Google makes it easier for holiday shoppers to score a deal: The search giant is helping retailers attract price-conscious consumers with new promotional labels and price comparison tools.

UK consumers’ hearty appetite for ecommerce hasn’t extended to social shopping. But there is strong potential for growth as TikTok triggers a new wave of community-driven commerce.

In the last year, Meta—and the overall US digital ad market—have changed significantly. Here are seven strategies from our “The Future of Meta” report that marketers should embrace in the new year.

Meta faces rocky road to reverse underperformance: Q3 shows revenue outlook weakening as metaverse projects swell expenses.

For many, Facebook’s new name introduced “the metaverse” as a concept. But a year out, most people have not entered the metaverse. Right now, Meta’s facelift doesn’t appear to have legs. (Quite literally—the little Horizon Worlds avatars still don’t have legs.)

About half of US Gen Z and millennial social users make purchases on social media, compared to 38% of US adults overall. Boomers are the least likely to buy via social.

There’s still a large percentage of social media users who don’t buy via social. Understanding what makes current social buyers buy can help brands and platforms increase sales and potentially grow their customer bases.

One year after the company’s name change, Meta’s business is in disarray. We explore the reasons for the downturn, our two-year outlook, and how companies that rely on Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms should adjust their strategies.

Last October, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook was rebranding as Meta and setting its sights on the metaverse, which he dubbed the “successor to the mobile internet.” But 12 months and more than $15 billion later, the company has little to show for it.

BeReal is the newest kid on the social media block. The app has already captured the attention of Gen Z, and its growing popularity has sparked copycat features from Snapchat, Instagram and, yes, even TikTok. But do brands of all stripes need to embrace BeReal—or is it not ready for primetime just yet

Q3 wasn’t an easy quarter for Meta. Snap is in a tough spot. TikTok was the elephant in the room amid its rivals’ disappointing Q2 earnings calls.

In this report, we look at the most important updates for social platforms in Q3 and how those changes will affect marketers. For the first time, we’re including updates for YouTube as well.

Ahead of its third-quarter earnings, Meta has expanded its ad offerings for Instagram, Messenger, and Reels.

This year, 102.6 million people will buy via social platforms in the US. That’s up just 5.9% from last year, following double-digit growth that’s persisted since we began tracking this metric, in 2016.

On today's episode, we discuss how the digital ad duopoly is evolving, the most interesting dark horse digital ad giant, and whether Netflix, not TikTok, is a bigger threat to Facebook and Instagram. "In Other News," we talk about ad industry practices coming under fire as privacy lawsuits surge and who the winners and losers will be when the third-party cookie says goodbye. Tune in to the discussion with our analyst Paul Verna.

Creators and influencers are looking for ways to diversify platforms in order to increase audience outreach, foster community, and assure they’re not at the whims of any single social media algorithm.

LTK thinks the time is ripe for a social commerce foray: The app is integrating shopping just as Meta and TikTok cool off on commerce.

Social commerce experienced two years of exceptional growth amid the pandemic, and while growth in the number of social buyers is slowing, the amount of social commerce sales is still rising rapidly, said our analyst Jasmine Enberg on a "Behind the Numbers" podcast.

In the US, 52% of Facebook users reported seeing more ads on the social network, while nearly half of YouTube and Instagram users said the same of their respective platforms. Across the social platforms we studied, less than 10% of users felt ad load had decreased.

Reels, Reels, and more Reels: Facebook released an API for Reels, allowing users to share short-form videos to the app from outside platforms.