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…

LinkedIn to Shut Down Their Stories Feature from the End of Next Month

Sometimes you can have too much of a good thing, right?

Following Twitter’s decision to abandon its social stories project ‘Fleets’ last month, LinkedIn is now also moving away from its LinkedIn Stories experiment.

As explained by LinkedIn:

“We introduced Stories last year as a fun and casual way to share quick video updates. We’ve learned a ton. Now, we’re taking those learnings to evolve the Stories format into a reimagined video experience across LinkedIn that’s even richer and more conversational. We want to embrace mixed media and creative tools of Stories in a consistent way across our platform, while working to integrate it more tightly with your professional identity.”

As a result of this, LinkedIn Stories, in its current form, will be removed at the end of September and they will also be sending a notification out to Page Admins.

Among its key learnings from its year-and-a-bit old Stories project, LinkedIn says user response has shown that:

• Users want their Stories-like content to live on beyond the 24 hour window, and be available on their profile
• Users want more creative tools to make engaging videos across the platform

As a result, LinkedIn will incorporate these two elements into its next video project, which it will now develop in replacement of the Stories product.

LinkedIn hasn’t provided any details beyond that, but with its acquisition of how-to video platform Jumprope earlier this month, it seems likely that LinkedIn will be looking to develop more professional showcase video tools for user profiles, providing another way to present quick insights, skills pointers and more, in a more creative, engaging way.

Instagram Will Now Require Users to Enter Their Birth Date as Part of New Protections for Youngsters

Instagram is taking the next steps in its effort to better protect younger users, in line with coming regulatory changes, by asking all users who’ve not previously entered their date of birth to do so in the app.

As explained by Instagram:

“We’ve been clear that we want to do more to create safer, more private experiences for young people. To do that we need to know how old everybody is on Instagram, so we’ve started asking people to share their birthday with us if they haven’t shared it previously.”

As you can see above, the new prompts will ask users to add their birthday, which, if ignored, will eventually see users blocked from the app until they add in the required information. Instagram says it will show the new prompts ‘a handful of times’ before implementing restrictions on usage.

In addition to this, Instagram will also begin asking for people’s birth date info when displaying warning screens on posts, as another measure to get users to enter their age.

That will essentially force all users to input their age info, which Instagram can then use to better manage and protect younger users from unwanted exposure in the app.

A good step? Let us know what you think!

TikTok Announces ‘TikTok World’ Showcase Event for September 28th

TikTok is certainly the social platform of the moment, with its never-ending stream of light-hearted video clips providing entertainment for an increasing amount of users around the world, with the app continually leading the download charts and rising to become a genuine competitor for Facebook and Instagram.

So what’s next for the platform? Can TikTok continue to innovate and evolve in line with user expectations, and actually become real, significant, ongoing competition for the big players in the space?

We’ll get more of an idea of this next month, when TikTok hosts its first ever ‘TikTok World’ showcase event.

The event is likely to give us a preview of what’s next for TikTok. The full details of the program schedule have not been released at this stage, but we certainly recommend adding this to your diary!

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