Social Media Industry Round-Up #89: TikTok’s New App, AI Avatars, Creator Insights for Brands & Threads API Launch

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 :)

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TikTok's New SECRET Platform, YouTube Beating Netflix & More Social Media Updates.

Coming up tomorrow at 12 pm BST, our CEO & social team discuss all of the marketing updates of the week, the reality of working on social and our controversial opinions on some platforms… 👀

TikTok’s New App.

Whee is TikTok’s new platform to share photos with friends and family. Essentially, another version of Instagram. 

TikTok said: “Capture and share real-life photos that only your friends can see, allowing you to be your most authentic self.”

According to the description & screenshots on Google Play, this platform is essentially a version of Instagram, where only friends can see and comment on a user’s pictures. 

It appears to be a soft launch, as the platform is only available to download on Android for ‘more than a dozen countries’.

Brand Avatars.

Symphony avatars are TikTok’s latest creative AI tool for brands.

TikTok said: ‘With 58% of TikTok users saying they are more likely to trust brands after learning about them from TikTok creators, avatars help scale and globalise branded content with a personalised, human feel and a wide variety of gestures, expressions, nationalities, ages and languages.’

There are two types of digital avatars: 

• Stock Avatars: Pre-built avatars created using paid actors licensed for commercial use.
• Custom Avatars: Crafted to represent a creator or a brand spokesperson with multi-language abilities, giving creators and marketers the control and power to scale their likeness and brand.

Commercial Music Library for Adobe Express.

TikTok has added 1M+ pre-cleared songs and sounds via TikTok's Symphony Assistant within Adobe Express. 

TikTok also provided some statistics to show the importance of adding music to content:

• 88% of TikTok users say that sound is essential to the TikTok experience
• 68% said they remember the brand better if they post a TikTok featuring a song they like
• 62% said they're more curious to learn about the brand that uses music

Earlier this month, Sony sued Marriot for unlicensed use of music (Beyoncé, Michael Jackson, and Harry Styles) on their social posts. This example serves as a reminder to agencies, creators and brands about the consequences of improper licensing.

Creator Insights for Brands.

Brands will be able to access creators' insights and find similar ones. 

This will be useful for marketers who manage influencer partnerships. However, we’ll have to wait and see whether it will be mass adopted by creators or not, as they’ll have to manually select to show their metrics or not.

Live Streams for Close Friends.

Instagram keeps working on more personal connections and Close Friends features. The latest update is Live Streams for the Close Friends list only. 

Music for Video Carousel Posts.

Users can now add music to carousels, even if these include a video frame. 

API Launch.

Meta has announced that Threads API is now available for all developers. This means that brands and marketers will be able to use third-party platforms to schedule, post and report. 

Meta said: “People can now publish posts via the A.P.I., fetch their content, and leverage our reply management capabilities to set reply and quote controls, retrieve replies to their posts, hide, unhide or respond to specific replies.”