As social media users continue to spend more time in their direct messages than posting to the main feed, companies are beefing up their features for private chats.
TikTok recently said it will soon offer users the ability to send pictures and voice notes up to a minute long in its direct messages (DMs) and group chats, while Meta announced filters to sort Instagram DMs by categories like “Story replies,” “Unanswered,” “Followers,” and “Verified Users” for professional and personal accounts with more than 100,000 followers.
The intent is to make the DMs more engaging. TikTok’s DMs will soon be more media rich, while Instagram’s could see more engagement from bigger accounts that would otherwise drown in new message notifications. Both updates are part of wider push to reengineer social media apps for the way people use them now, which is more private and less posting.
A 2023 Morning Consult poll found 61% of adults with a social media accounts were more selective about what they posted online, and 28% said they posted less on their preferred platform than the year before. It’s a change Instagram head Adam Mosseri called “a paradigm shift,” in May, and the implication for social media app design is a greater emphasis on improved messaging.
Meta’s X-clone Threads, which launched without DMs in 2023, finally added them in July. Meanwhile, Instagram has made a flurry of improvements to its DMs since 2024, including editing messages, pinned chats, longer voice messages, location sharing, and scheduled messages. Spotify has added DMs, too, just in case you wanted to use yet another closed platform to connect with someone.
Social media might feel far less social than it once did, but it seems a lot of the conversation is simply going on away from public view. As people spend more time chatting one-on-one than posting publicly, social media apps are becoming a lot more like messaging apps, too.