What’s New in Social Media - December

Are you struggling to keep up with the constant social media updates and new features? Here are some of the most recent changes and announcements from your favourite Social Media platforms in the month of December. Keep reading to learn more...

Instagram has begun testing longer stories

Last month Instagram was spotted experimenting with Stories with a duration of 60 seconds. The platform launched an official live test of the feature which will see videos split up into clips of 60 seconds rather than the current 15 seconds. The update had been highly requested by the community. By increasing the stories clip length, users will be able to share longer videos to their stories without cutting them off. The main takeaway for brands using Instagram to market their company is that the 3-second golden rule is more important than ever. To engage viewers in longer story videos, brands will have to use the first few seconds wisely to grab the attention of their followers and retain them. 

Twitter Spaces and Twitter Super Follows

After a months-long staggered rollout, Twitter Spaces is now available to all users on Android and IOS. Until now, you could only create and host a space if you had over 600 followers. Two new features have also been announced by the Platform ahead of schedule, ‘Recordings’, a feature that lets you record and share your broadcast and ‘New Alerts’, which notifies users of trending spaces, are both in testing. 

In Spaces, you can add two co-hosts, up to ten speakers and tag your Space with up to three topics to help you find relevant viewers. Twitter hasn’t yet revealed how it’ll find the best Spaces to push, but it’ll likely work in a similar way to the top trends, based on what’s most popular from topics, interests and accounts that you engage with. 

Furthermore, the platform’s ‘Super Follow’ option is now available to all IOS users. Public applications opened up in June and the feature launched in Beta in September but for only certain accounts. To get it, you have to have more than 10,000 followers and then you can charge a monthly subscription fee of any price up to £9.99. Selecting ‘Super Followers’ in the tweet composer will limit the reach of that tweet to paying subscribers and you can choose which tweets you want to activate this on.

TikTok Tips

TikTok is testing an option where select creators can earn tips from their videos, similar to Twitters Tip jar. Although it’s only a test right now, some creators are already seeing the option to add a Tips button to their profile. Creators must have over 100,000 followers to apply for the feature and TikTok says it won’t take a cut from those tips. 

Whatsapp could get an Instagram Reels tab

Instagram reels are set to have their own dedicated space on WhatsApp in the future. There is no confirmation just yet, but this could fit into WhatsApp’s status, the platform’s version of stories. This Whatsapp update would also enable reels to play natively on the platform, allowing them to be viewed and shared more easily. If Brands and Creators make use of Instagram reels, this featured integration into Whatsapp means you can expand your audience across both platforms. 

LinkedIn Company Pages

There are a couple of things that are new on Linkedin company pages this month. They are ‘Primary Workplace’, a feature that lets you state if your working options are remote, on-site or hybrid; ‘My Company’, which lets you manage employee engagement in the app and curate content for employees to share and ‘Customisable Competitor Analytics’, which lets you add up to 9 competitors to benchmark against their performance. 

Did you learn something new about Social Media this month? Head to the Gather Social website today to read another blog.