Stay up-to-date with the hottest marketing trends and the latest social media updates.
From TikTok’s troublesome future with the US to Andrew Tate’s arrest. We’re covering Instagram’s plans to stay current in 2023 and how Social Media is impacting the brain development of teenagers, plus much more…
Here at Brandlective, we are excited to support our clients with these latest announcements from our favourite marketing channels.
Are you ahead of the curve?
TikTok Faces US Ban After Discovery that Chinese Officials had Used the App to Spy on US Journalists
TikTok’s future in the US is looking a lot less certain after an investigation found that parent company ByteDance had been spying on several American journalists whom it believed had been in contact with ByteDance staff, and gained access to commercially sensitive information.
As reported by The Financial Times:
“Over the summer, four employees on the ByteDance internal audit team looked into the sharing of internal information to journalists. Two members of staff in the US and two in China gained access to the IP addresses and other personal data of FT journalist Cristina Criddle, to work out if she was in the proximity of any ByteDance employees, the company said.”
FT further reports that a BuzzFeed journalist and several users connected to the reporters through their TikTok accounts were also targeted in the ByteDance probe.
Viral Tweet + Big Ego lead to Andrew Tate being detained on rape and human trafficking charges
Well, this news has taken the Internet by storm. Tate has gained notoriety for his misogynistic comments, which resulted in him getting banned from major social media platforms. Tate made headlines after an online spat with activist Greta Thunberg, in which he boasted his many expensive cars with “enormous emissions.”
Unverified online rumours circulated in the immediate aftermath of Tate’s arrest that Romanian police may have learned about Tate’s whereabouts from a video he posted as a reply to Thunberg, as the pizza boxes seen in the video appear to be from a Romanian pizza place.
Apparently, this part of the story untrue, according to the BBC who reported that “this is not believed to be the case” which is disappointing as it made for great viral social media content. Tate, who has been under investigation since April, tweeted about Romania a week ago, which may have given a clue to the authorities about his whereabouts.
Greta Thunberg saving the world in more ways than one.
Social Media Use Is Linked to Brain Changes in Teens, Research Finds
Teens who frequently checked social media showed an increased sensitivity to peer feedback, although the cause of the changes was not clear.
A new study by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina tries something new, conducting successive brain scans of middle schoolers between the ages of 12 and 15, a period of especially rapid brain development.
The researchers found that children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed a distinct trajectory, with their sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time. Teenagers with less engagement in social media followed the opposite path, with a declining interest in social rewards.
The study, published on Tuesday in JAMA Pediatrics, is among the first attempts to capture changes to brain function correlated with social media use over a period of years.
Are you concerned for your children? Or what it may mean for marketing in the future?
Facebook Adds Another Way to Facilitate Reels Creation in the App
This single update may be the best summary of Meta’s 2022 innovation efforts.
Yes, as you can see in this image, posted by Radu Oncescu (and shared by Matt Navarra), Meta’s adding yet another way to get users to share Reels on Facebook – even if they don’t have their own video content to upload to the app.
Following the explosive growth of TikTok, Meta has been trying to get more users sharing more short-form video, in order to tap into the same trend, and align its own platforms with what it considers a transformative usage shift.
Innovative? Or a bit blackmail-ey?
And finally….
Instagram Chief Outlines Key Areas of Focus for the App in 2023
2022 was a mixed year for Instagram, with the platform reaching a new milestone in monthly active users (2 billion), while also repeatedly copying TikTok and seemingly losing its own identity, at least to some degree, in the process.
Remember the panic when Kylie Jenner said that she was over IG?
Ultimately, however, the numbers tell the tale, and right now, Instagram remains a critical consideration for most marketers by sheer size alone. And with that in mind, it’s important to understand where the platform is headed, and what’s coming next for the Meta-owned app.
Today, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has provided some insight on just that, posting a quick overview of the platform’s three key priorities for 2023.
View this post on Instagram
As per Mosseri, Instagram’s key elements of focus are:
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Inspire people to be creative
Mosseri says that this is a fundamental on which Instagram was born ‘with those amazing photo filters and crazy frames back in the day’. Pretty sure the ‘crazy’ features he’s referring to actually came from Snapchat – but Instagram was the first major platform to implement different filters and overlays for images in order to customize your image posts.
We can expect to see Instagram adding in more visual customisation and editing tools.
Why? Because Meta knows that it will need creators to help build its metaverse vision, and Instagram is its best pathway to connect with next-level talent – because ‘no one cool’ uses Facebook anymore. Its other apps don’t facilitate the same level of visual creation.
As such, Instagram really is Meta’s gateway into the next phase, and it’ll need to use IG to not only connect with the next generation of artists right now, but to also guide them into multi-dimensional creation.
The social platform that can best facilitate simplified 3D creation, in all its many applications, stands to win out in the AR/VR shift, and you can expect to see Instagram looking to add more tools along these lines throughout the next year.
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Help people discover things they love
This is both a major opportunity and a major risk for IG, because in order to do this, it needs to shift user behaviour away from what they know and love (seeing the latest posts from people and profiles that they’ve chosen to follow) and into a new, TikTok-like experience, which is no longer geared around your own curated social graph.
That works on TikTok because that’s how the app established itself from the start, with a focus on highlighting the best content from across the app, based on your interests, as opposed to pushing you to follow the users that you like, and keeping you confined within your direct-defined scope.
TikTok ultimately succeeds in this approach because its algorithm is so good at showing you more content that you like, which then enables it to double down on that engagement by broadening the pool of content that it can choose from. On Instagram, you want to see the latest posts from friends and the profiles that you’ve chosen to follow first, and while IG is trying to shift users away from this, it hasn’t been a smooth transition as yet.
So do we still need an algorithm or not?
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg noted back in July that just over 15% of the content in Instagram feeds was being delivered via its AI recommendation engine, and that he expected to see this ‘more than double’ by the end of 2023. That, despite some hiccups along the way, is likely still the plan.
Will that extend to Stories too, in showing you Stories from people and pages that IG’s algorithm thinks you might also like? Probably.
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Spark connections between people
The last element relates to the use of the main IG feed for content discovery, with more people now sharing and discussing posts in DMs and Stories, which is a new shift in social engagement.
It used to be that people shared posts publicly, both as a means to connect with others and share more about their own personal interests. But over time, and amid various concerns related to divisive discourse and ‘cancel culture’, more people have become increasingly wary about what they share to their main feed, which has seen a bigger trend towards more private sharing, and engaging around content within smaller, private groups.
Instagram’s been looking to feed into this with new additions like ‘Notes’, which enables users to share a conversation prompt in a Stories-like bubble above your Direct inbox.
The idea is that this will help to trigger new conversations and engagement opportunities in the app, which, as Mosseri says, could help IG differentiate itself from other apps by building for engagement around content, as opposed to just focusing on the content itself.
Will that work?
