We Are Social’s Monday Mashup #563

hannahcurrey

Facebook is paying musicians and creators to use its live audio features
Meta is investing in audio, with Facebook offering to pay musicians and creators to use its Clubhouse-competitor, Live Audio Rooms. The platform is giving musicians and other creators $10,000 to $50,000 per session they host on Live Audio Rooms. To get your hands on this cash, Facebook wants creators to host four to six sessions at least 30 minutes in length. It pays to be a creator nowadays, with funds now being offered by most platforms, such as TikTok and Snapchat, which also offer similar incentives in order to attract and retain talent.

Instagram now asks suspected bots to verify themselves with video selfies
Instagram is booting out the bots, with video selfie verification being added to the platform to ensure accounts are attached to real people. There is plenty of bot activity on Instagram, with the accounts leaving spam messages, artificially inflating like or follower counts and harassing real users on the platform. The new video verification aims to reduce this, looking at all angles of the face to decipher whether the user is a real human or a social media troublemaker. 

Instagram introduces ‘rage shake’ and ‘finally’ features 
We’ve all been at our wits end with faulty tech, but what if your frustration could be translated into action? Instagram has added a new feature called the ‘rage shake’, which lets users report a problem more quickly. When you shake your phone while the app is open, a pop-up screen will appear, asking “Did something go wrong?” prompting you to report an issue. Another handy addition to the app is the ability to delete a single photo from a photo carousel. When you have a photo carousel open in the app, go to the three dots menu at the top right, hit edit, swipe to the photo you want to get rid of, and press the delete icon.

Snap Inc. rolls out Multi-Format delivery
Advertisers, listen up. Snap is introducing Multi-Format delivery, which allows advertisers to purchase all video ad formats on Snapchat in a single ad set. This covers all video ad formats, including Story Ads, Snap Ads, Commercials and Collection Ads. Multi-Format delivery will allow brands to optimise their campaigns toward their central goal, such as ‘video views’ or ‘engagement’, making Snapchat an ideal location for advertisers to target their key audience.

Twitter stops auto-refreshing timelines
Ever been half way through reading a tweet and the app conveniently decides to refresh itself? Well this irritating feature is now a thing of the past as Twitter has stopped auto-refresh on its feed. Users can now decide to load new tweets at their leisure by clicking on the Tweet counter bar at the top of their feeds.  

Clubhouse launches live captions on iOS
There was a small win for accessibility last week, as Clubhouse finally introduced live captions for iOS users. Prior to this, Clubhouse had come under criticism for being inaccessible to those who are hard of hearing. Accessibility features like captions have been rolling out across several platforms lately, such as Instagram Reels, with Clubhouse finally catching up to its competitors with this new addition. The app currently supports 13 languages for captions, including English, French and Italian.

Ones to watch
Facebooks tests News Feed controls that let people see less from groups and pages.