This month in social: March 2023

It’s been a while since our last social media update, and a lot has happened this month. We’ll be regularly posting and updating our month in social media insights from now on!

Meta

Integration of the IG nation – Users of Instagram are starting to see a new update to integrate Stories and Reels – they are now seeing full-length Reels playing within the Stories stream, as opposed to getting the first 15 seconds, then having to tap through to view the whole thing.

We think it’s a bid to keep users engaged on stories, as more people will share Reels to their stories rather than their main feed. What do you think?

Verified – Meta has announced that it’s making its new Meta Verified program available to users in the US, which means that American users will now be able to purchase a blue checkmark on Facebook or Instagram for $US11.99 per month on the web, or $US14.99 in-app, accounting for respective App Store charges.

Call me – Meta has begun to experiment with other ways for users to authenticate their accounts… with a missed call. In a bid to save SMS charges, this update will track your phone activity… hmm…

Meta says that leveraging missed calls for authentication purposes is currently only supported on Facebook Lite, and is only in certain regions.

We are enabling users to authenticate their accounts with a missed call, in addition to manually entering a one-time password (OTP) sent via other methods. After granting the following two permissions (1) call-log access and (2) call management, users will be able to seamlessly log in to their account without the need for manually entering an OTP

Twitter

I’m blue da ba dee – On Thursday March 23rd, Twitter announced that ‘legacy’ blue checkmarks will begin being revoked as of the week commencing 1st April 2023.

On April 1st, we will begin winding down our legacy verified program and removing legacy verified checkmarks. To keep your blue checkmark on Twitter, individuals can sign up for Twitter Blue here: https://t.co/gzpCcwOpLp

Organizations can sign up for https://t.co/RlN5BbuGA3…

— Twitter Verified (@verified) March 23, 2023

This is part of a second subscription based push where Twitter wants to see a whopping 50% of its revenue coming from subscriptions (however, as of writing this the current situation stands at 0.12% of the whole of Twitter being subscribers to Twitter Blue… eek!).

Go with the flow – A Twitter designer, Andrea Conway, recently shared the below mockup of a new notification flow that would enable you to get notifications for activity on any tweet.

It shows that you would have the option to select “notify me” from the three-dot menu on any Tweet. You would then get alerts for any new replies or quote tweets, enabling you to stay on top of the evolving discussion.

Dress up your words – Tweets will soon have bold, italic and underline options within the tweet composer window. Elon Musk also noted that font size would be an optional consideration back in January, although we might not be seeing it in this initial launch.

LinkedIn

Finally, we follow – Company pages will also now be able to follow other pages in the app! Meaning another way to stay on top of relevant industry trends.

Native scheduling – Although the option to schedule posts via third-party apps has been in our arsenal for a while now, LinkedIn has added the availability to natively schedule posts** from company pages.

The native post scheduling option will enable you to map out your posts up to three months in advance, while you’ll also be able to see all of your scheduled posts via your company page tools.

** This is only available in the web version of LinkedIn, not the mobile app.

LinkedAI – As a Microsoft owned company, it’s potentially no surprise that LinkedIn is turning to AI to generate certain aspects for creating a LinkedIn profile. The new GPT-powered tool will provide you with personalised writing suggestions for creating a profile.

In addition, LinkedIn’s also testing a new AI-powered job description tool, which will make it faster and easier to write job descriptions.

Other

The end of TikTok? – After initially resisting calls to ban TikTok from government devices, the UK Government has now changed course, and announced an immediate ban of the Chinese-owned app on all Government employee phones.

However, a TikTok spokesperson stated that:

We believe these bans have been based on fundamental misconceptions and driven by wider geopolitics, in which TikTok, and our millions of users in the UK, play no part. We remain committed to working with the government to address any concerns

Watch your profanity – YouTube has announced an update to its incoming policy on profanity in video uploads, and how that will affect monetization, based on creator feedback that its pending update was unfair and would have a significant impact on their revenue potential.

Effective from March 7th, the new rules will allow higher levels of profanity, which will greatly reduce the impact on YouTube creators.