centre.
Social media updates for WhatsApp
This April 2023, Meta will release a new update to WhatsApp for Windows that will significantly simplify your life! A new user interface for group chats is included in the latest version, increasing WhatsApp's ability to be used for video conferences. It also loads and functions significantly more quickly than earlier iterations.
WhatsApp has created a specific feature that allows admins to control who can join a group. An admin now has more control over who can enter when sharing the invite link for their group or making it joinable in a community.
WhatsApp says it would not disable end-to-end encryption to comply with UK law so it might be banned in that country. This regulation mandates a decrease in WhatsApp's security standard, which they say is for reasons related to child safety and counterterrorism.
Social media updates for YouTube
In addition to introducing new video download options and rolling out a new experiment that will suggest hashtags to include in your uploads discovery, YouTube is also rolling out some new options for podcast creators.
Even though this option has been available within the YouTube Studio, selecting a thumbnail frame is now available to creators on iOS through the Shorts Creators menu.
In addition to improving the usage of Shorts for musicians with a new option to connect to audio pivot sites, YouTube is adding some new insights data for creators using its new multi-language audio (MLA) function.
YouTube will launch its multi-view feature in the coming months, allowing its TV subscribers to view four streams simultaneously on one screen. YouTube is taking advantage of the significant rise in users who watch YouTube content on their home TVs, which has been the category of consumption that has grown the quickest over the previous five years.