Music has become synonymous with the social media experience. It drives trends, fuels engagement, and adds personality to short-form video content, which makes up the bulk of today’s feeds. Whether you are scrolling TikTok, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts, chances are the video you are watching is paired with a song. In fact, 85% of videos on TikTok, 84% of videos on YouTube, 58% on Instagram, and 49% on Facebook contain at least 10 seconds of music.

Instagram has crossed 3 billion monthly active users, joining Facebook and WhatsApp at this major milestone. For all the talk about it “dying,” the platform remains deeply embedded in culture and continues to grow.

At Meta Connect, Meta announced several new smart glasses and metaverse technologies. Along with a second generation of its flagship Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the Oakley Meta Vanguard designed for athletes, it revealed the Meta Ray-Ban Display, a new category of smart glasses featuring an in-lens display.

Instagram announced a new school experience for US college students. After verifying their student email through UNiDAYS, students can add a school banner to their profile and access a directory of confirmed classmates, organized by graduation year.

Meta expanded access to Meta AI translations, giving creators the ability to automatically dub and lip-sync their Facebook and Instagram Reels in another language using their own voice and tone.

Meta is extending its teen safety measures to include adult-managed accounts that feature children under 13—such as family vloggers, kid influencers, and parent-run pages.

Facebook added the ability for users to add music and themed backgrounds to text posts.

Facebook is cracking down on unoriginal content. After taking action on over 500,000 accounts engaging in spammy behavior and removing 10 million profiles impersonating creators, Facebook is now enforcing stricter policies on accounts reposting others’ content.

Facebook says links in post captions can hurt reach. Some users are now seeing alerts in their Professional Dashboard warning that links may reduce distribution, and encouraging them to place links in the comments instead.

Facebook will classify all videos as Reels. In the coming months, any video content posted regardless of length or orientation, will be labeled a Reel.

Meta is expanding its generative AI tools for ads. Updates include creating ads based on different audience personas, turning multiple images into videos with music and text overlays, and Video Highlights, which lets viewers skip to key segments of a video ad.

Meta unveiled several updates to its creator-brand advertising solutions.