Social Media News Round-Up: 10/12/21
This week’s social media marketing news at a glance:
Scroll down to read the full news stories
👾 Messenger adds new group AR effects
🔗 Instagram adds custom text option to link stickers
👻 Snapchat outlines new AR advancements for creators and brands
📢 Instagram ramps up safety and well-being features for young users
Messenger adds new group AR effects
Messenger has announced it is adding new AR effects to its groups. These effects can be applied to multiple people during video calls and include a royal crown and a retro recording display among others. Messenger has partnered with a range of influencers for the roll out of these effects, including King Bach, Bella Poarch and Zak King, in what could be a bid to win back younger users to the platform.
Instagram adds custom text option to link stickers
Instagram’s link stickers recently replaced the less accessible ‘swipe-up’ format, which has proved incredibly popular with users, creators and brands. Now, Instagram is allowing all users to write whatever they want in a link sticker on Instagram stories, rather than the text being automatically generated based on the URL. Along with a new range of colour options to choose from, this gives users more creative freedom to drive traffic to external websites in new and exciting ways.
Snapchat outlines new AR advancements for creators and brands
During the platform’s annual Lens Fest AR showcase event, which was hosted digitally this week, Snapchat shared a range of updates to its Lens Studio tool. These include advancements in the realism of the program, for example more AR creations reacting convincingly to forces like gravity and collisions, real-time data interactions, as well as a call-to-action link option.
Instagram ramps up safety and wellbeing features for young users
In response to the ever-growing concern about young people’s safety and mental well-being on the app, Instagram has introduced some new features. One of these features is a new parental control option to allow parents and guardians to set time limits for how long children can spend on the app, parents to see how long their child is spending on Instagram, and children to notify their parents when they report another user. The platform’s also officially announced the new ‘take a break’ screen time prompts which were spotted in testing early November.
