Social media is forever changing which makes it easy to miss an update from time to time. Twice a month, we look into three of the latest key updates from the past few weeks from the various social media giants. Here’s what’s been happening recently…

Instagram Set to Remove ‘Shop’ Tab From Home Screen

Instagram’s UI looks to be getting an update, with a few minor tweaks to the app layout, and the placement of function buttons on-screen.

As you can see below, from February, the navigation bar at the bottom of the app will now have the shortcut for creating content in the middle, as opposed to the current Reels shortcut. The Reels button will shift to the right, while the Shop tab that’s currently in that spot will disappear.

Which is another indication, that shopping isn’t taking off as well as Instagram had hoped – though Instagram notes that it will still support its shopping tools after the update.

As noted by IG: “You’ll still be able to set up and run your shop on Instagram as we continue to invest in shopping experiences that provide the most value for people and businesses across feed, stories, reels, ads and more.”

What Are The Latest Twitter Updates?

A quick Twitter 2.0 update: Over the weekend, Twitter chief Elon Musk confirmed that Twitter will be bringing back its side-swipe option to switch between the algorithmic and chronological timeline later this week, with its update to the bookmarks UI to come next week.

Twitter has already shared examples of how both of these updates will look, with the former actually already being released early last year, before Twitter rolled it back because it annoyed people so much.

Twitter engineer Andrea Conway shared the image below of the updated bookmark button last week, which will get more prominent placement on the tweet detail screen.

In addition to these updates, Musk says that long-form tweets will also be coming in February. That, at least at this stage, will still see tweets displayed in their regular size and format in-stream, with a ‘Show more’ prompt at the end. That’ll provide an alternative to long tweet threads, and Musk is hoping that the capacity to share longer updates will get more creators posting more content to the app, instead of linking people off to other host sites.

Enough to keep you interested in using Twitter or has Twitter been removed completely from your social media strategy for 2023?

TikTok Adds New TV Show and Movie Tags, Powered by IMDb

TikTok’s adding a new option that will enable users to tag TV shows and movies in their uploads, with linkage through to IMDb for more info on that content.

As you can see in this example and above, soon, you’ll be able to select a movie or TV show to link to in your TikTok clips. That tag will then be displayed above the video caption, and will direct users to a dedicated page in the app which will display basic info about that content, sourced from IMDb, including release date, cast notes, etc.

Viewers will also be able to tap through to the full IMDb page if they choose, while they’ll additionally have the option to save that movie or film, essentially bookmarking it for later. Users will also be able to find a listing of other TikTok clips that have linked to the same show/movie, in order to glean more insight via TikTok clips.

Pretty cool huh? It’s a good way for TikTok to lean into the popularity of trending TV shows and films in the app, and provide more direct promotion of the source material – because often, people will post a random clip from a show, and it can be difficult to determine exactly what that snippet is from.

Want to be the first to the latest news in social media? Subscribe to our email newsletter and we’ll send the latest updates straight to your inbox every other week.