Social media updates and new features to know this week
Including Meta, Facebook, TikTok and more.
Hello social strategists and welcome to another week! There are plenty of new tools to discuss, including Facebook’s nickname option and Threads’ new profile summaries. Let’s check out how these features can improve your social game.
TikTok
TikTok just launched a new program called TikTok Foundry. It’s built for “venture capital and private equity firms,” allowing them get extra help from TikTok when boosting ads.
With Foundry, these firms can get up to $15,000 in matched media to help jump‑start ad campaigns, one-on-one support from TikTok ad experts for strategy guidance or help with ad ideas, and early access to new ad tools and beta tests. It will also offer educational resources, webinars, and chances for special exposure or co‑marketing.
Meta
Meta is making its AI‑powered advertising tools part of the standard workflow. Instead of having to opt in to extra features, its Advantage+ AI tools are now being merged directly into the everyday ad‑creation process. For new ad campaigns, these options are now on by default, per Meta.
This allows advertisers to get more help from Meta’s AI without any extra setup. It can suggest where to spend your budget, which audiences to target and where to place ads.
Meta says these AI-driven features are significantly better and more efficient than earlier versions and far more likely to help campaigns perform well.
Facebook is rolling out a new feature that lets people use a nickname and a custom avatar when posting, commenting or reacting in groups instead of their real name.
That means if you join a group, you could show up as the nickname you pick rather than your full name for that group only. The nickname option must be enabled by the group admins but it could give members a bit more privacy and flexibility when commenting or sharing.
Threads
Threads is testing a new feature that uses AI to generate short interaction summaries on user profiles. So when you visit someone’s profile, even if you don’t know them well, you might see a quick summary of what that person posts about, what their interests are and a recap of your past interactions.
The idea is to make it easier to understand someone’s activity and interests at a glance, kind of like a TLDR for their profile, per app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi. You can see what this looks like here.
Threads also now lets users create group chats with shareable links. When starting a new chat, users can choose “Create with link” to generate a link that others can use to join. Users can also generate a link for an existing group by going to the three-dot menu and turning on the “Invite link” option.
Only admins can create these links, but anyone who gets the link can share it with others.
X
X has updated its algorithm to show users more relevant content.
The platform is now using Grok to sort the Following feed by what it predicts users will find most engaging rather than showing posts in chronological order.
This means that when users open the Following feed, posts are ranked based on relevance and predicted interest, considering past interactions and the accounts they follow.
Courtney Blackann is a communications reporter. Connect with her on LinkedIn or email her at [email protected].
