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The Week in Social: Digital Grads, TikTok Ads, and Facebook Oversight

12 May 2020 Bradley Walker

The week in social

Brands and the Digital Graduation Trend

Oh, graduation season. It is a rite of passage, a hallowed ceremony of transition. Across the nation, and the world, students in High School and College will be turning the last page on this chapter of their lives. This year, most all of them will doing it remotely. Can the true pomp and circumstance of this tradition truly measure up in an online arena? Social networks, brands, and a serious list of celebrities are betting on it. Whether it’s celebrity commencement speeches, post-ceremony live concerts, or a ‘prom in a box’, a multitude of brands are coming out to make it a special day for grads.

TikTok expanding its audience

It’s clear by now that one of the most important milestones for any social platform is the point at which they get serious about ad revenue. This is often the time where a company casts their net well beyond the influential, socially savvy audience that brought them to prominence. TikTok is showing it can do more than hit the woah, launching a broad audience capture campaign in the U.K. which is projected to continue through May.

The Facebook Oversight Board

Twenty people from around the world, none of them Facebook employees, have been named to The Facebook Oversight Board. This $130 million committee is charged helping Facebook navigate the tricky path of what is and what isn’t acceptable on the platform. In theory, the body has the power to overrule Mark Zuckerberg. The question is: will they?

Tweet Scheduling for Everyone

Among a host of new user-focused updates, Twitter is testing allowing unpaid posts to be scheduled natively. This may not seem like a big deal. After all, middle-ware publishing platforms have allowed one to schedule organic posts for years. Meanwhile, Twitter has been thus far focused on providing brand management tools to paying customers only. Will this be a turn toward a platform that is broadly easier to manage directly?

Unified Google Chat?

Not many tech companies expected a sudden global call for quarantine. As a result, messaging apps that have been muddling around for years were caught behind the ball. Meanwhile, product managers were left scratching their head as to why Zoom became the eponymous conference call solution. Google hopes to pick up the ball in a strong way through unifying of its six, yes six, different communication applications.

WeChat online shopping

Merchants in Guangzhou are brushing up their live stream pitches and demonstrations. A partnership between WeChat, local government, and local merchants aims to use live streaming to enable sellers to reconnect with their audiences in an economy that has suffered deep cuts due to the pandemic.