Welcome to Connected Church News!
Top 5 latest Digital & Social Media News in 5 minutes, to help your ministry stay on top of industry trends.
This week, we have news about Apple, Snapchat, YouTube, Meta, Ethereum, Web3.
🗞️ News 1: Meta adds Community Manager for Live Streams; redesigns Groups menu
Meta has added two new functionalities that could be helpful for churches and ministries. First, is related to Live Streams. When you go live on Facebook, you can now add someone as a community manager with the capability of moderating comments, banning people, and a few other capabilities. Now, this has always been there, in an unofficial way, but now Facebook brings this new role as a community manager with a badge. So the person will get a badge, they can use their own personal profile, their name, everything as it appears on Facebook profile, and they moderate the session. This could be really useful when you use volunteers for moderation. Now you can officially say this person is a moderator. So do check it out. The second news is about Facebook Groups. Facebook has streamlined the sidebar menu, making it easier for people to pin certain groups, find new groups, interact and engage. I’ll link to all the details, to both the stories in the show notes.
🗞️ News 2: YouTube improves Shorts analytics & adds audience behavior metrics
Source:YouTube
YouTube has announced improvements to its analytics and to the Songwriters Mini-site. First, related to analytics-YouTube has added key metrics to the YouTube Studio Dashboard. Key metrics related to audience behavior like’ new and returning visitors’ will now appear under the analytics tab. If you click on the See More button, you should be able to see these tabs and the data listed there. And Shorts Analytics has also been revamped, the way the metrics are presented in Shorts Analytics has had an upgrade. And it’s now more in alignment with the rest of the analytics presentation. The third announcement was related to Songwriters Mini-site, the site that lists information about artists, musicians and songwriters. Now that has been given an upgrade. So if you are a Christian musician, or a band, or in worship ministry, then you might want to check out how your information is listed there and tweak the info accordingly.
🗞️ News 3: Snapchat launches its paid subscription service, Snapchat+
Source:Snapchat
Snapchat has announced that they are releasing a new paid premium subscription plan called Snapchat+. People who subscribe and users who are in the monthly subscription plan will get the ability to change their app icon. They would get a badge, and a few other perks that are going to be given to the subscribers. Now, the interesting thing that I wanted to bring to your notes is, the trend of social media channels starting to look at premium subscriptions as a revenue model. Last week, we reported Telegram releasing its paid subscription plan and now Snapchat. It is interesting to see the trend starting to pick up with even major players like Snapchat
🗞️ News 4: Apple devices to get an advanced ‘Lockdown Mode’ for spyware protection
Source:Apple
Apple has announced a release of an important feature in its upcoming operating system, where you will have a mode called Lockdown Mode that lets you almost shut your device down to cyber-attack and spyware attacks, there by protecting you. This, as per Apple statement, is an ‘extreme’ level of security. That’s the word used by Apple. It says “…It’s an extreme optional protection that should only be used if you believe you may be personally targeted by highly sophisticated cyber attack”. So it’s not for everyone. It’s for high-profile people who are being attacked in a certain way, by certain spyware. But having said that, it can be activated by anyone. I know that you, as a nonprofit leader, a church or a ministry leader, could be interested in protecting yourself against certain types of attacks. So, do take a look at this news, and when it gets released in the future, have a look at how it might suit your requirement.
🗞️ News 5: [Web3] ENS, Ethereum Name Service registrations grow more than 200%
Source:CoinTelegraph
In our web3 news today, we look at how ENS, Ethereum Name Service has seen more than 200% growth in just the last two weeks. This is partly because, maybe, the gas fees overall has gone down in the system. And also people are starting to realize the utility of a .ETH domain. ENS basically lets you register your domain name with a .eth extension. This not only looks cool, as you might have seen in other platforms like Twitter and other places where people use that as handle, but it also has a utility, in the sense, you can connect it to a crypto wallet, and you can use it as an NFT. And there are many utilities based on this. So if you as a church, a nonprofit, or a ministry, have not looked at a .ETH domain, then you might want to discuss it with your team and see if this is something that’s relevant to you
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
