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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.”

But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided? Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.

There are constantly trends and fads on the Internet, and people make a good living amplifying them. But I think that industrialized content marketing is one of those fads, and it will end up where they all do: petered out because human beings are too smart to fall for its appeal.

people in 14 countries will begin seeing a link to a “Tips for spotting false news” guide at the top of their News Feed. Clicking it brings users to a section offering 10 tips as well access to related resources in the Facebook Help Center. Facebook is also collaborating with news and media literacy organizations in several of countries to produce additional resources.

“Improving news literacy is a global priority, and we need to do our part to help people understand how to make decisions about which sources to trust,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of News Feed, wrote in a blog post about the initiative. “False news runs counter to our mission to connect people with the stories they find meaningful. We will continue working on this, and we know we have more work to do.”

It’s working with third-party fact checking organizations to flag false content in the News Feed, the company recently announced the Facebook Journalism Project to work with news organizations on products and business models, and it’s one of the funders of the new News Integrity Initiative, a $14 million project “focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

“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.

Anthony Noto, COO of Twitter, and former Goldman Sachs banker, is leading the company

He's betting the company on a risky strategy: to turn the social network, famous for celebrity feuds, trolls and Donald Trump, into a destination for live video — from sports to financial news to political debates.

Noto, a Silicon Valley outsider known for his hard-charging style, has struggled to convince investors or Valley insiders that his plan can really fix the company.

Location technologies like GPS are sharing analytics on where and how this content is being viewed.  The good news?  Connected TVs definitely have a role to play in the multiscreen IoT – especially in the area of building new models of marketing and advertising relationships.

The way we look at location-based marketing (LBM) is unique – our definition is basically: The intersection of people, places and media.  We don’t equate LBM to just mobile [devices]. – Asif Khan, LBMA

once you know the location of the person you’re trying to influence – the question you should ask is: what media happens to be near them in that particular place? Could be a billboard, radio, television – anything. We’re very focused on media context.”  

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.

In 2016, BuzzSumo analyzed more than 800 million Facebook posts. Based on their findings, posts with less than 50 characters “were more engaging than long posts.” According to another, more precise study by Jeff Bullas, posts with 80 characters or less receive 66 percent higher engagement:

Paid posts: 5 to 18 words Every Facebook ad needs three types of content: a Headline, Main Text, and a Description. After analyzing 37,259 Facebook ads, AdEspresso found that ads did best when the copy in each element was clear and concise. According to the data, the ideal length for a: Headline, the first text people read, is 5 words. Main Text, the snippet above your image or video, is 14 words. Description, the text that lives directly below your headline, is 18 words.

Videos: 30 to 60 seconds With video, one of the primary measures of success is how long people watch, also known as your video retention rate. In 2016, Kinetic Social tracked 2 billion social ad impressions and found that 44 percent of 30- to 60-second videos on Facebook were viewed to completion. Meanwhile, videos that ran under 30 seconds or over two minutes saw completion rates of 26 and 31 percent, respectively. A more recent poll, from 2018, showed that 33 percent of Facebook users preferred to watch shorter videos, from 30 to 50 seconds long.

By 2014, “Facebook the big news machine” was in full swing with Trending, hashtags and news outlets pouring resources into growing their Pages. Emphasizing the “news” in News Feed retrained users to wait for the big world-changing headlines to come to them rather than crisscrossing the home pages of various publishers. Many don’t even click-through, getting the gist of the news just from the headline and preview blurb. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, moving their spend from the publisher sites to Facebook.

In 2015, Facebook realized users hated waiting for slow mobile websites to load, so it launched Instant Articles to host publisher content within its own app. Instant Articles trained users not to even visit news sites when they clicked their links, instead only having the patience for a fast-loading native page stripped of the publisher’s identity and many of their recirculation and monetization opportunities. Advertisers followed, as publishers allowed Facebook to sell the ads on Instant Articles for them and thereby surrendered their advertiser relationships at the same time as their reader relationships.

This is how Facebook turns publishers into ghostwriters, a problem I blew the whistle on in 2015. Publishers are pitted against each other as they make interchangeable “dumb content” for Facebook’s “smart pipes.”

Shazam execs' talk of using their proprietary data for advertising puts them in league with The Weather Company, Pandora and Amazon, which are all mining information like pollen count, song choices and product purchases to inform ad targeting. Mr. McGurn said the Shazam app ingests the live audio feed from 160 TV networks every day. That positions the app as an ally to TV networks trying to stem their share of ad spend from being siphoned online.

Shazam is also currying favor with TV networks as a way to drive viewership. For last fall's Country Music Association Awards, Shazam pushed alerts featuring the show's air date and time to the in-app news feeds of eight million users who might be interested in watching, like those who had previously tagged a Blake Shelton song. Ten million people received such a notification for The Grammys.

People who use Shazam to "tag" the game's broadcast this year will be shown a new Twitter-like timeline. The live content feed will document the game -- from tweets to photos to ads -- and is designed to keep people using Shazam for the duration. But even if people tune in and out of the app, Shazam has created a new ad-retargeting program that plugs into Facebook.

As more consumers turn to social media to solve customer service issues, their expectations are also rising, according to the survey. More than two-thirds of customers said they felt a telecommunications company should respond to questions on Twitter within three hours.

