For more strategies to make the most of the upcoming holiday season, check out our 2021 Holiday Toolkit for Businesses.

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As the holiday evolves beyond romantic connections, the candy giant follows suit

Facebook first debuted its live shopping feature in November 2020, partnering with women’s fashion brand Anne Klein for a series of holiday-themed shopping events. Instagram: The platform first introduced live shopping capabilities for merchants that use its in-app payment system, Instagram Checkout, in May 2020.

We're also really focused on Instagram because we do see a lot of our sales coming from there. As a small startup, it's really important to test different strategies. When you see something working, you do more of it. How are you thinking about the content that you’re putting out there? A lot of it has to do with what consumers are asking for and putting ourselves in their shoes.

As a result, TikTok will have a dedicated section in our quarterly social media update series, which analyzes key developments from the major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Here are three major developments for TikTok in Q2 2021 and what they mean for marketers:.

Here’s how marketers can navigate Q3 2021’s product, commerce, and monetization changes on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and Twitter.

What to expect: Social ads will continue to drive retailers’ holiday awareness and performance objectives, as Facebook and Instagram serve as the primary channel. But Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency initiative has disrupted targeting and measurement, as many users have declined to opt in to tracking. The result: sales attribution data that struggles to link conversions to ad impressions.

Most influencers consider brand awareness to be their primary role when collaborating with marketers. But in the past year, social networks like Instagram have slowly begun opening commerce features to creators, indicating that influencer marketing could soon play a larger part in driving purchases on social media.

Gen Z and millennial respondents had a slight preference for Instagram over email. Regardless of channel, the focus on health and safety, as well as flexibility, empathy and price, are likely to remain major trends in travel messaging in the longer term. That will be a notable pivot for many travel brands that have traditionally promoted aspirational holidays. Health and Safety.

Absolutely not, because they have to check their holidays, they have to check their finances, they have to see if somebody's interested in going with them.” —Oneika Raymond, an Instagram creator focusing on travel. Some creators say they are seeing an increase in requests to measure their results based on purchases. It’s not an easy conversation when it does come up.

Affiliate revenue growth also surged in November, ahead of the holidays. As with the rest of ecommerce and digital advertising generally, for affiliate marketing, the holidays are boom times, when consumers often make bigger purchases resulting in larger average order values (AOVs) and do research online before buying.

“This destination is a place where people can go shop from all the brands and all the creators on Instagram,” said Vishal Shah, vice president of product at Instagram. Although Pinterest already has a high signal-to-noise ratio for shopping, it introduced a Shop tab alongside product searches in April 2020.

But several higher-funnel ad channels achieved a noticeable uptick between 2017 and 2018, including Instagram (up 2.5 points to 44.8%), YouTube (up 7.1 points to 33.4%), Twitter (up 2.8 points to 25.8%), Pinterest (up 3.5 points to 12.9%) and Snapchat (up 3.5 points to 8.3%).