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 YouTube, OpenSea, Meta, Twitter, WhatsApp, Web3.
🗞️ News 1: YouTube launches a helpful Corrections feature for videos with errors
Source:YouTube
YouTube has released a new useful feature called Corrections to deal with videos that have errors in it. Have you ever had a situation where you upload a YouTube video and then after some time, after a little bit of engagement and comments, and the videos is doing so well, and you realize that there is an error in the video. For example you misquoted a scripture, you said one Bible verse instead of another, or something like that, and now you have to refilm and reupload and all of that complications. YouTube Corrections helps you deal with that by indicating… at that particular point, there will be an indicator at the top of the video that shows there is an error in this spot. And people can click on it and there will be a pop-up that says at this point this is the actual verse, but we have misspelled it, or something like that, and then you can explain it to people. That way, you don’t have to re upload the entire video. Very helpful feature. Do pass it on to your video team.
🗞️ News 2: Meta makes VR more social with ability to invite friends to Horizon Home
Source:Meta
Meta made a significant announcement last week, making their VR environment (Horizon) more social. Meta announced that they are bringing the ability for you to invite friends into your Meta Quest VR environment. When you use a Meta Quest headset, the VR headset, and you put it on, the first thing you see is this environment called Home. So far it’s been just a place to start with, and then go ahead and do other things. Now Meta saying you can invite friends who can come and hang out with you inside that location called Home. It is almost like a newsfeed. That’s like the main area where you interact with people. Right now, you interact with other people in news item in a vertical scrolling environment, now you will do the same interaction with your friends, but in an interactive VR virtual environment. Very interesting announcement. And it’s a step towards what Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about-making virtual experiences more social.
🗞️ News 3: Twitter releases Product Drops reminders & Location Spotlight feature
Source:Twitter | Twitter Business
Twitter released 2 useful features last week. One is called Location Spotlight that lets you highlight the location of your ministry under your Twitter bio. So right below your bio, you can have a card that displays your location information, your operation hours, etc. Because usually, people come with a question like “when is the service?” Or “Where is it located?” So this feature could be especially useful for churches and location-based ministries. Do take a look. This is available only for professional accounts, so you might want to convert your Twitter account to a professional account, which can be done inside the app very easily. The second feature is called Product Drops, that lets people get a reminder… if you’re going to have a launch of a fundraiser, or some kind of a product-based promotion for your nonprofit or ministry, you can let people set reminders. Once they click on ‘Remind Me’ button, they will be reminded by Twitter when the launch happens. Very useful
🗞️ News 4: WhatsApp users can now securely migrate from Android to Apple devices
Source:Mark Zuckerberg
WhatsApp users can now safely migrate their WhatsApp data from an Android phone to an Apple iOS device. Earlier, the feature to go from an Apple to an Android device was released. We reported that right here in this news bulletin a while ago. Now they have released it in the reverse direction. This announcement is important because, as you know, as ministries, we may have to constantly change devices because your WhatsApp account may be handled by a volunteer or a staff member, and you might want to constantly change devices. So, this feature could be useful. The announcement came from the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg on his Facebook post, where he said, “we are bringing the ability to securely switch between phones and transfer your chat history, photos, videos and voice messages between Android and iPhone”. Very useful
🗞️ News 5: [Web3] OpenSea migrates to new protocol for better efficiency, lower fees
Source:OpenSea
In our Web3 news this week, we have a significant announcement from OpenSea NFT platform that is going to migrate to a new Web3 protocol called Seaport. This migration to a new protocol is going going to help OpenSea solve two big problems that they have. One is very high gas fees associated with the transaction. If you’ve tried to do any NFT transaction, you know the amount of fees you pay just to make that transaction happen. Apart from the purchase cost, there’s going to be a big fees for the transaction. Now that is going to reduce significantly with this new move to a new protocol. In fact, the headline says, “Launching seaport saving the community millions in fees”. So that’s the kind of impact it’s going to have. The second impact impact or second solution is improved efficiency. The current system is not very efficient in terms of transactions. So that is going to improve with OpenSea’s migration to the new Sea port protocol
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
