The month begins with a day to watch what you hear, read, and see, followed by World Autism Awareness Day and days to celebrate beer, siblings, and pets.
Those social media holidays just set the stage for the “big two” of Easter and Earth Day.
Social Media Holidays to Mark on Your Calendar
- April 1: April Fools’ Day
- April 2: World Autism Awareness Day
- April 7: World Health Day
- April 7: National Beer Day
- April 10: National Siblings Day
- April 11: National Pet Day
- April 20: Easter
- April 22: Earth Day
- April 23: World Book Day
- April 26: National Pretzel Day
Social Media Platform Updates
TikTok
Goodbye Creator Marketplace, Hello TikTok One
This is no April fool: TikTok will shutter its Creator Marketplace April 1 and direct brands and creators to TikTok One, which it described as a “more expanded experience” in emails to brands and creators.
TikTok One will continue to be a destination for brands and creators to connect, and creators will be able to access trend tracker points to the platform’s top trends, user-generated content, creators, hashtags, and songs.
Tips on topics such as using TikTok creative tools, ad products, and business accounts will be provided.
TikTok’s Video Generator tool is shutting down, with people being redirected to the platform’s artificial-intelligence-powered Symphony Creative Studio. Its Symphony Assistant lets creators summarize trends, create TikTok-native scripts, brainstorm ideas, and create TikTok-style videos using AI inputs. Captions, voices, music, and stickers can be added to videos, and they can be localized to other languages.
AI-powered Symphony features were also added to TikTok Ads Manager, letting brands generate ads with a small number of inputs and optimize those ads with suggestions from Symphony, along with making edits via other AI-powered features.
TikTok Means Business
The company shared a report by Oxford Economics, which found that 7.5 million U.S. businesses on TikTok employ more than 28 million workers.
Oxford Economics found that 4.7 million jobs in the U.S. benefit from using the platform: Over 3.1 million directly use TikTok in their work, either by creating content or managing accounts, while more than 1.6 million use the platform for tasks such as lead generation for sales teams, customer engagement for marketing, or user feedback for product teams.
TikTok said 74% of businesses that participated in the study credited the platform with helping them scale their operations.
Feeling Secure
TikTok introduced a new Security Checkup tool that gives users a single destination to review and update their account security settings.
Security Checkup can be accessed by clicking “Settings and Privacy,” followed by “Security and Permissions,” at which point users can:
- Add a phone number and email address so that they have a backup login method.
- Enable two-step verification when logging in from an unfamiliar device.
- See devices that are logged into their account and remove any that are unrecognized or no longer in use.
- Review suspicious activity on their account when flagged by TikTok.
- Use device-based authentication methods like Face ID or Touch Unlock for a secure and seamless sign-in.
Support for Parents and Teens
TikTok detailed several updates aimed at helping parents and teens craft the latter’s experience on the platform.
A new Time Away option within TIkTok’s Family Pairing feature lets parents designate specific times when their teens are blocked from using the application.
Another new Family Pairing option lets parents see who their teen is following on the platform, who is following them, and who they have blocked.
TikTok will add a feature in the coming months that lets teens who report videos simultaneously alert parents, caregivers, or other trusted adults.
Parents can re-enable TikTok’s STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) feed, which is available in over 100 countries, if their teens have turned it off.
Daily time limits for teens can be customized by parents, and TikTok noted that all users under 18 have a 60-minute daily time limit by default.
If a teen makes their account public, parents can switch it back to the default private setting.
Users under 16 who are on the platform after 10 p.m. will have their For You feed interrupted by TikTok’s wind down feature, a full-screen takeover with calming music.
Other TikTok News
- TikTok rolled out in-app experiences to mark the releases of Mayhem, the new album from Lady Gaga, as well as I Said I Love You First, the collaborative album by Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco.
- The company teamed up with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children to launch AMBER Alerts in the U.S., helping raise awareness of missing children among the TIkTok community.
YouTube
The Long and Short of Views
View counts for YouTube Shorts will increase following a change the Google-owned video platform announced.
Creators will now be credited with a view every time one of their YouTube Shorts videos begins a play or replay, instead of after the video is viewed for a certain number of seconds.
YouTube said it enacted this change due to feedback from creators, who wanted more insights into how often their Shorts are actually seen.
Following the change, YouTube Shorts metrics are now aligned with those used by TikTok and Instagram Reels.
Creators can go into Advanced Mode in YouTube Analytics to see the older metric, which can be found under Engaged Views.
