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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.”

Again, it starts with a customer list that a business has already created — for example if I’ve given my email address to the bookstore on my block so that I can hear about future sales and events. Businesses will be able to upload those lists of email addresses, phone numbers, and user IDs to Facebook, though the data will be hashed first so that Facebook doesn’t have access to that information. Meanwhile, Facebook’s user data will be similarly hashed, so the company can compare both sets of hashed data, creating a list of users whose contact information matches up with what the advertiser uploaded.

Americans spent four hours and 43 minutes a day (!) watching live TV and shows on their DVRs in the third quarter of this year. That’s down from four hours and 46 minutes in Q3 2012.

Comcast, the country’s biggest pay TV provider, said 70 percent of its subscribers watch stuff on demand, and that TV shows account for 40 percent of its usage. (If you factor in pay-TV channels like HBO, the number jumps up to 60 percent.) So once you do factor in on-demand usage, you see a different story. Nielsen said that there has been a small increase in the number of people watching live TV, and a significant increase in the number of “timeshifted” TV watchers — people watching on either DVRs or VOD.

while Comcast, Nielsen and some of the TV networks are trying to figure out how to change this, right now timeshifted TV is much less valuable for them than live TV. (Hence the warm reception for Twitter’s “we’ll bring our viewers to live TV” pitch.)

News publishers’ “pivot to video” was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real for news video too — even if people within those publishers doubted the trend based on their own experiences, and even as research conducted by outside organizations continued to suggest that the video trend was overblown and that news readers preferred text. (Heidi N. Moore put many of these trends together in 2017, and her accounting is only strengthened by the new information that we’re seeing this week.)

The court case was unsealed this week, following efforts by organizations like the online publishers’ trade organization Digital Content Next to make previously redacted parts available to the public. I read the filing and pulled out some of the most interesting and relevant parts for news publishers below. I wanted to try to see whether Facebook’s active promotion of its video offerings might have influenced news publishers’ allocations of resources, and whether it is reasonable to allege that Facebook knew, as publisher after publisher laid off editorial staff and pushed into video, that that was misguided. I wanted to know whether people working in news organizations were fired based on faulty data provided by a giant platform that publishers believed they could trust.

Arising primarily from social media, they represent snippets—not streams—of information and can help companies to figure out what customers want and to spot looming industry and market disruptions before competitors do. Sometimes, companies notice them during data-analytics number-crunching exercises.

potting weak signals is more likely when companies can marshal dispersed networks of people who have a deep understanding of the business and act as listening posts

Nordstrom, for example, took an early interest in the possibilities of Pinterest, the digital-scrapbooking site where users “pin” images they like on virtual boards and share them with a larger community. Displayed on Pinterest, the retailer’s products generate significant interest: the company currently has more than four million followers on the site.

Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

As reach declined, the raw number of engaged users plunged as well, falling on average by 35%. Some pages saw engaged users fall as much as 76%. Only one page in the data set had an increase in the number of engaged users, coming in at 0.7%.

To add salt to an open wound, current research from Forrester and Wildfire shows that engaged users are a brand’s best customers.  They are more likely to purchase, recommend and prefer brands when they are socially engaged with that brand.  With fewer engaged users (-35%), brands bottom line are further penalized by the recent changes.

ou can currently get FIVE types of retargeting on twitter without having to get on your knees to get on some private beta list (like we do) or go through one of the ad partners.

There is also website remarketing, like on Facebook, which came out on Twitter in June 2014. Grab your pixels here.

Compared to Facebook custom audience tools, Twitter’s match rate (the number of emails, phone numbers, etc you can match to a Twitter profile) will be lower. And that the traffic you get will be much smaller.

Problem number one: Building a relevant and engaged audience on Snapchat is difficult, compared to other social networks.

Issue number two: Snapchat has its own vibe. It may be difficult for many companies to achieve Snapchat credibility without some help from the cool kids.

the third issue is, the challenge of creating continuous, credible, snap-worthy content that disappears can be significant.

