Social Media Industry Round-Up #44: Threads vs Twitter, Improved Reels Templates, New Video Features for Facebook & Pinterest Deep Links

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 :)

It’s no surprise that Threads, due to being a new social media platform, has seen higher engagement rates than its direct competitor, Twitter.

But we have to keep in mind that Threads is brand new, with potentially higher levels of activity over the launch period than it'll see on an ongoing basis.

Last week we shared that Threads was the fastest-ever app to reach 100M users, which took only 5 days. The team at Visual Capitalist have created a list of how long it took different platforms to reach the same number.

In order to combat spam attacks, Adam Mosseri has announced that they’ll tighten rate limits on Threads. This was also a recent update on Twitter that users didn’t take well, but its main purpose is to protect users and avoid data scraping.

Instagram Chief, Adam Mosseri, has confirmed that it’ll be ‘many months’ until Threads is available in the EU due to expanding requirements of the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which protects customer privacy and control over data usage, as well as mitigates monopoly-type behaviour.

Instagram wants to encourage its users to create more short-form video content, so they’re making it easier to discover and use Reels templates.

• Improved Template Browser process: It will be organised by ‘Recommended’, ‘Trending’ and ‘Saved Templates’.
• Improved template editing process: To better map the creation flow.

Facebook is renaming its ‘Watch’ tab to ‘Video’ to be more representative of its expanded video offerings which include Reels, long-form videos and Live.

They’ve also redesigned its video Explore feature to highlight popular video topics, which will be a mix of human curation and algorithm recommendations.

TikTok has finally launched an ads transparency library, so you can have a look at competitors, partners and other brands for ad inspiration.

This library will include:

• Ad creative
• Dates ad ran
• Ad targeting used
• The number of people served the ad

To improve account security, TikTok has introduced passkey access for iOS users, which includes Face and Touch ID.

TikTok has gained the license to Warner’s full music library for use on TikTok, TikTok Music, CapCut, and in TikTok’s Commercial Music Library. This is not only beneficial for brands wanting to use trending copyrighted music, but also an opportunity for Warner artists.

In order to increase traffic from the app and encourage users to convert, Pinterest has introduced deep links for ads that will redirect users directly to the brand’s app.