YouTube Turns 20
YouTube Global Head of Music Lyor Cohen shared some milestones the platform has reached as it celebrates its 20th anniversary.
- YouTube now reaches over 100 countries in 80 languages.
- YouTube Music and YouTube Premium worldwide subscribers, including trials, topped the 125 million mark.
- For the second consecutive year, Nielsen ranked YouTube as the No. 1 streaming platform in watch time in the U.S., with more than 1 billion hours of content viewed on TV sets every day.
- YouTube Shorts tallies over 70 billion daily views.
Premium Lite
Following up on last month’s announcement, YouTube will roll out its Premium Lite pilot test to more U.S. users.
Premium Lite gives users a $7.99-per-month option to see most videos on the platform without ads, and the company said it will soon be extended to all users in Australia, Germany, and Thailand, where it has been running a pilot test.
Other YouTube News
- Brandcast 2025, YouTube’s annual Upfront presentation, will take place May 14 at Lincoln Center in New York. CEO Neal Mohan, Chief Business Officer Google President Sean Downey will be joined by creators and artists including MrBeast, Lady Gaga, and Brittany Broski.
- YouTube teamed up with the American Psychological Association on a guide for parents regarding healthy screen habits for teens.
Creator Marketplace Updates
Instagram updated its Creator Marketplace with AI-enabled creator discovery and content recommendation tools, as well as new creator insights for businesses.
Personalized, AI-enabled creator content recommendations for brands were added to the Partnership Ads Hub in Ads Manager.
Creator recommendations in Creator Marketplace are now based on a creator’s affinity to a brand, helping brands predict which creators will be the most effective in driving results for an upcoming ad campaign.
Keyword search was added to Creator Marketplace to provide more granularity for brands searching for a creator partner, letting them search for terms such as “soccer moms with dogs,” “gluten-free desserts,” or “gadget unboxing.”
Other new Creator Marketplace features include:
- Creator cards with playable Reels: Surface playable Reels on creator cards to show relevant reels content.
- Easier creator engagement: For creators who opt in, businesses can now more easily contact a match using the creator’s direct email.
- Experienced creator badges: To help brands better understand the experience a creator has with both branded content and partnership ads, badges will be shown on the profiles of creators who have previously run partnership ads.
- Active partnership ads: A creator’s current partnership ads will be shown on their creator profile to help brands better understand their approach to content and the types of brands that creator supports on Instagram.
Finally, Instagram is expanding Marketing API (application-programming interface) support for partnership ads to make it easier for brands to run creator marketing campaigns alongside their business-as-usual ads.
Double Time
Instagram users can now view Reels at double their actual speed by long-pressing on the right or left side of their screen.
TikTok had already offered this feature, as both platforms started out with videos limited to 15 seconds in length before enabling longer-form fare to be shared.
A More Personal Threads Experience
Instagram added personalization controls to its stand-alone Threads app.
The platform is testing a way for users to add up to 10 topics to their biography so they can share their favorite communities and interests, and tapping on those topics will direct people to related conversations.
People in the test group will see prompts to add a suggested trending topic or one related to previous posts they have shared.
The timely topics tag in Threads was redesigned to make it more prominent in users’ For You feed.
Threads users can now choose to allow replies and quote-posts only from followers.
Instagram said it is easing its approach to political posts on Threads and phasing civic content back into the app in a more personalized way.
Users can now personalize the order of their feeds.
Finally, the video player in Threads was updated with pause, play, and skip buttons, as well as a pinned progress bar enabling users to easily move backward or forward.
Other Instagram News
- Instagram had been testing a School Partnership Program with the International Society for Technology in Education and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, and that program is now rolled out, letting educators report potential teen safety issues, including bullying, directly to Instagram.
Meta
Talking AI at ShopTalk
Meta used ShopTalk 2025 as the kickoff point for one week’s worth of updates to help marketers hone their strategies on its various surfaces.
Omnichannel ads, which enable advertisers to show ads that highlight nearby locations to people most likely to shop in-store, are being extended to more advertisers.
New AI-enabled optimization Shops Ads works with Advantage+ sales campaigns to show ads to people that the company’s systems predict are most likely to make a purchase using a Facebook or Instagram Shop.
A simplified checkout experience will be introduced to those Shops, bringing customers directly to the advertiser’s website to complete their purchase. This feature will begin testing in Australia and Taiwan.
Advertisers can now incorporate creators by using Partnership Ads and Advantage+ Catalog Ads together.
