Social Media Industry Round-Up #82: Instagram’s New Algorithm, Universal Music is Back, New Google Performance Max Features & Threads Bonus Program

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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EXPOSING The New Instagram Algorithm

In this week's episode of Have You Herd, Zoe, Lucy & Scott?talk about Instagram's new algorithm, how creators can benefit from these changes, new AI features from Google and Sabrina Carpenter... ??

TikTok & Universal Music Are Back!

TikTok has announced that it’s come to terms with Universal Music Group on a new multi-dimensional licensing agreement.

TikTok said that, with U.M.G, they’ll deliver improved remuneration for U.M.G.’s songwriters and artists, new promotional and engagement opportunities for their recordings and songs and industry-leading protections with respect to generative A.I.?

This comes after Universal pulled its music from TikTok back in February after failing to reach an agreement to renew music licensing on the platform.

Instagram Launches a NEW Algorithm

Instagram is updating its ranking systems to highlight original content from smaller creators.?

• This ranking change will give smaller creators more distribution
• It’ll replace reposts with original content in recommendations
• It will add labels to reposted content
• It will remove content aggregators from recommendations

TESTING - Trimming Reels for Stories

The platform is testing a new tool that allows users to choose which 15 seconds of a Reel to display when sharing it on Stories.

Technical Issues

Earlier last week, Instagram experienced a glitch in which some users lost thousands of followers. According to Instagram, ‘A technical issue resulted in Instagram accounts seeing an inaccurate loss of followers in their Account Insights, but total follower counts on profiles were not impacted. The issue has since been resolved, and follower metrics in Account Insights are now accurate.’

New Performance Max Features

To provide marketers with deeper insights into their campaign performance, Google has launched a few new features for its AI-powered Performance Max campaigns:?

• Customer lifecycle goals: Introducing new types to help marketers tailor their Performance Max campaigns and optimise towards acquiring and retaining the most valuable customers.
• IP exclusions: A new layer of control to filter out unwanted traffic.?
• Test & learn in real-time: To quickly and easily test optimisation strategies within a Performance Max campaign to see if these drive better outcomes.?
• Detailed demographics: Age and gender will appear alongside interest and behavioural data.?
• Budget pacing insights: To help marketers find more campaign optimisation opportunities.

Bonus Program for Threads Creators

Threads offers up to $5,000 bonuses for high-profile creators to post on the platform to boost engagement. Creators might be eligible if they reach over 10k views for a selected invite-only pool of creators.

Hidden Words & Notifications Controls

Threads is launching a new option for users to hide posts containing certain words from their feed, search, profiles and post replies. Also, the capacity to mute notifications from content interactions the user has done.