ICYMI: Teens ❤️ YouTube, Guess What Else Makes the List?
Gen Z Insights and Some Hot Takes 🔥
[Photo by Eyestetix Studio on Unsplash]
Welcome to ICYMI: a recap of social news and trends to help creators and marketers make sense of the constant updates. This is my last update of 2023 — unless Adam Mosseri plans to keep dropping updates through the holidays. In the meantime, I’ll be on Threads, Stories, Twitter and LinkedIn while visiting family in Canada. And I’ll be back in your inbox on January 5th 💌 Happy Holidays and wishing everybody love, friendship, interesting jobs, peace, good health and all the other wonderful things you deserve in the new year!
⏰ 1-SECOND SUMMARY
YouTube tops the teen favorite list and BeReal is still hanging on
Instagram now lets you create and share your own meme-able Add Yours templates
Instagram launched two-second looping video Notes
RIP: Instagram Guides, LinkedIn Carousels and all the other features we lost access to this year
See Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and more ad libraries we got access to this year
Has anyone coined FGC (fan generated content)? If not, I’m calling it and more of my hot takes
💻 ROADMAP
📲 Meta Updates
Instagram is giving users the ability to develop and share their own custom Add Yours templates in Stories using GIFs, text, and gallery images.
Instagram announced two-second looping video Notes for followers or Close Friends, plus the ability to respond to Notes in DMs using audio, photo, video, gifs, and stickers. As an art form, I like the challenge of finding ways to communicate in under two seconds. Will it stick? It might with Gen Z and Notes overindexes with teens so that’s all that matters at this point.
You can now make AI generated backdrops for your Instagram Stories. You’re able to insert your own prompts or choose from automated choices like “on top of a wedding cake” or “surrounded by puppies.”
Note: this is the mainstream, mundane stuff that’s going to make people comfortable with artificial intelligence — just like the puking rainbow AR lens put Snapchat on the map back in 2015.
Mark Zuckerberg shared a Reel that revealed multimodal AI features for Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. The glasses will now be able to understand what you’re seeing — using the built-in camera, they can help write a caption, describe an object and even make outfit suggestions.
Instagram rolled out new safety tools that will help you cut down on spam activity. Read more.
Instagram creators can now go live using streaming software like OBS or Streamlabs via desktop, which could help level up live streams on the platform.
Instagram is testing a feature that allows users to choose who sees their likes on posts and Reels.
Mark Zuckerberg kicked off Threads launch in Europe with a welcome post on Thursday.
📲 YouTube Updates
Eligible YouTube creators will be able to gift up to 10 free subscriptions per month, which gives viewers access to channel membership perks like custom emoji and more.
📲 Snapchat Updates
Snapchat+ has added Generative AI capabilities for subscribers, including its Dreams feature which lets users create AI selfies with friends.
📲 TikTok Updates
TikTok is buying a majority stake in Indonesia's largest e-commerce platform Tokopedia, worth a reported $1.5B, after TikTok Shop was banned in that country in September.
👆🏻 CLICK THRU
💡 Teens, Social Media and Technology
YouTube (93%) is the most used platform among U.S. teens by a wide margin, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, followed by TikTok (63%), Snapchat (60%) and Instagram (59%).
Other interesting takeaways from the survey include:
Nearly 1 in 5 teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok “almost constantly.”
Teen girls are more likely than teen boys to use Instagram (66% vs. 53%), BeReal and TikTok. Teen boys are more likely to use Discord (34% vs. 22%), Twitch and Reddit.
BeReal is still hanging on. Fully 13% of the 1,453 teens surveyed between Sept. 26 and Oct. 23, 2023 said they used the app.
Here are some other recent Gen Z insights to keep in mind for 2024:
💡 The Platforms You Didn’t Expect
Expect Pinterest and LinkedIn to be the sleeper hit social platforms of next year, especially where Gen Z is concerned.
Teens make up more than 40 percent of Pinterest’s active monthly users and are now the platform’s fastest growing demo, outpacing millennials.
And whether teens actually love LinkedIn, like The Cut breathlessly proclaimed earlier this year, they are the generation currently entering the workforce as job seekers. Also watch for Gen Z to take over the reins as social media managers, posting on behalf of brands. That will drastically shift the tone and culture of the platform as we know it.
💡 Gen Z Turns to TikTok for News
Whether or not TikTok Shop takes off, one thing is clear: Gen Z likes to get their news from TikTok, sometimes cutting out news media entirely and going straight to citizen journalists. At least 14% of U.S. adults regularly get their news from TikTok, according to a Pew Research Center survey. And that number goes up to 32% among adults ages 18 to 29.
Related: Check out TikToker Kelsey Russell, who delivers the news one update at a time
💡 Gen Z Recognizes Brands Based On Audio
Having spent almost half a decade tuned in to trending audio on TikTok, we’re starting to see the impact: Some Gen Zers can recognize brands based solely on ‘sonic memes,’ according to an amp report that came out earlier this fall.
💡 Gen Z Is the Dupe Generation
Gen Z prefers knockoffs more than any other generation, according to a study from Business Insider and YouGov. And while it might be easy to catch Gen Z's attention, it’s “harder to earn their loyalty," Ellyn Briggs, a brand analyst at the research company Morning Consult told BI.
