Real News You Can Use: Jan 2025 📰

I know what you’re thinking… “Oh god” really? More of that news I cannot use, or, action within my business because it’s just marketing jargon! 🙅🏻‍♂️

NOPE! Here are some of the TOP bits of 2025 news I’ve digested for you that WILL actually help you!

Big Tech to Pay Australian Media Outlets: The country's government plans to require major tech companies to pay Australian media outlets for news content hosted on their platforms. The initiative will target tech companies that generate over A$250 million in local revenue, including major platforms like Meta (Facebook's parent company) and Google. Companies that fail to reach voluntary agreements with news media businesses will face mandatory charges, creating a financial incentive for tech platforms to negotiate directly with news organisations. Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones emphasised that these charges can be offset through voluntary commercial agreements between platforms and news media businesses.

Facebook Login for Business Eligibility Expands: The solution offers customisable onboarding experiences and enhanced control over login processes to meet specific client needs. The system reduces the need for ongoing compliance reviews while protecting sensitive customer data. Interested Tech Providers can visit the new Facebook Login for Business web page to learn more about the benefits and capabilities; if they do not see the opt-in banner for Facebook Login for Business in the app dashboard, their app is currently not eligible for this feature.

Consumer Video Consumption Research from Snap: Video consumption habits are shifting significantly across global markets, with small screens (mobile) now dominating viewer attention. According to a comprehensive study by Snapchat, Dentsu, and Kantar spanning eight markets and over 9,000 participants aged 13-49, 67% of consumers watch videos on small screens daily, compared to 50% on big screens (TV). The report offers insights into viewer motivations by screen size, the impact of dual-screen advertising, and more.

Threads' Follow Lists: Instagram's Threads platform is testing a new feature in the U.S. that suggests curated collections of multiple profiles for users to follow. The test begins with a small group of community members creating these custom feeds, while all U.S. Threads users can view and follow the suggested profiles within these collections.

Tumblr Launches Communities: The feature is available globally across web, iOS, and Android platforms, following a beta testing period. It allows users to create private Communities (invite-only for mutual followers) and public Communities (open to all) centered around shared interests. Communities have high member capacity limits to facilitate connections between users with shared interests and obsessions.

Midjourney Moodboard and Multiple Personalization Profiles: The new moodboard feature allows users to upload collections of inspirational images that inform the AI model's style generation. Users can now create and switch between multiple custom versions of Model 6.1, each with distinct aesthetic preferences. The personalization process has been accelerated, requiring only 40 initial ratings instead of 200 to create a profile, though 200 ratings are recommended for optimal results. Organizational improvements include naming profiles, setting defaults, and tracking images associated with specific profiles. These updates follow last week's release of Patchwork, an experimental collaborative whiteboard feature.

Google Whisk: The new AI image generation tool that uses images rather than text as prompts. Users provide three input images: one for subject, scene, and style. The system uses Gemini to generate image captions, which then feed into Google's Imagen 3 model for creation. It focuses on capturing essence rather than exact replication, allowing creative remixing. Whisk aims to be a rapid ideation tool rather than a precise editor. It lets users explore multiple variations and edit underlying prompts when needed. Currently available in the US at labs.google/whisk, the tool can create various outputs including digital art, enamel pins, and stickers.

Instagram Story Features: Instagram is introducing a new story feature that allows users to create year-end collages featuring their favorite 2024 moments, available only through early January. The collage feature streamlines the existing process, which previously required manually resizing and repositioning multiple photos as stickers or using the more restrictive grid-only layout option. Instagram is also launching temporary end-of-year features, including "Add Yours" story templates that enable friends to respond with their own stories. Additional seasonal features include "New Year" and "Countdown" text effects, holiday-themed chat designs for direct messages, and special effects triggered by phrases like "Happy New Year" in notes and DMs.

Scheduled Instagram DMs Test: Instagram is rolling out DM scheduling functionality. Users can schedule messages by holding the send button and selecting a future date/time. The chat will display a "1 scheduled message" confirmation, with the ability to schedule additional messages.

Instagram Screenshot Blocking is Live: Following testing earlier this year, the social media platform prevents users from taking screenshots of direct messages when the sender uses Vanish Mode or View Once.

Boosting for LinkedIn Personal Profile Posts: LinkedIn is introducing a new post-boosting feature that allows members to promote their content in the LinkedIn feed. Members can increase their visibility, follower count, and website traffic by boosting selected posts. Users can customize their promotion by setting a budget and selecting target audience parameters. The targeting options include location, language, job title, job function, company industries, and job seniorities.

LinkedIn Advertising Platform: Companies replaces the Company Engagement Report, offering enhanced visibility into how businesses interact with brands on LinkedIn. It categorizes engagement levels and allows marketers to save reports as targetable audiences. Data-driven attribution moves beyond last-touch analytics to show how all marketing efforts contribute to lead generation. This helps advertisers understand which touchpoints impact the customer journey most. Measurement Insights provides a centralized dashboard in Campaign Manager for analyzing performance across member, company, campaign, and ad format levels. This unified view helps marketers evaluate their full-funnel marketing efforts. Qualified Leads Optimization enables advertisers to target prospects similar to their existing qualified leads by connecting their CRM through CAPI. This feature aims to improve conversion rates by focusing on high-quality leads most likely to convert.

Snapchat Monetization: Snapchat is expanding its creator monetization with a unified program launching February 1, 2025. Creators can monetize Stories and Spotlight videos over 1 minute with ads. Eligibility requires: 50,000+ followers; 25+ monthly posts (Stories/Spotlight); 10+ days active in last 28 days; Either 10M Snap views, 1M Spotlight views, or 12,000 viewing hours in the previous 28 days.

