Get Social: May Edition
Social media trends, updates and content ideas to fuel your inspiration
👋 Welcome back to Get Social!, your monthly newsletter designed to simplify the world of social media. Giving you;
The most important new social media trends, news and updates you need to know
Content ideas and inspiration to help fuel your creativity
Post templates to help you create content faster
Ready? Let’s do it.
The social media stats, trends and data you need to know
Check out the slide deck for all important social media data, trends and updates you need to know this month. Or, watch on-demand:
TL;DR
Here are the 6 key takeaways from all of the changes this month.
🤖 Generative AI tools are becoming ubiquitous across the social platforms. Expect to see many more features appear over the next few months. (More on this below ⬇️)
🙌 Collaboration is a big focus for Instagram. It’s awesome to see new tools that help us create content together. Remember to think beyond your feed - collaboration is often the key to social media success.
❤️ Instagram is making it easier to collect and work with User Generated Content (UGC). This type of content essential to grow our brands.
🤯 TikTok is shaping up to become the new Google. If you are a location-based business, TikTok’s new geo-tagging and review tools will be something worth considering.
📺 With YouTube’s growing user numbers and increasing smart TV audience numbers, it continues to be a strong, but underutilised platform.
🐥 Keep an eye on Twitter alternatives, like ‘BlueSky’ but often early ‘hype’ is just that.
Stat of the month
Time spent watching YouTube on TV’s now exceeds any other streaming service. 🤯
Consumption habits have shifted more towards watching YouTube on smart TV’s - meaning that it’s never been more accessible for small business to have their content shown in the living room of their target audience.
When you also consider that YouTube also has the broadest age demographics of any social platform, along with formats for both long-and short-form content, it really does look like a compelling platform to grow our audiences.
Tip of the month
Why TikTok ‘For You’ page has changed the whole social media landscape and what it means for you.
When we think of social networks, we think of our friends first. We follow people we like (mostly!) the resulting feed of posts comes from people you chose to follow, algorithmically prioritised as that network sees fit. That’s called a Social Graph.
Enter TikTok and their greatest innovation, the ‘For You’ Page.
Instead of scrolling a feed from accounts you follow, TikTok serves you content they think you’ll like based on your interests. This sort of algorithm is known as an Interest Graph. Who you’ve followed plays in, but the videos you like/share, comments you post, content you create, and captions/sounds/hashtags of content you engage with all contribute to what TikTok places in your feed.
This is the single innovation that made TikTok the fastest growing social media app ever and led to users spending 2x the amount of time on TikTok compared to Instagram.
As a result, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are now shifting towards algorithmic feeds based on interest graphs. This no longer means that those with the largest follower counts will always win - interest graph social networks mean that anyone has a shot at reaching audiences much wider than just your followers.
After years of declining ‘organic reach’, of us building our followers only to have our content seen by a fraction of them, TikTok has shown a new way forward - and it means that those who understand their audience and can make content that educates, inspires and entertains them will win.
Quote of the month
We’re going to see so many more AI features baked into social platforms, that on the face of it, look like they will help remove our creative block and help us tick the ‘post on social’ box.
But, (as with LinkedIn’s updates this month), having AI write our content is great for a first draft to get our creative juices flowing, it’s your unique insight that makes your content unique
I was reminded of this reading this quote - It’s our human imagination and unique perspective that makes our content special.
Social Media Post Inspiration
This link (which only works on desktop for now), will take you to the post inspiration library, hosted for free on Adobe Express, with over 25 post templates, of which you can use in the following ways:
🎨 Edit and download the post ideas you like
➡️ Create a free Adobe Express account and copy the whole library to your own account, so you can use these ideas whenever you need.
📅 Plan out your content calendar for the next month using the Adobe Express Content Scheduler and schedule each of these ideas to be published across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest with one-click.
Protecting your mental health as a social media creator
Whilst Jordan and I love social media for its ability to help us create new connections, build communities and grow our audiences, it can be a challenging to maintain a sense of balance and calm.
In the spirit of Mental Health Awareness Month, Jordan and I stepped away from our usual actionable social media strategies to have a more open conversation about the challenges that comes with spending a lot of time on social media and the coping mechanisms we use.
Hopefully you’ll find it helpful.
That’s it for this week, we so hope you found this useful 🙌
Don’t forget to share this newsletter with your friends 😊
We always love chatting about and helping on all things social media. Feel free to connect and message us at @jordandeneellis and @andyrlambert
Jordan and Andy