Welcome back to this week’s TEAM LEWIS Social Round-Up. Another week, another collection of social platforms finding increasingly inventive ways to keep us inside their apps for slightly longer than we intended.
This week TikTok would like you to leave voice notes in the comments, Reddit is letting AI do more of the advertising work, YouTube is tightening up branded content, WhatsApp is quietly continuing its transformation into an app for absolutely everything, and X is changing how it pays creators. Again.
Let’s get into it 👇
Latest News
🎙️ TikTok adds voice notes, polls and photos to comments
TikTok is giving its comment section a fairly substantial upgrade. Users will be able to leave voice comments of up to 60 seconds, creators can now run polls directly in comments, and people can respond with photos, including carousels of up to nine images. Voice and carousel comments are rolling out globally, while comment polls are already available to creators.
For brands, the interesting bit is the poll feature. Comments are already where a huge amount of TikTok culture happens, so being able to ask the audience a question without forcing them into a separate post could be genuinely useful for quick feedback, product decisions or simply getting people involved. The voice notes will presumably be used entirely responsibly. 👉 Read More
🤖 Reddit opens its AI-powered Max campaigns to everyone
Reddit has taken its Max advertising campaigns out of beta and made them available to all advertisers. The system automatically handles targeting, creative rotation, placements and budget allocation, with Reddit claiming early tests delivered 17% lower CPA and more than 27% additional conversions compared with standard campaigns.
It’s yet another platform essentially saying, “Give us your money and some assets and we’ll take it from here.” The useful part is that Reddit has also added asset groups, so marketers can still separate products and messages and see what is actually working. Automation is becoming unavoidable in paid social, but thankfully we’re not quite at the point where you just type “sell trainers” and go home. 👉 Read More
🛍️ YouTube gets smarter about shopping and sponsored content
YouTube is testing a system that can automatically show viewers a locally available retailer when creators tag affiliate products. At the same time, it’s updating its branded-content disclosure labels and giving creators more control over age and geographic restrictions on sponsored videos.
The local shopping bit is particularly sensible. There’s very little point watching somebody recommend a product beautifully if the link then takes you to a retailer that doesn’t exist in your country. For brands working with creators across multiple markets, this is another small move towards making influencer content behave more like proper commerce infrastructure rather than somebody sticking a link underneath a video. 👉 Read More
💸 X is changing how creators get paid
X has moved all US creator payouts from Stripe to its own X Money service. It comes as the platform also retires its existing Creator Revenue Sharing programme and moves creators onto its newer Original Content Rewards system, which puts greater emphasis on original posts. Creators outside the US will continue using Stripe for now.
It’s another piece in Elon Musk’s long-running plan to turn X into the fabled “everything app”. Social network, news service, AI company, banking product and whatever else gets announced next Tuesday. The more important lesson for creators is a familiar one. Building your entire business around whatever monetisation scheme a platform happens to offer today remains a slightly terrifying strategy. 👉 Read More
💬 WhatsApp would now like to pay your electricity bill
Meta has launched bill payments inside WhatsApp in India, allowing users to pay more than 22,000 providers across categories including electricity, water, insurance, credit cards and loans. People can already use WhatsApp in India for things like metro tickets and government services, so this pushes it even further beyond simple messaging.
The obvious comparison is WeChat, and Meta isn’t exactly hiding the ambition. For communicators and brands, WhatsApp increasingly needs to be thought of as more than somewhere you send customer-service messages. In some markets it is steadily becoming an entire customer journey, from conversation to transaction, without anybody ever needing to visit your lovingly redesigned website. 👉 Read More
👔 LinkedIn says Gen Z is becoming increasingly important to B2B brands
New LinkedIn research surveying more than 18,000 professionals and 6,000 marketers finds Gen Z is increasingly moving into workplace decision-making roles, while many still struggle to build the professional networks needed to progress their careers. LinkedIn says 44% see not having the right network as the biggest barrier to getting an entry-level role.
For B2B marketers, it’s worth remembering that “Gen Z marketing” no longer just means trying to sell somebody trainers on TikTok. The oldest members of the generation are now approaching 30 and increasingly influencing buying decisions at work. So perhaps we can finally stop every Gen Z strategy beginning with someone suggesting we “make it a meme”. 👉 Read More
🔧 Quick Tip of the Week
Start treating your comment section as content, not admin.
TikTok’s new polls, images and voice replies are another reminder that some of the strongest social ideas can come from what happens after you publish. Look through your best-performing posts and identify questions, jokes or recurring comments you could turn into your next piece of content. The audience has already done the research for you.
✨ Campaigns We Love ✨
🖊️ Parker turns a LinkedIn spec-ad challenge into real advertising
A designer posted an unsolicited anti-AI Parker Pen billboard idea on LinkedIn, it became a viral creative challenge, hundreds of people made their own versions, and Parker actually turned the winning work into real digital billboards in Times Square. It’s a brilliant example of a brand spotting an organic conversation, joining it without murdering it with twelve rounds of approvals, and rewarding the people who started it.
👉 Turns out commenting “great work!” wasn’t the only option
🚽 Sydney Water makes a soap opera about things you shouldn’t flush
Sydney Water has launched Pipe Dramas, a series of deliberately over-the-top vertical microdramas designed to teach Sydneysiders what not to put down the toilet. They use melodramatic characters, dubbing and ridiculous plot twists to turn a fairly unglamorous public-service message into something that actually resembles the content already taking over short-form feeds. A wastewater campaign inspired by TikTok soap operas. We live in extraordinary times.
👉 Flush the wipes, ruin the relationship
🗓️ Mark Your Calendars
Opportunities to celebrate this week
- Wednesday September 9 – Teddy Bear Day 🧸
- Thursday September 10 – World Suicide Prevention Day 💛
- Saturday September 12 – Chocolate Milkshake Day 🥤
And next…
- Tuesday September 15 – International Day of Democracy 🗳️
- Wednesday September 16 – International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer 🌍 & Guacamole Day 🥑
- Friday September 18 – International Equal Pay Day ⚖️
- Saturday September 19 – International Talk Like a Pirate Day 🏴☠️
- Monday September 21 – International Day of Peace 🕊️
That’s a wrap for this week!
I’m off to leave a 60-second voice note underneath a TikTok, let Reddit spend my advertising budget and then see whether WhatsApp will pay my electricity bill for me.
See you next week, bye 👋
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