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 TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Messenger, YouTube, Facebook.
🗞️ News 1: TikTok Tactics launched with online courses on Marketing & Ads
Source: TikTok
🗞️ News 2: Instagram profiles can now display Scheduled Live info
Source: Instagram
🗞️ News 3: Twitter launches a new ‘Toolbox’ resource & tools hub
Source: Twitter
🗞️ News 4: Messenger gets full encryption for calls & group chats
Source: Meta
🗞️ News 5: Q4, 2021 – YouTube closes strong, Facebook loses daily users
Source: Alphabet | Facebook
[News 1] TikTok Tactics launched with online courses on Marketing & Ads
TikTok launches TikTok Tactics, which is a new online learning platform with courses on TikTok Marketing and Advertising. If you, as a Church or Ministry have been wanting to learn more about how to use TikTok for advertising related to your Ministry or a nonprofit, then this is a good resource for you. They’ve got courses related to targeting, attribution, they talk about the samples, creative samples that work well on TikTok, etc. So it could be really useful for your Ministry team or your social media team. We will link to it in the show notes.
It’s a very simple email, name, kind of a sign up process. And then you get started. The courses looked really good on mobile. In typical TikTok-style, they have made all the videos mobile-friendly. The site itself is mobile friendly. And you can quickly go about learning key things about TikTok.
[News 2] Instagram profiles can now display Scheduled Live info
Instagram has been launching new features related to videos and messaging. In 2022, it looks like they’re focusing a lot on this space. In line with that, this new announcement comes from the head of Instagram, where he says that you can now take Instagram Live, which you have scheduled, and get that information, that scheduled information, displayed on your Instagram profile page! Which could be very important, because as a Church or a Ministry, we are all about live streams, right? So when you schedule an Instagram Live for your Ministry, you can now display that info on your profile so that people can click on it.
They will know that you’re going to go live. They also released one more feature where you can remix any video on Instagram, not just Reels. You can actually even remix newsfeed video or any video that you look at on Instagram. You can just click the remix button and you can remix it.
[News 3] Twitter launches a new ‘Toolbox’ resource & tools hub
Twitter launches new ‘Twitter Toolbox’ which is a resource centre which has tools or apps or software related to Twitter that helps you manage your Twitter campaigns easily. If you as a Ministry use Twitter a lot, then you definitely want to have a look at this hub because it has three categories of tools as of now. One is what they call ‘Expression’ tools, which is basically posting-related tools like Buffer. Buffer is one of those tools. So they help you post, and schedule, and plan on Twitter.
The next is ‘Safety’ tools, which is basically moderation tools, because Twitter can get overwhelming if you have too many conversations going on. You might want to moderate it in a proper way. So that is the safety tools. And the third is ‘Measurement’ tools, which is my favourite. They give you some tools for Twitter analytics. Because unless you understand what’s going on on Twitter and all the conversations, it’s very difficult to navigate, being a public platform and a microblogging platform. So these are the tools in the ‘Toolbox’ hub, do have a look.
[News 4] Messenger gets full encryption for calls & group chats
Facebook Messenger has added new features to the platform. The announcement has multiple features including stickers and gifts, etc. But there are 3 features that I wanted to bring to your attention. One is the end-to-end encryption option for group chats and also calls. They are bringing end-to-end encryption to all of this. The next thing is, the ability for you to edit your video before sending a message to someone. Because most of us in Ministry use Facebook Messenger as part of our ad campaigns, and being able to reply to people who respond to that ad, maybe for prayer or counselling or something like that related to nonprofits, when you do that, it is now going to be easier for you to edit that video response that you’re sending to them.
Maybe add a text or do things like you would do on Stories and then send it to them. That option is coming, which is good. Finally, the third thing is if somebody takes a screenshot of a disappearing message, let us say you send a disappearing message and before it disappears, if someone takes a screenshot, then you will be notified, which is a neat feature.
[News 5] Q4, 2021 – YouTube closes strong, Facebook loses daily users
Last week, both YouTube and Facebook released their quarterly earnings details for Q4 2021, which also gives us a full picture of how the year 2021 was, for both these big social media platforms. Obviously they have done very well with revenues. Both of them posting very strong revenues, ad revenues in particular. But the interesting thing is, Facebook for the very first time lost a little bit on the daily active users, in last quarter, which is very interesting to see what’s happening to that platform. Also what I wanted to bring to your notes is those reports contain some details which indicate the trends that are coming for 2022 in both these platforms. YouTube and Facebook are the dominating platforms, so I wanted to bring this to your notice.
I will link to the entire report. I will also link to the earnings call that YouTube has publicly made available, and the CEO Sundar Pichai talks about some of the trends and some of the things that are coming. Very interesting. Both of them have big plans for 2022. You might want to take a look at these two reports.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches and Ministries. You can subscribe to Natchi’s email newsletter by clicking here.
