Political Social Grab Bag - November 2021 - Becker Digital Strategies

Political Social Grab Bag

What am I thinking about?

How can it be the end of October already? What a year! I missed last month’s newsletter due to a trip with Dad so there will be lots of links in this one so I’ll just get right to the content…watch our socials for links to an upcoming piece trying to provide some perspective on all the FB/Meta news of the last few weeks and some thoughts on where we go from here

Trainings & Webinar Alerts

Nov. 4 & 5- Digital Fundraising Summit (virtual) from Center for Digital Strategy – use code becker21 for 25% off registration 🙂

Jan 18 & 19- Facebook Ads Training (via zoom)– all things Facebook Ads related led by Beth and Elana Levin from New Media Mentors

Feb 8- 11 – Social Media Deep Dive (live)- our 4 day deep dive into Social Media in London, UK

Feb 13-19- Digital Organizing Bootcamp (live) – our week long Digital Organizing Bootcamp in London, UK

Feb 22 & 23- Digital Analytics (live)- our 2 day Digital Analytics training in London, UK

Feb 28- Mar 5- Advanced Digital Bootcamp (live) – our Advanced Bootcamp in London, UK

Upcoming announcements include Bootcamp Dates for 2022, a new Social Media Advanced Workshop, Social Media Deep Dive and more

Do you know of an organization that would like some digital training in 2022? We are filling out our calendar now so drop us a line and let’s chat!

What am I reading?

Facebook Removed The News Feed Algorithm In An Experiment. Then It Gave Up. – This is your must read of the month.

How platforms are changing our politics– Good summary of 2 recent studies addressing the effect of social media on our online political discussions (Casey Newton is always a must read and if you’re not already subscribed to Platformer I highly recommend it!)

Twitter’s own research shows that it’s a megaphone for the right. But it’s complicated.– TL/DR version: People engage with super charged emotion in posts, people dunk on the right which ups the engagement which then leads to more reach and thus the cycle perpetuates

What Social Media Needs to Learn From Traditional Media– Really good read that helps provide some context of things to think about as the Facebook Papers continue to roll out

Texas is set to pass a new law banning Facebook from censoring conservatives – by the time you read this it’s passed and signed into law- look for more laws like this from states and then let’s watch them meander thru the court system

The red flag meme is a red flag for accessibility – reminder: accessibility is important and should be thought about with every piece of content we create.

Let’s Talk About Social Media and Accessibility – a 2nd must read for this month

New Tools of Interest

New Platform: Minus – but use it sparingly you can only post a total of 100 times…TOTAL

NameCoach – handy tool that provides a voice recording for your email sig line with name pronounciation and screen reader friendly-izing your sig line

Messer– Use a Mac? Don’t use Canva? Here’s a handy tool for resizing your images for optimal social media sizes

Speaking of Canva…they are now making a big push into video creation

Platform Updates

Facebook

Big news for c3s! Facebook Donation Ads!

Important for advocacy purposes: Coordinated inauthentic behavior on FB has long been a thing but now FB is cracking down on “Coordinated Authentic Harm” before you panic read the article..it’s not what it sounds like

Now in testing: Share a single post to multiple groups at once(do. not. like!)

Now live: Facebook Reels

So many new Page features coming soon (and some already here)

At long last organic A/B Testing for posts beyond just video posts!

So far only on profiles but here’s hoping it’s coming for Pages: Add photos from mobile device when adding photos to a post on desktop

Important change to how reach is being counted for ads

Instagram

In testing: Donations no longer relegated just to Stories

We mentioned this before as an “in testing” now it’s live! Link stickers for everyone in Stories

In testing: “Montage” to be used to convert Stories into Reels & “Favorites” which are the mechanism to save posts to go back and easily find later

Also now in testing:“Selected People” for Stories

IGTV changes…sort of

Now rolling out: live stream scheduling

IG is beefing up Insights

Twitter

Is Twitter really going to start reporting reach? Maybe? I say maybe because it looks like it’s reach of folks who don’t follow you not total reach (remember if it does we will change the Google Doc for Analytics the day it rolls out globally!)

Please please please

Slowly rolling out now: Communities– thinks FB Groups for Twitter!

On profile tipping now available for all profiles– could this be another drip drip fundraising stream? Time will tell but there’s no harm in experimenting

Coming soon: the ability to remove followers from your followers list instead of blocking – pretty sure this is a court case waiting to happen when an elected official chooses to do it so buyer beware

Now in testing: the ability to create a gif in the Twitter camera

Rolling out now: edge to edge images and video

Finally a dedicated Spaces Tab

Speaking of Spaces…they’ve removed the # of followers needed to host one, now anyone can host a Space

Other

LinkedIn Stories Video– we hardly knew ya

If you run ads on Reddit at all this new “conversation placement” ad placement might be a good one to try (and rumor has it Twitter is testing something similar with replies placements blech)

At long last TikTok has rolled out Auto Captions

Also in TikTok news…Q&A videos got a big update

Changes to YouTube captions

Winning the Internet

Did your org change it’s name on Thursday?