Group items tagged

The company is relaunching Groups by rolling it into its main app by the end of the month after quietly pulling the standalone app earlier this year, and it will be streamlining the service by cutting out several features, including an ability for Group administrators to pre-moderate comments; and a way to email send Group posts as emails to the whole group, while also adding in new features like threaded replies and the ability to post video and other media.

Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook announced that it too was killing off its Groups app so that it could integrate the feature closer with the core app experience. In both the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, the idea is somewhat the same: while we have our wider networks of friends and Pages that we follow on both platforms, sometimes there is value in communities that are focused around more specific interests, and ultimately, that might turn out to be the lever that brings more people in and out of using the main service.

conversations taking place in Groups will now appear in-stream on the LinkedIn feed, rather than in a separate tab. When group members are replying to posts, there will now be threaded replies, which will let people respond directly to comments within the thread.

Before now brands and publishers have participated in Groups through the personal accounts of people in their companies.

In the past year, as Facebook has tried to fix the platform, it prioritized Groups as a constructive activity on the social network, connecting people on the service in positive ways. Facebook shows more messages from Groups in the News Feed, too, so they have a better chance at reaching people.

“This consumer complaint raises a number of concerns about Facebook’s privacy policies and practices,” the committee leaders wrote in the letter. “Facebook’s systems lack transparency as to how they are able to gather personal information and synthesize that information into suggestions of relevant medical condition support groups. Labeling these groups as closed or anonymous potentially misled Facebook users into joining these groups and revealing more personal information than they otherwise would have. And Facebook may have failed to properly notify group members that their personal health information may have been accessed by health insurance companies and online bullies, among others.”

Marketing in 2015 is about treating your audience as fans, not customers. We found that 63 percent of people wish brands treated them like a friend instead of a consumer, so it's important to understand the attitudinal and behavioral nuances of groups in order to do that well, and connect in a more intimate way."

the need for “an algorithm that delivers the depth and breadth of the content we have on a specific topic and then eventually as it relates to people,” he added.

This is related to Twitter’s larger aim to better organize its content—to separate the interesting and timely tweets from the noise. Twitter has already begun tweaking the timeline where tweets appear—most notably (and controversially), by introducing tweets from accounts users haven’t chosen to follow.

Costolo said that the favorited tweets by other users show up when the user pulls to refresh their timelines twice and Twitter has no new content to show both times.

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,"

"Facebook is establishing itself as a destination for premium video content, and demonstrating a willingness to pay significant amounts of money for that content. Facebook can likely drive revenue growth to offset content costs, albeit at lower margins than what the company currently generates," analyst Brian Wieser wrote in a note to clients Wednesday. "However, because of measurement issues the company has faced in the past (and possibly a new one identified by a trade publication in Australia and replicated by us within the United States), we think the primary winner of Facebook's expansion in video will be third party measurement firms," he added.

Facebook apologized for overstating video viewership times in September last year. The company said a metric for average user time spent on videos was artificially inflated.

The firm's analyst cites Australian trade publication AdNews, which revealed last week "Facebook's claims to reach 1.7mm more 16-39 year-olds in Australia than exist in the country according to its census bureau."

For now, the deals will be limited to a percentage off and will only be good in store -- Target is hoping Cartwheel will serve as a traffic driver. That also allows the marketer to offer a variety of deals for groceries, which are only available in store.

part of the retailer's new digital savings program, built with Facebook and dubbed Cartwheel. The program, with the tagline "A whole new spin on saving,

faintly similar to Facebook's early commerce foray, Beacon, where users automatically shared their purchases on Facebook.

2. Leads.  This is a new feature in SlideShare Pro.  If you insert a form into your content, SlideShare will capture the viewer’s profile and, through its LeadShare API, automatically import the contact into SalesForce.com.  Seriously, what other social network focuses on actual lead capture and sharing? 

Alternatively, you could simply survey the early adopters and decide if they are leaders worth following:  Edelman Digital, Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence, Razorfish, Dachis Group, JESS3, Dell Enterprise  and, oh, The White House. 

45% of B2C marketers have a dedicated content marketing group in their organization. 69% are creating more content now than they did one year ago. The use of blogs dropped from 72% last year to 67% this year; the biggest increase in tactic usage has been for branded content tools (from 37% to 47%). B2C marketers are using, on average, 7 social media platforms this year, compared with 6 last year. 71% of B2C marketers use print or other offline promotion, making it the paid method they use most frequently to promote/distribute content; yet only 46% of them say it’s effective. The method they find most effective is search engine marketing (57%).

more “advanced” metrics had generally seen the most growth. For example, engagement—the top KPI—had jumped 32% in the past two years, while sentiment tracking showed year-over-year growth of 38%.

sales conversions and brand ambassadors dropped by 38% and 58%, respectively, between 2012 and 2014. Still, web traffic as well as followers, fans and group size—simple and relatively useless figures—ranked second and third, which Useful Social Media said was “slightly disconcerting.”

So, your preferred influencer has a million followers on Instagram. Are those followers real or fake?Even Fortune 500 companies can’t always tell. Look at Procter & Gamble, for example. Last year, two of their brands (Olay and Pampers) placed in the top 10 brands using influencers with large fake follower counts. The number one brand on that list was Ritz-Carlton. The hotel and hospitality group used “influencers” whose followers were 78 percent bought and paid for, instead of the real deal.

In the long run, influencers grab eyeballs but don’t necessarily help grow businesses. It’s all too easy to get caught up in the star-gazing aspect of it all and wind up valuing essentially meaningless metrics over actually building your brand.

If the influencer goes off-script or causes a scandal, you get tanked too. And there seems to be no end of ways for some influencers to get into public trouble. Just ask YouTuber Logan Paul, whose posting of video footage of a dead body earned him months of bad press and tough consequences.