Social Media Industry Round-Up #42: Threads Has Finally Launched, Twitter Changes, TikTok’s Picture-in-Picture, Instagram Collaboration Posts & Hyperlinked Keywords

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 :)

Meta’s alternative to Twitter finally launched last Thursday.

The platform described as ‘Instagram for your thoughts’ is now available globally except for Ireland & EU users due to increased data privacy protections.

This is what we know so far:

• Threads can be up to 500 words long.

• Users can choose who can reply to their posts by selecting from ‘anyone’, ‘profiles you follow’ and ‘mentioned only’.

• You can upload videos up to 5 minutes long.

• You can use your Instagram username & automatically fill out basic profile info.

• You can easily follow the same people you follow on Instagram.

• Instagram is working on a decentralised protocol called ActivityPub (more freedom to utilise your in-app information and the ability to take your audience to other platforms).

To avoid AI from scraping too much information off Twitter, Elon Musk has decided to limit verified accounts to reading 10,000 posts a day, 1,000 for unverified accounts, and 500 for new unverified accounts. Once users reach this limit, they get a ‘rate limit exceeded’ message.

Twitter has announced an updated version of TweetDeck, a tweet management platform:

• Updated tweet composer that includes all tweet functionalities (GIFs, polls, etc.)

• Improved Advanced search filters

• Sort TweetDeck columns into ‘Top Tweets’ or ‘Latest Tweets’

• Video Docking to watch a video while performing other functions

However, this platform could soon be for Twitter Blue subscribers only.

Now users can continue watching a live stream or audio-only version when exiting the app when using the picture-in-picture option.

Users can add up to three collaborators when sharing a feed post or Reel. Contributors will have access to all organic insights.

To drive improved discovery and connect users to related content, YouTube is testing hyperlinked keywords. This way, users will be able to click on a keyword they’re interested in while reading comments and continue watching the video in the miniplayer.