Another new optimization lets Meta’s ads system show additional products from a brand’s catalog when promoting a preferred product set with Advantage+ catalog ads or Shops ads.
Meta expanded access to new opt-in attribution setting Incremental Attribution, which uses machine learning to optimize for incremental conversions.
The company will continue to explore the ability to use generative AI to place clothing on virtual models.
Advertisers can already use background generation in Catalog Ads, and Meta is experimenting with more personalized outputs for text generation.
In the coming weeks, Meta will begin testing ads in notifications on Facebook, giving advertisers a new place to engage people and drive discovery and reconsideration for their products.
Meta will also introduce the ability for advertisers to request emails before sharing promo codes in their promotion ads, helping them build deeper connections with their customers.
Finally, site links—which allow marketers to highlight multiple landing pages in a single image or video ad and are already available on Facebook—will be extended to Instagram advertisers worldwide.
Attention, Best Buy Shoppers
Best Buy Ads’ new Social+ tool lets brands layer first-party customer data from the electronics retailer on top of Meta’s Advantage+ shopping campaigns on Instagram and Facebook.
Those campaigns will then connect to sales data from Best Buy’s app, stores, and websites, giving advertisers a clear picture of what is driving sales.
Advertisers can also automate the application of relevant first-party audiences, impression delivery, and ad placement.
Best Buy Ads is also added a managed service option that lets advertisers use their shopper marketing budgets to buy offsite ads on Meta for the products they’re selling at Best Buy.
Community Notes Are Coming
Meta began testing Community Notes across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in the U.S.
Community Notes will not appear publicly during the testing phase.
Meta said roughly 200,000 people in the U.S. signed up as potential contributors across all three apps, and the waitlist remains open, adding that it will gradually and randomly admit people off that waitlist.
Community Notes will not have usernames attached to them at launch, so they can be judged by their context, and not by who wrote them.
Contributors must be at least 18, with accounts that are more than six months old and in good standing, and either have a verified phone number or be enrolled in two-factor authentication.
The feature will debut in six languages: Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
Other Meta News
- The company will use facial recognition technology to detect and prevent scams and enable faster account recovery in the European Union, South Korea, and the U.K.
- Virtual assistant Meta AI launched in 41 European countries and 21 overseas territories.
Just Friends
Facebook is going back to its roots, announcing that the Friends tab on its platform will now show only content from friends, and no recommended content.
The revamped Friends tab debuted in Canada and the U.S., and it will feature birthdays, friend requests, posts, Reels, and Stories from friends.
The company explained in a blog post, “Connecting with friends has been a part of Facebook since it launched. Over the years, Facebook evolved to meet changing needs and created best-in-class experiences across groups, video, Marketplace, and more, but the magic of friends has fallen away. We’ll be adding several ‘OG’ Facebook experiences throughout the year, beginning with the revamped Friends tab.”
Other Facebook News
- Creators who are part of the Facebook Content Monetization program can now earn money for views on public Stories.
Putting a Pin in Coachella
For the second year in a row, Pinterest teamed up with the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival to help determine the top festival trends for 2025.
During both weekends of Coachella (April 11 through 13 and 18 through 20), a live installation designed in partnership with designer and creative director Ramisha Sattar, Chappell Roan’s creative director, will provide an immersive space where attendees can bring to life their favorite festival trends with the help of fashion stylists and makeup artists.
Pinterest explained in a blog post, “Upon entering the space, visitors will be immersed in festival trends brought to life through interactive installations. In the styling area, on-site stylists will help visitors remix their look with trend-inspired upgrades and accessories before heading to the photo studio to have their portrait taken by a professional photographer. This photo will be added to one of Ramisha’s collages, allowing them to become part of the artwork.”
The platform also analyzed tens of millions of searches related to performers, outfits, hair, and makeup to find the top trending looks set to dominate festival grounds this season. Highlights include:
- Freestyle Fits: Baggy, bold, and certified gold. It’s a throwback to the Y2K streetwear era for Coachella. Serving up looks inspired by hip-hop and R&B, vintage jerseys and camo shorts are the moment—making it feel like 2007 all over again.
- Stereo Punk: Your favorite festival is getting a hardcore revamp, with crust punk jackets and all-leather everything shaking up the desert. Plaid skirts, chain belts and mohawk braids? Absolutely unhinged (in the best way).
