Social media news: Catch up on the latest platform updates
Stay up to date with the biggest social media platform news and developments for November 2022:
YouTube is introducing @ handles, to make it easier for people to find and engage with channels. Unlike channel names, handles are unique and will also create a matching channel URL (e.g. youtube.com/@handle). YouTube is currently reaching out to channel owners to choose their handles – make sure you reserve yours!
YouTube launched “pinch to zoom” (zoom in and out of videos on mobile) and “precise seeking” (swipe up to display a row of thumbnails which you can use to get back to a specific part of the video) to all users.
TikTok has launched a Photo Mode carousel feature for still images. The carousel can be set to music and images automatically display one after the other, though users can also manually swipe through them.
TikTok launched TikTok Academy, to educate marketers on how to best use TikTok for business.
TikTok’s Photo Mode carousel.
Twitter has officially started rolling out its Edit Tweet feature to Twitter Blue members. (But access to this new feature hasn’t significantly increased Twitter Blue sign ups.) Meanwhile, Twitter’s new boss, Elon Musk, is looking into charging more for Twitter Blue, which will include the blue verification tick.
Twitter now lets you post a combination of images, videos and GIFs in the same Tweet. While this is a great addition, we’d still recommend Twitter carousels to share multiple images and/or videos in a single Tweet, for an even more engaging experience — see some examples here.
LinkedIn is gradually rolling out carousel posts, and displaying posts with multiple images as a carousel in place of a grid to selected users (see notification image below).
LinkedIn is introducing auto-captions for videos, which you can choose to add or review before they are published (English-only for now).
Pinterest has updated its Pinterest Trends tool, giving marketers better insights into the latest shifts and trends on the platform, including audience, demographics and seasonal trends.
Instagram is testing a native scheduling feature with selected users.
Instagram is launching 2 new ad placements: in the Explore home (in the grid as you open the Explore tab), and in profile feeds (as you open and scroll through the content of someone else’s account). The latter is currently only a test.
Facebook is closing its Bulletin newsletter subscription service by early 2023.
