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, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Limewire, Web3.
🗞️ News 1: YouTube partners with Shopify adding direct shopping to channels
Source: YouTube
YouTube made a big announcement about their partnership with Shopify bringing direct shopping experience to the platform. Your viewers will be able to shop inside YouTube without leaving the plat form. Now that is the a big advantage. The announcement says we are “…partnering with Shopify to enable creators and merchants to easily feature their products across their YouTube channels and content. Now eligible creators can link their Shopify store to their YouTube channel in just a few steps”. There are some steps involved both on the YouTube side and on Shopify side. I will link to this article with all the details in the show notes. Do pass it on to your e-commerce team in your church or your nonprofit, and also send it to your social media team, so they know how this integration works tightly. In fact, the YouTube Studio app now gets a separate Shopping tab.
🗞️ News 2: Instagram expands Subscriptions with exclusive Tab, Reels & Chat
Source: Instagram
Instagram announced that they are expanding their Subscriptions feature with additional exclusive features for subscribers, including a tab exclusively for subscribers, reels and chat… subscriber chat. You can also now create posts that are exclusive to your subscribers. I found this announcement interesting because this could actually indicate a trend where you and me, as church and ministries, as we look to online tools for community building, this indicates a trend in which that could go. For example, in Instagram today, you can have a post that appears exclusively to your subscribers. Now, could this be post, reels and chats that give an exclusive experience to your church members? Maybe to your followers of your nonprofit in the future? I know Instagram is still experimenting with this, but this could actually bean indication of ‘online community building’ for churches and ministries in the days to come.
🗞️ News 3: Google launches its Ads Creative Studio globally to all users
Source: Google
Google announced that they are rolling out their Ads Creative Studio tool globally to all users. Earlier this year, they had launched it under a testing mode, and we reported it in our news bulletin. This is a very useful tool, especially for the creative team that produces your ad assets in your church or your ministry. Now, what they can do is, they can use this tool to streamline their workflow, to collaborate with each other. In fact, there is a very useful feature called ‘Swappables’ where you can select, for example, let’s say you have a video, a YouTube video or something, where you have an image or your text and you want to replace that with other variations, during the creative process. For example, your video can have this image or that image, in the versions one and two, and you can mark the image, text and sound as ‘swappables’. And this tool will automate the process and make it easier for you. So, quite a useful tool. Do pass this on to your advertising team.
🗞️ News 4: Twitter gives users on all devices the ability to Unmentioned themselves
Source: Twitter
Twitter has announced that they are rolling out the ‘unmentioning’ feature to all users, on all devices, globally. This is a feature that lets you remove yourself from a conversation, once you are not comfortable with the way things are going. Especially on a platform like Twitter, where things can get a little uncomfortable, once more people get involved, and the conversation starts taking a different direction, you don’t want to be part of that anymore. As of now, there was no option for you to remove yourself from a particular thread of conversation. But now with this feature, which has been testing for a while, you can actually do that. You can remove yourself from the thread. And once you select the unmention feature, you will be able to do three things: your username will be untapped from the original tweet and replies, users won’t be able to mention you again, you will no longer be notified about updates to the exchange. Quite useful.
🗞️ News 5: [Web3] LimeWire announces its relaunch as a music NFT marketplace
Source: Mashable
In our web3 news today, we are highlighting the relaunch of tool called LimeWire that once used to be popular for file sharing, but got into a lot of controversy. Now they are relaunching it as a ‘Music NFT Marketplace’. I wanted to highlight this to you because this is a model that you can explore and actually research, if you’re planning to introduce NFT into a traditionally popular model. For example, Music and Music Marketplace is not new, but bringing NFTs into the mix is something that many people have been exploring. But LimeWire seems to have thought of a few things much more deeper, bringing much more clarity into a few things. Like for example, you can use your credit or your debit card on the platform. And some of the NFTs are actually originals, available only on this marketplace. They’ve thought through a few things. This could be a good research platform for you if you are planning to introduce NFT into your ministry or your nonprofit.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
