Welcome to Connected Church News!
Top 5 latest Digital, Social Media & Web3 News in 5 minutes, to help your ministry stay on top of industry trends.
This week, we have news about Meta, Google, Instagram, X, AI.
🗞️ News 1: Meta Offers Ad-Free Subscription Option in EU for Facebook & Instagram
Source: Meta
Meta has officially announced that they are offering an ad free subscription program in the EU, European Union region. This topic has been in discussion for quite a while now because of the strict legal compliance issues that companies like Meta, in the social media space, have been facing in the European Union. And now this comes as an option, not only to overcome the advertising privacy issues. But also as an additional revenue model. This is an important trend that you and me in the nonprofit and ministry space need to watch out because once this takes off then it brings in a question of how are you going to reach your audience in the EU region using ads on Facebook and Instagram. So we will watch this news closely and as it develops, we’ll keep you informed.
🗞️ News 2: Google Pay Can Now Be Used to Pay for Public Transit in 500+ Cities
Source: Google
Google says that Google Pay is now an accepted form of payment in public transports in more than 500 cities around the world. Google has a definite advantage over other players and competitors because of Google Maps. Millions of people use Google Maps every day to find transit information and so on. So Google is strategically building in Google Pay into Maps. This announcement says once you open Google Maps and search for a transit option, you can make the payment right there inside Google Maps itself and board the transit. It’s going to be interesting to see how Google dominates this space, not only for convenience reasons, but also because this payment option is contactless and you don’t have to carry your credit card and you just make the payment using your phone, which is all working out nicely together.
🗞️ News 3: Instagram Reminder Ads Gets New Features Including Stories Placement
Source: Instagram
Instagram has announced that they are adding couple of important required features into the Reminder Ads option. Reminder Ads are a very useful option inside Instagram, which can help you remind people about, say a ministry event, or your church services, or your nonprofit fundraiser, or anything like that. Because people today are busy and they’re on Instagram most of the time and Instagram is a good tool to remind people to quickly attend the event or, take the action that you want them to take. So Reminder Ads are quite useful. But they have been missing some key features which have now been added. Number one, from a workflow perspective for your advertising team, Reminder Ads can be created directly within ads manager, which is good. And number two, Reminder Ads can also be featured in Instagram Stories. That new placement option has been added inside Reminder Ads. Share this with your ministry advertising team and they’ll be happy.
🗞️ News 4: X (Twitter) Launches Premium+ Subscription with No Ads & Creator Tools
Source: X
X platform has announced that they are launching a new subscription plan called Premium+. This is an upgrade option to existing premium users. They will get three things. First is “…no ads in the For You or the Following section. And they will have largest boost for the replies inside X platform”. So when you reply to an existing post within X, then you will get a bigger boost! That’s what the announcement says. I don’t know, we’ll have to wait and see how that performs. Then finally “…access to our full suite of creator tools”. And it says that this is already available on the web and there is a link. We will link to it in the show notes. Check it out. It’s quite interesting to see how almost all the major social media platforms are moving towards the subscription space.
🗞️ News 5: [AI] Joe Biden Issues Executive Order; Frontier Model Forum Gets $10mn
Source: US WhiteHouse | Google
In our AI news highlights this week, we have two important news items. One is from the United States government, where the president of the US, Joe Biden, has signed an executive order on AI. The order has six new standards for AI safety and security, and it also outlines how the government plans to use AI in an ethical manner. We will link to it in the show notes if you are interested in AI development, then this is definitely something you want to check out. The second news is about the formation of an industry body called Frontier Model Forum, which has been put together by big names like Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, in which Amazon has heavily invested. These companies have set aside $10 million as an AI safety fund. It also says that this fund will be used for developing responsible AI models, and having a conversation with governments related to AI.
Author of The Connected Church. Social Media and Digital Marketing Consultant for Nonprofits, Faith-based Organisations, Churches, and Ministries.