Twitter shows you everything posted by those you follow: news, thoughts from friends, pictures and more. You dip in and out as you like. But similar to live TV, when you turn it off — when you’re not actively watching Twitter — then you’re missing everything. Those 10 or 100 or 1,000 accounts you follow? Even though Twitter shows you everything from them, unlike Facebook, you’ll largely miss whatever they do if you’re not watching Twitter constantly.

That 5% engagement rate sounds pretty good, but it’s based only on the 7,195 people who actually saw my tweet. What’s the engagement rate for my overall audience of 390,000? That’s 0.1%, rounded up from 0.0923%.

Tweet & Tweet Again To Reach 30% Of Your Audience Twitter’s own post suggests that high visibility isn’t common. Consider this from it wrote today: We saw that brands that tweet two to three times per day can typically reach an audience size that’s equal to 30% of their follower base during a given week. This indicates that Tweet consistency is a key factor when it comes to maximizing your organic reach on Twitter.

When the TV show The X-Factor (U.K.) put a hashtag on the screen, it generated 27,000 tweets in 90 seconds.

Note that Twitter reported a half a billion tweets per day in October, up from 140 million per day in early 2011. It’s also a different way to measure its data than Twitter had in earlier years, when it would often tout the number of tweets, but really mean “items,” in terms of shares and re-shares which have to be shown on other peoples’ timelines.

witter is ramping up on big data visualization.

“We work very hard to remove illegal content from our platform and are determined to work with others to solve this problem,” the company said in a statement. “As experts have pointed out, this legislation would force private companies rather than the courts to become the judges of what is illegal in Germany.”

Germany officially unveiled a landmark social-media bill Wednesday that could quickly turn this nation into a test case in the effort to combat the spread of fake news and hate speech in the West.

The highly anticipated draft bill is also highly contentious, with critics denouncing it as a curb on free speech. If passed, as now appears likely, the measure would compel large outlets such as Facebook and Twitter to rapidly remove fake news that incites hate, as well as other “criminal” content, or face fines as high as 50 million euros ($53 million). Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cabinet agreed on the draft bill Wednesday, giving it a high chance of approval in the German Parliament before national elections in September. In effect, the move is Germany’s response to a barrage of fake news during last year’s elections in the United States, with officials seeking to prevent a similar onslaught here.

The people talking metric lumps together the number of people who have liked, commented or shared a brand's post or page, or engaged in some other way. But some advertisers place different values on various forms of interactions - for instance, attributing a higher value to a comment than a like.

Without Facebook-reported daily likes and comments, marketers and agencies will need to track them manually. For those tracking larger pages with multiple posts, that could get tedious. Companies like PageLever could benefit from the change.

The power of retargeting lies in its ability to keep your brand top of mind among users through continuous exposure.

optimal number is approximately 17-20 impressions per user per month, breaking down to roughly one impression every other day.  At this level, your users won’t be inundated with ads, but will see your brand with enough frequency to solidify brand recall.

clickthrough rates decrease by almost 50% after five months of running the same set of ads. After seeing the same ads again and again, a user’s interest is no longer peaked and the ads are more likely to blend into the background.

PTAT brings everything together by measuring all of the individual Facebook users who have engaged with a page’s content and created a “story” in their News Feed and their friends News Feeds in the past seven days.

Prior to the introduction of PTAT in the Fall 2011, most marketers relied on a mashup of metrics – including the number of Likes, active users, comments and other performance indicators – to measure the health of their page.

According to Facebook the different types of stories measured in your PTAT score include: Liking your page Liking, commenting on, or sharing your page post Answering a Question you’ve asked Responding to your event Mentioning your page Tagging your page in a photo Checking in or recommending your place

1. Overestimating the Importance of Facebook Pages

2. Caring Only About Numbers of Fans

3. Thinking You’ll Get Enough Fans from Your Email Lis