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 Spotify, Canva, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn.
🗞️ News 1: YouTube announces a new set of monetization options for Shorts Creators
Source: YouTube
YouTube made an announcement last week which could be one of its biggest moves to tackle the competition from TikTok. YouTube Shorts, which directly competes with TikTok, is getting new monetization options including a lower threshold to enter YouTube Partner program. The announcement says, shorts focused creators can apply for YouTube Partner program by meeting a threshold of 1000subscribers and 10 million shots views over 90 days. They’ve also added and bundled up Super Thanks, Super Chat Channel Membership and all those good monetization options for Shorts creators. So, you as a church or ministry, if you are starting to create YouTube shorts, then this is an option that you might want to check out. We will link to all the details in the show notes, have a look.
🗞️ News 2: Spotify launches Audiobooks strengthening its position in the industry
Source: Spotify
Spotify has announced that they are adding audiobooks to their offering, further strengthening their position in the industry. They are already one of the leading players with offerings such as music and podcasts and now audiobooks are joining the lineup. The announcement says starting today, Spotify listeners in the US will be able to purchase and listen to more than 300,000 audiobook titles, making our platform a true all in one destination for everyone’s listening needs. Very interesting. And as ministries, anything related to the audio industry is something that we need to pay attention to because people give their ears to it and faith comes by hearing. And I also know many ministries in churches listening to me have audiobooks. So maybe it’s time for you to look at Spotify as another means of distributing the products to your audience.
🗞️ News 3: Canva launches Visual Worksuite with collaborative documents & slides
Source: Canva
Canva announced the launch of Visual Worksuite, which is a bundling of various products that were already on the platform but focused towards work and making organizations more productive. This includes presentations, whiteboard, and a new product called Canva Docs, which is similar to Google Docs but with the combination of a visual element that Canva is very popularly known for. Now, this could potentially compete against Google Docs in the days to come. And this is something that is important for nonprofits and ministries because, as you know, Canva is very pro nonprofit, and it gives out free licenses to nonprofits. And I know lots of nonprofit listening to me already used canvas free and this is something you might really want to check out. Pass this on to your visual design team or your leadership team or your content team that uses canvas.
🗞️ News 4: TikTok partners with Penguin allowing users to tag their books in videos
Source: TikTok
TikTok has made announcement about a new interesting feature that lets you tag a book inside TikTok videos. This comes out of the partnership that TikTok has with Penguin Random House and people who have the books from this publisher will now be able to create a link in TikTok video clips. And when others click on the link, it will open up to a page that has things like the summary of the book and videos of other people who have talked about the book and so on. So, it’s a nice little way to bring together a community of people and ideas around one book. So, this is a feature that could really be useful, especially in #BookTok, which is the hashtag you use on TikTok for books. And according to TikTok, this hashtag has had 77 billion views. TikTok is really innovating. One of the influencers that TikTok is thinking like a startup and innovating. I totally agree.
🗞️ News 5: LinkedIn releases a new Focused Inbox & Machine Translated Captions
Source: LinkedIn
LinkedIn made announcements about the new features that they are adding to the platform. There were multiple items in the announcement, including ways to display your certificates from organizations like Oracle, IBM and Meta in an official way. But there are two items that I wanted to bring to your notice. One is called Focused Inbox, where they are taking the direct messaging option within LinkedIn and cleaning it up a bit by creating a separate space for messages that may not be fully relevant to you. So those items will move to a separate space, and you can focus on important conversations. So, this is in line with what’s happening in Messenger and Instagram DM and so on. So, it’s not very surprising, but it’s good. It’s come to LinkedIn where there are lots of spams. Now, the second feature that I want to bring to your attention is called Machine Translated Captions. The announcement says that LinkedIn Learning Videos will now have automated Machine Translation Captions that will help you watch and learn in new languages.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
