Social Media updates and what they mean for you – August 3rd

Meta and X are stealing the show this week and LinkedIn has succumbed to our robot overlords. Let’s dive into all the social media updates you need to know.

Meta
The social media giant found itself in some hot water this week over their Reels revenue share scheme. Many creators were incorrectly notified that they’d be receiving whopping payouts of tens of thousands of dollars when the reality turned out to be more modest. Understandably people were pretty pissed.

The music industry’s going to love this one – AudioCraft, Meta’s generative AI for music, is now available for everyone to use. Excellent. The idea is that you put in a text prompt and it spits out ‘original audio’ for you to use in any context.

This one’s unlikely to have too much of an impact on you, but we’ll cover it anyway – news content in Canada is now banned. It’s all thanks to the new Online News Act.

Ever found yourself thinking, “I wish this chatbot had a different personality” yeah us neither, but apparently Meta did. They’re developing AI chatbots with over 30 different personas ranging from historical figures to stereotypes. Perfect.

What does this mean for me?
Look, the number of creators making a meaningful living out of revenue share schemes is minimal, so please don’t pin your hopes of retiring on it. However, if you do meet the criteria, we can totally see why you’d be annoyed.

Putting the problematic issue of getting AI to generate music rather than paying artists fairly aside, this update could be useful for marketing campaigns. The idea that you can ‘create’ whatever music you want specifically for a certain campaign or piece of content is very attractive.

If you’re in Canada, you won’t be able to view any news on Facebook at all.

Being serious for a second, we suppose there are *some* instances where you might want to personalise your chatbot. It could help with branding, for example, a museum using a historical figure. It could increase the entertainment value, which may increase engagement. So some potentially useful applications, if it’s executed well.

X/Twitter
*sigh*. Apparently, the platform formally known as Twitter is experiencing record monthly usage. Although we’ve got no idea what data Musk is using because he just shares a graph with no x-axis label (ironic). Who was it that said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics”?

X/Twitter has changed how its revenue share works, taking a much smaller piece of the pie. From now on, they will take nothing until your payout exceeds $100k a month and then they’ll take 10%, but only after the first 12 months.

What does this mean for me?
Does X/Twitter still have its place? For now, yes. But for how much longer, we’re not sure. As more and more features are moved over to Twitter/X Blue the usefulness decreases and we cannot believe that uptake is genuinely as good as Musk says. Afterall, he has a pretty big stake in making it work (remember that fatty loan he took out after being forced to buy the company when he tried to back out?).

Many creators will get nowhere near the $100k threshold so this could be very good news. But the reality still remains that most creators earn tiny amounts from revenue shares like this, so maybe don’t make plans to retire from it just yet.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is apparently VERY on board with AI, adding a stream of new features over the last few months. The latest in development is ‘LinkedIn Coach‘, which is designed to guide you through the profile-building and usage options available on the platform.

What does this mean for me?
This particular AI tool could be useful for helping you quickly get your profile set up or optimised if you’ve been on the platform a while. But the heavy reliance LinkedIn has on AI seems bizarre given the whole point of it is to connect real humans with other real humans. The more AI-generated content there is on there, the more removed real humans are from the whole thing.

And that’s it for this week folks! Sign up for weekly updates direct to your inbox every Thursday and follow Jordan on LinkedIn for daily tips and tricks. See you next week!