[Top 5 Weekly News] From Google, LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, Web3: Week 1, Nov 2022
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 Google, LinkedIn, Meta, YouTube, Web3.
🗞️ News 1: Meta brings Reels to Facebook Groups; announces new community tools
Source: Meta
Meta announced that they are adding multiple new features to Facebook Groups, including Reels, which is an exciting announcement because Reels coming into Facebook Groups means you can now start creating short vertical videos with text and audio and narration and filters and effects and all of that for a closed group of people that you are ministering to. So especially in the nonprofit, ministry, church setting, I think this can be useful with prayer groups, discipleship groups and small communities, etc. So think about it. And even a nonprofit setting, there can be many applications, including creating specific content to a specific group of audience in a Facebook group. So this also is enabled for the members, so they also can create Reels to be shared within the group, which is exciting. They also added multiple other community tools, which I will link to in the show notes. Have a look
🗞️ News 2: YouTube rolls out design changes to platform including Ambient Mode
Source: YouTube
Next time you log into your YouTube app, you may feel like things look a little bit different because YouTube has been rolling out some UI design changes to the platform. And that includes features like pinch to zoom, which allows you to focus on one little part of the video. Like you can just pinch and zoom the video like you would do on an image on Instagram. And you can focus on one part of the video, say, right side corner of the video. Let’s say that’s an information you want to focus on. You can do that. I think it’s a useful feature. And you can even think of this feature when you create content for your audience. You can say something like you can pinch and zoom if you want to focus on the number on the right side or something like that. So something to think about. And the other feature is called Ambient mode, which adjusts the background of the app based on the color of the video, which is also a nice touch because it’ll look nice to the audience.
🗞️ News 3: LinkedIn continues to grow in both revenue & engagement, says Microsoft
Source: LinkedIn
Microsoft released its quarterly results for the first quarter and as part of the announcement they said that LinkedIn continues to see growth in both revenues and engagement. The announcement says that LinkedIn revenue grew17%, driven by talent solutions and LinkedIn sessions grew by 24% with record engagement. That is what the announcement says. As you know in the social media world in terms of content, things are drastically changing, especially due to the short form video disruption that’s happening. Thanks to TikTok and companies like Facebook are struggling to grow. Even with Facebook’s tweak and shift towards Metaverse with Meta, they are still not able to show strong growth. So it’s interesting to see how LinkedIn is growing in this space.
🗞️ News 4: Google launches My Ads Center, giving users better control over the ads
Source: Google
Google has launched a new tool called My Ad Center and this tool will appear in Google’s products like Google Search, YouTube, etc. When you search for something, you see ads along with the search results. Now below those ads you will see an area called My Ad Center where you can choose your personalization on what kind of ads you want to see, whether it’s relevant and all of that. Earlier there were elements like about this ad or ad settings where these things were available. No wall of that is being replaced by this new tool called My Ad Center. So it’s important for you as an advertiser or a marketer to understand this new process or behavior that is going to be in front of your audience. So when they see your ad, this is what they are going to choose. So it becomes all the more important for you to target the right audience so that they do not say I don’t want to see this ad.
🗞️ News 5: [Web3] UK’s Lower House of Parliament votes in favor of Crypto
Source: Coindesk
In our web3 news this week, we have news about UK, United Kingdom’s lawmakers in the lower house of the Parliament voted in favor of recognizing cryptocurrency as a regulated financial instrument. And this isa significant step-in the Web3 world where crypto is a big part of the whole Web3 ecosystem and every regulation like this, especially in a major economy, has an impact on how this shapes up for the future. You will be interested to know that Rishi Sunak, who is now the UK newly elected Prime Minister. When he was a finance minister during his tenure, he had unveiled a plan to make the country as a hub for cryptocurrencies. So now he’s the prime minister and then this goes through the Parliament. It’s all interesting.
Originally published at https://www.natchilazarus.com on November 2, 2022.
