Instagram head Adam Mosseri is teasing upcoming generative AI features for the social app that will allow creators to “change nearly any aspect” of their videos using text prompts. The editing tools will be powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model, and are expected to launch on the social network sometime next year, Mosseri said […]
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Threads is introducing a new way to reshare photos and videos on its social network. Instead of quote-posting the original post and then adding commentary, Threads users will instead be able to click a new option, “Use media,” allowing them to just reshare the photo or video directly to a new post where they can […]
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For every illegal drug, there is a combination of emojis that dealers and consumers use to evade detection on social media and messaging platforms. Snowflakes, snowfall, and snowmen symbolize cocaine. Love hearts, lightning bolts, and pill capsules mean MDMA, or molly. Brown hearts and dragons represent heroin. Grapes and baby bottles are the calling cards for codeine-containing cough syrup, or lean. The humble maple leaf, meanwhile, is the universal symbol for all drugs.
The proliferation of open drug dealing on Instagram, Snapchat, and X—as well as on encrypted messaging platforms Telegram and WhatsApp—has transformed the fabric of illegal substance procurement, gradually making it more convenient, and arguably safer, for consumers, who can receive packages in the mail without meeting people on street corners or going through the rigmarole of the dark web. There is no reliable way to gauge drug trafficking on social media, but the European Union Drugs Agency acknowledged in its latest report on the drivers of European drug sales that purchases brokered through such platforms “appear to be gaining in prominence.”
Initial studies into drug sales on social media began to be published in 2012. Over the next decade, piecemeal studies began to reveal a notable portion of drug sales were being mediated by social platforms. In 2021, it was estimated some 20 percent of drug purchases in Ireland were being arranged through social media. In the US in 2018 and Spain in 2019, a tenth of young people who used drugs appear to have connected with dealers through the internet, with the large majority doing so through social media, according to one small study.
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Meta’s social network Threads is experimenting with a feature that will let you schedule posts, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said. Users who will get to test this feature won’t be able to schedule replies. “We want to balance giving people more control to plan their Threads posts while still encouraging real-time conversations,” he said. People […]
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Instagram has quietly rolled out the ability for users to schedule direct messages. The Meta-owned social network confirmed to TechCrunch on Monday that the new feature is rolling out to all users globally. The option to schedule DMs will be especially useful for creators and brands that want to schedule outreach messages at optimal times. […]
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Twitter alternatives — new and old — have found audiences willing to try out a newer social networks since Elon Musk took over the company in 2022. Mastodon, Bluesky, Spill and T2 are some of the social media platforms people are among them. So is Meta’s Threads platform. What is Threads? How do you create […]
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Nearly half of teens in the U.S. are online almost constantly, and the platform they’re using the most is YouTube, a new study from the Pew Research Center has found. The Center reports that 46% of teens say they’re online “almost constantly,” and 90% of teens it surveyed said they use the Google-owned video platform, […]
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Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads on Wednesday were all experiencing issues to varying degrees as a result of a global outage affecting Meta’s apps. The cause of the outage is not yet known, but Meta has acknowledged a “technical issue” in a post on X. The company at 1:48 p.m. ET wrote, “We’re aware […]
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A U.S. appeals court has overturned a decision in an antitrust lawsuit against Meta, which was filed in in late 2021 by the long-shuttered social app Phhhoto. In court, the startup alleged that Meta violated U.S. antitrust law by copying its core features and suppressing competition. U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto in 2023 granted Meta’s […]
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Instagram is officially rolling out “trial reels” to give creators a way to test out new content by publishing videos that don’t appear to their followers. The feature, which launched in testing in May, allows creators to experiment with new ideas and see what performs best without having to worry about how their followers may […]
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A change to Meta’s developer tools is impacting third-party consumer apps that had previously integrated with Instagram. Among those affected by the changes are the Match-owned dating apps Tinder and Hinge, which had allowed their users to link their Instagram profiles to their accounts to display their posts to potential matches. Day One, the journaling […]
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Dan Whateley/Business Insider.
Social platforms have spent years trying to get Americans to buy stuff from videos, posts, and livestreams. That bet seems to finally be paying off.
The 2024 holiday sales from social media — driven by TikTok Shop and influencer affiliates, among other factors — show how far social shopping has come in the past five years.
