Upcoming Social Media Updates That We All Should Know This Week

Social media platforms are almost constantly updated for better user experiences,  well at least that’s what the platforms intend to do, but often those updates can further decrease engagement for social media marketers and up-and-coming creators. According to SproutSocial, 80% of digital marketers rely on increasing social media engagements across all platforms as their number one strategy. Below, we have listed down a few upcoming social media updates of 2021, let us know what you think of those updates below!

1. Instagram: Auto-captions

Instagram is testing a new feature of auto-captions in Stories. With the introduction of this feature, instead of stopping and typing out whatever you’re talking about in your recording, you can have the text type itself out by just adding the “Captions Sticker” to your video.

Plus points to Instagram for making the platform more inclusive for its users, definitely!

But, viewing this from a Pakistani perspective, would such a feature be able to detect a Pakistani accent or various languages from around the globe?

2. Facebook: Is it the new Clubhouse?

In February 2021, the New York Times reported that Facebook is building a Clubhouse rival. New screenshots of a Facebook audio product that is still under development exhibit what is seemingly a live audio broadcast experience, which appears to be more like an extension of the app’s existing Messenger Rooms, rather than a separate independent app. Though, it was later confirmed by Facebook that the screenshots are just an example of what the extension could look like and not the final image of the product.

What is necessary to note, though, is that Facebook views Clubhouse as enough of a competition to recreate its feature entirely under Facebook’s guise, much like its recreation of Snapchat Stories and TikTok through Instagram Stories and Instagram Reels.

3. Twitter: Assessing Reactions

In the 11 years that I have been using Twitter, I can say with surety that any Twitter update has always been followed by outrage, even if the update itself wasn’t bad and deserving of at least a bit of praise. Especially when Twitter replaced stars (favorites) with hearts (likes), and recently when it introduced Fleets, i.e. Twitter’s version of Stories. Currently, the app is considering the potential of upvotes and downvotes, and emoji-style reactions for tweets. Throughout the month, Twitter has been surveying users in order to get feedback on whether they would like a broader set of emoji-style reactions, very similar to those of Facebook.

Other than that, the platform is also assessing a way for its users to signal their likes or dislikes towards a tweet, with either green up arrow and red down arrow icons, or with thumbs up or thumbs down, much like Reddit’s up and downvote feature.

If Twitter does take these steps, it would definitely make tweets more engaging, and users would get an honest reaction from their followers. But to think that they would receive, and also appreciate any constructive criticism, is questionable.

So what do you think? Should these apps go ahead with these updates? If not, why? And if there’s something missing from those updates, what would you want them to add further to these features? Share with us what you think!