TikTok FINED $13.8M, New Instagram Features and More News for April 2023

Hey everyone. My name is rich and we're going to be going through some of the social media news for April of 2023. This is your first time listening. This is let's talk social and we are on season four, episode three. And today we're going to be talking about a lot of topics just across all the social channels, and I'm going to briefly hit the headlines and then we'll jump into them. So first first one, I think kind of thing is the biggest headline here is Tik. TOK has been fine to$12.7 million by the United Kingdom for misusing children's data. So Tik TOK is still under attack for data misuse. Facebook ads, a broadcast channel chat option for Facebook groups. Australia bands, Tik TOK on government devices. LinkedIn is testing the suggested posts and user feeds. Instagram NFTs are being deactivated. April 11th. Tik TOK is rolling out an edit post button, which is cool. And then users can now mention each other and Instagram notes along with Metta giving us new reels ad options. And I'm not going to go over the Twitter and other stuff because it's irrelevant. Let's talk about the metal stuff first, getting us a new reels ad options. So click the messenger ads and what's app conversion optimization are now available for your Facebook reels ads. And they've also rolled out the support for the ads on Facebook reels, post engagement objectives. What's lets you measure interactions like reactions, comments, likes, and then compare them to engagement from other ads or campaigns. So we've been able to pull in reels like via video and it just turns into a normal video ad. This is going to actually give you. A placement in the reels now. And so like it says here you can track. Other interactions and conversion objectives that you weren't able to previously. And so we have some other ways that we can try to get customers to convert there. So that's exciting. If you were a current client of ours and listening to us, we'll probably be implementing this. Our ads team is going to be. As we normally do requesting. What's your best reels and going through. What we think will be the best for you guys. Now in the Facebook news, specifically, those of you who have Facebook groups, they added a broadcast channel chat option. And this is going to be really interesting, especially for those who do live selling and everything. And it says here, a broadcast channels are a one to many group chat. So they were launched earlier this year for Instagram creators and it looks like they're making their way to Facebook groups. Now, if you have access to the feature. Broadcast channels could be a good space to connect with your audience on a more personal level. Get feedback from members and share news and updates. I think it's hilarious how this doesn't mention selling products at all, but that's a hundred percent what it's going to be mostly used for there. So we'll see if like comments sold and some of these other live selling platforms ever adopts and gets API keys to where you can go live. At this level inside of your little group, two. Now, instead of Instagram, you news here, we've got that you can now add or mention, hit someone with their handle users in your Instagram notes. And so notes were launched as a way to spark conversations between you and your followers. And so now you can add the capability to tag somebody in a note. So if you're chatting with another person, you can mention people and they can click straight to their profile. You would think that would have an obvious thing to have installed before? Rolling that out. Come on guys. You need to have me on your team over there. What's going on. And honestly, I don't think that's that big of a deal. And a few guys have used this notes thing to actually spark conversations with customers. Let me know. I feel like this is one of the things they roll out and then they hype it up so much. And then they just Take it off the lineup after a year or so. And they just delete it. Similar to what I'm talking about right here, NFTs will be deactivated on April 11th. So if you were familiar with NFTs those, the the crypto art pieces and those things, You could buy one. With your blockchain currency. And then you could basically tie it to your Instagram profile and brag to everybody with your profile photo. That you had purchased a super expensive NFT or whatever it is. They are now deactivating that I don't think many people used it anyways, to be honest. So you'll no longer see NFTs inside of people's profile photos. Now for tick talking to a lot of our clients and and a lot of you guys still care about Tech-Talk. As one of the major sources for where you're like creating content and trying to put out most of your stuff. And as it's been under just a hell storm for the last, like two or three weeks now across the entire globe. And Australia just recently banned Tik TOK and all government devices. This is the us that UK, New Zealand, Canada, Belgium, and the EU have already been in the app from official devices over security concerns. So Australia is late to jumping on the train with us, but it made headlines because this is just another affirmation to the privacy concerns and data misuse concerns that we are all having with Tik TOK and. Why we are looking to ban it currently. And so the future of tech talk for the public is still up in the air. If you run your ads on ticktock for your business, you might want to think about contingency plans just to be safe. I just spoke with a ag client yesterday and we were telling them like, It's a lot to bite off and start chewing on, it may be disappearing in a few weeks anyways, so let's give it another couple of weeks before we start putting a lot of money into that category. They were also recently Tik TOK was not my client. Thank goodness. I recently find a$12.7 million by the UK watchdog, whatever that is for misusing children's data. And again, we're coming back to these data, misuse things China's just under a ton of flack for this. And so what this means for us, And what information commissioner John Edward said in a press release is that Tik TOK allowed as many as 1.4 million children in the UK under 13 to use the app. And collected and use personal data without parental consent. And while this may not directly impact you at ad scrutiny facing tech talk and contributes to it's unknown future. So yes, it can impact you if you're doing a lot of your sales. On here. We have some clients you can post a video and make a hundred sales in like the