Brand Management: Fanbase Crowdfunding Success, TikTok’s New Campaign
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Social Networking Service: Fanbase, an Atlanta-based social media startup, has accrued over $12.7 million in crowdfunding as of the end of July 2025. Founder Isaac Hayes III raised $10 million in a “seed round” (first round) of funding in 2024, making him the first Black entrepreneur to do so. In a post celebrating this most recent metric, Hayes says that Fanbase is and will become “a disruptive force [...] by offering a platform where creators can monetize from day one.” By being recognized for this crowdfunding achievement, the founder says he is “paying it forward” to all of his Black colleagues and mentors who taught him how to do all of it.
Instagram now offers reposting, a feature that has been available on other social media platforms like X/Twitter. ”Reposting reels and posts,” dubbed as “a way to make sharing things with your friends and family easier,” recommends them to mutuals’ feeds quicker. Instagram also specifies that this feature will be especially useful for Creators. When a Creator’s reel gets reposted, for example, that reel will be shown to the Reposter’s followers, even if they don’t follow the original Creator, giving them broader reach. This feature has been added alongside the new “Friends” tab, where users can see posts that their mutuals have “liked, created, reposted or commented on,” and the Instagram Map, similar to Snapchat, allows users to see their mutuals’ locations at any time.
LinkedIn Games now includes a ‘Mini Sudoku’ game, in addition to the existing games. The new feature was created in collaboration with Nikoli, a Japanese puzzle magazine and Thomas Snyder, a three-time sudoku champion. According to LinkedIn, the LinkedIn Games portion of the website sports a strong engagement rate, with “86% [of people] who play return the next day.”
Online Video Platform: TikTok has launched a new campaign called “See Where Music Takes You,” built to celebrate music discovery. The campaign spotlights fans, creators and emerging talent in the music industry while featuring Panamanian and African-American musician Ravyn Lenae’s track “Love Me Not” - a track which originally trended on TikTok and spurned her into stardom. The “Add to Music App” feature has helped this campaign further by allowing users to add their favorite music from TikTok to their playlists.
Twitch’s crackdown on “viewbots,” bots that “artificially inflate viewership numbers on streams” has led to vastly lower viewership numbers for many major streamers. According to analyst Zach Bussey on X, site-wide viewership was reportedly down 5-22% following the first week of targeting viewbots, however Twitch themselves note “long-term” positive impact.
Industry: In response to a multitude of strict regulations on Artificial Intelligence (AI), Facebook’s parent company Meta has launched a “pro-AI super PAC” in California to aid lawmakers who support pro-AI policies. Given that California is home to a big portion of the tech industry, especially some of the bigger AI companies, Meta has taken it upon themselves to prevent putting California’s “technology leadership” at risk. A spokesperson for Meta has stated that this super PAC, for one, will back “candidates regardless of party who recognize California’s vital role in AI development.” This disclosure coincides with Facebook’s ongoing purging of accounts—10 million over the course of 2025 so far—for posting “unoriginal content,” including reposts with no commentary or other forms of content recycling.