TikTok Shop, which had its official wide launch in the US in September 2023, reported $100 million in single-day US sales on Black Friday this year, triple what it drove in 2023. Americans viewed over 30,000 TikTok shopping livestreams that day, with one creator picking up $2 million in sales from a single session.
The company's holiday gold rush didn't come easily. TikTok and its owner ByteDance have spent years investing in its e-commerce business, even as competitors like Instagram have pulled back on shopping features.
TikTok began testing out social-commerce features in the US as early as 2020 when it let creators add shopping buttons to some videos. It began rolling out its more advanced product, Shop, in the US to a group of merchants and agencies in November 2022 after testing in other markets like the UK. It's since built out its own order fulfillment program, enlisted hundreds of outside partners to train merchants and creators on how to sell in-app, and recently began connecting creators with manufacturers to build their own products.
TikTok likely wants to replicate some of the success of its sister app in China, Douyin, which drives hundreds of billions in sales annually, often via influencer livestreams. While TikTok's numbers are comparatively small, the company has made a ton of progress this year, social-commerce executives told Business Insider.
Max Benator, the CEO of the social-shopping agency Orca, said he expects to hit just under $100 million in total gross merchandise value, or GMV, in 2024 across the company's clients, a roughly 10X increase from 2023.
"We've now been on TikTok Shop since the very beginning, and we've seen successes gradually and consistently increase month over month," Benator told BI. "The numbers are serious."
Outlandish, a TikTok Shop agency that recently opened a livestreaming hub in Santa Monica, said its Shop sellers earned $48 million in US sales in November, up from $20 million in October. The company is betting that live shopping will continue to gain traction in the US, as it has in more mature social-commerce markets like China.
"It's QVC on steroids," Outlandish's founder and CEO William August told BI.
Amanda Perelli/Business Insider.
TikTok Shop's holiday performance was impressive for an e-commerce newcomer, but its business remains a small piece of overall holiday sales.
Total online Black Friday sales in the US hit $10.8 billion this year, up about 10% from 2023, according to Adobe Analytics. Online sales in the US between November 1 and December 2 reached $131.5 billion, and hit $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday alone.
Retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Target continue to dominate much of online spending, but social-media influencers and other affiliate marketers are playing an increasingly important role in driving purchases on those platforms.
About 20% of US e-commerce revenue on Cyber Monday arrived via affiliate or other promotional links, a 7% year-over-year increase from 2023, per Adobe Analytics.
Outside TikTok and affiliate marketing, other influencer-focused platforms are also reporting meaningful sales volume this year. Live shopping platform Whatnot said in November that it had surpassed $2 billion in year-to-date livestream sales, for example.
When TikTok and competitors like Instagram and YouTube first began testing e-commerce features in the US, not all consumers were psyched.
Social media is for entertainment, not shopping, some said. Amazon and other big retailers have long dominated e-commerce, and changing consumer habits is a challenge. Instagram backpedaled on its shopping product last year, removing its Shop tab in February 2023 and eventually partnering with Amazon for its in-app shopping strategy.
But TikTok kept charging forward with social shopping. It enlisted an army of agency partners and livestream coaches to accelerate the adoption of Shop and flooded its feed with videos of creators hawking goods in exchange for a commission.
TikTok's owner ByteDance was likely behind the company's determination to make social shopping work as it sought to bring Douyin's success to TikTok.
Dan Whateley.
Now that live shopping and social commerce are beginning to take hold in the US, TikTok and ByteDance's push into the category is paying off (though it all could fall apart if TikTok ends up being banned in January due to a divest-or-ban law).
"This is the year that we've seen the real beginning of live shopping in America," said Julian Reis, the CEO of SuperOrdinary, a social-commerce agency that's worked with TikTok and Douyin. "With TikTok, we've had the first real foray into building an ecosystem that ties in entertainment and live shopping together, and a full-service ecosystem that brings in the creators, the affiliates, the products, the brands altogether."
