Luan Wise and Andy Lambert hosted their regular social media updates during The Lighthouse Social Summit on 30 June, with all the recent social media news- trends and data, and feature updates.

You can watch it again, here:

Here’s what they covered:

Trends and Data

  • Gen Z Social Media Preferences
  • UK Social Media Engagement Data
  • Time spent on social platforms (US)
  • LinkedIn performance

Feature Updates

  • Meta/Facebook updates
  • Twitter updates
  • LinkedIn updates
  • Instagram updates
  • TikTok updates
  • Snapchat update
  • Pinterest update

Trends and Data

Gen Z Social Media Preferences

We’ve all heard of them, but who are Generation Z? Gen Z are those who were born between 1997 to 2012. These are your teenagers, school leavers, university students and recent graduates. Gen Z are a large influencing factor for social media trends and so it is important to consider what they are doing. In 2021 we saw that Gen Z were using Instagram the most, followed by Snapchat, then TikTok and then YouTube. In a big switch-around, YouTube is now the most popular platform for Gen Z, followed by TikTok.

Currently, every month, YouTube shorts has 1.5 billion views. Approximately 75% of YouTube’s viewership is watching YouTube shorts, which makes it bigger than TikTok. This likely adds to the high relevance of YouTube amongst Gen Z.

Instagram and Facebook are sitting together in third place and Snapchat takes number four.

It can be interesting to look at the time-of-day preference that Gen Z have for each social media app. From this, content creators can plan when is best to post their own content for the highest engagement rate across the younger generation.

TikTok, perhaps unsurprisingly has greater engagement late at night. I know many of us have a guilty pleasure of scrolling through our For You Page before bed, even if we are not Gen Z. On the other hand, Instagram is more popular in the morning, with its preference declining steadily as the day goes on. Depending on your target demographic, this information can be useful.

Sticking to the preferences of the younger generations, teens have had some interesting changes over the past six years in terms of their preferences. TikTok has clearly grown since 2020, whereas Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have taken slight dips in preference. Interestingly, Discord seems to be growing in popularity, which could be informative for marketers in how they can utilise this growing popularity.

UK Social Media Engagement Data

For a marketing researcher, getting trusted UK data can be a rarity. So, it was very exciting to see this piece of data by Ipsos. There is evidently quite a lot of plateauing and slight declines across the reach of the platforms over the past month. Twitter is losing quite a lot of time spent on it in the UK, whilst TikTok, Snapchat and Facebook seem to be growing.

A very interesting statistic is that users in the UK spend more time on TikTok compared with any other country in the world. This shows the amount of momentum that TikTok continues to have in the UK.

In terms of time spent on social platforms, US data shows that TikTok still remains the most addictive social app by user time spent per month with almost 6 hours more per month compared with 2021. Facebook comes in second, with a slight decrease from 2021, although it is still a popular and important platform.

Feature updates

Meta/Facebook Updates

First of all, Luan recommends that content creators follow Mark Zuckerberg to get regular updates from him but also to read the comments and see the feedback from these updates.

For the recent updates, Facebook Reels have taken a big shift towards creator monetisation. Creators now have an opportunity to share their reels on both Instagram and Facebook and all funds will go directly to the creator until 2024. There is certainly an emphasis on creators on the platform is good for all of us and will likely bring a bigger audience to the platform and provide a greater chance for other content to be seen too.

Auto-dubbing has been added for Facebook Videos. Dubbed audio is now available in a secondary language and so now videos can be watched by people who speak a different language.

Collaborative posts have now come to Facebook. This is important for greater reach across two different audiences. The more collaborations, the more chance you have of reaching other people’s followers.

Also, Facebook has improved group discoverability. Now, people have access to group chats and feed channels. The functionality of groups has thus been greatly improved and the user experience will be much better. Community audio is now added to Facebook groups too, so lots of new features to experiment with for Facebook group numbers.

Twitter Updates

First, Twitter has launched the ability to pin comments within communities. Now people can highlight and reduce the chance of their audience missing important posts. Another feature of communities is the ‘For You’ feed which puts recommended tweets specific to the user at the top of the feed.

