March 11-2024: A Recap of What Happened in The Digital Space Last Week

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Here is a recap of what happened last week in the digital space. Kindly click on the hypertext links to read more from the sources

Meta: Facebook, Instagram & Messenger

Facebook, Instagram & Messenger were down. The screenshot below, is just Elon Musk having a field outage and Meta spokesperson Andy Stone making the announcement on his platform X.

Instagram was the most downloaded app in the world in January 2024, with 52 million downloads, followed by #TikTok, according to App Intelligence Data.

Instagram has new DM Updates

?? You can now edit messages up to 15 minutes after sending them.

??Soon you’ll be able to pin up to three group chats for easy access.

??You can choose to turn read receipts on or off, for all of your chats or specific ones.

??You can now save your favorite stickers in DMs for easy access

??You can reply messages with stickers, GIFs, videos, photos and voice messages

??New chat themes

Instagram now allows boosting posts with music if you agree to boost it without music

Threads launched a live test of its API, enabling content scheduling in some third-party apps.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn went down on Wednesday, following Facebook outage on Super Tuesday

LinkedIn added more context to “Who Viewed Your Profile” with the “Interesting Views” section to include more specific notes on why a viewer is considered "interesting.”.

LinkedIn rolled out new career development and internal mobility features across LinkedIn, namely:

• Next Role Explorer, a dynamic career path visualization that recommends potential next roles to employees inside their company based on their current title and career goals

• Connecting? learning and hiring tools together to match employees to internal jobs and help them get discovered by internal hirers.

Lesson:

LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, & Messenger were down. Imagine setting up all your business or personal brand on one app and one day it just shuts down. In whatever investment you make in digital, try to diversify and have your own website. Don't over rely on social media platforms

TikTok?

U.S. lawmakers push for ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban. A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation on Tuesday to give China's ByteDance about six months to divest popular short video app TikTok or face a U.S. ban, seeking to tackle national security concerns about its Chinese ownership.

TikTok introduced new and upgraded features to the Creator Rewards Program. The Creator Rewards Program will continue rewarding high-quality, original content over a minute long with an optimized rewards formula focused on 4 key areas: originality, play duration, search value and audience engagement according to TikTok blog

TikTok announced its collaboration with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and Disney Entertainment to bring the 96th Oscars? to its community. Through initiatives like #FilmTok, TikTok aims to leverage its platform to showcase creators to a global audience of over 1 billion people, while also impacting the film and entertainment industry

TikTok was the highest-earning app in the world in January 2024, earning $196M of net revenue, according to App Intelligence estimates.

3 Reports Show That Brands Are Seeing Less Engagement on TikTok Over Time

1. Rival IQ shows TikTok’s current average engagement rate of 2.63% for brand content is down by more than half of what it was a year ago (5.69%).

2. Emplifi shows TikTok post interactions are down 26% from its highest numbers at the start of 2022.

3. SocialInsider report shows the average engagement rate for TikTok clips declined by 35% over the past year.

This could be reflection of platform maturity and brand adoption or it could be that brands are producing less engaging content over time

X (Formerly Twitter)

A major update on X, that any content creator, social media manager, or digital marketer would love to see. X is working? on audience analytics This is long overdue. X Analytics has been "plain" compared to other social media platforms.

The addition of gender, country, and age is very important. This will help in understanding your audience better and will be useful during campaign analysis

The feature will be available for? premium users

Image credit: @nima_owji on X

Elon Musk confirmed that soon you will be able to watch X long form videos on your smart TV

Elon Musk said that X will soon remove the like, re-post and reply buttons in-stream

X is working on AI generated media labels. This is what it will look like. I wonder if users will manually label them or if a system will label them.? On TikTok? the system labeling AI generated content is really off at times. I have noticed different cases where images aren't AI generated but are labeled AI. Recently, a video of Nairobi being AI

X Articles are now live on X. X articles is a new way to share long form written content on X. Publishing articles is a feature limited to Premium+ subscribers and verified organizations. Articles are available globally

Elon Musk Vs OpenAI

Elon Musk tells OpenAI to change the name to ClosedAI, and he will drop the lawsuit. Last week, Elon Musk sued OpenAI founders Sam Altman, Greg and others for making it a profit company. OpenAI has responded by sharing details of their relationship with Elon.?

According to the OpenAI blog, Elon wanted it to be a profitable company and he was in control. "In late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity. Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO"

OpenAI

OpenAI announced 3 new board members, and Sam Altman rejoins the OpenAI Board of Directors. The new boards are:

1.? Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

2. Nicole Seligman, former EVP and General Counsel at Sony Corporation?

3. Fidji Simo, CEO and Chair of Instacart.?

Co-Pilot

A Microsoft AI engineer, Shane Jones, sent letters to the US Federal Trade Commission and Microsoft's board Wednesday over concerns that Microsoft's Copilot Designer, which is powered by OpenAI's DALL-E 3 is generating "harmful content.

Resources

• 21 of the best ChatGPT courses you can take online for free on Udemy do not include certificates of completion
• Report Finds No Correlation Between Social Media Engagement and Content Readership
• The 10 Best AI Writers & Content Generators Compared

Thank you so much for reading

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