Social Tools & Trends, Apr 2
ICYMI, here's what happened on social media this week
[Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash]
Thanks for reading! This is a weekly roundup of trending social content and key platform updates to help you catch up and make sense of what’s coming.
Roadmap
📲 Instagram is on a mission to clone TikTok. This week they launched a duet feature called Reels Remix. “Oh look, it’s Duets,” was the common reaction in reference to TikTok’s popular feature. Duets allows users to build on another user's video on TikTok by recording their own video alongside the original as it plays.
🗂 TikTok aims to stay one step ahead and rolled out a new playlist feature this week, which allows users to group video clips into collections.
💼 LinkedIn launched their “creator mode” this week to help business influencers promote their LinkedIn accounts and build a following on the app. They’ve also confirmed they’re working on a social audio Clubhouse rival.
💯 YouTube is testing a few new designs that won’t show the public dislike count in response to creator feedback around well-being and targeted dislike campaigns. Reaction from creators is mixed but seems similar to the concept behind Instagram’s hidden like count to make the platform less of a competition for creators.
Trending
😈 Lil Nas X’s release of “Call Me By Your Name” dominated social conversation, helped in part by him firing back at critics on Twitter, pumping out daily videos on YouTube, uploading memes and reaction clips to TikTok all day and posting behind the scenes pics on Instagram, all while trolling Chik-Fil-A — the man is a digital beast and the poster child for a large-scale digital rollout.
📺 Jimmy Fallon invited Addison Rae on his show to teach him TikTok dances and Twitter was not having it, in part because the segment failed to give credit to the BIPOC creators who actually choreographed these dances. As one person put it, this is literally the plot of Bring It On.
🚢 The Ever Given remained stuck in the Suez Canal for 144 hours and the internet collectively lost it. Finally, a global news event people could laugh at — except for, you know, the $1 billion in damages.
👆 Click Thru
😡 Jeff Bezos was reportedly behind aggressive Amazon tweets targeting Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren, among others. The tone of the tweets was so over the top that an Amazon security engineer flagged them as “suspicious.
Meanwhile, a new report details Amazon’s program Veritas, which was meant to train fulfillment center workers chosen for their “great sense of humor” to confront critics — including policymakers — on Twitter in a “blunt” manner.
Employee advocacy programs are great, and sometimes even more effective than corporate messaging, but this ain’t the way to go about it.
🖼 “The age of Instagram as art gallery is over. The app feels less and less like a place to curate your “best life” and more like a platform for spilling tea, swapping memes, and encouraging political action or dumping your camera roll in carousels.” I cannot improve on this paragraph so I’m just going to encourage you to read this No Filter newsletter on the Instagram aesthetic.
🏐 College athletes who are part of the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics can now make money from brand deals. And a college athlete turned influencer, who grew her TikTok following to 2.7M during the pandemic, is believed to be the first to make money off her likeness.
“I believe that each athlete should be able to monetize their brand. It’s American. And I’m grateful for the influence and the amount of followers I’ve garnered on TikTok, but even if that goes away. I’ll always be creating and doing DIYs. It’s just what I do.”
🍊 This is a fascinating backstory to how a specialty citrus grower used influencer marketing to get Americans to buy Sumo Citrus (the world’s best orange, according to me). And it all started with Instagram’s Head of Fashion Partnerships Eva Chen.
💰 Reddit taking on Wall Street may have been peak FinTech but this week’s headlines at the intersection of finance, culture and digital media came close with a Miley Cyrus CashApp insta giveaway, TikTok star Josh Richards launching a venture capital fund, Animal Capital, and Saturday Night Live’s cryptocurrency explanation (the only time I’m going to reference NFTs in this newsletter).
🎤 Microsoft Excel TikTok is a fascinating niche, and the top comment on this Rod video is a best-in-class example of social listening.
