Table of Contents
ToggleMarch Social Media App Updates 2023
YouTube- No More Overlay Ads and New Monetization Guidelines
In a big change for YouTube ads, the platform will no longer be supporting Overlay Ads starting April 6th in an effort to improve the viewer experience, as well as shift engagement over to “higher performing ad formats”. These ads only appeared on desktop, and the social media platform expects this will have little effect on creatives based on the performance of other add types.
YouTube made another announcement that it will be softening its requirements for monetization in regard to violence and profanity. Back in November, the platform limited ads or completely demonetized a creator’s video if there was profanity within the first 15 seconds of a video. The November approach to profanity appeared to be retroactive, impacting every YouTube video that had swearing in the beginning. There was also no tier system for profanity, which has now been updated. There is also more nuance in the number of times profanity can be used, and has reduced the amount of time to the first 8 seconds.
The Advertiser Friendly Guidelines in November also had stricter guidelines around videogame violence, which specifically impacted the gaming community’s ability to monetize content. While the immediate impact on content creators’ income is unknown, it’s refreshing to see that Youtube is exercising social listening and monitoring to help better serve the needs of their community.
Meta – Help AI Researchers Maximize Inclusion and Diversity
Meta has launched a new dataset aimed at helping to curb biases found within artificial intelligence. The dataset, Casual Conversations v2, is “a consent-driven, publicly available resource that enables researchers to better evaluate the fairness and robustness of certain types of AI models.” A diverse group of paid participants records themselves saying different monologues to allow researchers to have more information to build AI on.
The first iteration of the study’s subcategories only had three options for gender (male, female, and other), age, apparent skin tone, and ambient lighting. In hopes of making AI more inclusive, the new participants now include more languages and dialects, variations in skin tone, trans and non-binary gender options, recording setups, voice timbre, and activity.
If you’re a marketer interested in using AI, this can help you target a wider audience by appealing to specific demographics through inclusive content.
Reddit – New Video “Watch” Feed and Comments Search
While Reddit is a social media platform we discuss often, the site offers many unique marketing advantages and is a treasure trove of data for social listening and monitoring, especially with some of its latest features.
And the very end of February, the site released the ability to search through comments across desktop and mobile., making it easier to find those golden nuggets of consumer feedback. This month, Reddit announced a new “Watch” feed in the app. While currently, users can easily scroll through videos on the app, the dedicated feed will give users a TikTok-like experience, which will give users more power over the videos they see. This has the potential to increase engagements and views for those who are leveraging Reddit marketing.
Reddit is also shutting down its audio social element akin to Clubhouse, Reddit talks, due to its 3rd party audio vendor shutting down.
Twitter – Removing Live Recordings Livestream Archive, Direct Message Updates, and Decentralization
As is the new normal, Twitter has a slew of new updates. Twitter’s live streaming element Periscope will no longer be supporting live archives as reported by BuzzFeed’s tech reporter Katie Notopoulos. When the livestreams will be deleted is not clear, but will happen “soon”. While Reddit is sunsetting its Red Talk, there has been no mention yet of the fate of audio recordings from Twitter’s audio element Spaces. For now, it’s probably best to download archives from both Periscope and Space, given the tumultuous nature of the company since Elon Musk’s takeover.
Similar to Meta, Twitter is now offering end-to-end encryption for direct messages. What this means is that no one other than the people involved in the DM can read the message. While this does offer greater security and protection for users, opponents fear it can also foster criminal activities as neither government and legal authorities nor the social media app itself can access messages with end-to-end encryption.
Twitter is also giving users the ability to reply or react directly to specific messages within the feed, a feature Meta has had for both Instagram and Facebook. Users may also soon be able to reply with emojis in DMs and give users the ability to customize their default reactions.
Musk recently spoke at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom 2023, reinforcing that his vision for “Twitter 2.0” is to have Twitter be a source of truth and preserve the foundations of “free speech”, and create a more decentralized system where users determine the rules, and using Community Notes to police misinformation and untruths by adding contextualized explainers to Tweets.
Of course, many people’s concern with this approach is the rise of hate speech on Twitter, which we did an analysis on right after Musk’s takeover.
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What We’re Reading
- LinkedIn Adds More Ad Targeting Criteria, Provides Tips for B2C Campaigns – Social Media Today
- Discord updates its bot with ChatGPT-like features, rolls out AI-generated conversation summaries, and more – TechCrunch+
- New bill will give the Commerce secretary the power to ban TikTok, Warner says – CNBC
- 10 Inspiring and Influential Black Women
- What is the Metaverse and Why is it Important for Marketing?
- How to Protect Twitter Account Now that Text Verification is a Paid Service