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 Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, BAYC, Web3.
🗞️ News 1: Instagram updates web interface & rolls out in-app post scheduling tool
Source: Instagram
The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, made a couple of important announcements last week in his Instagram channel. One is about the web user interface. When you visit Instagram.com on your computer screen in your browser, you will now see a better looking design which occupies your full screen instead of having white spaces on the sides. It also helps when you are trying to use it as a ministry, as an organization, and your team is using it. They most probably use it on the browser, so they’ve made that experience better, check it out. The second, more important announcement is about the ability for you to schedule your Instagram posts on the mobile app directly. So you don’t have to use other tools like Creative Studio, etc. You can just directly schedule it on your Instagram app. You can schedule it up to 75days.You can also manage it right within the app. I think this is going to be quite useful for many people in the days to come.
🗞️ News 2: YouTube brings YouTube Shorts to bigger Television (TV) Screens
Source: YouTube
Vertical short form video content is continuing to dominate social media. And this announcement by YouTube’s chief product officer says that YouTube shorts are now coming to bigger television screens. Yes, they are not just dominating the mobile vertical videos, that’s what we call them. But now the vertical mobile videos are coming to bigger screens, much bigger than the mobile phone. And it’s interesting that this announcement says that people actually appreciate the fact that they can easily watch these shorts and consume these short videos, entertaining short videos on their television screen. So it’s interesting how YouTube is taking the strength of their connected television and adding it to the short form video, heating up the competition with TikTok and Instagram reels and all of that. So anyway, as a ministry or nonprofit is good for you because if you do short videos, which you should be doing, then you will have now more eyeballs using larger television screens.
🗞️ News 3: Twitter launches Mixed Media, allowing you to mix videos, images & GIFs
Source: Twitter
Twitter has announced that they are launching a new feature called Mixed Media, which I think is going to be useful for lots of nonprofits and ministries. This lets you add four different elements in one tweet, and those four can be either a video or images or GIFs, so it can be any combination. Now, that makes it interesting because you can get creative. You can add one video and then one image to explain the video, or you can have a couple of images about an event and you can add a promo video along with that to showcase the event. So all of this going out in one tweet makes you reach people in a much more visual way, conveyed in a tweet in a much easier fashion. So I think it’s a great feature. Definitely check it out. Pass it on to your ministry social media team. It’s also nice to see Twitter coming out with new features in spite of all the changes and transformations the company is going through after the new CEO took over.
🗞️ News 4: WhatsApp launches Communities, 32-people video calls & in-chat polls
Source: WhatsApp
WhatsApp has announced that they are starting to roll out the New Communities feature globally to all users and it will be available in the next few months to everyone. We reported on this New Communitiesfeature a while ago. This is basically an umbrella for your organization. So as a nonprofit or church, I think it’s going to be useful for you where you create one community, probably in your church’s name or your nonprofit’s name and have all the WhatsApp groups that you use for your organization under that umbrella. So it’s going to be a very easy way to manage these WhatsApp groups because I know many organizations use WhatsApp to connect with your video team and your admin team, your leaders and all those things, now even with your community so you can now group everything in one place and manage them easily. I think it’s going to be a great feature. They also announced in this announcement that they are expanding the video calls to 32 people, which is again a useful feature. And groups to 1024 people. Check out all the announcements.
🗞️ News 5: [Web3] Blockchain Association in MENA region & A New NFT Royalty Model
Source: Coin Telegraph | Decrypt
In our web3 news round up we have two news items. One is about a blockchain association being set up in Abu Dhabi for the MENA region which is Middle East, North Africa, the rest of Africa and the Asia region as well. So this is going to be based in Abu Dhabi but it covers the interest of all these regions and it involves some big names like Binance, Crypto.com all of them being involved in this nonprofit, helping make a representation for the web3 future so which is a good step. The second is news about the Bored Ape Yacht Club founders releasing a model for NFT royalties. Bored Ape Yacht Club is one of the biggest NFTs and the founders have come out saying there needs to be a new royalty policy for NFTs which allows wallet to wallet transfer for free. Sounds like a great model. We will link to all the details in the show notes. Check it out.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
