Social media updates and new features to know this week
Including Facebook, Snapchat, LinkedIn and more.
Welcome back, social friends! This week brings several updates to social ad campaigns, privacy options and managing time spent on social platforms. Let’s dig a bit deeper to see how these new social tools can help improve your strategy.
Private Facebook groups now have the potential to become public.
Admins of private groups can choose to convert their group to public, making new content visible to everyone to potentially increase discovery and growth.
Pastposts remain protected, however, according to Meta. Only those who were members before the change, plus admins/moderators, will still see the older content.
To ease the transition, Facebook also added safety features like a three-day review period before a group becomes public, notifications to all admins and group members about the change and visual cues, to signal when a post will be public.
Snapchat
Snapchat announced a deal with Perplexity AI to integrate Perplexity’s conversational AI search engine directly into Snapchat.
Starting in early 2026, Snapchat users worldwide will be able to ask questions in the app’s Chat interface and receive answers backed by verifiable sources.
Under the deal, Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over one year.
LinkedIn has updated its Professional Community Policies to clarify why some articles or images that violate its content rules may be allowed on the platform.
“There are rare times when content that violates our policies is educational or newsworthy enough that keeping it on the platform is in the public interest,” LinkedIn says.
These would be limited cases for content from medical procedures to images of war “shared for awareness or newsworthy purposes.”
All content on the platform is carefully reviewed before making a final decision, LinkedIn says.
LinkedIn also announced algorithmic changes to keep conversations on the platform more authentic.
In a post from Gyanda Sachdeva, VP of product management at LinkedIn, the company made it clear that “engagement pods” or groups where people coordinate likes and comments to boost visibility go against LinkedIn’s rules and the spirit of real conversation.
LinkedIn is therefore refining its algorithms and moderation tools to spot and limit this kind of inauthentic activity. You can watch the full explanation here.
Reddit has updated its Ads Manager.
When advertisers set up an ad campaign, the audience settings are grouped into two parts: Audience Suggestions, which shows where Reddit’s system can automatically find similar users, and Audience Controls, the filters an advertiser can choose that the system must respect.
Also, Reddit changed how custom audiences and demographic filters combine with the automated targeting. The ad can reach people who match either the manual audience filters or the automated suggestions, giving more flexibility.
WhatsApp is introducing usernames so people no longer have to share their phone numbers when someone contacts them. Instead, when users pick a unique username, people or businesses can find them by the screen name rather than a phone number.
At the same time, WhatsApp is adding a “Business‑Scoped User ID” or BSUID, for businesses. This means companies will get a new identifier that works whether or not a user picks a username, helping them communicate without relying on a phone number.
WhatsApp says the goal is to protect user privacy while still being able to network and connect with others. The update won’t take effect until “later in 2026,” per the app makers.
Threads
Threads has added time‑management tools to help users keep track of and limit how much time is being spent on the app.
In account settings, users will now find a screen that shows daily usage plus options to set a daily time limit and a sleep mode that can automatically cut usage or dim notifications during specific hours or days.
YouTube
YouTube is rolling out a set of updates to help creators and brands use the platform more flexibly. These include the ability to stream across different formats.
They’re also improving how users can see paid vs organic metrics to better understand what content is performing because of ads versus what’s working organically, saying, “This will empower creators to make data-driven decisions about how they want to grow their channel organically or use paid tools like YouTube Promote.”
Courtney Blackann is a communications reporter. Connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected].
