Social Media Industry Round-Up #108: Social Commerce Insights You Must Know, The Newest Search Engine To Keep An Eye On & Understanding The Algorithm

Every week, the team at The Social Shepherd puts together all the relevant industry updates in a round-up newsletter.

This way, we keep our team, clients and interested marketers up to date with what's going on in the social media industry :)

Don't forget to subscribe if you want to be updated every week.

Understanding The Algorithm

Sad news from Instagram, as Adam Mosseri confirmed that the platform downgrades the quality of content (making videos more or less blurry), including Reels and Stories, based on its engagement. 

In short, videos that don’t perform as well will decrease in quality, allowing more power to the algorithm to push those that are doing well. 

This makes sense, but it can also be detrimental for low-performing posts, as the low quality will hinder their performance even more. To that, Mosseri replied: 

“It works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level. We bias to higher quality (more CPU-intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It’s not a binary threshold, but rather a sliding scale.”

Meta AI Is Gaining Popularity.

Meta’s AI has now reached over half a billion users, and it’s on track to become the ‘most-used’ assistant by the end of 2024, according to Mark Zuckerberg. 

Users are using it as an alternative to ChatGPT, as a text-to-image generator, or as a voice assistant.

Meta has been pushing on AI development, with the latest launch being Movie Gen (text-to-video generative AI) a couple of weeks back. In fact, more than 15 million ads have been created with generative AI in the last month alone. 

Is your brand missing out on AI-generated assets?

Meta’s Search Engine.

Some reports indicate that Meta is working on creating its own search engine, so its AI doesn’t only rely on Google and Bing for web searches, to find answers to conversational queries. 

Meta’s AI responses always link back to the source, so it makes sense that the company wants to keep users within their platforms, as well as be able to provide more powerful and real-time AI tools powered by their search engine.

TikTok 101.

TikTok is launching new enhanced content and a new interface for their TikTok Academy platform, so marketers can learn more about the platform and educate themselves on how to utilise all the tools available to improve performance. 

The current modules are: 

• TikTok Basics 
• Build Brand Awareness 
• Drive Website Conversions 
• Promote Your App 
• Generate Leads 

This is a good place for aspiring marketers and social media enthusiasts to start, but TikTok assures that even professionals will learn an extra tip or two. 

Threads Is On The Rise.

Threads has reported over 275M monthly active users on the platform, up from 200M back in August. 

If the platform continues to grow at the same speed, it’ll overtake X’s monthly active users by June 2025.

Social Commerce Insights.

Snapchat has just released a report on e-commerce on the platform, and purchasing behaviours of Snapchat users on the platform. 

Here are some of our favourite findings: 

• 85% of Snapchatters state that they discover new products or brands from social ads and content, versus 63%.
• 84% of Snapchatters report learning about new trends and products through social channels, versus 54% of non-Snapchatters.
• 84% of Snapchatters frequently suggest brands, products, and services to family members and friends, compared to 70% on other platforms. This shows that Snapchat provides an ecosystem for meaningful engagement with a closed group of customers.

In short… Snapchat is on the rise (again) and we anticipate seeing a fair chunk of our clients investing more in the platform in Q4 and into 2025. 

All-In-One.

YouTube has updated the ‘Content’ tab so all content formats (long-form, Shorts, lives and playlists) are on the same page, showing view and like counts, so creators can see with a quick glance what pieces of content and formats perform best. 

Bye Celebratory Templates.

Not really a marketing update, but an update for all professionals. 

LinkedIn has announced they’ll remove some celebratory templates, including Appreciation, Welcome, and Skill Assessment Badge posts within the next month. 

This means that LinkedIn is moving away from its graphic style posts, to encourage user to use their own assets. However, we might see LinkedIn testing with generative AI creatives to replace these templates.