SOCIAL
Is TikTok Too Ephemeral to Track?

With over 1 billion users — and 105 million in North America alone — Tiktok is a centerpiece of cross-generational conversations, pop culture references, and daily use.
From a top-level view, it’s no wonder our dopamine-driven brains have registered accounts in droves. But if our primal drivers were the only explanation, TikTok wouldn’t have risen to the ranks. From 2018 to 2020, TikTok’s user base has grown by 800%. Its “it factor” shown in a 2021 Nielson study – a unique ability to inspire belonging, community, and authenticity – is surpassing existing tech conglomerates who frankly are looking to replicate its design.
Yet these unique, core characteristics that inspire rare possibilities to share information – i.e. quick videos, shareable music, catchy hooks, and clever audio overlays – have underpinned a new problem for brands, public figures, celebrities, and influencers gaining traction: How, and by which metrics and comparatives, do you track success when the content itself is quite ephemeral?
The rise of social listening technology
Tracking social success outside of in-platform metrics isn’t a new problem, so many tech companies outside of the platforms have already tried to solve it. In part, they have.
Developments in social listening technology have helped users understand how their profile or brand first into the digital landscape – the algorithms read captions, analyze user behavior, track performance metrics, and even summarize user sentiment based all tied up in a nice bow that you can actually benefit from.
Then audio content came along.
“Audio presents a fundamentally different set of challenges for moderation than text-based communication. It’s more ephemeral and it is harder to research and action,” said Discord’s chief legal officer, Clint Smith, referring to the channel’s moderation struggle around their newest Stage Channels audio feature.
The whole tech stack of audio-based social channels – TikTok, Instagram’s Reels, Clubhouse, Discord’s Stage Channels – have just started to research tracking solutions internally, but the tools for audio content moderation are lagging far behind social listening tools for text-based conversations. A few external companies are developing speech analysis API, but at the moment, there is no streamlined approach to audio conversations online.
The problems with audio moderation
Because of this, social platforms, their users, and their tech integrations don’t have much of a tracking system at all, particularly when it comes to managing problematic commentary or harassment. In these instances, platforms will often resort to blocking users over anything, which creates its own set of accessibility issues.
For example according to Reuters, “Twitter keeps Spaces audio for 30 days or longer if there is an incident, Clubhouse says it deletes its recording if a live session ends without an immediate user report, and Discord does not record at all.”
Managing and tracking any text or image-based commentary, let alone problematic commentary online, isn’t an easy job for humans to start with. There’s a job title for this: Community Manager. But addressing problematic mentions, crisis moments, or something like adverse health events in ephemeral audio conversations? The job market is wide open.
Further, even if platforms create more monitoring parameters internally tomorrow, users and brands would still be left to their own devices to monitor their own content.
So for people, influencers, and brands wanting to moderate content and social listen on audio platforms, the problem is three-fold:
- Audio content is, by nature, more ephemeral than written content. You may be able to transcribe something, but you’ll still lack extra cues, like the visual signals of video or accompanying text comments.
- Few tech companies offer APIs to social listen to audio on new social apps such as TikTok or Discord. For the ones that do, they are still in the beta phase.
- Even if brands wanted to track audio manually, most companies lack the human power, resources, and time to do so.
Not all bad
These overall symptoms of audio content are likely to increase in impact as platforms like TikTok grow and evolve.
But it would behoove users to remember audio content’s benefits as we grapple with ephemerality and nuance – audio itself reigns superior in its ability to connect to an audience. Podcasts started just two decades ago, and now billions of people around the globe engage daily. In the U.S. alone, Insider Intelligence projects listenership to surmount to 144 billion by 2025.
Whether you’re more convinced by TikTok and other audio-based channels’ inevitable challenges or its research-backed potential, there’s a reason so many are engaging, and from this view, the bandwagon doesn’t look so bad.
SOCIAL
17 Content Options for Each Stage of the Sales Journey [Infographic]
![17 Content Options for Each Stage of the Sales Journey [Infographic]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/1675388078_17-Content-Options-for-Each-Stage-of-the-Sales-Journey.png)
Looking to formulate a better content strategy for 2023?
This will help – the team from Orbit Media has put together a listing of 17 content formats, and where they fit within the sales funnel which could provide some inspiration for your planning.
There are some good pointers here, with specific approaches that you can take at each stage of the journey.
Check out the full listing below – while you can read more on the Orbit Media website.
SOCIAL
Meta Soars by Most in Decade, Adding $100 Billion in Value

Correction: February 2, 2023 This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article misstated how much Meta expected to spend on its deal with the virtual reality start-up Within. It is $400 million, not $400 billion. Meta’s stock surged on Thursday …
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SOCIAL
Twitter’s Cancelling Free Access to its API, Which Will Shut Down Hundreds of Apps

Well, this is certainly problematic.
Twitter has announced that, as of February 9th, it’s cutting off free access to its API, which is the access point that many, many apps, bot accounts, and other tools use to function.
Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead ????
— Twitter Dev (@TwitterDev) February 2, 2023
That means that a heap of Twitter analytics apps, management tools, schedulers, automated updates – a range of key info and insight options will soon cease to function. Which seems like the sort of thing that, if you were Twitter, you’d want to keep on your app.
But that’s not really how Twitter 2.0 is looking to operate – in a bid to rake in as much revenue as absolutely possible, in any way that it can, Twitter will now look to charge all of these apps and tools. But most, I’d hazard a guess, will simply cease to function.
The bigger business apps already pay for full API access – your Hootsuite’s and your Sprout Social’s – so they’ll likely be unaffected. But it could stop them from offering free plans, which would have a big impact on their business models.
The announcement follows Twitter’s recent API change which cut off a heap of Twitter posting tools, in order, seemingly, to stop users accessing the platform through a third-party UI.
Now, even more Twitter tools will go extinct, a broad spread of apps and functions that contribute to the real-time ecosystem that Twitter has become. Their loss, if that’s what happens, will have big impacts on overall Twitter activity.
On the other hand, some will see this as another element in Twitter’s crackdown on bots, which Twitter chief Elon Musk has made a personal mission to eradicate. Musk has taken some drastic measures to kill off bots, some of which are having an impact, but Musk himself has also admitted that such efforts are reducing overall platform engagement.
This, too, could be a killer in this respect
It’ll also open the door to Twitter competitors, as many automated update apps will switch to other platforms. This relates to things like updates on downtime from video games, weather apps, and more. There are also tools like GIF generators and auto responders – there’s a range of tools that could now look for a new home on Mastodon, or some other Twitter replicant.
In this respect, it seems like a flawed move, which is also largely ignorant of how the developer community has facilitated Twitter’s growth.
But Elon and Co. are going to do things their own way, whether outside commentators agree or not – and maybe this is actually a path to gaining new Twitter data customers, and boosting the company’s income.
But I doubt it.
If there are any third-party Twitter apps that you use, it’ll be worth checking in to see if they’re impacted before next week.
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