Welcome to the September instalment of Social Butterfly – TCD’s state-of-social-media wrap with Social Media Lead Jamie Hatch and Client Services Manager Tessa Charters.
Spring has officially sprung and now is the perfect time for you to be spring cleaning your socials.
Here’s the TL;DR on the big topics from the TCD group chat this month.
A new perspective
Last month we talked about LinkedIn’s facelift and it seems Instagram got jealous. Confirmed by none other than Instagram guy, Adam Mosseri, Instagram is officially going vertical, continuing its evolution towards a more portrait-focused interface.
Following reports of a new, vertically-oriented profile grid, Mosseri confirmed in a Q&A that Instagram is indeed testing this feature. He justified the move by explaining that the majority of content shared today fits either the 4:3 or the 9:16 aspect ratio used in Reels, and “cropping it down to a square is pretty brutal”. While this update is still being tested, we recommend moving away from square posts ASAP to avoid any funky cropping or zooming when the changes do come.
Instagram has clearly recognised that photo dumps are here to stay, rolling out the option for up to 20 frames in a single carousel (because getting enough content approved for a single image post wasn’t already hard enough). This trend lets the Feed still stay curated and beautiful, while allowing brand authenticity to shine through via the swipe.
Instagram has launched a new way to help hype up your friends publicly, launching comments on stories. That’s right, you can now drop public comments directly on a story, giving you a new way to interact. But don’t worry, if you’re more into keeping things private, sliding into DMs is definitely still a thing.
New fonts have also entered the building, business cards for your Instagram profile could soon be a thing, views are now the primary Instagram metric and Instagram is in its Myspace era with a new feature allowing you to add a theme song to your profile.
LinkedIn for you
LinkedIn, you have us confused. For a platform that’s all about the work hustle, we’re not sure why you’ve felt the need to tempt us with entertainment by adding a ‘Videos For You’ section to your feed. Do we really need another reason to procrastinate? From a content standpoint, the videos appear to be vertical, so if you’ve been using horizontal formats, your days might be numbered. It does make sense, given the platform’s growing mobile audience. Hopefully, this change means our videos will work harder for us.
In other news, the platform is to introduce semantic capability for search, meaning we’ll be able to find what we want, when we want it – even when we don’t have all the right words to describe it. And, joining the trend, LinkedIn is the most recent kid on the block to be chasing the once-illusive verified tick, so page verification will soon be a thing.
TikTok enters the chat
Sharing is caring and TikTok knows it, which is why they’ve introduced new options allowing for group chats. It checks out, considering TikTok thrives on shareable content; and considering sharing content is our love language, we’re totally here for it.
TikTok has also unveiled a new feature called Spotlight, designed to boost movie promotions. With TikTok becoming the go-to place for discovering the latest movies and TV shows, Spotlight helps get the word out by curating content that matches the user’s interests. Warner Bros. used it to hype up Dune: Part Two and it’s reported to have worked like a charm, driving loads of traffic and engaging fans with interactive content.
TikTok is also making it even easier to shop directly in the app. Now, you can discover and buy your favourite Amazon products without ever leaving TikTok. How does it work? Amazon product recommendations appear right in your “For You” feed. When you’re ready to purchase, you can quickly and securely link your TikTok account to your Amazon account with a simple one-time setup.
Everything else
You can now cross-post between all your meta accounts (but just because you can, doesn’t mean you should). Threads is rolling out a suite of new features designed to empower creators and businesses alike on the platform, including insights, scheduling and drafting options.
Meanwhile, YouTube is experimenting with comments instead of views as the key metric under videos when browsing. (We stan an engagement metric.) And Snapchat’s taking things retro, giving us a real throwback moment.
The cherry on top
Unless you’ve been living under a rock – or have taken a break from social media (in which case, you’re a stronger warrior than us) – you’ve probably seen words like ‘demure’, ‘mindful’ and ‘cutesy’ overtaking your feeds.
What started as just another TikTok video by creator Jools Lebron has turned into a cultural phenomenon and it’s taking brands along for the ride, creating a marketing goldmine ripe for content.
Proving that brands can benefit from jumping on trends, Warner Brothers Australia and NZ, have copped a whopping 2.6m views on their take of the trend, while Lyft went down the influencer path, having Jools take a very demure Lyft ride for just under 500k views.
The lesson? Keep your ear to the ground, pay attention to what is trending, jump onto the trend quickly and don’t try too hard.