- Dark Ethereal: Dark angel meets forest fairy in this supernatural trend. Generation Z will float through Coachella in flowing silhouettes, sheer-on-sheer styling, and lace—lots of it. Add moody-hued velvet, stacked chokers and layered jewelry to create a festival look worthy of the underworld.
- Urban Wrangler: Break out your bandanas, besties. Rodeo attire gets a gritty upgrade for Coachella. Think worn-in boots and bolo ties paired with tons of tattoos—and plenty of attitude. This rugged aesthetic is storming the desert come April.
- Main Pop Girl: Breaking news, the pop girlies are taking over. This April, expect princess pinks, full glam, and bombshell curls that scream “diva!” Basic’s not in her vocabulary: Who else could get everyone to rock leopard print and red nails? It’s giving superstar.
- Twee Aesthetic: What if your fave indie playlist was an outfit? That’s right, twee is back. Picture dreamy pastels, florals inspired by vintage wallpaper, and the return of the Peter Pan collar. Embrace your inner quirk by adding Mary Janes and bows to your look—and yes, you should totally get bangs.
- Pastel Goth: We’re so here for this dark academia x bubblegum pink mashup. Look out for pretty pastels and platform boots, with a sprinkle of skull and cross accessories for that extra gothic twist. Dainty chains and lacy chokers? Soft girl, meet your dark side.
Other Pinterest News
- Kate Hamill joined the company as Vice President of Enterprise Sales for North America, where she will oversee enterprise sales teams and revenue across the U.S. and Canada, reporting to Chief Revenue Officer Bill Watkins. Hamill spent the past 13 years at Meta, most recently as Managing Director of Industry for Retail and Ecommerce.
- Pinterest shared six best practices for its Premiere Spotlight video ads.
- Finally, the company shared new findings from media intelligence firm MAGNA indicating that ads in overall environments people perceive as positive can also drive better results.
Snapchat
Improved Target Cost Bidding
Target Cost bidding helps advertisers scale efficiently and easily on Snapchat by setting a target cost-per-action and having the platform’s systems deliver a CPA within a reasonable range of that bid, and Snapchat recently made some improvements to the process, powered by machine learning.
Snapchat said its ML technology now automatically adjusts bids on behalf of advertisers in a way that maximizes scale, while respecting their desired CPA goal.
The company added that the ML adjustments enable it to more accurately predict conversion events, leading to improved performance results for early adopter advertisers using Target Cost bidding on Pixel Purchase and Pixel Sign Up.
Other Snapchat News
- The first three advanced AI video lenses are now available exclusively for Snapchat Platinum premium subscribers. Fox and Raccoon seamlessly animate those respective animals into Snaps, while Spring Flowers generates a zoom-out effect revealing the person in a Snap holding a bouquet of flowers.
- Speaking of lenses, new ones were added to celebrate the six-month anniversary of the release of the fifth generation of Spectacles augmented realty glasses, along with new platform features, such as leaderboards, an AR keyboard, new hand-tracking capabilities, and an improved ability to open links to lenses directly via messaging threads like Google Messages, iMessage, and Snapchat.
- Snapchat teamed up with National Research Group on a study of the role movies and TV shows play in Snapchatters’ lives.
- Finally, Bitmoji on the platform can now be dressed in Prada styles including the Re-Nylon Shoulder Bags and Collapse Sneakers, as well as new options like barrel jeans, boat shoes, and trench coats.
LinkedIn Ads Updates
LinkedIn detailed several updates to its advertising offerings.
Accelerate is a new, AI-driven, objective-based campaign tool that merges professional data from the platform with an advertiser’s own data, such as retargeting or company lists, to help that advertiser zero in on high-intent audiences. Objectives that can be selected include brand awareness, engagement, lead generation, website conversion, website visits, and video views.
Brand Lift Testing on the professional network was enhanced with multiquestion surveys within a single impression and a new approach that favors clicks over pure reach.
Updates to LinkedIn Campaign Manager were designed to streamline the entire advertising journey, from planning to measurement. Advertisers can use Media Planner to estimate return on investment, reach, and impressions. Ads can be duplicated in new campaigns or accounts, reducing setup time. And Marketing Overview provides a snapshot of account-wide performance.
Finally, the LinkedIn Conversions API now features a one-year lookback window, up from 90 days, and the ability to apply the same conversion rules across multiple LinkedIn ad accounts will be added soon.
Other LinkedIn News
- LinkedIn opened the doors to the London Experience Centre, an innovative space to bring together customers, social impact organizations, and industry experts across hiring, business-to-business sales, and marketing.
