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’s Rolling Out an Option to Share Feed Posts With ‘Close Friends’ Only

Instagram’s rolling out a new option to share feed posts with Close Friends only, providing another way to facilitate more enclosed group engagement.

Similar to having the option to target your stories to your ‘close friends’ which was released in 2018, Instagram will now allow you to take more control over who sees your posts on your feed too.

As you can see below, posted by influencer marketing expert Lia Haberman, some users are now seeing a new ‘Audience’ selector option within the post composer flow, which enables them to share their feed post with ‘Close Friends’ only, as opposed to posting to their profile as normal.

Instagram has experimented with several other variations of private sharing, some of which have included ways to share posts with selected users, while you can also switch your profile to private to restrict your posts from public view. But this new option would make it easier to limit who can see your posts, with a direct prompt within the creation flow that enables you to activate this setting on a post-by-post basis.

Though as noted in the image, any selection you make on IG will not impact your Facebook audience settings when cross-posting.

As noted, the update aligns with the broader social sharing shift towards more private group engagement, as opposed to public posting. Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has repeatedly said that Instagram users now share way more content via DMs than they do in feed posts or Stories, and he and his team have been working to build in new features to link into this trend, including collaborative posts, post collections in chats, Notes, and more.

Sharing posts with close friends only is another step along this path, which could help users feel more comfortable about sharing more often, if they know that only a few trusted people will see that update.

It’s not a major change, and functionally, it’s not a big shift either. But it would provide another option to facilitate more enclosed group discussion, which could help IG lean into the latest behavioural trends.

Have you seen this update on your IG yet? Let us know if you’ve found it useful!…

‘X’ Improves on Job Posting Functions

X’s (Twitter’s) new job listings are reportedly seeing a good response, with “hundreds” of companies now listing open roles on their X profile, just two months after the option was first launched.

And now, X is looking to add more job functionality into the app, including job recommendations, new ways to share job listings, a centralised job discovery element, and more.

First off, this week, X has shared some new concept images of job sharing options that’ll be coming soon to the app.

As you can see above, X will soon enable auto-populated job display listings within DMs, posts, and in communities, whenever you share an X job ad URL.

That could facilitate further amplification of roles within the app, with the option to share in DMs and communities of particular note.

DMs are seeing increased usage over time, in all apps, as people move away from public posting, while sharing jobs into dedicated communities could help to highlight roles to more engaged users, based on their interests. It could be a good way to boost engagement with X’s job tools, and awareness of such, which could also help to get more businesses using the option.

Though there is a catch… Organisations do apparently have to pay $US1,000 per month to access job listings. So maybe we’ll stick to LinkedIn after all …

Can Threads Still Capitalise on Early Interest?

While Meta’s Threads app raced to 100 million members in less than a week after its initial launch, setting a new growth record, it’s dropped off significantly ever since, with the app now sitting on 128 million users 8 weeks out from its full release. That means that’s its only added another 28 million members in seven weeks, at an average of 4 million per week, which is a huge decline from its early hyped rise. (stats taken from Quiver Quant).

And it’s worth bearing in mind those figures are members, not active users of the platform. Threads has a big advantage in this regard, because it’s been prompting Instagram users to create an account, with an easy, streamlined account creation process linking the two apps. But its actual user numbers are a lot lower, with the latest third-party reports indicating that Threads is now serving just 10 million daily actives, down from a peak of 49 million in July. Threads’ average session time is also down to just 3 minutes.

For comparison, X currently has around 250 million daily actives, with an average session time of 25 minutes.

So does that mean that the dream is over, that Threads is done for, and that we should all just accept that nothing will ever surpass Twitter, now X, for real-time engagement? Watch this space!…

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