Group items tagged

One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

Hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts that amplified fake news and disinformation in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential election are still active on the site, tweeting about other fake news and conspiracies more than a million times every day, according to a report released Thursday by the Knight Foundation.

Twitter hasn’t cracked down on many of its fake news amplifiers. Eighty percent of Twitter accounts that were spreading false information during the campaign were still active on the platform, researchers found.

The study found that most of the fake and conspiracy tweets on Twitter linked to only about 1o websites, including The Gateway Pundit and Truthfeed. That trend was largely unchanged from 2016. Additionally, about 60 percent of the accounts that shared and amplified fake news were estimated by researchers to have been automated accounts. Those accounts were densely connected, following each other at high rates and retweeting each other frequently, intensifying the impact and reach of each post.

local

ok page while still bringing their friends (ie, fans) along with the

Today, we’re releasing a new free tool to help anyone discover what percent of an any Twitter account’s followers are fake vs. real: The Fake Followers Audit.

The tool is designed to estimate the percentage of a given account’s followers that fit one or more of the following buckets: Spam accounts (those that purely send spam tweets) Bot accounts (those that have no real human actively operating them) Propaganda accounts (those designed to propagate dis/misinformation) Inactive accounts (those that no longer use Twitter or see tweets)

ou will be able to follow more than 300 “topics” across sports, entertainment, and gaming, just as you are currently able to follow individual accounts. In return, you’ll see tweets from accounts that you don’t follow that have credibility on these subjects. Twitter executives hope that Topics will make the platform more approachable for new and intermittent users and make it easier for heavier users to discover new accounts and conversations. The feature, which began testing on Android in August, is set to roll out globally on November 13th.

Before Twitter updated its lists feature last week, users could create only 20 lists with 500 accounts in each; now, they can create 1,000 lists with 5,000 accounts in each. The update impacts the role Twitter plays as an international news source by enabling journalists to be even more organized and save time as they gather, report and share news and information.

f you don’t already have lists (and even if you do), remember that your lists should reflect how you use Twitter, not how anyone else does. Tailor your lists to your needs.

As of this writing, I have more than 130 Twitter lists. And, no, that’s not too many — not if you keep them organized and find them useful. Here’s a link to my list of lists. I’m still moving accounts from old combination lists to many new lists. And I’m still creating more.

Google’s controversial encrypted-search feature has had a chilling effect on B2B publishers’ ability to track organic search referral terms,

Encrypted search queries, which are enabled when a user signs into a Google account, now account for almost 40% of referring traffic data to B2B sites

“Eventually you’re not going to be able to measure SEO performance by keyword or understand the impact of organic search on your website traffic, engagement or conversions.”

mobile platforms combined to account for 60% of total digital media time spent, up from 50% a year ago. And mobile apps accounted for more than half of all digital media time spent in May at 51%.

mobile sharing is dramatically outpacing desktop sharing: in Q2, sharing from smartphones and tablets grew more than 30%, while sharing from the desktop declined 5%.

Pinterest and Twitter have done the best job harnessing mobile users. While half of all shares on Facebook are mobile, that number jumps to 75% of shares on Pinterest and Twitter.

50.3% of traffic coming from mobile (40.3% from mobile phones, 10% from tablets) and just 49.7% from computers.

The rise in mobile phone traffic to online stores is partly being fuelled by the overall trend of social-fuelled discovery becoming a major marketing channel.

A crisis creates a vacuum, an informational void that gets filled one way or another. The longer a company or other organization at the center of the crisis waits to communicate, the more likely that void will be filled by critics.

in the two days after the Ethiopian Air crash, Boeing made crisis communications missteps that may have a long-term effect on its reputation and credibility.

Silence is passive and suggests that an organization is neither in control nor trying to take control of a situation. Silence allows others to frame the issues and control the narrative.

advertiser interest in Snapchat is flat to dwindling, as many opt to move toward Instagram

Issues with Snap include continued issues over measurement, difficulty in finding content, influencers moving to other platforms and lack of outreach to agencies and brands from Snap

Some brands "think Snapchat is dying, and they want their brand associated with a platform that is growing,"

Three main factors determine what you see in your Instagram feed:Interest: How much Instagram predicts you’ll care about a post, with higher ranking for what matters to you, determined by past behavior on similar content and potentially machine vision analyzing the actual content of the post.Recency: How recently the post was shared, with prioritization for timely posts over weeks-old ones.Relationship: How close you are to the person who shared it, with higher ranking for people you’ve interacted with a lot in the past on Instagram, such as by commenting on their posts or being tagged together in photos.

eyond those core factors, three additional signals that influence rankings are:Frequency: How often you open Instagram, as it will try to show you the best posts since your last visit.Following: If you follow a lot of people, Instagram will be picking from a wider breadth of authors so you might see less of any specific person.Usage: How long you spend on Instagram determines if you’re just seeing the best posts during short sessions, or it’s digging deeper into its catalog if you spend more total time browsing.

Instagram is not at this time considering an option to see the old reverse chronological feed because it doesn’t want to add more complexity (users might forget what feed they’re set to), but it is listening to users who dislike the algorithm.Instagram does not hide posts in the feed, and you’ll see everything posted by everyone you follow if you keep scrolling.Feed ranking does not favor the photo or video format universally, but people’s feeds are tuned based on what kind of content they engage with, so if you never stop to watch videos you might see fewer of them.Instagram’s feed doesn’t favor users who use Stories, Live, or other special features of the app.Instagram doesn’t downrank users for posting too frequently or for other specific behaviors, but it might swap in other content in between someone’s if they rapid-fire separate posts.Instagram doesn’t give extra feed presence to personal accounts or business accounts, so switching won’t help your reach.Shadowbanning is not a real thing, and Instagram says it doesn’t hide people’s content for posting too many hashtags or taking other actions.