Welcome to The 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 Facebook, Clubhouse, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube.
🗞️ News 1: Facebook will remove sensitive ad-targeting options starting Jan 2022
Source: Facebook
🗞️ News 2: Clubhouse launches ‘Replays’ with download option; improves user analytics
Source: Clubhouse
🗞️ News 3: Twitter expands Twitter Blue subscription service to US and New Zealand
Source: Twitter
🗞️ News 4: TikTok releases 2021 trends report showcasing how families use TikTok
Source: TikTok
🗞️ News 5: YouTube decides to hide the ‘Dislike’ button count on videos to protect creators
Source: YouTube
[News 1] Facebook will remove sensitive ad-targeting options starting Jan 2022
Our first big news from Facebook. Last week, Facebook made an important announcement about the decisions they made to remove multiple ad targeting options starting January 2022. The announcement says that “…starting 19 January 2022, we will remove detailed targeting options that relate to topics people may perceive as sensitive, such as topics referencing causes, organizations, or public figures that relate to health, race or ethnicity, political affiliation, religion or sexual orientation”. So as you can see, the words that they have used include the word ’causes’, ‘organizations’, ‘health’ and so on, which might include some of the activities that you as a nonprofit or ministry are involved in, and the campaigns that you run on Facebook. This comes to effect only on 19th Jan. So you do have some time to make the adjustments. Please pass this on to your social media and advertising team.
[News 2] Clubhouse launches ‘Replays’ with download option; improves user analytics
Our next news is about Clubhouse. Last week, Clubhouse announced the launch of a new feature called Replays, which, as the name says, allows you to toggle ‘on and off’ the option to enable replays for any conversation in a public room. So you, as a creator, can choose to either enable it or not.
Even though this announcement comes right after Twitter Spaces’ announcement about recording and replay, which happened a couple of weeks ago, I think Clubhouse has really thought through it in a different angle. Because there is a unique feature that they have added, where you can not only forward, scrub in a replay, but you can actually skip between speakers! If you know about Clubhouse, one of the thing in Clubhouse is when multiple speakers are there, and they go on and on, because it’s an audio platform, and sometimes you just want to listen to your favorite speaker, or move to the next point, or jump off from a speaker.
Now you can do that in a replay by just clicking the ‘next speaker’ button. You can just go to the next speaker and listen to whoever you want to listen to. That makes it much more meaningful, helps you capture conversations or parts of the conversation that you want to capture, almost like chapters in YouTube. Very interesting. I’ll also link to the details that they have released about making the user analytics better on Clubhouse.
[News 3] Twitter expands Twitter Blue subscription service to US and New Zealand
Our next news is about Twitter. Twitter announced the expansion of its paid subscription program, Twitter Blue to United States and New Zealand. Earlier, they launched it in Australia and Canada. Now they’re expanding it to US and New Zealand. This is a minimal $2.99… less than $3 subscription per month, which gives you access to additional features on Twitter, including undo, Tweets and app, icon and BOOKMARKS and a few other things. But the most interesting part of this offering is your ability to read articles from top publishers Ad free.
You can read articles from publishers like Washington Post, La Times, USA Today, Atlantic, Reuters, and so on as part of this premium subscription. So I think it’s a quite interesting route that Twitter is taking, considering people go to Twitter all the time for news article consumption.
[News 4] TikTok releases 2021 trends report showcasing how families use TikTok
Our next news is about TikTok. Last week, TikTok released a 2021 Trends report that showcases the platform’s ability to attract families, which is not something that you generally think of the moment you think of TikTok. You only think of young audience, but you don’t think of families. But this is an interesting report that talks about how popular creators have created content related to the family, the hashtags, the videos that they’ve actually created, and the trends that are developing on TikTok. So quite an interesting article. And you, as a nonprofit or a ministry, if you’re focused on family in some way, you definitely want to take a look and see if you can get some inspiration out of it.
[News 5] YouTube decides to hide the ‘Dislike’ button count on videos to protect creators
Our final news of this week is a big one from YouTube. Youtube has announced that they have decided to remove the number of dislike counts that you see below a video. The dislike button is going to remain there. It’s just that they are are removing the public view of the number of dislikes a video has got. If you still want to see how many dislikes your video has, you can still go to the analytics and look at it, but just that it is not going to be publicly visible. Youtube says the decision came after they tried an experiment, where if they hide the count, people don’t actively go and try to dislike a video, just because they don’t like the creator or they don’t like the topic or something like that. Some bias. And people click a lot of on the ‘Dislikes’ on the video just to discredit it. YouTube wants to avoid such kind of a thing to protect the creators.
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.
