Social Media Industry Round-Up #21: TikTok Auto-Scroll Mode, Paid Blue Checkmarks for Instagram, Boost Option for Tweets & Google’s Bard

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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New TikTok Features Coming Soon: We’re beyond excited about some of the latest updates TikTok has announced: 

• Edit post button: No need to delete and re-upload a clip when you spot a typo in the caption. 
• Save videos without a watermark: Looks like TikTok finally listened and decided to allow users to download the clip without a watermark, so it’s easy to repurpose for other platforms. 
• Auto-scroll mode: A handy feature for those who want to enjoy the content without moving a finger.

Updated 'Promoted' Tools on TikTok: TikTok has launched four new Promote tools to help drive discoverability. These tools will help brands and marketers: 

• Drive visits to their TikTok page 
• Get more messages from potential customers
• Boost other creators’ content
• Target audience by location

New Filters on YouTube for Searching Comments: Creators will be able to filter comments by response status & content type to make it easier to find active discussions within a comment section. 

More Metrics in YouTube Studio: There will be an upgraded stacked bar chart display for the ‘How Viewers Find You’ so it’s easier for creators to see where their viewers come from in a more simplified and visual way. 

Meta is Exploring Paid Blue Checkmarks: After Twitter released the Twitter Blue subscription, other companies like Meta saw it as a business opportunity. 

Meta has still not confirmed this update, but reverse engineer, Alessandro Paluzzi, found a new mention on the Facebook and Instagram codebase, which he later shared with TechCrunch.

TESTING - Boost Option for Tweets: Twitter has launched an in-stream boost option for tweets, which would be an easy way to promote a tweet without launching a campaign in ads manager. 

TESTING - Search Tweet Likes: The company is also working on a new feature to search who has liked a tweet, which would give users more insight into who is interacting with their content. 

Google Announces ‘Bard’: After ChatGPT announced a paid subscription and that Microsoft is currently looking into integrating the platform into Bing, Google announced they’re working on a similar platform called ‘Bard’. 

‘Bard’ will be a conversational AI service which will provide ‘fresh, high-quality responses’ via information sourced across the web.

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