Welcome to Connected Church News!
Top 5 latest Digital, Social Media & Web3 News in 5 minutes, to help your ministry stay on top of industry trends.
This week, we have news about ChatGPT, WhatsApp, TikTok, Meta, YouTube.
🗞️ News 1: Meta Starts Testing Paid ‘Meta Verified’ Program For Organizations
Source: Meta
Meta has announced that they have started testing the Meta Verified program for businesses and organizations. Meta Verified is a paid subscription program that’s already available for individual creators, but now they are expanding it to businesses. Even though it looks like a similar offering with the blue tick and you know verified badge and so on, there are two additional advantages that are being offered to businesses and organizations that I want to bring to your notice. First is, the visibility on Facebook and Instagram, when it comes to search. The announcement says “brands that are verified will appear at or near the top of search results”. That’s one. No.2, ” verified brands will get a custom whatsapp page that is easily discoverable via a web search”. Now that isa big advantage because you get a whatsapp page that appears on Google search results.
🗞️ News 2: TikTok Announces AI-Generated Content Regulation Steps With New Labels
Source: TikTok
TikTok has announced that they are launching labels that you can use to disclose whether a content was generated with the help of AI or not. AI generated content is great, but it’s also becoming a problem on social media because when you look at a video or an image that is generated using AI, you don’t know whether it is real, or it stems out of the imagination of an individual just using prompts to generate something. Like a fake image or something imaginative, right? Social media platforms are trying to self regulate this, especially after the high level meeting that happened in Washington (USA) a few days ago. We are seeing that platforms like Facebook and Instagram, they’re all trying to come up with ways to combat this AI generated content problem. And TikTok is leading the way with this announcement. So even if you don’t label your content as AI generated, there are ways in which TikTok says they will find out, with expert opinion, and they might even pull that content down.
🗞️ News 3: WhatsApp Launches ‘WhatApp Flows’ to Facilitate In-App Transactions
Source: WhatsApp
WhatsApp has announced a new product or a feature called WhatsApp Flows, which will enable you to conduct end to end transaction, right from showcasing a product, to helping people choose variations of the product, then making payment and so on. Everything being facilitated through this new feature. This is going to be based out of the WhatsApp Business platform and this announcement was made at the global Conversations event. If you remember, last week, we had a similar announcement from TikTok with this feature called TikTok Shop. Basically these organizations like TikTok and Meta are trying to get all the transactional elements inside the app itself, so that you don’t have to go out of the app. They want organizations and businesses to consider these apps like an e-commerce store, which is exciting, because as nonprofits and ministries, we can use this for donations, we can use this for products, we can use this for various transactional applications.
🗞️ News 4: YouTube Launches a New App ‘YouTube Create’, with Tools for Creators
Source: YouTube
Last week at the ‘Made On’ YouTube event, YouTube announced multiple new tools for creators, including a green screen effect called ‘Dream Screen’ (I like the name) where you can use AI to create a screen in your background when you shoot videos. Very cool feature. But the bigger announcement was about a new App, an exclusive mobile app for creators, called ‘YouTube Create’, which is a video editing app with multiple features like Music, easy video editing flow. It’s more like CapCut, but from youtube. But when you use it, obviously, it’s going to have music and other things which are youtube-friendly. So if you are Focusing on YouTube as a nonprofit or ministry that definitely this is an app you want to check out. You might want to also consider using this app as a part of your toolkit, when it comes to your volunteers, or staff in your ministry, or your media team
🗞️ News 5: OpenAI Releases DALL-E 3 AI-Image Generator Integrated With ChatGPT
Source: OpenAI
OpenAI announced the release of the next version of DALL-E, which is their AI image generator, and this is going to be the third version. So it’s DALL-E 3. The interesting thing about this new release is that this image generator solves some of the annoying problems that people have with prompt generation. The earlier version of DALL-E was great, but it still depended a lot on prompts. But in this version, DALL-E will work closely with ChatGPT. And because of the chatbot integration, you can actually have a conversation with ChatGPT while you’re generating an image, and ChatGPT will help you with the prompts itself. Because generating prompts is the problem when it comes to AI. And OpenAI seems to be tackling the prompt challenge by combining multiple tools. A very interesting strategy from OpenAI. Do check out this announcement and also give it a try.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