🔥 MY HOT TAKES
👶🏽 People Are the New Logos
This nugget was part of a Chief Influencer podcast conversation I had with Anthony Shop recently (our episode comes out 12/21!) but it also aligns with the move I’ve seen away from overly promotional social campaigns toward more authentic, show-up-as-yourself organic storytelling. And it’s not just about influencer or creator faces. Social managers, this means you should make customers, executive leadership or even employees the face of everything next year. I previously wrote a post about what creators and brands could learn from TV. I’m amending that slightly to tell you brand social in 2024 is best represented by the reality series that is your workplace. Pull back the curtain and create a recurring series taking us behind the scenes. Brand polish is out. People being real is in.
💵 Creators Will Be a Point of Sale
This was the year that creator commerce tools, platforms and retailers put creators front and center and I don’t think it’ll slow down in 2024.
LTK added in-app checkout from creator storefronts with LTK Cart earlier this year. This week, they launched LTK Match.AI to more efficiently match brands and creators.
Linktree launched Store Link earlier this year, a move that allowed creators to display products in a more visual way. This week, the company acquired Koji, a link in bio competitor, as its second major investment of the year.
Klarna, a buy now, pay later service, introduced Creator Shops, providing a dedicated area for creators to showcase product recommendations.
TikTok Shop launched this year, giving users the ability to buy directly within the app from creators just as easily as they could from brands.
YouTube rolled out creator features to improve shoppable video, including the appearance of shopping buttons and timestamped tagged products.
Related: Check out Lindsey Gamble’s 2024 prediction “Brands Will Invest In Their Own Creator Programs”
🤩 Introducing FGC (Fan Generated Content)
Brands will lean into fan-led activations, in addition to working with UGC and nano creators to help drive online conversation around everyone’s favorite things. Fandoms have done it already, unprompted. See: McDonald’s Grimace Shake, Nicki Minaj’s Gag City, and Eras Tour Friendship Bracelets. Now, I think brands are going to proactively reach out to see if they can work with fan groups to create something special in advance of big launches.
🧮 New Ways to Measure Impact
As we consume and share content in different ways, social managers and creators will need new and different analytics to help them understand the value of their content.
For example, YouTube needs to award some type of engagement metric for a video that’s been scanned and analyzed by Bard AI. Jules Terpak touched on this recently in a really insightful video.
And as people’s interactions shift to DMs and group chats, shares will become one of the most important metrics to track. But what happens to a piece of content after it disappears into a private conversation. Maybe there’s a blockchain solution (did I really just say that?) but brands and creators do need better solutions to understand the value of shared content.
Related: Read your ICYMI crowd-sourced 2024 predictions
🪦 RIP 2023
It’s not just you. Features or content formats you depended on for months or even years have a habit of disappearing overnight. Here’s a recap of some of the things that went missing in 2023.
So long, YouTube Stories. Google nixed the feature in June even as Stories remain a priority on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
So long, YouTube Shorts Links. YouTube removed clickable links across Shorts comments and descriptions.
So long, LinkedIn Carousels. The platform said carousels would disappear December 14, along with profile videos and image links. Users have found a carousel work-around by uploading PDFs.
So long, Instagram Shop Tab and Live Shopping. While YouTube and TikTok are pivoting hard into shopping, Meta is still trying to find its footing in e-commerce.
So long, Instagram Guides. This feature, which allowed you to curate Instagram posts into mini magazines, never really got the promotion it needed to succeed. Guides disappears December 15.
Are there any other retired features that you’ll miss?
🔨 RESOURCES
Thank you European regulators for the push to require more transparency, resulting in social resources that are helpful for us all. Whether you work in paid social or are a creator looking for examples of what your favorite brands are doing with other creators, we’ve never had as much access to the brand ads and branded content ads that are running on social networks:
Related: Check out Jenny McCoy’s Wednesday Morning for more paid social resources!
📖 WORTH READING
Congrats to everyone on the Roman Empire trend train. You made Google’s most searched list of 2023 trends -Google
Random fun: Find out what era you belong in with Google’s Time Capsule quiz -Google
After years of massive growth in the U.S., TikTok’s popularity in the U.S. may be plateauing -NBC News
694K Reels are being sent by DMs every minute and more fun facts in this “What Happens on the Internet Every Minute” infographic -Social Media Today
Bookmark this as your weekend long read: The Year Twitter Died -The Verge
Creator talent agency Whalar just announced The Lighthouse, a creator campus opening in Venice, CA, and NYC next year with Colin and Samir as Creators in Residence -Fast Company
Amanda Marcovitch could teach a masterclass in creator management. She just happens to be YouTuber Jon Youshaei’s wife and COO -Uscreen
Watch out beauty brands, Alix Earle wants to launch her own label -Glossy
MrBeast’s data obsession led him to co-found a new analytics platform -TubeFilter
Thanks for reading! Let me know if you’ve got any hot takes of your own for 2024?!
I'm curious - what are your thoughts on the removal of Instagram Guides? I personally find that attention spans are getting shorter on social media and everyone is saving individual 3-7 second Reel videos so they can curate their own trip. Guides are helpful, but there is a certain level of wanting control over your own trip itinerary that felt like this was poised to fail. Let me know what you think!