101 News Podcast Episode 1
101 News Podcast – Episode 1
Welcome to 101 News – the podcast within a podcast that brings you trends and fresh updates from the world of Digital Marketing. Give it a listen by clicking here.
In this blog post, I will be covering MailChimp’s latest restrictions, The new Meta subscription update and the future of Twitter.
MailChimp
MailChimp users would’ve seen that they are reducing their limits on their free plan. Users with free accounts can now only have a maximum of 500 contacts on their MailChimp account unless they upgrade.
This could pose a problem for many small businesses, forcing them to purchase a paid-for plan or finding a new alternative!
Users may struggle finding an appropriate alternative; it could be argued that MailChimp is probably the best software of its kind. We’ve researched other alternatives but most of their free contact limits are even smaller than MailChimp.
If you have more than 500 contacts you’re probably looking at prices starting at £22 a month, or alternatively, get trimming, dump those contacts that never open your emails and see if you can get back to a free plan audience size.
Meta Subscriptions
In December last year, Twitter launched Twitter blue which was basically a subscription on Twitter, which gave you a shiny verified badge. Lovely. And of course, Facebook and Instagram couldn’t be left behind on the hype.
Mark Zuckerberg has decided he will be launching a paid subscription service, allowing Facebook and Instagram users to verify their accounts for up to $14.99 a month. It will cost $12 for web access and $15 on IOS and Android, and is being rolled out first in Australia.
Meta blue verified users will also get access to more features that will ‘increase visibility and reach’, such as prominence in search and recommendations.
We can definitely imagine some fuss being kicked up… Especially, for example, small businesses with a small marketing budget, struggling to stay afloat, now given the option to spend more money on a monthly subscription to be ‘verified’ or, the alternative, to not perform very highly in search results.
The future of Twitter
How many of you actually use Twitter daily? There is much discussion online as to whether the future of Twitter is bright.
Since Elon Musk’s take over in 2022, job cuts at the social media firm have meant a 7,500-strong workforce has been cut to just 2,000. These job cuts could be seen as concerning, as some of them have been from the Diversity and Inclusion team.
Musk stated that he took over the platform to ‘help humanity’, but has instead been accused of turning it into Muskland, reportedly alternating the algorithms so they would make his tweets more visible than the US presidents. To some, it feels like Twitter is a barren wasteland, with a few angry townsfolk still shouting and shaking their pitchforks at Elon Musk, sitting on a throne, talking to an audience of 3. Maybe, Twitter just doesn’t cut it how it used too – it was where we once saw brands bickering and jumping on news trends, but it looks like they’ve all jumped ship over to TikTok – and who can blame them?
Meme of the week
This week’s trending meme comes in the form of a TikTok. Featuring a scene from a film starring Nicholas Cage and Pedro Pascal – Pascal, who, by the way, has recently soared onto the newsfeed of the nation with his role in the TV adaptation of a video game called The Last Of Us).
The theme of the meme is a clip taken from the film titled The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, which was released in 2022, and basically shows Cage and Pascal’s characters off their face on LSD, driving down the road to the song “Make your own kind of music”.
Video memes are of course visual, and therefore hard to describe. So head over to our Instagram and TikTok platforms to see this meme in action by clicking here.
So there you have our first ever 101 news roundup – we hope you found it useful and maybe had a couple of laughs along the way.
Subscribe to listen to our news podcast every Tuesday morning as we bring you the latest news from the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing.
