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Hello, my beautiful friends, and welcome back to a brand new episode of the Weekly scroll, your five star creator approved news update designed to keep you ahead of the apps, ahead of the trends, and ahead of the algorithm. I'm your host, Caitlin, and if you're brand new here. Hi. Welcome. This is where we break down everything happening across Instagram, MeTa, Facebook, TikTok threads, YouTube and the entire creator economy so you don't have to scroll for 10 hours a week just to keep up. Today is a big one, y'. All. It always is. We've got so many good updates to run through and a lot of info about AI, so I can't wait to dive in. So grab your coffee or your Stanley cup, grab your money walk shoes and let's get into today's scroll. This week's episode of the Weekly scroll is powered by Club Influence. It's my Instagram membership that gives you everything you need to crush trends online. We provide you with weekly trends, reels, ideas, plug and play templates, and trending audio so you can just stay consistent on Instagram without aimlessly scrolling your feed for ideas. Hello. Sign me up. I will link a promo code for you guys. Because it's the end of the year. I want to get you guys inside in the show notes. Hit us up. Come join us inside Club Influence. All right. I'm back, by the way, from Chicago. I was in Chicago for the last 24 hours. I actually got home last night at 3:30 in the morning and I woke up at 10, had my coffee, met with my team, and now I'm here giving you guys the Weekly Scroll. I have bags under my eyes today, so that's fun. And a full day is scheduled for me, so we just got to get back into it, right? And I'm not like the super duper pushy, like, hustle culture means everything. That's not me. I'm a mom of two. I'm a wife, I'm a dog mom. But sometimes we just have to keep going. One thing I said yesterday when I was speaking on stage is that, you know, there's people out there that will post once or twice or a couple times. Maybe they even get a viral reel and pull in some followers. And then they're like, oh, this isn't working for me. Like it's not happening fast enough. Let me just tell you, I have got here blood, sweat and tears crawling my way out of holes to get where I'm at to, to grow this brand, to have this social media agency, to have this podcast. It doesn't come easy, and you have to put in the work. So today I had a choice. It's like, either push this episode to Friday and let down my audience who looks forward to the weekly scroll, or get my ass out of bed and go do the thing. So here I am, doing the thing. I hope you guys appreciate it. I'm tired, but I'm here. And we have so much to go through today. So, first and foremost, Meta is filling your apps with AI characters. What does that mean? So Meta is rolling out AI Studio so that users and brands can create AI characters inside of Messenger. That's Meta, messenger, like Facebook, that's Instagram, that's WhatsApp, all of them. These bots can chat like people and eventually have their own voices and their own personalities. Wild. Right? So how do I feel about this? What I think is that for brands and businesses, this could actually be really cool. I know AI is scary. We actually talked about this at dinner in Chicago because some of the realtors. I was there speaking to a bunch of Realtors about Instagram and how to grow your business using Instagram, and, you know, they're curious, what do you think about AI? I'm not afraid of AI. I think that we have to embrace it or we're going to get left behind. Wild. But one of the realtors actually was talking about how they're testing this new feature. I guess they're doing listing videos, right, where you go through and you tour a home. An AI can actually put people in that home, like having conversations over dinner or someone napping on the couch. And I'm like, whoa, you're lying, right? And he's like, no, this is real. So I'm actually curious to see how all that goes. But I do think that AI is here to stay and we just have to roll with the punches and we have to learn how to incorporate it into our business. So what AI Studio actually is, in plain English, it's a tool where creators and brands can build a chatbot version basically of them or their character that talks to people in the DMs, in the comments. You can define its personality, its tone, what topics it can answer and what it should not do. And it's slowly being integrated into Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram. I think it's kind of cool because I can't always be in my DMs, right? So if you had, like, my chat girl that's there to answer your questions while I'm out, I mean, I don't think I'd hate It. If you guys follow this is Nikki on Instagram, she actually has this chatbot and it talks like her. Like, it has the language like her. It says things like her. And I honestly feel like I'm talking to her when I DM her and I get that chatbot. I still know it's the chatbot because she says something like, this is Nikki chat or this is Nikki bot or something like that. So I think it's important to, like, be honest with our audience and our followers and say, like, hey, this is, you know, so and so bot. I'm here helping Caitlin manage this stuff, but I don't know, I think it's something for us to embrace. So why Medicare so much about this? It's engagement at all costs. If an AI can answer people at 2am, people stay in the app longer, right? So that's what Meta wants. So they're going to give us these resources to help people get answers at 2am Meta has openly said they plan to bring millions of AI characters into these apps. And these AI profiles will post, they'll reply, they'll interact like people. This is all according to Social Media Today. If you want to go in and do your own research on this, I think for creators and small businesses, there's a potential upside, because one, it's a first line of