Social Media Updates: Threads App, Twitter Rate Limit, TikTok Watermark-Free Downloads, + More

So you’ve probably heard, but Instagram’s new text-based app, Threads, is the hottest thing on the market right now. With over 100 million downloads in just five days after launch, the app’s broken records that were previously held by the likes of TikTok and ChatGPT. While this is by far the most talked about industry news at the moment, there are also a few other key updates that you should know about. Here are July’s social media updates to help you create the best marketing strategy for your business.

Instagram Launches Threads App:

Instagram launched Threads on July 6, 2023 and as we mentioned above, it’s already making waves. Threads is an app for sharing text updates and joining public conversations. After logging in with your Instagram account, you can create posts up to 500 characters long with links, photos, and videos up to five minutes in length. 

While it’s too early to say whether or not it’s worth it to create an entirely new Threads social media strategy, we see it as a powerful way to engage your followers in deeper conversations. It’s a great opportunity to connect more intimately and build follower trust.

Twitter Introduces Rate Limit:

So while Meta has been working on Threads for quite a while now, there’s a lot of speculation that part of why they launched now was because of Twitter’s latest Rate Limit fiasco. On July 2, Twitter announced that they would implement rate limits to safeguard the performance and stability of the platform. 

These thresholds would effectively limit the number of posts a user can read per day to 10k posts for verified accounts, 1k posts for unverified accounts, and 500 posts for new unverified accounts. Unregistered viewers are unable to read tweets entirely.

While Musk says that these limits were put in place to protect the platform from extreme levels of data scrapping and system manipulation, because Twitter is a platform primarily used for the rapid transmission of news and ideas, a lot of users were frustrated with these new changes. It remains to be seen if these updates will stay in place or if they will revert back to original models in light of competition from Threads.

TikTok Testing Watermark-Free Downloads:

We’re all for working smarter so the fact that TikTok is testing watermark-free video downloads is music to our ears! If these changes launch publicly, we’ll be able to download and cross promote content across different platforms more efficiently.

Instagram Allows 3+ Collaborators On Posts & Reels:

Up till now, “collaboration” posts have been limited to two accounts. With these new changes, creators now have the capacity to include more partners on a single piece of content. This leads to greater engagement, cross-promotion, and creativity across their platform. This also makes it easier for advertisers to view organic insights directly from the platform.

So there are the most important social media updates of July 2023. Which of these was most exciting? Are you going to be using the Threads app? Let us know in the comments below!