This Week’s Social Media News — April 1, 2021
Welcome back to Café Social’s regular weekly social news updates. We’ll keep up to date with all things digital and social so you don’t have to.
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Brazil Approves WhatsApp’s Payments License
Brazil’s Central Bank has approved the Facebook company’s payments license which will allow them to start using WhatsApp as a kind of PayPal/Venmo/Cash App/Square. China’s way ahead of us on integration between social and payments but Facebook’s making headway more broadly across the world so expect more updates soon.
IGTV Expands Revenue Sharing For Australian Creators
Instagram has rolled out ad placements to IGTV for creators in the UK and Australia as they expand their roster of revenue-sharing tools. In contrast to YouTube, Facebook (as a parent company) has had a lot of trouble more directly sharing cash with the creators that give them the assets around which they place ads. Not every creator is yet eligible but stay tuned.
Facebook Expands Ad Agency Training For Those Affected By COVID Layoffs
As COVID relief schemes wane across the world, Facebook is expanding their ‘Rise’ ad agency training program to new countries in the wake of the advertising industry’s lowest employment numbers since 2014. Designed for advertising professionals who’ve faced redundancy or furlough, Rise is a training program to help digital advertisers get back on their feet. Find out more here however note that Australia isn’t formally part of the scheme.
Facebook Investing In Undersea Cables To Better Connect NA and APAC
Technically offline — well, sort of — Facebook is investing in two new undersea cables to improve Internet connection capacity for expanding Asia Pacific markets. Expanding digital access to a faster Internet has been on the Facebook playbook for a while — Facebook-installed-as-standard-and-undeletable phones aside — so it’s no surprise they’re continuing to make infrastructure investments.
After all: Facebook’s just about capitalised on the number of online users already on the platform so, to grow, they need to connect new people to the Internet who don’t already have it.
Instagram And Snapchat Launch ‘Remixes’ of TikTok’s Duets Feature
Both Instagram and Snapchat are working on their own versions of TikTok’s iconic ‘Duets’ feature, with both seeming to call them ‘Remixes’ for now. Find the Instagram testing discovery, as retweeted by Matt Navarra, here and the Snapchat testing discovery here. Update: we wrote this draft yesterday and now they’re out on Instagram.
Twitter Spaces Coming To Desktop
As Clubhouse continues to remain the gold standard for audio-based social (for now…) Twitter is pushing ahead with Spaces and it will soon be available on desktop web browsers. Find the announcement as tweeted by @magusnn, one of Twitter Spaces’ engineers, here.
LinkedIn Working On Clubhouse Clone
And LinkedIn, late as ever, is working on a Clubhouse rival of their own. LinkedIn and Twitter, for our money, are definitely the two platforms on which this audio capacity makes the most sense — where Facebook’s will likely remain mostly friends and family — as they’re replacing the pub chat given enduring COVID restrictions. We’ll see how these platforms perform once everyone is back to regular, face-to-face, unrestricted life.
YouTube Testing Hiding Public Dislikes
YouTube is also testing removing public dislike counts to help alleviate some of the social pressures on the site. Creators will still be able to see their dislikes, so not really sure how that helps ease up on the bullying pressure, but at least it won’t create a publicly accessible dopamine storm for those looking to downvote for a laugh.