Days after Meta admitted that it’s been over-moderating its content, with mistakes impacting creators, the company announced an expansion of a new policy that will help to keep creators from being penalized after their first time violating Meta’s Community Standards. On Thursday, Meta said that the policy, which launched in August for Facebook creators, will […]
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Instagram Threads, Meta’s competitor to Elon Musk’s X, is testing a way to make your replies to others’ posts less visible on the platform. The company is adding a new privacy feature that allows you to customize your profile to remove the tab that displays your replies. This leaves only the two tabs that show […]
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Meta is updating its Broadcast Channels feature on Instagram in an effort to make it easier for creators to collaborate with their followers, the company announced on Wednesday. Up until now, viewers could not respond to a creator’s post in a Broadcast Channel, and were limited to emoji reactions. Now, the company is giving creators […]
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Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta’s investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usage even further. So to make sure it will […]
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Xavier Lorenzo/Getty Images
A splintered social media world is on the horizon — and it's paving the way for a new, more authentic breed of influencer.
"People are just trying to find authentic communities," Eric Wittman, CEO of photo-editing app VSCO, told Business Insider.
Wittman pointed to Reddit's surge in users and skyrocketing earnings as an example. Bluesky's user base has also risen in recent weeks to 21 million, and Mastodon is seeing more modest growth, with about 90,000 new sign-ups this month, according to its CEO.
In a white paper published earlier last year, Chand Rajendra-Nicolucci, who researches digital public infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said there's a reboot taking place.
He believes that will include the rise of "very small online platforms" that host the kind of intimate conversations that are lacking on today's major platforms.
"It will create a lot more fragmentation in the market," said Wittman. "It's going to be more interest-driven and more community-driven, which I think is healthy."
Audiences appear to be more discerning. Some are getting cynical about sponsored posts and bored of being sold to, especially when products or brands don't align with their values.
For example, TikTok can feel like a pseudo-shopping channel where every other video seems to be an ad.
Kate Smoothy, an SEO specialist and the founder and director of Webhive Digital, is also a content creator with 47,000 TikTok followers. She told BI she only partners with brands that she believes in because she values her audience's trust.
"As soon as you lose that trust, you may as well kiss the whole content creator thing goodbye," she said.
Smoothy said she sees things changing, with different "tiers" of content creators emerging from the industry's oversaturation. The top ones will have prioritized their community and built trust with their audience.
"Ultimately, the 'lower down' creators will struggle to establish themselves or pivot as the industry adapts to new platforms and changes in trends," Smoothy said.
Lucy Edgerley, the head of influence at the global social media agency Born Social, told BI that Gen Zers, in particular, are craving creativity, entertainment, and inspiration.
Some may choose alternative platforms like VSCO, Bluesky, and Mastodon over the major players of Instagram, TikTok, and X.
Others are following their favorite creators to subscription services like Substack or Patreon.
"Platforms like Pinterest, which foster ideas-driven content, are thriving because they align with this demand," she said.
Wittman said that 57% of VSCO's user base is between the ages of 18 and 24, and the app is seeing a million new sign-ups a month. He pointed to the lack of ads on the platform — none if users opt for the paid service, which starts at a monthly fee of $2.50.
"We are very restrictive on who can advertise on our platform," Wittman said. "When we do these brand partnerships, we want to make sure that it's a brand that kind of suits our principles and philosophies as well."
Young people who have grown up with social media are learning the lessons about the dark side of it — the mental health toll, the bullying, and the over-consumerism — the hard way, he said.
"They're looking for healthier places to go to where they're not feeling manipulated," he said.
Not everyone sees it this way. While newer platforms such as Threads and Bluesky are reporting impressive numbers, Kim Murray, the founder of the influencer marketing agency Virality Boost, told BI that many influencers are likely to stay put with what they know.
"Most creators find it challenging to build and maintain audiences across an ever-expanding array of platforms," she said.
Audiences are already more selective than they used to be, she added, so influencers will have to evolve wherever they are, regardless of their follower count.
"This shift signals a transformation rather than an endpoint," Murray said. "The real opportunity lies in how influencers adapt to meet this heightened selectivity by focusing on distribution strategies that deliver genuine value to both audiences and brands."
Wittman said the bar has been raised, and he sees a move toward "intellectual influencers" emerging, where people gravitate to creators who offer something unique.
"They actually want experts," he said. "They want it to be fun, and they want it to be creative. They don't want just some crazy infomercial."
Edgerley agreed we're witnessing a shift. Despite the success of YouTube shorts and TikTok, long-form storytelling is on the rise, she said, suggesting users want deeper engagement rather than endless scrolling.
"Ultimately, it's about meeting audiences with humor, inspiration, and substance," she said. "Not just ads."
