Social Media Industry Round-Up #4: Adding Topics to Reels, Scaling Back Shopping Features, TikTok Voted Most Innovative Ad Platform & Google Event

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 :)

Users can now add ‘topics’ to their Reels when uploading them. This will help brands & creators categorise their content, so they’re more likely to get in front of users who will engage.

Instagram released some basic advice on how to make the most out of Reel ads on the platform:

• Storytelling is key.
• Immersive video ads but keeping in mind safe zones.
• Creative has to be:
  • Entertaining with sounds and visual effects.
  • Digestible with bite-sized content and voiceovers.
  • Relatable partnering with creators and being native.

It turns out that Instagram’s revenue from its shopping features is not as significant as they expected it to be. They’ll be moving to a simpler and less personalised shopping experience and potentially removing the shopping tab to ‘declutter’ the interface.

We’ll keep an eye on how this decision develops, as it would directly impact social commerce.

Several users have seen a ‘Repost’ tab on some profiles. This means that Instagram is testing a new feature that would allow users to reshare content from other users (always crediting the original source).

Instagram continues to test ways to keep creators on-platform. This time, they’re allowing them to create their media kits within the platform, where they can write a bio, top posts, brands they’ve worked with, selected analytics and audience stats.

The Wall Street Journal released a report showing the decline of engagement on Reels, as users are shifting to TikTok for short-form videos. Some stats they highlighted:

• Instagram users spend 17.6m hours a day watching Reels vs TikTok's 197m hours.

• Only 20% of Meta's 11m US creators post Reels.

• A third of Reel videos were created on another platform first, usually TikTok.

TikTok has also joined the BeReal cloning trend by adding a new 'TikTok Now' tab, which works the same way as the original social media platform. Users will get a notification once a day at a random time, and they'll have 3 minutes to share a picture (front and back camera) with their audience.

TikTok has uploaded much more data to the ‘TikTok Insights’ tool to provide marketers and brands with market trends and snapshots. The tool allows users to filter down data which can later be used as insights for campaigns.

The latest Kantar Media ‘Media Reactions’ survey pointed out TikTok as the most innovative global media brand among media buyers. It also highlighted the platform as the most fun and entertaining, which aligns with the content that TikTok encourages its creators and brands to share.

Google has been making many changes to its Search algorithm lately, so they’ve put together a ‘Search Insights Event’ to share a bit more about the latest advances in Search and how it’s looking to improve results. The event will take place on Wednesday, September 28th, at 6 pm BST.

YouTube has been one of the platforms that have successfully integrated short-form video content, with more than 1.5 billion monthly users. To encourage Shorts creation even more, YouTube has shared an essential guide on how to use all the available features and some best practices.

Watch our latest podcast here to know more about how to growth-hack TikTok!