Access Tag

Good news for brands on Twitter: now, all companies on United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia they can add a new ‘Featured Location’ module in your business accountwhich includes location information, business hours and additional contact methods.

As you can see in this example on the Twitter for Business page, the Spotlight module includes a variety of additional business information elements within a separate section below your main profile information and above your tweets.

The module is part of Twitter’s Professional Profiles option, which is available to all businesses, free of charge, within the app.

Twitter has been slowly expanding its professional profile tools, after initial testing of the option began. in april last year, with select brands participating in the beta program. Twitter then began inviting more businesses to sign up, before opening it to all applicants in September.

Now, you can convert to a professional profile through your account options, so you don’t even need to go through Twitter’s full approval process to switch to a professional presence.

The Location Spotlight module is one of several new elements Twitter is developing to help brands maximize their presence on the app. It’s an easy way to give your brand presence a more professional look, while providing more information to help people get in touch, which could lead to more leads from the app.

(Note: Mentions of ‘Shop Spotlight’ here are Twitter’s rebranded Shop module, which is currently only available to select brands in the US.)

Anyone can guess where Twitter plans to go with its pro tools, even Twitter is probably unclear, given the pending acquisition of Elon Musk. Some have speculated that Twitter could go the Facebook route and eventually restrict the reach of business accounts to force more brands to pay for ads.

That seems unlikely on Twitter, but there is a risk that by converting your profile you could have algorithmic impacts as a result of the platform’s strategic changes.

But you can convert back to a personal account at any time, and Twitter has no rules, at least at this time, that force companies to make the switch.

As such, it could be a good option, providing more touch points for your business.

To convert your Twitter profile to a professional account:

• Go to your profile settings or open the sidebar when you’re on your Home timeline in the app. If you’re in the sidebar, scroll until you see the “Twitter for Professionals” tab and select it. If you’re in your profile settings, scroll until you see “Switch to Pro” and select it
• Once you have entered the conversion flow, select “Start”
• Select a category for your professional account and select “Next”
• Choose “Company” or “Creator” and select “Next”
• Congratulations! You are already a Professional on Twitter!

You can read more about Twitter Professional Account Conversion Process here.

Of all of Meta’s current offerings, their ‘Horizon Worlds’ VR creation platform provides the most indicative view of their future metaverse plans.

And starting this week, more people will be able to share in that vision, with Horizon Worlds launching for users in the UK, as well as the US and Canada.

As shown in the video above, Horizon Worlds allows users to create their own virtual spaces, complete with a variety of 3D objects and tools that they can use to create interactive environments.

Meta launched Horizon Worlds with all users in the US and Canada in December, and is now expanding it to the UK, before opening up access to all EU users in the coming months.

According to Goal:

“From the beginning, we envisioned Horizon Worlds as a creator-friendly VR environment that features world-class social worldbuilding tools. And by building those tools and listening and incorporating feedback from creators, that’s exactly what it is. But we are always working to make it even better. For example, last month we launched our first asset library, a collection of pre-made items that creators can use whenever they want. In addition, we have also committed $10 million dollars to help creators get their worlds off the ground.”

The asset library will play a big role in the next stage of the metaverse, with Meta looking to help brands build 3D models of their products, to enhance e-commerce visualization, which can then also be made available in Horizon Worlds for use. in user projects.

That will provide new promotional opportunities in this emerging digital space which, as noted, gives us the clearest indicator of what the metaverse will look like, at least in Meta’s current view, as a consumption tool.

We’ve already seen some hints of the marketing implications in this regard, with brands like Wendy’s creating their own branded environments in Horizon Worlds, inviting users to come and engage with their virtual products and activations.

That, again, is where the metaverse is headed, with individuals and brands able to create Minecraft-like interactive spaces, where users can fully immerse themselves in virtual reality, or potentially through other means as well, in their creations.

Although it is quite basic at the moment, in its early stages of development. Eventually, as Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has shown, the metaverse will incorporate a wide range of fully immersive and interactive environments, allowing you to create and explore all kinds of new worlds, beyond anything you’ve ever experienced.

We’re nowhere near that yet, in terms of fully functional, interactive, avatar-driven participation in these VR worlds. But ultimately, that’s where Meta is headed, and if you want to get a sense of what’s coming and what Meta sees as the next evolution for brand pages, Horizon Worlds is your current best indicator on this front.

But the commitment to virtual reality also opens up new forms of harassment and abuse, in an even more closed and immersive space. Which is another element Meta needs to address.

On this front, Meta has also announced the addition of ‘Voice Mode’ in VR, which will allow users to choose whether they want to hear other users speaking within the VR environment.

As Meta explains:

“[Voice mode] It will allow you to choose how you listen to people who are not on your friends list, including the option to not listen to unwanted conversations. By default, you’ll hear all nearby users at the same volume, but with Voice Mode, you can easily switch to Distorted Voices, where the voices of non-friends come across as friendly, unintelligible sounds.”

