OLIVER Social Update - 13th December
Hello! Last week the GTA 6 trailer became the most watched video in 24 hours on YouTube ever, and it’s got the gamers in our office very, very excited. Although dropping a trailer for something and revealing it’s coming in 2025 is as cruel as Zuck and Elon teasing us that they’d fight to the death in a cage and never going ahead with it…
In this week’s edition, we talk about how Threads is getting on, look at Instagram’s trend forecast for 2024 and assess Strava’s move for (fitness) world domination.
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Threads - a temperature check
What is it? 🤔
It’s almost been 6 months since Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter/X, launched. But, with Meta finally getting past privacy regulations and planning to roll out in the EU, potentially leading to millions of new users, we thought it was time to check in on how the platform is actually doing.
Not that well, it seems.
Threads has finally rolled out Topic Tags - their version of hashtags - responding to community feedback that the platform made it difficult to spark conversations around latest events. As of earlier this week, the most popular tags are still people appearing to test the new feature, rather than anything useful or insightful:
We’ve not seen a huge amount of large accounts or brands take advantage past an initial test post to see if it worked.
The numbers aren’t looking great either. Threads has 10.3 million daily active users and a daily active time of just 3 minutes. While Twitter doesn’t release daily active user numbers, Threads’ monthly stat of under 100 million is dwarfed by X’s 556 million monthly users (and 32 minutes daily time spent).
We also ran our own mini poll to see if our social team and brands are using Threads. The results showed that 38% create Threads content for brands, but only 13% actually use it personally.
Why is this important/ what does it say? 💡
Sometimes we feel like we have to be present on every new platform. But in the case of Threads, is it worth the investment? We’re still not sure.
With X in its peak Elon Musk era, Threads has a real opportunity here to take the social conversation crown. Only time – and more promising app updates – will tell if it manages to get it.
Are you using Threads for your brand? Leave us a comment:
- Holly Whitecross, Senior Social & Content Manager 👩🏻
Instagram is talking trends
While other platforms look back on the creators, songs, and trends that defined 2023, Instagram is setting its sights on the future. In their recently published Trend Talk, Instagram partnered with WGSN to share results of a survey looking at Gen Z trends across the US, UK, Brazil, India, and South Korea.
So, will we get a sneak peak at what 2024’s ✨girl dinner ✨ could be?
The report dove deep into seven categories including fashion, beauty, social media, dating, friendships, and more. Let’s take a look at our key call outs:
Share less, not more: Gen Zers are prioritising “meaningful connections” on social, saying they plan to use it to keep up with their friends and family.
This comes to no surprise to us as we’ve been seeing over the last couple of years that younger generations are increasingly sharing less online publicly and more private, enclosed group interaction.
A close second for Gen Z being on Instagram was to stay on top of trends (Fashion, Music, Tech)
Beehive get into formation: fandoms are here to stay! With 75% of Gen Z saying they belong to a fandom online – the post popular globally are: TV shows, anime, musicians, and video games.
2024 will be Gen Z’s ✨growth era ✨ self-improvement and development for the year ahead are top of Gen Z’s lifestyle priorities.
Gen Z’s top three priorities for 2024 are to “stay healthy” (work out regularly, eat healthy etc.), explore a career path, and travel.
Taking action on the issues is important to Gen Z, who will be making the most of 2024 by: “educating yourself/others,” “voting,” and “using social media to spread awareness.”
And finally, their Ick List:
🍝 Chewing with their mouth open
🤣 Bad sense of humor or taste in memes
💅 Dirty fingernails
🍼 Uses baby voice
❌ Follows their ex on IG
While some of these trends follow the trajectory of 2023, we can take some interesting insights for planning social for next year. You can read the full report here.
Other platforms have also released their 2024 trends recently, including Pinterest and TikTok - keep your eyes peeled for future editions of this newsletter 👀
- Eireann Beardon, Global Social Lead 👱🏻♀️
Strava flexes its messaging muscle
What is it? 🤔
Strava, the fitness tracking platform popular with runners and cyclists, is launching in-app messaging and will let users send private one-to-one and group messages.
Why is it important? 💡
This is Strava’s big move towards becoming a true social network, with users being able to unify all communications around fitness into a single app. Adding messages to a pre-existing algorithmic feed, communities and friends means that Strava hope people won’t need to go to other channels like WhatsApp or Facebook to organise their club meet ups or social events.
A trend that we’ve noticed (and talked a lot about) since the pandemic is people shifting their time from the feeds on big social platforms and focusing more on niche communities based around their interests and passions: whether that’s separate platforms like Strava and GoodReads or groups within existing ones like #BookTok or r/movies. Platforms building out more functionality will inevitably encourage more users to spend more of their time in these apps.
If Strava are expecting people to spend more time in the platform, it will be interesting to see how they plan to monetise this eventually, and if brands will be able to access the messaging feature. Brands are already on the platform, like Adidas having a UK Running Club that runs events and provides a real life community, but the platform is noticeably free of advertising. Will Strava disrupt this sporting safe haven to make larger profits? We’ll be keeping an eye and handing out plenty of Kudos in the meantime…
- Nick Smith, Senior Social Manager 🧔🏻♂️
Shoutouts to my X…🤦🏻♂️
(our new weekly section with the latest goings-on at the platform formerly known as Twitter)
X are pitching advertisers to come back to the platform in “Q5” (post-Christmas to mid-January) - claiming that there is a “a surge of engagement” around certain tentpole moments, meaning “your brand can remain relevant to your audiences while driving maximum ROI”
One thing that may damage this charming of advertisers will be Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after running a public vote on his profile:
They’re also starting to roll out their AI chatbot, “Grok” to Premium subscribers in the US, which is designed to act as a “research assistant” with a “rebellious streak”.
- Nick Smith, Senior Social Manager 🧔🏻♂️