Social Trends & Tools, Feb 26

ICYMI, here's what happened on social media this week

Feb 26, 2021

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.

🎉 Twitter’s Having a Moment

Twitter’s been on an acquisition streak (I talked about it here) and then dropped a bunch of announcements Thursday.

The biggest one was Super Follow, a new feature that will allow Twitter users to charge followers and give them access to bonus content for a proposed $4.99 monthly fee. That sparked conversation about whose tweets were worth paying for. Musical artists, comedians and other creatives has been the best option mentioned thus far.

Communities was also announced, a groups feature which will allow users to connect around shared interests.

Twitter also seems to have opened up its new audio feature Spaces to a lot of users. Thursday night was the first time I’ve been able to launch an audio chat room and I really appreciated everyone who stopped by to talk. The vibe was much more intimate and chill than Clubhouse, and I hope it continues this way.

It’s still too early to tell how much of an impact this will have on the platform’s popularity or which new features are most useful to users but here’s a quick recap of the Twitter activity you should be monitoring:

New Features:

Fleets (like Stories)
Spaces (audio social)
Revue (like Substack)

Coming up:

Super Follows (like Patreon)
Communities (like Facebook Groups)
Safety Mode (stronger controls for muting abusive accounts)
Identity (people, businesses and bots will get different profile pages)

👆Click Thru

💻 TikTok will let you schedule updates through its desktop site. Which is a game changer for busy creators. But — and this is a big BUT… Taylor Loren pointed out that scheduled videos don’t allow for music so it’s only good for “original sound” videos like voice overs and instructional videos.

💰 All hail the “creator economy.” Twitter picked that option in a Taylor Lorenz poll Wednesday night that pitted the term “creator economy” against “influencer economy” and “passion economy.”

*To clarify, there is a New York Times digital culture reporter named Taylor Lorenz and a digital marketer at Girlboss named Taylor Loren. What are the chances.

📲 LinkedIn is developing a new service called Marketplaces for freelancers, going up against work-for-hire platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

📰 Facebook and Google have each pledged $1 billion to news organizations. Google announced last October that it would pay publishers to create and curate content for a new mobile product called Google News Showcase. Facebook’s announcement came this week after a standoff with the Australian government over paying for news on its platform.

🎤 Spotify is making moves. They launched new tools for podcast creators, like polls and Q&A features, to enable a more interactive experience. They also launched the Spotify Audience Network for audio ads so advertisers can reach listeners across music and podcast experiences.

🌯 Sometimes the Internet is a kind place, like this Reddit post that offers step-by-step instructions to ordering a Subway sandwich to someone with bad anxiety.

🌱 Plant-based diets got a big boost from Kim Kardashian’s Instagram post, just as TikTok banned That Vegan Teacher.

🤯 TIL Tom Cruise TikTok is a thing

🎥 This kid’s time travel TikTok has got Hollywood potential.

💌 Modern design is overrated: USPS got everyone feeling nostalgic.

👀 This is a randomly charming article about a journalist who tracks down the actual location from Microsoft’s Windows XP default desktop wallpaper. That green hill does exist.

📚 Resources

💵 This 2021 Creator Pricing Guide offers some guidance on average creator rates by vertical, audience size and content-type. As with anything else, this is just a starting point and shouldn’t be considered a definitive pricing guide. Thanks to Fernanda Sarmento for flagging this.

🌎 The Google Trends team puts out a daily email on trending topics. If staying on top of national and global web searches and cultural conversations is part of your job, you need to sign up for this. It’s one of the few things I open daily.

🤓 There are so many amazing free educational workshops and sessions out there right now. If you’re just getting started, take advantage of these upcoming sessions. And if you’re a manager, make sure your team is always learning: