Social Media Industry Round-Up #99: New Instagram Fonts, Creating Your Own AI Voice, Instagram x Spotify & Other Social Media News

Every week, the Marketing team at The Social Shepherd puts together all the relevant industry updates in a round-up newsletter sent every Tuesday 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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How Brands Prepare For Peak Season.?

Listen to our Social team, discuss all of the marketing updates from the week, as well as everything you need to know as a brand to prepare for Black Friday, Christmas, and peak season…

Subscribe to our YouTube channel to be the first to watch!?

Meta Shuts Down Spark AI Studio.?

Meta has announced that its Spark’s platform, launched in 2017, will no longer be available as of January 14 next year. This means that AR effects built by third-party brands and creators will no longer be available after this date.?

However, effects owned by Meta will continue to be available to users across all Meta Apps (Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp).?

Although this decision might seem like a step backwards for the platform’s push on AR, Meta confirmed that this decision is part of their larger efforts to prioritise the products. We believe this might be due to other companies developing other AI & AR tools, and Meta wanting to differentiate themselves by investing more time on the Metaverse, AR glasses and other experiences.

Gearing Up For Peak Season.

If you still haven’t started planning for Q4, you might be running out of time.?

The peak season prep has officially started, and Google Merchant Center has launched some new tools to help businesses make the most of Black Friday & Christmas shopping.?

• New product trend insights: Will highlight key shopping search and purchase trends in the app.?
• Summaries of recent product performance: Will give you insight into the products that are gaining the most traction at any given time, as well as key trends that can help you prioritise your marketing efforts.?
• Conversational queries to Merchant Center reporting: This tool uses generative AI to translate a user’s request into a custom report that highlights their own performance data.?
• Improving its product availability notes on listings: New automated onboarding process, that’ll sync in-store availability from the website, and integrate it into the Merchant Center account.

New Fun Updates & Tools.

Instagram has launched a handful of updates for users to personalise their content across Reels, Stories and carousels.?

• Expanded fonts, effects, and animations, as well as a new simplified text tool for Reels & Stories.?
• New text and layering images, and the ability to add text and stickers to photos and carousels.?

This comes after Instagram announced the new carousel limit increased to up to 20 photos and videos in a single post.

Bring The Beat In.?

It’s clear to see that Instagram is gearing up to take over TikTok’s active users in case the US sell-off goes ahead. The platform has just announced some tests & updates centred around music.?

• Music on profiles: To showcase your taste in music (no auto-play). MySpace anyone??
• Music-sharing process via Spotify: Testing a new integration with Spotify that would enable IG users to continuously display the track that they’re listening to, via their IG Notes indicator.?

Create Your Own AI Voice.?

TikTok has created the perfect tool for Social Media Managers & creators who are tired of recording voiceovers for their explainer videos.?

The platform has just launched a ‘Create your own AI voiceover’ via CapCut, which lets you record a few lines so you can use your text-to-speech voice (private & only available to the original user) for future clips.?

What’s even better? You can translate your voice to other languages effortlessly to accommodate more markets.

Q4 Holiday Season Guide.

Q4 is around the corner and, if you haven’t started planning for peak season yet, you might be a bit late!?

TikTok has released a marketing guide to advertising this holiday season, which includes key trends and moments, insight into the full funnel, product and creative solutions.?

We also recommend listening to this week’s Have You Herd podcast episode, as we cover the most important things to keep in mind for Q4, as well as advice from our Paid, Organic and Influencer Marketing in-house experts.