- The professional network released new report The ROI of AI, a look at sales activities where AI has the biggest impact.
- Finally, Zip, the fifth in LinkedIn’s series of thinking-oriented games, is now available for play.
X
Sprucing Up Communities
The latest version of the X app for iOS features Communities timeline tabs with more robust sorting options.
X users can now view and sort by all time, day, likes, month, my posts in this Community, my replies in this Community, new, trending, week, and year.
Prior to the update, Communities could only be sorted by most liked, most recent, and trending.
The Post With the Most
Reddit is adding several tools to aid the post-creation process.
A post check feature now being tested on Android and iOS lets users see if their content may be in conflict with a community’s rules prior to posting it.
On desktop and Reddit’s apps, when a post is removed due to community rules, the user will receive a prompt enabling them to repost the content to an alternative subreddit.
Community posting requirements will be shown before desktop and app users post.
Relevant communities will be suggested based on the content in posts that are being created, also on desktop and Reddit’s apps.
Finally, on those same surfaces, post insights including shares, upvotes, and views will be available.
Discord
Ads Coming to Mobile
The non-skippable Video Quests ad format Discord debuted last fall will begin appearing on its mobile app in June.
Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max became the first brand to launch a video ad on the platform, a two-minute trailer for its Dune: Prophecy series, marking the platform’s debut of Video Quests.
Discord said it is promoting mobile video ads as a brand awareness play for advertisers across all categories relevant to its gamer audience.
The platform offers another ad format, Play Quests, that lets advertisers incentivize users to try new games.
Feeling Social
The new Discord Social SDK (software development kit) is now available free of charge for game developers to download and use in their games.
Developers of all sizes can use the SDK to bring Discord directly into their games, allowing players to connect and enhance their multiplayer experiences by chatting with in-game friends and teammates to coordinate and share their gameplay experience.
Players can also send invites directly from their in-game unified friends list to their Discord friends, letting them drop into the exact party/lobby/session where they are playing.
Say Hey Overlay
Discord overhauled its Overlay experience, which lets people use its platform while playing games.
Previously, the Overlay brought up the Discord client in the middle of the screen, but game players can now use widgets that appear around the screen to see messages and adjust sound and video settings, and those widgets can be customized for opacity, sizing, and placement on the screen.
If two Discord users are streaming at the same time, the picture-in-picture widget lets them see each other’s feed.
Discord also added more free dark themes to its desktop app.
Other Discord News
- Discord began meeting with investment bankers to prepare for a possible initial public offering.
Take It to the Limit
Meta-owned messaging app WhatsApp will test a monthly limit on the number of broadcast messages that businesses and users can send.
Curbing spam is the motivation behind the potential move.
Meta said users can turn to channels or status updates to share messages with large numbers of recipients.
WhatsApp Business accounts had been able to send unlimited broadcast messages free of charge, but Meta plans to introduce a paid version with additional tools.
Digg
Digging Up Digg
Digg went from being referred to as the internet’s home page after debuting in 2004 to dividing up its assets among multiple buyers in 2012, but Digg founder Kevin Rose and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian are reassembling its carcass.
The goal is to bring back Digg as a community-first platform that uses AI for content moderation.
True Ventures, which counts Rose as a partner, and Seven Seven Six, Ohanian’s venture firm, also pitched in funding.
Brands That Stay on Trend
Carter Gregory dons his favorite Levi’s and shares his morning routine.
@thecarterb Cowboy Carter’s morning routine in my favorite @Levi’s #ad #liveinlevis ♬ original sound – Carter Gregory
Caleb & Andrea introduce the new Go to Jail Expansion Pack for Hasbro’s Monopoly.
@calebnandrea #AD | @Monopoly Game got a whole lot spicier with the Go To Jail Expansion pack! 🚨 Shop now at Amazon! #Monopoly #fyp #couplescomedy #couplescontent #gamenight #relationships #calebnandrea ♬ puzzle pieces – choppy.wav
A trip to the premiere of Prime Video’s First to the Finish by @meimonstaa for Mazda Sports.
@meimonstaa All dressed up for an exciting viewing of First To The Finish, now streaming on @Prime Video! @Mazda USA #FirstToTheFinish #MazdaPartner #MazdaMotorSports #ad ♬ original sound – Mei Mei
Open Influence’s team stays on top of the latest trends and is here to help you maximize your creator campaigns. Open Influence is a leading global creator marketing agency dedicated to creating engaging campaigns.
