Social Media news, trends and updates for April
Social media data, trends, updates and content ideas to fuel your inspiration.
Hey friends, Andy here 👋
For the eagle-eyed amongst you, you’ll notice that the GetSocial newsletter has had a rebrand.
You can still expect your monthly debrief on social media news, trends and ideas - but with some added goodness. More on this below…
For anyone new here, this is your monthly newsletter designed to simplify the world of social media marketing. Giving you;
The most important new social media trends, data and updates you need to know
Content ideas and inspiration to help fuel your creativity
Tips to help you grow your brand online
Ready? Let’s do it.
View on web for the best experience.
📣 The social media data, trends and new features you need to know
Here’s the slide deck, giving you a network-by-network run through all of the most important updates you need to know for April.
TL;DR. These are the three themes that stood out to us over the course of last month.
1️⃣ Video content is only going to become more important. Instagram and Facebook Reels continue to grow (see below) and LinkedIn is making moves in the short-form video space too.
2️⃣ Platform growth is shifting and getting increasingly hard to stay on top of. It’s never been more important to make your audience your no.1 focus. Threads has just surpassed X for daily active users in the US, so there’s good growth here. But we need to take time to understand how our audiences are using these new platforms before jumping in.
3️⃣ LinkedIn is seeing great organic growth. Both usage and engagement rates continue to grow.
🚨 Stat of the month
The Meta copy-paste strategy for Instagram Reels is clearly paying off. Instagram’s push to short-form content was a direct result of TikTok stealing users’ attention away. At one point, the time spent on TikTok was 10x the time an average user spent on Instagram. And that’s not good news for Instagram.
The ‘time spent’ metric is an important one for social platforms, as the more time a user spends on the platform, the more ads that can be shown. And the more money the platforms make. 💰
Over the course of the last four years, Instagram has turned the situation around and now TikTok is plateauing and Instagram continues to grow. This means two things for us;
Reels (and short-form video in general) will continue to be crucial for us to maintain organic growth.
More people spending more time on Instagram will (hopefully) mean that organic reach will continue its upward trend.
📣 New feature of the month
Sticking with the Reels theme, Instagram is gradually rolling out the ability to upload 3-minute Reels. This follows TikTok’s pattern of gradually increasing the maximum length for uploads.
For us businesses, this gives us more creative freedom, but as we all know, we still need to ensure we capture attention with the right intro hook and design our content to keep viewers watching until the end. This is one of the most important engagement signals for both Instagram Reels and TikTok.
👉 Tip of the month
The social platforms rarely provide strategic guidance for marketers, but I stumbled upon this exception, from another very helpful social media newsletter.
Instagram shared three tips to help us maximise growth:
Consistency is crucial, posting at least 3-5 times per week (not including Stories) to ensure the algorithm pushes your content regularly.
Use 3-8 relevant niche hashtags in captions, not comments, is the recommended sweet spot.
The algorithm prioritises content with trending audio, though brands should legally stick to licensed sound collections.
No big surprises here, but then again it’s simple, actionable and achievable advice from Meta themselves, so I’ll take it!
🗞️ In other news…
So, to this rebrand thing.
SOCIAL 3.0 is the name of the best-selling book I published a couple of years ago and given that I’m supposed to be a marketer, I thought it best to link this newsletter with the book along with more tools and resources for businesses that want to grow through content and online communities.
The first resource is a content calendar with 50+ content ideas and an accompanying structure and strategy, ready for anyone to use immediately. It’s free and ungated, I hope you find it useful!
📬 See you next month!
That’s it for this week, we so hope you found this useful 🙌
Don’t forget to share this newsletter with your friends and join in our live stream today to run through all of the updates we’re making on Adobe Express to speed up social media workflows.
We always love chatting about and helping on all things social media. Feel free to connect and message us at @jordandeneellis and @andyrlambert
Made with ❤️ by Jordan and Andy
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