As shown in the image above, when a user selects “Distorted Voices”, strangers will see an indicator that they cannot hear them in space. Users will be able to change this setting at any time, but it provides another security measure to help protect users in VR, where there have already been some concerning cases of abuse, even in its early, rudimentary state.

At the end of last year, one Horizon Worlds beta tester reported being groped by a stranger in VR, while another experienced “gang rape” by male users in space, which he described as a “very real” feeling.

Those incidents prompted Meta to add a new ‘personal limit’ feature, which allows users to keep others at a distance from their avatar.

Meta has now also added new pop-up warnings that are displayed to people behaving disruptively in the VR space.

Therefore, there are measures to mitigate the risks, to a certain extent. But it looks like this could become a much bigger concern moving the platform forward, and Meta needs to make sure it’s fully addressed before rolling out a broader implementation of its metaverse.

Will that really happen? Meta doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to addressing potential issues like this before they become major concerns, and it wouldn’t surprise anyone if Meta went ahead with expanding their vision of the metaverse over anything else, including the user security.

Which, in some ways, seems to be happening with Horizon Worlds expanding to the next stage, though Meta hopes its developing security tools will be enough to provide adequate protection for users in virtual space.

Meta announced the launch of FAcebook Graph API v14.0 and Marketing API v14.0which are the back-end systems that power the connection to Meta’s various tools and platforms, and facilitate access to third-party applications.

Meta’s API updates can be sneaky, with big changes sometimes hidden in technical jargon, so it’s worth keeping up to date with the latest to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

So what’s new in this release – and what does it mean for regular users?

Well, sure, it’s mostly aligned with developers, but there will be widespread impacts, in different ways.

First, Meta is updated the questions it asks developers to answer as part of its data protection assessment, which it first launched last July.

Questions, like the one above, essentially ask developers whether their apps will use Meta data in a negative way, such as using personal information for discriminatory purposes or sharing Facebook user data with third parties.

The measure is an additional layer to better protect Meta from possible misuse, as Meta can refer to developer responses as a way to revoke access for all apps based on these settings.

Although I find some of the question strings quite funny:

“Oh yeah, my app puts people with disabilities at a disadvantage by taking their Facebook profile information and evaluating if they’re using a screen reader, and it’s been years.”

It’s a pretty flimsy layer of insurance, given that each developer will just tick the right boxes and move on, but as noted, the real impetus is to give Meta a fallback run position – that’s i.e. you have agreed to this contract which states that your application won’t be used for this purpose.

The deeper questions will provide more capacity on this front.

Meta is also meIntroducing a new “access verification” process to identify technology vendors using its platform.

“This process will be required for new and existing businesses with applications that require access to customer business assets on Meta.”

This will help Meta better understand how each app uses its data and what it enables on the user side, with third-party management apps now required to disclose this specifically.

As an extension of this, Meta is also adding new tools in Business Manager that will give businesses more visibility into the application integrations they use to manage business assets, through which they will also soon be able to manage their various access points and tools to stay on top of these features.

Meta is also adding “Transactional”, “Marketing” and “One Time Password” as message template options through the WhatsApp Business Management API and WhatsApp Manager UI, while also adding support for configuring and editing post-conversion optimization. process.

Finally, it also adds new authorized use cases to access both the user Likes and publishes data via the Graph API.

“Starting today, permitted use cases will include parental access controls and monitoring apps that analyze user tastes and the content of user posts. These apps are used by parents and guardians to screen for potential risks to the safety or well-being of anyone under the age of 18. Apps are limited to social media analytics of young people as presented in the app’s user interface.”

It’s a tricky area for Meta, because that’s exactly how it got into trouble with the Cambridge Analytica case, with academics having access to Facebook user data, in depth, which allowed the CA team to develop a psychographic system for alternative purposes.

It’s still unclear how effective this was, but since then Meta has essentially locked down access to this kind of information – so the fact that it’s now available in certain circumstances is significant.

On the other side of the coin, Meta is also removing some options, including connection targeting for ads, which allows advertisers to segment their audience based on how people are connected to your business.

For example, using connection targeting, you can select audience segments based on whether they are connected to your Page, app and/or event. Connections also extend to users who are friends with anyone connected to your business.

“As part of our ongoing efforts to simplify our targeting options, we are removing Connection targeting from all Meta advertising platforms on June 15, 2022. Prior to this date, we recommend that developers convert their existing audiences that leverage connection targeting to an Engagement Custom Audience or equivalent Lookalike Audience. These alternatives also allow developers to target ads to users who are logged into their page, app and/or event.”

So Meta essentially removes the ability to reach friends of people who engaged with your page or event, but you’ll still be able to reach relevant and interested audiences through its lookalike audience options.

Meta is also removing the “User by Segment” feature from the Facebook Analytics Mobile App Custom Audience.

The changes this time around are relatively minor, and Meta hasn’t introduced any sneaky big updates, which again has happened from time to time (especially before a long weekend). But there are a few pertinent points to note, which will apply beyond the developer community.

For the most part, this won’t change your Facebook or Instagram advertising strategy, but there will be some minor changes to the Facebook marketing experience.

You can read more about Meta’s latest API changes here.