Czech president takes over F1 social media as a photographer, Snapchat partners with Spotify, and TikTok teams up with Charli xcx

Facebook launches a standalone app for sellers

Meta has introduced the Seller app, designed to help active sellers manage their listings on Facebook Marketplace. Using Meta AI, the app can generate a suggested product title, description, price and category from photographs. It also offers bulk listing creation, a unified inbox for communicating with potential buyers, inventory management and data on views, clicks, messages and items sold.

The app is currently available in the App Store to users aged 18 and over in the United States. Meta is also testing an Android version and says that approximately 430 million items are listed on Marketplace globally every month.

YouTube brings custom thumbnails to Shorts

YouTube has announced that creators enrolled in the YouTube Partner Program can now begin uploading custom thumbnails for Shorts. On desktop, they can also choose from three automatically recommended frames, while the mobile app will continue to allow them to select any frame directly from the video.

For standard videos, YouTube is adding thumbnail generation through Ask Studio. Creators can generate a design tailored to the topic of a specific video and then adjust elements such as its layout or colours. Custom thumbnails may give creators greater control over how Shorts appear in search results, on channel pages and across other surfaces outside the main vertical feed.

Spotify integrates with Snap Map

On 27 July, Snapchat launched Now Playing, a feature that allows users to show what they are currently listening to on Spotify directly on Snap Map in real time. Users can decide whether their listening activity is visible to all friends, only people with whom they share their location, selected contacts or nobody.

Songs discovered on the map can be opened in Spotify or saved to favourites. The saving feature also works from Spotlight and individual sound pages. According to the company, Snap Map is used by more than 450 million people every month. For Spotify, this creates another distribution surface, while Snapchat gains a new social signal based on the music tastes of real-life friends.

Campaign of the week: TikTok builds a dedicated world for Charli xcx

TikTok has launched a special activation for the release of Charli xcx’s album Music, Fashion, Film. Searching for the artist or the album title takes users to a dedicated hub featuring exclusive content, behind-the-scenes videos and community challenges. By completing tasks, users can unlock an album-themed profile frame.

TikTok supported the album launch with in-app promotion, a social media campaign and a billboard in Times Square. Charli xcx had more than 5.6 million TikTok followers when the activation launched. The campaign demonstrates how a platform can build a self-contained fan ecosystem around a new product instead of merely distributing an advertisement or a short music preview.

Petr Pavel receives more than half a million likes on global accounts

Czech President Petr Pavel spent the Hungarian Grand Prix working trackside as an accredited photographer. He arrived at the Hungaroring with his own photography equipment and official FIA accreditation, working alongside Czech photographer Jiří Křenek. Formula 1 subsequently included him among eight moments from the race weekend that fans may have missed.

The story quickly spread from motorsport media to major global accounts. Formula 1’s official Instagram post received more than 420,000 likes. At the time, the F1 account had approximately 43.5 million followers.

The story was also picked up by Pubity, one of the largest aggregators of popular internet content. Its post received more than 40,000 likes. The Pubity account itself had more than 42 million followers, allowing the story to reach far beyond the traditional audiences of motorsport and political news.

A post by ESPN F1 added approximately 22,000 likes, Autosport received another 31,000 and photographer Jiří Křenek’s post gained nearly 8,000. Across these five publicly available Instagram posts, the story therefore generated approximately 527,000 likes. It also prompted further reactions on Facebook, X, Threads and other platforms.

The story also generated a strong response on Reddit. A post in the r/formula1 community received approximately 16,000 upvotes and more than 1,000 comments. Many reactions praised Pavel’s genuine interest in photography and motorsport, as well as the unusual contrast between his presidential office and his work as a photographer directly beside the racetrack.

In addition to Formula1.com and Motorsport.com, the story was covered by the New York Post, Australia’s News.com.au, the Times of India and other international websites. Within several days, what began as a regional sports story had become a global topic distributed by sports accounts, major content aggregators and mainstream media.

The combined headline audience of just three of the main Instagram accounts, F1, Pubity and ESPN F1, exceeded 87 million followers. However, this figure cannot be regarded as the story’s actual reach. The accounts’ audiences overlap, posts are not shown to every follower, and precise data on impressions, video views, the geographical composition of the audience and watch time are available only to the administrators of the individual profiles.

Nevertheless, this was an exceptionally strong earned-media moment for the promotion of Czechia. The story was visually simple and internationally understandable: the president of a European country was not attending the race merely as a VIP guest, but as an accredited photographer pursuing a long-standing personal interest. Pubity’s involvement also helped the story move beyond the sporting community and reach a mass global audience.

The FIFA World Cup rewrites social media records

The World Cup final between Spain and Argentina was played on 19 July. Spain won 1–0 after extra time, with Ferran Torres scoring the only goal in the 106th minute. A record 6,810,966 spectators attended the tournament.

During the final, more than 30 million messages per second were sent through WhatsApp, setting a new all-time record for the platform. WhatsApp had already broken its previous record during the Argentina–Egypt round-of-16 match, when it processed more than 29 million messages per second.

Across more than 40 markets, official YouTube broadcasts of the final achieved an average minute audience of more than 21 million viewers. At the most-watched moment, more than 27 million people were watching simultaneously.

World Cup-related content on YouTube reached more than 1.7 billion unique users during the tournament, including more than 550 million through television screens. Between 11 June and 19 July, FIFA’s official channel generated more than four billion views and gained 7.5 million new subscribers.

On TikTok, World Cup-related content recorded a total of 1.2 trillion views. The official FIFA World Cup account generated almost 28 billion views and more than 1.7 billion likes during the tournament. It has gained 57 million followers since the beginning of 2026. Since the start of the tournament, fans published more than 22 million videos using tournament hashtags, while dedicated FIFA World Cup hubs on TikTok received approximately 520 million visits. Both #FIFAWorldCup and #WorldCup surpassed 12 million posts.

TikTok’s involvement extended beyond short highlight clips. Official livestreams by broadcasting companies generated 660 million unique views, media partners published more than 107,000 posts and the Today @ FIFA World Cup show reached 45 million unique viewers. Thirty creators from 22 countries also participated in behind-the-scenes communication. More than 96 million fans used the tournament hub on TikTok to collect digital Panini cards. According to TikTok, it was the platform’s most successful campaign to date in terms of the number of participating users.