Shopify has now been integrated into Twitter, so it is joining a lot of the other platforms in the increased popularity of social media shopping. With Twitter Shopping you can make your brand part of the conversation and create a fully immersive shop page to showcase products. Product Drops will be launching, which will be another feature of Twitter Shopping.

Currently being tested in other countries, Twitter Notes could become a feature in which people can share more information than just a standard tweet.

LinkedIn Updates

Again, LinkedIn seems to be focusing on content creators with a lot of their updates. A new audience analytics feature comes to LinkedIn. We now have more data, more insights and more features. We also have access to new post analytics if your account is in ‘creator mode’- the more data you have, the more you can optimise your marketing. Further, LinkedIn is also encouraging the joining of groups that can increase your engagement and reach. This could increase exposure and engagement according to LinkedIn, so it will be interesting to see how this affects our results.

Also, LinkedIn has a ‘Lead Gen’ form to make lead generation easier on the platform and for you to be able to store contact and campaign information in one place.

The ability to have hashtags and mentions on LinkedIn articles is now available, helping your content reach a more specific and relevant audience. The platform has also launched new follower growth tools in creator mode. Product showcases are available and also newsletters that people can subscribe to. Suggested people are now provided based on what they talk about. So, it is recommended that you optimise your own profile by adding these features to your account, so you come up higher in the search.

LinkedIn Live audio events are an interesting addition going forward. It launched a few years ago but now it has been developed and you can comment on the event before, during and after. So, you can get conversations going and increase engagement.

Finally, the ‘repost’ button is now a feature. You can either share with a comment or repost the original post in a cleaner way, without having to add a comment. This would be a good feature for employees sharing company news.

Instagram Updates

Instagram’s full-screen feed view is coming. This will completely change the experience and will look very similar to TikTok. It will be an interesting change and we are looking forward to seeing what happens with stories as some of the insights seem to remove the story feature. This update will be optimised for the use of Reels and now swipe-able stickers and 90-second durations are two of the newest updates for Reels. Pinned posts are another feature that has been added to Instagram, which is important for demonstrating how our grid looks and what objective we are currently speaking about.

Photo remixing has been added to Reels and there has certainly been a focus on adding imagery in video format, with many creative routes. In Facebook Creator Studio, Reels can be edited and trimmed. This expands the creative ability of the platform and allows us to schedule reels in advance.

Instagram’s creator marketplace is now available for influencers and brands. Similar to other platforms, there is now a place to go to work collaboratively with brands and influencers all in one app.

TikTok Updates

TikTok’s analytics have been updated and improved. There is a new completion rate feature and a more in-depth analysis of other engagement rates. The completion rate is important for content creators to monitor.

For TikTok lives, users can now subscribe to lives which only furthers the community feel of TikTok lives. WooCommerce has integration on TikTok feature for those who use TikTok shop, and we can now see TikTok playlists. It is available to everyone, no matter how many followers you have. This is great for users to know what kind of content you create and for people to find older videos easily. TikTok stories have been rolled out to all users, but it is still quite niche. It will be interesting to see how TikTok further develops stories and how they are presented in the feed.

Templates have now been updated and so static images can be combined with videos in a creative way and is a great way to add pictures to your TikTok account in an easy and less predictable way.

Snapchat

Snapchat has added the option for shared stories, which enhances the community and collaboration feel that many of the platforms are striving towards currently.

Pinterest

Pinterest now provides the feature to idea pin ads. These are similar to stories and people can now advertise on these.

Takeaways

So many new and exciting features and interesting statistics this month! As always, we look forward to seeing how people use this information and any further updates in the future. Our main takeaways include:

  1. LinkedIn’s ‘Creator’ profiles are becoming far more useful
  2. YouTube Shorts is beginning to take the battle to TikTok
  3. Meta is doubling down on creator monetisation
  4. Social commerce is now ubiquitous across all platforms
  5. Collaborations will be key to future growth

Luan and Andy will be back sharing another summary of recent updates on 29th September. Book your place at the next Lighthouse Social Summit, here.

Tinisha Osu is a Marketing Executive with two degrees in Psychology. She is the first-author of a published psychology paper and is beginning her career in marketing through blog-writing, creating social media content and running marketing campaigns.