Welcome back to this week’s TEAM LEWIS Social Round-Up. I know, I know, we’ve been away for a while, apologies, but we’re back now with all your social news.
This week, in news that won’t surprise anybody, Instagram is officially growing faster than Facebook. It’s also offering to edit your Reels and then trying to get them onto your television. Meanwhile, X wants businesses to unleash chatbots into your DMs while Musk still insists he doesn’t want bots taking over the platform, Meta has agreed to some pretty significant restrictions for teenagers, and Bluesky has introduced the wonderfully anti-social option of asking the algorithm not to make you viral.
Let’s get into it 👇
Latest News
📈 Instagram continues to pull away from Facebook
Meta’s latest EU reporting shows that Instagram is continuing to grow considerably faster than Facebook. No surprise here, personally, I feel like this has been happening for a while. But now it’s official. Instagram reached 297 million active users across the EU in the first half of 2026, compared with 264 million for Facebook, whose usage has remained relatively flat and even declined during some previous reporting periods. Maybe people finally got tired of Brenda complaining in the local Facebook group.
It’s another useful reminder that while Facebook remains enormous, the centre of gravity inside Meta continues to shift towards Instagram, particularly when brands are chasing attention rather than simply audience scale. Instagram is now closing in on 300 million European users, while Facebook increasingly feels like the platform you absolutely cannot ignore but probably don’t excitedly mention first in the brainstorm. 👉 Read More
🛡️ Meta agrees to major new restrictions for teen users
Meta has agreed to pay around $18 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 US state attorneys general over claims its platforms were deliberately designed to encourage addictive behaviour. As part of the agreement, under-18s will face a default two-hour daily limit across Facebook and Instagram, alongside overnight restrictions, notification limits and more control over algorithmic feeds.
Obviously these are great steps, but the bigger question is whether this becomes a blueprint for social platforms more broadly. Meta is already encouraging TikTok and YouTube to adopt similar measures, while governments around the world, including Australia, continue pushing for tougher rules around young people’s social media use. For marketers targeting younger audiences, this is increasingly becoming something to plan around rather than an interesting policy debate happening somewhere else. 👉 Read More
✂️ Instagram will now make your first Reel edit for you
Instagram has launched First Draft, a new Reels tool that automatically takes multiple clips, trims pauses, selects useful sections and assembles them into a basic first edit. Creators can then rearrange or change everything afterwards, with the idea being that Instagram does the annoying first bit and you take it from there.
That could be genuinely handy for social teams sitting on mountains of footage and slightly less enthusiasm for turning all of it into Reels. Instagram says Reels now account for around half of all time spent in the app, so anything that lowers the production barrier matters. It won’t replace an editor, but it might replace 25 minutes of staring at seven nearly identical clips wondering which one is marginally less awkward. The Social Round-Up video is always one clean take, obviously, so sadly it’s not going to help us out here. 👉 Read More
🤖 X launches business chatbot accounts
X has launched an API allowing brands to build dedicated automated accounts inside X Chat. Businesses could use them for things like customer service, bookings, order queries or status updates, with bot profiles clearly labelled as automated and linked back to the company that owns them.
The slightly funny part is that Elon Musk has spent years talking about getting rid of bots on X, and now X is formally inviting brands to build some. To be fair, these are labelled, useful bots rather than fake engagement farms, but there’s still something beautifully X about declaring war on bots and then launching a bot product. For brands, though, it could make DMs a much more useful customer service channel. 👉 Read More
📺 Instagram wants Reels on your television
The Social Round-Up is coming to a TV near you soon. Yep, Instagram is actively promoting its connected-TV app, with a new campaign showing creators watching Reels together, following workouts and viewing food and travel content on the big screen. Instagram for TV is already available across Amazon Fire, Google TV and Samsung Smart TVs, as Meta looks for ways to turn traditionally solitary scrolling into something people might actually do together.
It’s another sign that the line between social video and television is becoming wonderfully meaningless. For brands, it potentially changes how you think about framing, pacing and production too. A Reel that looks perfectly respectable on a phone may feel considerably more homemade when it’s suddenly stretched across a 65-inch television in someone’s lounge. 👉 Read More
🦋 Bluesky introduces an anti-viral button
Bluesky has added an algorithmic opt-out that lets people stop their posts appearing to non-followers in its main Discover feed. It came just after the platform expanded support for longer videos, giving users both more ways to create content and more control over how widely that content travels.
It’s a genuinely interesting counterpoint to almost every other social platform, where the underlying product promise is basically “PLEASE ENGAGE WITH THIS.” Not everyone wants maximum reach. Niche communities and lower-pressure posting could become an increasingly valuable differentiator as mainstream feeds become ever more optimised, commercial and AI-filled.
Not going viral is something I’ve been great at for years. Now I have a legitimate reason for the boss. I pressed the anti-viral button. 👉 Read More
🔧 Quick Tip of the Week
If you regularly shoot events, interviews or behind-the-scenes content, keep more of your raw footage than you think you need.
Tools like Instagram’s First Draft make it increasingly easy to turn existing clips into quick social edits. A reasonably organised archive of usable footage is becoming a content asset in its own right, rather than a folder called FINAL_FINAL_USE_THIS_ONE.
✨ Campaigns We Love ✨
🎵 Spotify wants you to steal its posters
Spotify’s latest Fan Life work turns the time-honoured tradition of music fans nicking posters into the media idea itself. The outdoor posters have perforated sections designed to be torn off and taken home, with signed versions hidden among them. It’s lovely because the audience isn’t being asked to invent some weird new behaviour to participate in the campaign. Spotify has simply taken something fans already do and made it part of the idea. 👉 Please do steal the advertising
🍔 Burger King removes the terrible burden of choosing a burger
Burger King UK marked National Burger Day with a Decision-Free Drive-Thru, temporarily replacing the menu at one London restaurant with a single three-burger Burger Buddies box. It’s a beautifully simple idea built around decision fatigue and the apparently enormous mental challenge of choosing lunch. Sometimes the best customer experience innovation is simply taking the menu away. 👉 Don’t think. Just eat the burgers.
🗓️ Mark Your Calendars
Opportunities to celebrate this week
- Thursday September 3 – Skyscraper Day 🏙️
- Saturday September 5 – International Day of Charity ❤️
- Sunday September 6 – Fight Procrastination Day ⏰
- Tuesday September 8 – International Literacy Day 📚
And next…
- Wednesday September 9 – Teddy Bear Day 🧸
- Thursday September 10 – World Suicide Prevention Day 💛
- Saturday September 12 – Chocolate Milkshake Day 🥤
That’s a wrap for this week!
Apparently Instagram can now edit my Reel and put it on the television. If it can also present the Social Round-Up while maintaining believable eye contact, I may finally be in trouble.
See you next week, bye 👋
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