Welcome back for another monthly social media news update from Giraffe, thankfully the buzz around Elon Musk and Twitter has finally calmed down, for now! We can hear you all breathing a sigh of relief. With the end of Mach in sight, let’s get right into our latest news update.
Instagram’s Testing Full-Length Reels Replays Within Stories
Instagram is working on a new way to integrate Stories and Reels, with a new experiment that sees some Reels playing for their full duration within the Stories flow. As you can see through the link above, some users are now seeing full-length Reels playing within their Stories stream, as opposed to getting the first 15 seconds, then having to tap through to view the whole thing.
This opens up a new way to lean into the popularity of the Reels format, Instagram’s chief Adam Mosseri has previously noted that more people than ever are sharing content in Stories & DM’s as opposed to re-sharing posts to the main feed. This gives Instagram another opportunity to engage users for longer on platform, which Meta will no doubt hope that it re-ignites user growth.
A recent internal report from Meta showed that Facebook usage increased at the end of last year, largely driven by Reels consumption, which has risen 20% year-over-year. At the same time, original content creation in Meta’s apps is declining, with fewer people posting to both Facebook and Instagram than they have in the past.
With this in mind, a further integration of Stories and Reels makes some sense, and it could be that Stories become an even bigger consideration for creators, if this experiment leads to an increase in Reels consumption.
It’s still early days, but it’s interesting to see how Meta’s looking to merge its different functionalities, which could have implications for your posting approach.
LinkedIn Adds Option to Share a Post with Multiple Members at Once
In other social media news, LinkedIn has added an option to forward a LinkedIn feed post to multiple members at once, while you’ll also now be able to create a new group message when forwarding a post.
As you can see through the link, you’ll now be able to select multiple recipients when sharing a LinkedIn post, with the capacity to either forward the post to each member separately or create a new chat group with the selected users. You can also add a personal note to your message to include your own thoughts or points.
It could be a good way to spark more in-depth discussions in the app, and encourage engagement, while you could also use this to introduce connections to each other over shared interests.
With more social media interactions switching to DMs, every platform is now working to optimize DM sharing, and provide additional ways to lean into more private engagement behaviour.
LinkedIn recently reported that conversations in the app are up nearly 20% year-over-year, which is why it’s now looking to improve its DM options, and facilitate even more of these conversations.
Broader usage shifts has seen more and more people shying away from public posting, and the angst that can come with it, to enclosed group sharing – which LinkedIn is looking to better facilitate with this update.
LinkedIn’s rolling out the new multi-forwarding option to all users from this week.
Twitter Will Begin Removing ‘Legacy’ Blue Checkmarks from Next Week
Twitter is readying its next phase of Twitter 2.0’ subscription revenue push. Announcing that ‘legacy’ blue checkmarks will begin being revoked.
As per the above linked tweet, Twitter’s hoping to boost Twitter Blue and Verification for Business subscribers by prompting them to start paying for their blue tick instead. Twitter’s also alerting blue tick account holders with this in-stream notification.
That could see some legacy verified accounts paying up, bringing in a few more Twitter Blue subscribers – though the amount that are going to revert to Verification for Business, which costs $1,000 per month, will be far less.
But if Twitter wants to reach its target of 50% of its revenue coming from subscriptions, it needs to take action, because right now, according to analysis, Twitter Blue has around 450k subscribers, which equates to only 0.12% of Twitter’s total user base.
It remains to be seen if Twitter can achieve their lofty goals with this new subscription-based verification model. Whether you love the idea or hate it though, Twitter is pushing ahead regardless with this model.
Prepare to pay up or lose your blue tick, from next week.
That’s it for the Giraffe news update this month, for more updates and tips and tricks on social media strategy, head over to our blogs section which is full of rich info and ideas from our social media experts here at Giraffe.
