Social Media Industry Round-Up #83: TikTok Fights Back, Meta Enhances AI Capabilities, IG New Features and More!

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

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.

Listen To This Week's Social Media Updates on Have You Herd!

This week, we talk about TikTok's response to its ban, new AI tools on Meta, new interactive features on Instagram and how they'll affect our social strategies... As well as a few bonus updates 👀

Watch on YouTube, Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

TikTok Fires Back at U.S Government

TikTok has filed a petition in U.S federal court seeking to overturn the 'unconstitutional' ban.

TikTok says that the bill is based on speculation about the possible threat posed by the app and nothing more, with senators failing to articulate any legitimate cause for concern.

Meta Launches NEW AI Creation Tools for Facebook & Instagram Ads

Struggling to produce variations of your ad creatives? Here's an addition you might like to see.

• You'll be able to generate full image variations based on your original ad creative. 
• You'll also be able to use the same process to expand your visuals to better suit multiple surfaces. 
• Updates to its ad text variation feature, which will begin to learn your brand's tone of voice from previous campaigns.
• Finally, you'll be able to create text overlays for your ad content with a range of fonts to use.

YouTube Simplifies Ad Campaign Creation

YouTube is launching the ability to create ads within YouTube Studio rather than having to use the more advanced Google Ads setup.

It'll ask you about your goals: more engagement, video views or website visits.

A simple structure that we expect to be used in a similar way to Boosted Posts or Spark Ads to grow channel engagement and subscriber count, rather than performance-based objectives.

But you'll need to have a channel with 1,000+ subscribers to be able to utilise this new feature.

TikTok Shares Insights Into the Role It Plays In Product Discovery 

A new study conducted by Material has found some interesting findings about how users discover new products on TikTok. Here are some key stats:

• Weekly TikTok users are 1.3x more likely to say ads on TikTok lead them to discover new products/brands vs. ads on other social platforms.
• 45% of users continued searching for more information on the platform after discovering something on TikTok.
• 29% of users came to TikTok to specifically search for a brand or retail account on the platform.

Instagram Adds Four New Interactive Sticker Options 

With more sharing activity happening over private DM's than ever, Instagram wanted to release new features to encourage more and maintain in-stream interactivity. The four options are:

• Add Yours Music: users will be able to reply to a story with a song, providing another engagement option.
• Polaroid Frame: turning your photos into an old-school-like photo.
• Reveal Sticker: specific stories will only become visible when a user sends a DM to the creator. 
• Cutouts Sticker: a feature that has been available for some users since January that enables you to create a sticker from any element in a photo.

Want to hear our thoughts on the updates?

Listen to this week's Have You Herd podcast episode on YouTube, Spotify & Apple. Thanks for reading... and listening!

Jack,

Co-founder @ The Social Shepherd