According to the research, nearly a third of consumers said they would consider switching providers if their customer support requests through social media went unanswered. 

he potential for a disgruntled customer to do major damage to the brand is exacerbated by the speed at which social media can spread the word of a bad brand experience worldwide.”

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.

snag your free template to put together a complete crisis communication strategy. Use this post as a guide to complete it.

Create a Social Media Crisis Scale Convince and Convert devised a great solution to this problem. They built a customer response flowchart that matches the severity of an issue, to the right course of action.

Crisis Level 1: Isolated customer complaints and questions. Crisis Level 2: Angry customers, broken links, posts directing to the wrong page, factual inaccuracies, major misspellings on social posts. Crisis Level 3: High volume of angry customers, service outages, lack of product availability. Crisis Level 4: Product recalls, defective services or products, widespread negative press coverage, layoffs. Crisis Level 5: Lawsuits, serious accidents resulting in injury, illegal employee conduct.

100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 

But 40 is the magic number that Jeff Bullas found was most effective in his study of retail brands on Facebook. He measured engagement of posts, defined by “like” rate and comment rate, and the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.

The ideal length of a headline is 6 words

Many platforms and tools (Buzzsumo, Traackr, LittleBird, Tracx, Klout, etc.) try to identify and quantify influencer metrics such as: Relevance Reach/Audience Quality Engagement Activity

when a brand is working with an influencer the perceived potential (“I have 18 million followers!!!”, etc…) of the influencer to create great content and move an audience has surprisingly little to do with how well they perform at attracting an audience to their branded content.

We have found the most under-appreciated relationship is the third leg of the triangle: the relationship between the author and the brand, which are driven by both tangible rewards (fairness, upside) and intangible motivations (autonomy, reputation, and mastery).

as Page reach and engagement continues to dip for brands, Facebook has made some updates to help deliver value to businesses through Pages beyond just News Feed distribution.

Facebook Page is becoming more like a website for your business — a destination people will come to when they want information, or even make a purchase or booking, as well as a place to engage with great content.

Facebook has made it easier for people to recommend your business by bringing Recommendations to your Page. As shared by Facebook: People will now be able to post a Recommendation for your business including text, photos and tags directly on your Page. And Recommendations will also help you reach people while they’re searching for or talking about your business.

Instead of complaining that you are being “forced” into “pay for play” on networks like Facebook, embrace the fact that social paid promotion is probably the most sophisticated marketing tool ever created.

There is a steep learning curve to doing it right, and the need for a regular investment of time to properly manage campaigns. Additionally, even for paid campaigns, you still need to have content that doesn’t trigger ad blindness. But the ability to target your messages to exactly the right people, and to creatively remarket to those who have already shown interest, is unparalleled.

There is a major side benefit to moving toward that kind of content, beyond just keeping you in the news feed: Truly engaging content is better for your business. It helps make your brand more respected and remembered. It develops positive feelings toward your business that help influence people when it’s time to make a buying decision.

eMarketer predicts the combined U.S. digital ad market share of Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL -0.23% Google and Facebook will fall for the first time this year, shrinking to 56.8% from 58.5% last year. At the same time, overall digital ad spending in the country is likely to grow nearly 19% to $107 billion in 2018.

That would give Google command of 37.2% of the market, down from 38.6%. Facebook’s market share will likely be 19.6%, down from 19.9%,

Advertisers’ relationships with Google and Facebook have grown tense in recent years amid controversies over ads appearing next to inappropriate content, measurement discrepancies, and questions over the tech companies’ roles in Russia’s efforts to spread misinformation to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Facebook will focus on improving visual features in Messenger. In his post, Marcus says “people will expect a super fast and intuitive camera, video, images, GIFs, and stickers with almost every conversation.”

Messenger bet big on bots in 2017. Last year the company worked with small businesses and global brands to create more than 200,000 bots for Messenger. Marcus writes, “Look for investment in rich messaging experiences not only from global brands, but small businesses who need to be creative and nimble to stay competitive.” Since many of these bots provide very rudimentary features, we would expect to see improvements in overall user experience this year. We also expect larger brands to follow the lead of brands like Apple Music and Lego in creating marketing solutions made for the Messenger platform. 

Expect to see more businesses transitioning at least some of their customer service resources to Messenger. A recent study, commissioned by Facebook found that “56 percent of people surveyed would rather message a business than call customer service, and 67 percent expect to message businesses even more over the next two years.”

Arjoon said the move aims to use community engagement to bolster its influencer marketing.  And General Mills will continue to work with higher profile influencers on larger brands like Häagen-Dazs, said Bose. In general, working with advocates and influencers of varying profile has real cost efficiencies. Despite the challenges of working with influencers—from lack of authenticity to dramatic price increases—they are generally able to produce content more cost-effectively than agencies. So much so that Bose said General Mills would continue to pay influencers to promote its brands as part of a wider increase in spending on digital media. Last year, the advertiser spend up to a third of the digital budget for some of its brands on influencer marketing. Bose declined to reveal how much the advertiser spent.

The realities of the global pandemic have shown us that we’ve probably gone a little too far when it comes to the over aspirational inspirational, picture-perfect content produced by influencers,”

the advertiser is working with peer-to-peer software marketing platform Zyper to build communities of superfans to promote its Betty Crocker and Fibre One products