Have you noticed lately that every new update on every social channel seems to include a new way for people to collaborate with each other?

The most recent example is Instagram’s collaborative carousels, which allows users to add their own content to someone else’s carousel post.

The effort to integrate more collaboration comes at the same time that attention and engagement have been shifting away from newsfeeds. Social media user numbers are still growing (slowly) but we’re spending an increasing amount of time in DMs, group chats, and passively consuming Stories.

For the platforms, that’s a terrifying trend.

Their currency is the time we spend consuming monetizable content (in other words: anything that they can place an ad next to).

DMs are incredibly hard to monetize, and when you do, people tend to get annoyed (see: “Sponsored Snaps” at the bottom of this email).

In-feed content, on the other hand, brings in the highest ad rates, so it’s no surprise that the platforms are trying to reverse the trend by encouraging us all to spend more time scrolling and collaborating on our newsfeeds.

And that encouragement isn’t just coming from Instagram.

YouTube just introduced a new “Add Yours” Sticker which can be added to any Shorts video. Viewers can then create and upload their own videos that respond to or build upon the original Shorts video, effectively creating a chain of connected content.

The feature that likely inspired this whole movement towards collaboration was the TikTok Stitch, which supercharged the community and created a surge in content engagement.

And we can’t forget that Pinterest Group Boards — one of the original collaboration tools — are still alive and well today.

So What?

All of this ends up being great news for businesses that are looking to grow their engagement and form a sense of community around their brands.

Post engagement has been declining across the board as people spend more time interacting with friends in the group chat. Leveraging collaborative tactics effectively could pull our community members out of the shadows, bringing us back to a time when people felt like active participants in a brand’s social media presence.