Social Media Updates for Food, Drink and Hospitality: March 2026

Let’s look at social media updates for food, drink and hospitality brands for March. What changes will impact you directly?

ICYMI: February 2026 Social Media Updates

Facebook Updates

Location Fees

Meta have introduced a sneaky update just this week, they will now charge location fee’s for the delivery of ads in certain locations:

• Austria – 5%
• France – 3%
• Italy – 3%
• Spain – 3%
• Türkiye – 5%
• United Kingdom – 2%

This means, if you deliver £100 in ads to the UK (with a 2% location fee), you will be charged £100 (ad delivery), plus £2 (location fee), for £102 total. Not enormous sums for lower budget ad campaigns, but you can see how that would quickly snowball and could cost a small fortune! Meta claim that they have been “shouldering these costs” but now they have to pass them on as they “respond to the evolving regulatory landscape and align with industry standards.”

Manus AI

Meta have made their next move with AI integration into their ads platform, this “more than a chatbot” AI can:

• Launch fully functioning websites
• Create engaging ad content
• Build competitive research reports

The jury is still out on performance and functionality, but it is certainly an interesting development as Meta continue to integrate more AI features into the advertising ecosystem.

Premium Subscription

Meta is set to launch new premium subscriptions across Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, distinct from Meta Verified. These tiers focus on enhanced productivity and AI capabilities, including expanded access to Vibes video generation and the Manus AI agent.

Leaked Instagram features suggest perks like “ghost” Story viewing and follower insights. While Meta aims to diversify revenue, success depends on overcoming “subscription fatigue” by providing enough value to everyday users beyond existing creator tools.

Instagram Updates

Reorder Carousels

Instagram are working on the ability to reorder carousels after posting! A very helpful feature, we’ve all done it before, uploaded our media in the wrong order. You can now reorder your slides while the post is live so that you don’t have repost and lose your engagement!

Reshares

If you’re a prolific stories user then this is a great new data point for you. Instagram has started displaying a count of story reshares within the story views section.

Edits Updates

Instagram have added a new round of features for Edits including:

• New Timeline Settings.
• The ability to apply settings to other clips from the main track.
• The ability to copy and paste fonts and clips from one project to another.

I recommend you click on this link to dig into the updates because there’s a full explanation of each feature, it’s well worth reviewing particularly if you regularly use Edits for your reel creation!

Struggling to keep pace with the changes and what they mean for your social media strategy? We have capacity for new clients in 2026.

Book a discovery call today!

TikTok Updates

Local Feed (US only)

TikTok has announced the Local Feed, a dedicated home screen tab designed to connect users with nearby businesses, events, and creators. This feature highlights travel, dining, and shopping based on real-time location and content topics.

To power this, TikTok is introducing optional, precise GPS sharing (off by default) for users 18+. This feature is currently only available to US small businesses but should this testing period work out, then this is something that may be deployed globally and could be of huge value to food, drink and hospitality brands in the UK!

TikTok Shop Updates

There are a couple of very useful updates for TikTok shop including:

• Sample approvals made easy – with the new automated sample auto-approval workflow, sellers can now greenlight requests from creators who meet pre-set criteria, skipping the manual review process for each one.
• TikTok Creator Picks – highlights creators recommended by TikTok Shop based on their consistent performance, helping sellers quickly identify partners who meet TikTok’s quality and performance standards.

LinkedIn Updates

LinkedIn Premium All-In-One for Small Businesses

Premium All-in-One, a specialised subscription designed for small business owners and founders. Instead of juggling separate tools, it consolidates Sales, Marketing, and Hiring into one dashboard.

Key features include:

• Sales: Daily AI-powered prospect suggestions and advanced search filters.

• Marketing: Monthly credits to boost posts and auto-invite engagers to follow your page.

• Hiring: Monthly credits for job promotions to reach targeted talent faster.

• AI Assistance: Writing tools for personalised outreach and profile optimisation.

This is available in the UK and looks like a good choice for smaller businesses that want to use the premium features of LinkedIn and get a lot out of them, it’s certainly something we’re going to look at trialing to see how it benefits us!

Final Takeaway

Plenty of change, as always, across the many platforms that we have to navigate to maintain our online presence. I hope that this blog has given you some insights into the changes that will impact the food, drink and hospitality brands the most!

If you don’t want to have to worry about the ever evolving world of social media, we can take that strain from you! Book a discovery call and let’s talk about how we can help.