Threads Growth: The platform has reached 300M daily active users.

X Q5 Ad Costs Insights: The platform released an overview that presents it as a strategic marketing opportunity with key advantages, including a 34% lower average CPM and a 19% lower cost-per-engagement.

Third-Party AI Training Settings for YouTube Creators: YouTube has announced that creators can now allow third-party companies to use their content for AI model training directly through YouTube Studio settings. This new feature requires creator permission and approval from applicable rights holders, such as Content ID owners, to enable AI training access. The terms of service remain unchanged, with unauthorized content access and scraping still prohibited. YouTube will test three new variations of the video settings screen on Studio mobile and the YouTube main app with a small group of creators. The first variation shows visibility and audience options in a dropdown menu with additional options below "show more." The second variation groups options together with expandable sections for more details. The third variation combines the previous approaches, displaying visibility and audience dropdowns above the fold with grouped options under "show more."

ITV Content on YouTube: The UK broadcaster will make hundreds of hours of programming available on YouTube through a new partnership agreement and will sell advertising around its content, including both ITV Studios productions and commissioned shows. Dedicated channels will launch for news, sports, and daytime shows.

YouTube Voice Replies to Comments: Creators in the test group can record audio responses through a sound wave icon in the iOS app. While only select US creators can leave voice replies, all users can interact with these audio comments. The test aims to strengthen creator-audience relationships.

YouTube Partners With Creative Artists Agency to Train AI Talent: YouTube has partnered with Creative Artists Agency (CAA) to develop technology for detecting and managing AI-generated content featuring celebrity likenesses. The initial testing phase will begin in early 2024, working with CAA's roster of actors and athletes from the NBA and NFL. The technology will help identify AI-generated content featuring celebrities' faces and streamline the removal request process through YouTube's privacy complaint system. This initiative represents the first phase of a broader testing program, with plans to expand to include YouTube creators and other talent representatives in the coming months.

Giphy Trends Forecast: The platform analyzed 2024 search data to predict 2025 trends, highlighting Gen Z's growing cultural influence. Here are the key trends: Verbose language is rising, with searches for complex words like "lugubriousness" (+850%) and "pulchritudinous" (+446%) replacing abbreviations. Group chat terminology shows significant growth, with terms like "gm chat" (+52%) and "hey chat" (+65%) gaining popularity. Traditional millennial slang is declining, while Gen Z terms like "ijbol" (+13%) and "skibidi" (+112%) are increasing. Animal content saw massive growth, particularly "smoking duck" (+5394%) and "moo deng" (+98588%). Early 2000s nostalgia is trending upward, with increased searches for "hopecore" (+456%), "digital camera" (+71%), and "flash game" (+74%). The platform processes one billion daily searches, reaching approximately 25% of the global population.

Grok Features Updates: Recent updates include improved X and web search data integration, with responses now containing reference links and citations. The platform has enhanced Grok's image generation capabilities and added a redesigned Grok button on X posts for in-stream context. Additionally, the chatbot now has access to X's real time information. X is also testing voice query functionality for Grok, which is similar to Meta AI's capabilities in Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

Instagram AI-Powered Video Editing: The platform announced plans to launch a feature in 2024 that will enable comprehensive video modifications through simple text prompts. In demonstration clips, the AI technology showed capabilities ranging from dramatic alterations like changing Mosseri's appearance into a felt puppet to subtle modifications such as adding accessories or adjusting background elements.

Larger LinkedIn Feed Video Design: The platform is testing a new design emphasising video content in users' feeds.

Meta's Ad Revenue: Instagram is projected to generate half of Meta Platform Inc.'s US advertising revenue, according to research firm Emarketer. Instagram generated $32.4 billion globally in 2021, representing 27% of Meta's total sales, with that share increasing to nearly 30% of global business by early 2022. Emarketer forecasts Instagram's US advertising revenue will exceed $32 billion in 2025, marking a 24% increase from current figures, with the platform serving over 148 million American users.

Scheduled Threads Posts Test: The platform announced it will soon begin testing scheduled posts and noted that replies will not be eligible for scheduling.

Threads Media Sharing: is introducing a new feature that allows users to reshare photos and videos from other posts while maintaining attribution to the original creator. Users can access this feature by long-pressing on media content or tapping the repost icon, then selecting "use media" to create their unique post.

US Supreme Court on TikTok Ban: SCOTUS will hear arguments on the matter on Jan. 10.

YouTube Studio Video Settings: The platform is testing three variations of an improved video settings screen across Studio mobile and the YouTube main app. The first shows visibility and audience options in a dropdown menu, the second consolidates options into groups, and the third combines both approaches. This experiment is currently limited to a small group of creators.

YouTube Top-Performing Ads Review for 2024: The platform revealed that creative storytelling was a key differentiator due to YouTube's flexible format restrictions. According to the analysis, 44% of top-performing ads deviated from standard ad lengths (15, 30, and 60 seconds), and 52% of Shorts and in-stream ads exceeded 15 seconds. The platform reported that Shorts ads outperformed TikTok in terms of view duration, likes, and personal relevance. Creator collaborations emerged as a powerful strategy, with 98% of viewers expressing greater trust in YouTube creators than on other platforms.

I hope this news digest helped you, even if only one part!

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

1. Book a {10 MINUTE} Business Power Call with me, to arrange working together to make your social media videos stand out online as I tweak your approach, and analyse how to improve your current video, business strategy or marketing.

2. Don’t have time to create great videos yourself? Focus on your business, whilst we focus on creating the videos that you’ve always dreamed of. Get in touch to find out more.

Until next Friday, love to you all!

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