Features & insight
Features and insight
Expert analysis, reporting and long reads on the platforms, people and strategies shaping social media.
Instagram's photo comments and grid reordering mark the end of the read-only profile
Two features rolled out in June 2026 turn Instagram from a broadcast platform into a conversational workspace, forcing a rethink of community management workflows and how brands use their own content.
Snapchat's North America users are falling as its £1,600 AR glasses arrive
Snap posted 12% revenue growth in Q1 2026, but daily users in its most lucrative market declined for the second consecutive quarter. Advertisers betting on the platform's AR future need to know whether the audience will still be there when Specs ship this autumn.
Instagram's per-slide carousel captions rewrite the logic of visual storytelling
Brands and creators can now write unique captions for each of Instagram's 20 carousel slides, fundamentally shifting how multi-part narratives, tutorials, and product stories are structured on the platform.
Threads scales Live Chats with translation and co-hosts as it claims real-time ground X doesn't own
Meta expanded Live Chats access to all Community Champions on 30 June, adding built-in translation, up to three co-hosts, and message deletion. It's a text-based real-time format that X Spaces can't match, and Threads says hundreds of chats now run daily.
X's Custom Timelines hand brands a new segmentation problem disguised as control
X Premium users can now pin 75+ Grok-curated topic feeds to their home tab. For brands, that shifts the distribution battlefield from one algorithmic feed to dozens of audience-driven ones they don't control.
Threads hits 500m users, but Your Algo and Communities can't fix the discovery problem brands still face
Meta's text platform reached half a billion monthly users on 16 June and graduated Communities out of beta with a private feed control tool, but the infrastructure for brands to be found, not just followed, remains the weakest part of the proposition.
X launches native desktop livestream studio, cutting third-party software out of creator workflows
The platform's new Live Studio brings scheduling, thumbnails, chat controls and real-time analytics into Creator Studio itself, letting Premium creators broadcast without relying on OBS or Streamlabs and offering $1m in initial creator funding.
Facebook now pays creators up to $3,000 a month to post. Here's what they have to give up.
Meta launched Creator Fast Track in March with guaranteed monthly payments for TikTok and YouTube creators willing to post Reels on Facebook. The move intensifies the platform war for creator loyalty, but it's not about money alone.
Europe's social media age limit race creates enforcement nightmare for platforms
As 23 EU countries push ahead with conflicting under-15 bans, the bloc is hurtling towards a fragmented regulatory crisis before a special panel even delivers its recommendations on 13 July. France's law hangs on a Commission decision by 10 July, while platforms face the impossible task of enforcing 23 different thresholds across one single market.
Facebook's content planner and bulk Reels upload arrive as Meta squares up to third-party schedulers
Creator Studio's new calendar view and batch publishing tools give agencies managing client Pages a native workflow that finally rivals Buffer and Hootsuite. The question is whether it's already too late.
LinkedIn Creator Marketplace turns B2B influencer marketing into a searchable product inside Campaign Manager
Brands can now discover vetted LinkedIn creators by topic and audience inside the platform's advertising tool, while creators monetise through a new tab. The launch turns informal outreach into a managed, revenue-generating system.
Meta's paid subscriptions just made organic reach a pricing decision
Instagram Plus, Facebook Plus and WhatsApp Plus launched globally on 27 May, with creator and business tiers testing now. For the first time, reach and visibility sit behind subscription fees, not just algorithm performance.
Instagram now de-ranks TikTok reposts by up to 3x as AI fingerprinting forces marketers to rebuild cross-platform workflows
Instagram's 2026 algorithm uses AI fingerprinting to detect and suppress recycled content from other platforms, delivering up to 3x less reach for reposts. The shift ends the era of efficient one-video-everywhere strategies and forces a fundamental rethink of how social media marketers distribute content.
YouTube's Top Fans feature gates videos behind engagement, not payment
YouTube is testing a distribution option that restricts videos to the top 1% of a channel's most engaged viewers. Unlike memberships or Patreon, access is determined by watch time and interaction, rewarding attention instead of money.
Instagram's optional AI creator labels won't catch the people trying to deceive you
Rolled out 4 May, Instagram's new account-level AI creator badge is the first of its kind. But it's entirely voluntary, leaving the platform's biggest AI transparency problem completely unaddressed.
TikTok's follower-first algorithm is killing reach for creators with disengaged audiences
Algorithm changes rolled out in early 2026 now test videos on followers before pushing to the For You page, meaning creators with dormant follower bases are seeing reach collapse even when the content is strong.
Pinterest's Ask Pinterest app turns shopping discovery into a conversation. Brands need a new playbook.
Pinterest launched a standalone AI shopping app on 17 June that replaces keyword search with natural-language conversation, powered by its proprietary Taste Graph. For brands on the platform, the question is no longer 'are we findable?' It's 'are we conversational?'
Meta is set to overtake Google in global ad revenue for the first time. Here's what it actually means for social media marketers.
Emarketer projects Meta will pull in $243bn in ad revenue this year versus Google's $239bn, ending Google's unbroken reign at the top of digital advertising. The numbers are a forecast, not yet a result, but the trajectory behind them should reshape how marketers think about where budgets go next.
Social overtook TV as the world's biggest news source. Brand content just got a lot more complicated.
The 2026 Reuters Institute Digital News Report confirms what the trend lines have been promising for years: social and video platforms are now where most people on earth get their news. For social media marketers, that shift isn't just a media industry story. It rewrites the rules of tone, timing, and trust for every brand posting into a news feed.
Heineken's WhatsApp Bot Just Won the Social & Creator Grand Prix. Here's the System Behind It.
At Cannes Lions 2026, Heineken took the industry's top social prize for turning irritating voice notes into free pints. The mechanic is deceptively simple. The strategic logic behind it is one every social team should interrogate.
LinkedIn is testing topic-based suggested feeds at Cannes. B2B social teams should pay attention now.
LinkedIn is piloting a new suggested feeds feature with Cannes Lions attendees this week, surfacing posts by topic rather than by network. Backed by a March 2026 LLM algorithm rebuild, it's the most significant organic reach shift on the platform this year, and the implications for B2B social strategy are immediate.
Pinterest's 'Less URL, More IRL' Manifestival is the sharpest platform positioning play at Cannes 2026
While every other tech company at Cannes Lions is pitching AI tools and attention metrics, Pinterest has built a phones-down, hands-on beach activation that does something far more strategically interesting: it turns the platform's core product tension into a live brand argument. Here's what the mechanism actually is, and why brands should steal it.
Your LinkedIn brand page isn't showing up in AI answers. Your executives might be.
New Meltwater data, published May 2026 and amplified by LinkedIn itself, shows the platform has become the second most-cited source in AI chatbot answers for B2B queries. Three quarters of those citations come from personal profiles. For marketers still pouring resource into company pages, that's a strategy problem.
Cannes Lions 2026 tells the industry: showing your AI workings is now compulsory
The festival has introduced AI Craft subcategories across its craft-led Lions that require entries to prove AI genuinely changed the outcome, not just that it was used. For social teams making the internal case for AI-assisted content, Cannes just handed them the language to do it.