Social Trends & Tools, May 7
ICYMI, here's what happened on social media this week
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
▶️ YouTube hosted their Brandcast presentation to advertisers on May 4th, which focused heavily on Shorts and Originals.
More than 120 million people in the U.S. streamed YouTube or YouTube TV to their TV screens in December 2020 and YouTube is taking this as a good sign of TV screen time growth potential. Ergo, while short-form vertical video is exploding, that doesn’t mean you should ditch long-form, landscape content if it fits within your plans.
Depending on your vertical, some of the areas that saw growth year over year in the U.S. included:
Music content: Up over 50% YoY
Cooking content: Up over 40% YoY
Humor: Up over 60% YoY
Travel: Up over 40% YoY
Education-related videos: Up over 50% YoY
As for Shorts, all U.S. creators will soon have access to the Shorts camera and three new editing tools in the mobile app.
YouTube is also adding a Shorts tab at the bottom of its mobile homescreen. It’ll replace the ‘Explore’ button and live alongside ‘Home’, the create button, ‘Subscriptions’, and ‘Library.’
👻 Snapchat introduced a new Creator Marketplace which will connect marketers with Lens creators to collaborate on AR ads. The Creator Marketplace will open up to all creators in 2022.
📲 Instagram rolled out a captions sticker for Stories that automatically turns what you say into text, something they had introduced in Threads and IGTV uploads last year. The option should also be coming to Reels soon.
📣 Twitter unleashed it’s Tip Jar feature on Thursday, allowing users to tip one another for content they find valuable. Payment services include Cash App, Patreon, PayPal and Venmo. And, for now, the platform will not take a cut. Twitter also announced it will let users sell tickets to live audio chats on Spaces.
🗺 Facebook is testing its version of the Nextdoor app with its own Facebook Neighborhood experience in Canada to connect with neighbors and support local businesses.
👆 Click Thru
☕️ Facebook is scrambling to prevent Starbucks from leaving its platform after the coffee company said its posts about racial and social justice issues are overwhelmed by hateful comments. If Starbucks deletes its Facebook page, it would be one of the largest companies ever to do so.
📱 Will Smith shared a “dad bod” photo of himself on Instagram while revealing he was “in the worst shape of my life.” Given our collective pandemic trauma, the confession was relatable, vulnerable and… a marketing ploy to promote his new YouTube Originals unscripted series, Best Shape of My Life.
This immediately called into question the validity of this week’s other viral celebrity clips, featuring Ben Affleck DM’ing a girl he met on a dating app and Adam Sandler being turned away at IHOP. Thanks Will, you’ve ruined authenticity for the rest of Hollywood.
💰 Mr. Beast is a YouTube megastar (he’s on track to be the most subscribed creator in the world in the next year) and, reportedly, a pretty awful manager. But his success and how his multiple companies perform are being “scrutinized to see whether creators can parlay their social media success into a sustainable array of businesses.”
📽 Gen Z’s entertainment habits could have major implications for the future of Hollywood. Research says Gen Z prefers to spend their time on video games and music, while using social media substantially to connect to both. Among a list of entertainment options, film and TV watching was fourth for Gen Z. For other generations, it’s always been No. 1.
💄 Instagram launched a quarterly Instagram Insider ‘zine, starting with a Fashion and Beauty edition. The goal is to highlight content trends and influential creators on the platform. It’s beautifully designed and worth checking out but seems odd and slightly quaint for a digital site that sees 95M+ pieces of content a day to present trends on a quarterly basis versus daily.
🗓 This year, brands mostly skipped Justin Timberlake’s “it’s gonna be May” meme and Cinco de Mayo (here’s one reason why) and I don’t know, but it feels like we might be headed in the right direction.
🔨 Resources
Remember VSCO girls? That was a vibe way back in 2019. Here’s your primer to this season’s slang you might hear on social:
