Social Media Industry Round-Up #31: Instagram Links in Bio, Reels Updates, Meta Monetisation Program & 10-Minute TikToks Are Here to Stay

Our Marketing team is back with a roundup of news & industry updates. This way, we keep our team, clients and interested marketers up to date with what's going on in the social media industry :)

The time has come! Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, announced that users will be able to add up to five links to their IG bio.

To add multiple links to a profile, head to ‘Edit profile’ > ‘Links’ > ‘Add external link’. From there, users can drag and drop to order links.

There are a few exciting updates coming to Instagram Reels that will be beneficial for creators & brands:

• Trending on Reels: Dedicated page to discover top trending songs and hashtags.

• Redesigned editing experience: Clips, audio, stickers and text on a unified editing screen.

• Updated Reels insights: Adding total watch time and average watch time metrics.

• Improving gifts: Fans can send gifts on Reels by purchasing them directly on Instagram with Stars.

Meta has been working on Reels ads over the past year with selected creators by displaying overlaid promotions, but they will soon expand this feature to more users.

Meta has announced a new webinar series based on its ‘Performance 5’ framework, five data-proven tactics to help improve advertising performance across Meta platforms:

• Ad testing

• Conversions API

• Simplified ad sets

• Broad targeting

• Mobile-friendly video

For a minute, we all thought that the up to 10-minute video option had vanished from TikTok. However, the platform reassured users that the option is still available:

“We have not removed 10-minute videos - users can still upload videos up to 10 minutes. There was an earlier experiment that allowed select users to also record videos up to 10 minutes from the TikTok app, but that has since ended.”

Creators on iOS can select a specific frame to be the Shorts’ clip thumbnail. This feature was already available for Android users.

Android users will finally be able to reply to comments with a Short. This functionality was already available for iOS users since February.

Twitter is bringing back Keyword Targeting ads ten years after its initial launch.

Twitter initially deleted the option as keyword targeting wasn’t effective, since users post about topics they’re interested in, not that they’re searching for.

Elon Musk is re-launching its Creator Subscription Program, which allows users to monetise tweets and build a business in the app. Twitter will also reduce the entry requirements, allowing more users to sign-up.