next 24 hours from the one video. So that platform disappears. That's a lot of yearly volume that we might be missing out on. But I do think it's a noble cause to protect these kids because. I think someone in the United States, one of the governors or something just recently passed a bill or put it into play and is trying to get a bill passed where they are basically forcing it to where if you're under, I think it's 13 in the United States that you would require parental consent for any social media apps, not just tech talk. And so I liked that feature. My, I had just had a kid like a month and a half ago, so yeah, I'm starting to feel that, that little bit of a pressure there with that. And all the information stimulus that's out there. And then lastly, about Tik TOK. So they rolled out an edit post button. So now you can edit the thing after you've posted it. So you can go tweak your caption and tweak the the mentions and that kind of stuff. I don't think you can go and change your voiceover read CA do all that stuff. It's more of just like hashtags video covers, copy of mentions those sorts of things. Okay. So that's everything with Tech-Talk. Like I said, Twitter has some stuff going on there. They're taking the algorithm and making it open source. So anyone can go and read through the code and make suggestions to get better. That's been a thing for about six months now. And yeah, they're saying it's still not truly available for everybody. And so again, I don't think this really impacts a lot of us. They are starting to remove the blue check marks again. What does this mean for business next to nothing? Unless you're a verified Twitter user and they're taking that away from you that might hurt brand. I would assume a little bit. So here's some LinkedIn news. Those of us who use LinkedIn for hiring or for professional service promotion or any of those sorts of things. They are now testing a suggested post and users' feeds based off their engagement, activity and interest. So this is just like the, for you page on Tik TOK or the the search page on. Instagram, when you go on there or when you're just scrolling through your normal feed, it'll say suggested posts every now and again. It's going to be the same thing for LinkedIn. The reason that these platforms do that is because it allows, it basically gets its users more engagement because they're crossing more paths than they normally would. And what that does is that gets the users more excited about the platform of LinkedIn, and then it makes them wanna post to it more. Ultimately driving more ad revenue for LinkedIn, because if you have a bigger following there, you're gonna want to advertise more there. So their intention just like the rest of them. Is obviously backed from money. Those were like the big five topics I wanted to hit. And then. I also want to dimension this as we kick back to tech talk. And it's not that I hate tech talk. I do dislike it. I don't hate it, but I did want to show you guys this as well. It says Tik TOK slowly tries a us affiliate program and shows its Rico rules. And so I saw another article. I couldn't read because I don't pay for the thing there, but it said. Instead of slowly tries. It said sneakily tries to, or like tries to sneak out an affiliate program. Because they're under so much flack right now. And so despite all of the stuff that's going on in the court system and whatever is happening for their attack, they're still trying to roll out affiliate programs so that you can basically become a paid affiliate. And then this says, you can get. In-app revenues and cuts of all the stuff that you're doing. This is actually, I think what Instagram just removed. Two weeks ago, they took away their affiliate marketing programs and that upset a lot of the all of the smaller creators who were really banking on not only that revenue, but the additional exposure from the algorithm, lifting them inside of the algorithm. And I think that's going to be another little bit of thing here where it's like we're giving tick-tock all these problems we have in it with it. So anyways, just again, don't put all your eggs in the Tech-Talk basket, keep posting to Facebook, Instagram, don't give up on YouTube and YouTube shorts you need to be everywhere just in case. Okay. And then last other thing is Facebook is retiring the code generator, authentication elements. If you're like me and you hate this thing, or if you've been locked out of your Facebook account a lot, this is now going away and this should actually help you guys knock it. Your Facebook's hacked or locked out as often, because what would happen is they would hack into your account, tie it to their third party code generator, and then you would be locked out like permanently forever because the code generator was the one thing that could get you back in. And so I've had very limited success with clients, like getting them back into pages and trying to work around all these password issues and hackers, getting them locked out and whatever. But now that this is going away, I'm hoping that we'll have a little bit more luck with just the. Everyday user who's having these issues. That's getting hacked and all these things going on. If you guys have not secured your Facebook pages and authenticated like three friends to be your. Fail safe. If someone ever hacks you, you can hit up your three friends and the Facebook will send all three of them. A code, you punch all three codes into your profile. It lets you straight in. You need to be able to do that. So figure out how to do that. Just Google for it. Or you can hit us up if you want to maybe have a phone call about it. But yeah, that was just something I thought would alleviate some of the pain points that I've dealt with over the past few years with all of our clients, friends and family that get locked out of their Facebook's. Okay. The guys that has been the full episode for this week. And like I said, the social media news for April really of 2023, I will probably have some stories on our social media pages. If you don't follow us on Facebook or Instagram, go and follow us on there. We're obviously we post little shorts about these episodes so that you guys know when a new episode is posted, but we have stories that have fun facts, engaging things, questions that we'll ask for you guys. And then of course, if you ever comment and ask us questions or DMS, we're there to assist you and try to help out. So thank you for listening. Like I said this was news for April and we'll see you in the next episode.