support for, like, FAQs, frequently asked questions, things that AI bots can answer. Right? Lead qualifying. Maybe a bot can ask questions before they ever even book a call and get you more information about them so that when you do get on the call, you kind of already know the backstory of this person. And then there's the nurture aspect, like sending people to your freebie, your podcast, your membership. Hello. I love that. I will definitely be there for that. You could eventually, like, see this as having like a virtual assistant living inside of your Instagram DMs. And I'm okay with that. Now, the potential red flags of this is most users will not be able to tell what is a real human versus a bot if Meta does not label it clearly or if you're not saying like, hey, this is Caitlin Bot. You know what I mean? I say come at these people honestly about who you are and, and who this is so that they know, because there are real mental health implications when people start bonding with entities that are not real people. I don't know if y' all ever saw that movie where the guy fell in love with the AI lady on the screen. Freaking weird. But it's true. Like, think about these lonely People that think they're talking to you and then all along it's your AI. So I would be super transparent about that. And then obviously you have to understand that there's going to be mistakes, right, like brand tone issues or AI giving off, like off brand advice. So we have to definitely, like, watch it very closely. Practical takeaway from this. You don't need to rush into this to build an AI version of yourself. But if you want to experiment, you could start with like very tight guardrails, maybe only use it for frequently asked questions or sending links to things, or like a simple flow. If you're trying to see if this is a good lead or not, make sure it's clearly labeled as your assistant and then monitor those conversations, right? Like make sure you're peeping in there and seeing what's being said. I think early adopters who treat AI as a support tool, not a replacement for themselves, will win here. The people who unleash it on their community without supervision are probably going to get burned. So you have to be very careful there. So while Meta is trying to automate your DMs, guess what the government's doing. It's still trying to figure out what to do with TikTok. So Trump has repeatedly extended the enforcement of the TikTok ban by executive orders. So TikTok is technically banned by law, but the government keeps delaying the enforcement of it. So the latest extensions have pushed the deadline multiple times. And you can read about this in the Guardian, there's a whole article on it. TikTok's still running because the president keeps signing executive orders to delay it. But let me give you like a quick timeline recap. So, so this is explained in simple terms. So there was a law passed that TikTok has to either sell its US business or be banned because of national security concerns. Then the enforcement date hits, new administration comes in and keeps extending the deadline. January, April, June, then again to September and beyond. Like, what are we? We're in December at this point. The current reality is this TikTok operates like normal for 170 million US users while technically being in deadline purgatory. This is all according to AP News. So if you want to look it up, look it up. But why does this matter to creators and small business owners? Well, it creates constant platform risk. Like you never know if or when the plug gets pulled. And then brands are nervous about building strategies that are 100% TikTok dependent because what if the plug gets pulled tomorrow? But audiences are very much still there. They're using it daily. I mean, nothing's really changed on the user end. It's just not knowing. It's like the unknown. We just, we don't know. So what should you do right now? If TikTok is one of your main growth channels, there's a couple things you could do to just prep yourself. One, keep posting, but stop pretending that it's a stable long term home base. Just in case, you know, like start spreading yourself over to email or to Instagram. Maybe start telling them now like hey, you love me on TikTok, guess what, I'm over on Instagram too. And push them over to Instagram or push them to your email or you know, sms. Maybe you're texting them. Whatever it is, push them over to a safety net, right? And then diversify with at least one other short form platform. Maybe that's reels, maybe that's YouTube shorts or even Threads video for businesses. Think about this. If TikTok disappeared tomorrow, how would we talk to these people? That's why you have to have a safety net in place. And if the answer is I don't know, then your priority is building a list. And maybe that's just putting an email capture in your bio so at least people can get on your list and you can nurture them that way. TikTok is currently living on borrowed time, right? Use the reach while it's still there. Speaking of platforms, let's talk about the one Meta is really betting on right now and that's threads. Threads hit 350 million users and it keeps growing. So Meta's cute little baby app, Threads, it's not so little anymore. It's surpassed 350 million users and they're openly calling it their next major social app and the best alternative to X. I don't even log into X anymore. I don't know about you guys. To, to be honest, like last quarter it was 3,20 million, now it's 350 million. So that's 30 million new users joined since last quarter. That's crazy. Meta says time spent is up more than 30% too, thanks to better recommendations. That's according to social media today. So maybe you're getting a better algorithm over there. X, on the other hand, claims around 600 million monthly users. But there are big questions about how many of those are bots or they're inflated. We don't really know if that's all true.