Welcome to Rose Media’s monthly social media round-up for July!
The launch of Threads
The launch of Meta’s new text-based conversation app, Threads, has been the main talk of the social media multiverse throughout July, having achieved over 100 million sign-ups within its first week of launching. Threads is a direct competitor for Twitter – or as it has now been rebranded as, ‘X’ (more on that later) – and has been in the works since the beginning of 2023. Current features are much akin to those of Twitter, including posing text-based updates with a 500-character limit, interacting with the ‘threads’ of other users through likes, replies and reposts, and sharing images and videos (up to 5 minutes long).
With the app still in its infancy, several features are still ‘missing’, such as a trending page and an editable alt text function (and no emojis! *shocked face*). However, some insider documents were subsequently leaked almost a fortnight after Threads’ launch, revealing upcoming features that could be released for Threads. Interestingly, these features include ‘Trends & Topics’ (no telling as to what that could mirror…) and ‘Messaging’. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri had previously stated that there were no immediate plans for a direct messaging feature to be added to Threads, but as these upcoming features are based on feedback from creators, this would suggest that DMs have been highly requested and therefore caused Meta to backtrack on their original plans.
The user engagement for Threads has plummeted by a dramatic 70% since its boom post-launch, but the proposed introduction of these new features seems to be a careful plan by Meta to keep users returning to the app and hanging around for the next big feature.
Twitter rebrands to ‘X’
Following on from Threads waging war on Twitter, Elon Musk has now embarked on a huge rebrand of Twitter. Since Musk’s takeover in October 2022, Twitter suffered a loss of over 50% of its advertising revenue, most likely due to a large increase in hate speech across the platform. In a bid to rejuvenate Twitter against the shiny new heights of Threads, Musk has scorned the iconic blue bird in favour of a white X logo on a black background (albeit this is currently only on the desktop version of the site; the mobile app is yet to catch up) paired with a new name of simply ‘X’, to tie in with Musk’s latest project, parent company X Corp.
Musk is planning to create a ‘super app’ with X, seemingly hot on the heels of Asian trailblazers WeChat (a social media platform with a whole wealth of services, including messaging, mobile payments and video gaming), however, critics have labelled Musk as ‘playing an enormous game of catch-up’ and have dubbed the rapid rebrand as a mistake, citing security concerns and audience loyalty as potential reasons.
TikTok Text Posts
TikTok has also now joined the rivalry against Twitter / X by launching its own text post format. This new feature joins the popular options of video and photo posts and is equally as customisable, with a 1000-character limit to play with and many additions such as sound, backgrounds, stickers and more.
YouTube Embracing New AI Features
YouTube is moving with these current times of AI tools becoming increasingly popular with creators, and has introduced its own AI-powered tool to suggest video titles to creators. This tool works based on the description of the video and the transcript of the content. This is one of many updates to the YouTube Studio interface recently, tailoring a more intelligent platform for creators to easily upload quality content.
Snapchat Q2 Success
Snapchat has recently released its Q2 performance report, detailing an increase of 14 million daily active users within the quarter, taking it to 397 million DAU. In addition, Snapchat reported a record amount of active advertisers in Q2, with an increase of over 20% and improved advertiser retention in comparison to last year’s Q2. Snapchat have also teamed up with Linktree, allowing creators to link their Snapchat profile via their Linktree page.
