Digital Digest
February 6, 2023
A Chinese “spy balloon” flying across the United States piqued the interest of social users and generated 2.2 million social mentions from February 2-4. Social mentions increased as the story gained more traction and quadrupled between 2/2 (179K) and 2/3 (850K). Social activity was highest on 2/4 as people reacted to the balloon being shot down (1.2M mentions) and has steadily declined each day since.
Reddit users found the story especially interesting, as news updates were highly upvoted and contained thousands of comments (Examples 1, 2, 3). User images (Examples 1, 2, 3) and videos (Examples 1, 2) also generated high engagement as the “spy balloon” flew across the country before eventually getting shot down off the Carolina coast. The incident additionally inspired memes about what different countries’ “spy balloons” might look like (Examples 1, 2, 3) and appearances of balloons in video games (Examples 1, 2, 3).
As of February 9th, Twitter is cutting off free access to its API, which is the access point that many apps, bot accounts, and other tools use to function. Twitter analytics apps, management tools, schedulers and automated updates will cease to function as a result.
Twitter announced on Wed. Feb 8th that users that are subscribed to the premier Twitter account service, Twitter Blue, will now be able to post tweets with a limit of 4,000 characters. This is an extremely high increase from the usual 150 characters that standard Twitter users are allowed to use.
TikTok has added four new options to its Promote ad feature, which can drive more site visits, allow more messages from customers, boost other creators’ content, or allow location targeting as optimizations. Brands will now have more options for amplification and engagement.