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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.”

Facebook Connections Targeting, NOW the ONLY way to forensically slice audience psychographics. The good news is FB users who engage can be easily studied using free FB tools in Audience Insights, the API and subtractive campaign reach. Get a FB user to become a connection, like your page, use your app, engage with an event and/or any advanced combinations thereof.  THEN and only then can they easily be studied.

In the old days we didn’t have Custom Audiences, let alone the ability to study them. Still, we made major psychographic marketing strides. Remember the magic: Drive traffic from social psychographic targeting to your website. Keep track of that targeting and creative through UTM tags. Set Google, FB and any first-party cookies on your site. Because traffic came from very specific targeting, we KNOW what the audience is. No analysis required.

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.

You can find pointers on completing and optimizing your LinkedIn Page here. 

how to add a Follow button to your company’s website.