Lucy Hall
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Latest articles by Lucy Hall
100 free resources for social media marketers30 Oct 2026I love a free resource. Especially when it saves me time, helps me make something better or gives me a useful answer without booking a demo first.
Social media advice: post less, post more, be yourself, but make it look effortless30 Oct 2026I opened social media for five minutes and came away with a complete content strategy, three new anxieties and the strong feeling that I’m already doing it wrong.
The Best Social Media Marketing Events in New York for 2026–2730 Oct 2026Six New York events for social media, creator and influencer marketing professionals in 2026 and 2027, from SocialDay Forum NYC and Social Fresh to Social Media Week and Creator Economy Live East.
LinkedIn's hiring data shows social media marketers are filtering themselves out of 113% more roles29 Oct 2026LinkedIn Pulse launched with data showing members listing AI literacy are 78% more likely to get hired, but only 4% of marketers have added the skill. The gap is now the barrier.
YouTube's Shorts Series turns scroll into binge as creators build 60-second episodic shows29 Oct 2026Microdramas hit 6.5 billion views in the first half of 2026, and YouTube has given creators the infrastructure to turn Shorts into serialized TV. The shift gives social media marketers a blueprint for narrative campaigns that extend engagement beyond single-hit posts.
Twitch will now distribute streamers' clips to Instagram and YouTube through partners, shifting who controls off-platform growth29 Oct 2026Recaps Spotlight hands clip distribution to unnamed third parties, marking Twitch's first systematic push to promote creator content beyond its own walls. The change is opt-in, Partners-only for now, and raises as many questions as it answers.
Meta's Forum admin tools won't stop you running a bad group, but they will expose how much work you were avoiding29 Oct 2026Forum's new AI post tagging, shared calendars and compound moderation rules put real-time collaboration infrastructure into Facebook Groups admin. The catch: they surface exactly how much manual triage the platform was already expecting admins to do.
How to Get the Most From SocialDay’s Social Media Marketing Forum New York29 Oct 2026Practical tips for SocialDay's Social Media Marketing Forum New York: bring your questions, connect in the event app, make time for Meet the Experts and keep the conversation going.
Substack's podcast sponsorship play brings subscriptions and ads into one closed loop29 Oct 2026Dynamic ad insertion, IAB-certified downloads, and community tools now live under a single platform login. For podcasters who already run a paid newsletter, the pitch is stack consolidation. For sponsors, it's targeting newsletter audiences that already pay.
LinkedIn's job-title targeting reaches Google's CTV buying platform as programmatic routes multiply28 Oct 2026LinkedIn has made its CTV ad inventory available through Display & Video 360, giving DV360 buyers access to professional targeting without leaving Google's platform. It's the fourth programmatic route in 18 months, and it signals where LinkedIn thinks the B2B CTV budget is actually held.
YouTube partners with Bloomsbury to turn ACOTAR's book launch into a branded fandom activation28 Oct 2026The platform ships a custom Shorts quiz, Starfall progress bars and BookTube creator content to mark the sixth ACOTAR novel. The playbook works for any IP with an existing fan base.
YouTube revamps channel memberships for microdramas as views pass 6.5 billion and APAC growth hits 70%28 Oct 2026YouTube is rebuilding the membership experience for episodic Shorts after microdramas surpassed 6.5 billion views in the first half of 2026. The shift gives creators a subscription path that competes with microdrama apps charging viewers per episode.
LinkedIn Hiring Pro cuts six hours a week from small business recruitment, but the filtering happens before candidates see the role28 Oct 2026LinkedIn's AI hiring agent saves time by sorting applicants and drafting job posts. The efficiency gain is real, but it also means more roles are being screened by an algorithm that decides who gets through before a human looks.
Live Nation launches Creator Nation with funding to acquire creator management firms as Forbes list breaks $1 billion26 Oct 2026Live entertainment's biggest player is betting creator infrastructure is the next asset class worth consolidating. The timing is no accident: the top 50 creators just collectively earned over $1 billion for the first time.
Bluesky ships direct profile links as TikTok tightens the gate26 Oct 2026The platform is giving creators a straight line to other accounts and payment platforms just as competitors close those routes. The timing reveals where the leverage sits in 2026.
