👋 Welcome back Reader

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and are having a great start to the New Year. There's lots to discuss already so let's dive in...

🔥 2025 Trends and Predictions

Niche micro-influencers and private community platforms
Newsletters take elements from social media platforms
More series, more storytelling, more niche communities and more hyper-personalised content over generic trends on social media
Brands hiring in-house UGC creators (user-generated content) and encouraging EGC (employee-generated content). I said it in my 2024 predictions but I'm staying it again!!
The rise of rise of zero-click searches, a lean towards Generative Optimisation and expanding SEO efforts past Google

📰 In the news

Meta remove fact-checkers and move to community notes

Meta’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is removing fact checkers on their apps, starting in the US.

Until now, a team of independent, IFCN-certified fact-checkers reviewed viral misinformation across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meta said they will now be adopting a Community Notes system, similar to Twitter/X (owned by Elon Musk). This means that it will be up to the users of these platforms to review and rate the accuracy of content.

Adam Mosseri, Head of Instagram, also published a video summarising Zuckerberg's update and stating that Instagram will go back to recommending political content.

Zuckerberg explained that this change is to get back "to their roots" of free speech. However, many believe that this decision was made to appease the Trump Administration.

There are also worries that this will increase the amount of misinformation, defamation and hate speech on these platforms, and make Meta platforms similar to Twitter/X, which many users have abandoned.

TikTok is getting banned in the US on January 19th...

The TikTok ban will go ahead in the US on January 19th unless the US Supreme Court intervenes and takes action during a hearing on January 10th.

TikTok have been heavily promoting their other app Lemon8, which is similar to the likes of Instagram. However, the ban will affect all of ByteDance's apps including Lemon8, CapCut, TikTok Studio, etc.

Other news + updates

Instagram tests a new tool for scheduling DMs
Instagram test Trial Reels, letting users share Reels with non-followers
Threads experiments with Custom Display Names and Cover Images
Threads tests individual post analytics
YouTube giving creators an option to automatically make a Short from the most engaging parts of your longer-form videos
According to Buffer, the best time to post on Instagram in 2025 is 3PM (Mon-Fri) and 6PM (Sat-Sun), with Monday and Friday being the best days to post and Sunday being the worst.
Having exceeded 25M users, Bluesky adds Trending Topics to the platform
X raises Premium Plus subscription pricing by almost 40%
Honey, the browser extension that finds coupon codes, has been accused of hijacking affiliate revenue from influencers

From my desk

I am still in Dublin visiting family and friends but will be heading back to London this weekend. It's been a lovely couple of weeks, though I did catch that nasty flu that has been going around. Definitely a slow start to 2025 but that's okay!

I've set 3 attainable (🤞) goals and a handful of healthy habits–walks, yoga, workouts, reading–that I want to continue this year. I've also been thinking about what I want to do differently, which has sparked an idea to consolidating my online accounts... but more on that in a future issue.

Do you set goals or resolutions for the New Year? Or are you more of a word of the year kinda person? I'd love to know what you're working towards or looking forward to this year?