Instagram's Professional Dashboard is free, accurate, and ignored by most creators26 Oct 2026The platform hands every creator real-time audience insights, competitive benchmarking, and post-level attribution at no cost. The problem is not access. The problem is that most creators have not opened it in weeks.
Instagram Rings 2026 judges reveal what the platform actually values in creators, and follower count isn't on the list26 Oct 2026Donatella Versace, A$AP Rocky and Chloé Zhao will select 50 winners based on four criteria that override reach. The judging panel itself is Instagram's roadmap for what brands should look for when creative risk matters more than scale.
Pinterest opens premium inventory to programmatic buyers as revenue growth slows26 Oct 2026The platform launches Programmatic Deals across Amazon, Google and Yahoo DSPs, moving high-intent discovery inventory into the automated channels where brand budgets are already committed.
X shifts algorithm to reward dwell time over likes, forcing brands to rethink post length and format23 Oct 2026The platform now predicts how long users will spend on content and prioritises posts people read to the end, making lightweight engagement tactics obsolete.
Discord's 1GB upload ceiling quietly raises the floor for brand community infrastructure23 Oct 2026Discord's October 22 update adds right-click organisation and markdown previews, but the doubling of Nitro upload limits from 500MB to 1GB signals the platform is building toward serious brand asset sharing, not just gamer convenience.
Snapchat launches cross-device AI that works without the glasses, signalling ambient computing beyond the app22 Oct 2026SPECS Intelligence is Snap's first standalone AI service, available on iPhone and Mac from day one. The move positions personal context, not hardware, as the real platform play.
YouTube beats TV and movies as Gen Z's top storytelling platform, but 73% won't cast the influencers brands are paying for22 Oct 2026UCLA's Teens and Screens Report shows 72.9% of 10 to 24 year olds rank YouTube as the best medium for storytelling, yet only 16.8% would cast an influencer in a leading role. The gap between where audiences find stories and who they want in them forces brands to rethink how YouTube creator partnerships actually translate to other formats.
Meta confirms 200GB storage tier for Edits Plus but withholds pricing and rollout date22 Oct 2026The subscription will bundle cloud project syncing with expanded AI assistant access, but Meta still hasn't said what it costs or when creators can actually buy it.
Twitch's Stream Recaps hand brands a solution to the sponsorship reach problem, but only if they rethink campaign timing21 Oct 2026Twitch's new clip-driven recaps place stream highlights in followers' mobile feeds after broadcasts end, fixing a structural problem: most communities never see sponsored segments live. The change shifts when and how brand content delivers value.
Pinterest's CMO just told marketers to stop chasing attention. The platforms built on it are the reason why.21 Oct 2026Claudine Cheever's "intention over attention" argument reframes how performance should be measured on social, but the real test is whether brands can stop optimising for the metrics that fund the entire industry.
Meta's GenRecs tokenization solves the cold-start problem advertisers didn't know they were paying for21 Oct 2026Meta's new semantic tokenization approach replaces per-item ad IDs with shared vocabulary tokens, eliminating the cold-start penalty for new products and cutting recommendation system memory by over 90%. The shift means your newest campaign inherits what the model already knows, rather than starting from zero.
TikTok's news audience has stopped growing as Facebook and Nextdoor pull younger users back to local content21 Oct 2026TikTok's share of Americans who get news on the platform stayed flat at 20% in 2026, while its core 18 to 29 demographic dropped four percentage points. The shift exposes a plateau brands should have seen coming and signals a broader realignment towards proximity over virality.
YouTube tests burying the dislike button on standard videos as platform quietly dismantles negative feedback signals21 Oct 2026YouTube is testing hiding the dislike button inside the three-dot menu on long-form videos, mirroring the pattern that preceded removal on Shorts. For social marketers, it's another data point disappearing from quality assessment and another reminder that platform feedback systems are built for platform goals, not yours.
Meta suspends Muse sharing after 6,800 conversation links surface through DNS records21 Oct 2026Researchers found shared chat links by searching public DNS logs in a single query. The flaw exposes how AI sharing features can leak what you're discussing before anyone opens the link.
YouTube's 50MB playlist image limit removes the last technical barrier between brands and programmatic content organisation21 Oct 2026The YouTube Data API now accepts playlist thumbnails up to 50MB, a 25x increase that mirrors September's video thumbnail update and closes the gap between what the platform interface supports and what scheduling tools can automate.