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Consumers say the types of social content they value most from brands are posts about discounts/sales (72% say so) and posts that showcase new products/services (60%). In contrast, marketers say the types of social content they share most are posts that teach something (61% say so) and posts that tell a story (58%).

There is a significant disconnect between what marketers post to social media and what consumers want brands to post, according to recent research from Sprout Social. The report was based on data from a survey conducted in April and May 2018 among 1,253 consumers and 2,060 social media marketers.

They’ve abandoned the promise of helping companies genuinely connect with their customers. They’re not even very good at the model they’ve chosen, which is as a Web 1.0 ad seller.

Ads aren’t the focus on what marketers want from Facebook in the first place.

Facebook has completely gone back on what they originally promised marketers in 2007. It’s what they promote today. They sell this promise of connecting companies with their customers. Eighty-four percent of the time they don’t do that.

"The thing I've tried to do with any client opening up its customer service channels -- you have to have a crisis communications plan mixed with a customer service plan," he said.  "You have to anticipate what will happen. ... Companies that dive in without a plan of attack for those situations are finding it difficult."

"You have to have a lawyer on staff who can be on call and help your social media team craft communications in crisis situations," he said. "When you have a big publicity problem, you have your legal team working hand-in-hand with PR. Why wouldn't you do the same thing in the social media world?"

"Any industry that's heavily regulated will always have a layer of legal and compliance teams that have to be trained, and have to buy in," he said. "It can be done with the right legal team. But if you have a team that constantly says ‘no,’ it'll never work."

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.

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.

it is no longer relying solely on what Facebook users reveal about themselves. Instead, it is tapping into outside sources of data to learn even more about them — and to sell ads that are more finely targeted to them.

The push to refine targeted advertising reflects the company’s need to increase its revenue. Its shares are worth far less than its ambitious initial public offering price of $38 a share last May, and Wall Street wants to see it take concrete steps to prove to advertisers that it can show the right promotions to the right users and turn them into customers.

Last fall, it invited potential advertisers to provide the e-mail addresses of their customers; Facebook then found those customers among its users and showed them ads on behalf of the brands.

more strategic thought around how to deploy mobile in a shopping arena—not necessarily the new technologies or the new checkout system because that’s going to happen no matter what.”

s you start to see third parties map indoor spaces [and] you start to see retailers put beacons on the shelves, I think there is going to be some massively interesting creative unlocked [in 2015].” 

adoption of mobile payments and loyalty programs by both retailers and consumers. We’ve finally reached a long-awaited tipping point with beacons and NFC, and these technologies are poised to supercharge in-store sales and turn the tables on showrooming.” 

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).

what are some of the things you can A/B test with your influencer marketing campaigns? All the same things you test in your other channels…

xperiment with different types of content and track which resonates best with their audience for your goal. For example, images may drive better social engagement, while videos are better for leads and signups. Alternately, you may find certain content performs better on some channels over others.

Don’t forget all the types of content you have at your disposal – podcasts, live stream videos, tweets, Instagram Stories, webinars, long-form blog posts, short-form blog posts, and much, much more.

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.”

Optimization is a standard practice for most marketing channels. Not so much in influencer marketing, according the influencers surveyed. Influencers indicated that it is rare for marketers to ask for active campaign data and even more unusual that adjustments are made midstream.

One topic that the influencers strongly agreed upon is that longer engagements would produce better results. They believe their followers will see brand partnerships as more authentic and will become more familiar with the brand as they see it more. They also feel that micro-relationships, like one-post campaigns, are ad-like, which can discredit both the brand and influencer.

Many influencers provided anecdotes of high-performing content, especially on blogs, that lived long after the influencer marketing campaign ended. Examples of continued performance include content interaction, traffic generated to a website and appearance in search results. As an opportunity, marketers could engage with the influencer to amplify that content where it lives or extend it through paid support. At the very least, reengaging past successful partners or content should be top of mind.

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.”

But the fascination with Google+ as a would-be Facebook killer obscures the larger story about what Google+ offers.

Google+ is really two things. One is a destination for connecting with friends and subjects that interest them. When the press writes about Google+, it's usually in this context. But Google+ plays a second role, as a product that improves other products. Google tends to talk about this in abstract terms -- it's "a social spine;" it's a "fabric;" it "weaves" Google products together. Let's try to be a little more concrete about what Google+ is doing besides giving people a Facebook alternative.

Google+ is a single sign-on system. Until the social network launched in June 2011, users of various Google services used different identities for each.

51 percent of consumers want to talk about companies without being listened to, 58 percent want companies to respond to their complaints shared on social media.

32 percent of consumers of all ages and 38 percent of Millennials (18-24-year-olds) have no idea companies are listening to what they say in social media.

43 percent of consumers think listening online intrudes on privacy, even though this is "social" media. Boomers put up the biggest fight (36 percent said they don't want brands listening to what they say about brands online), while only 17 percent of Millennials said the same).

Marketers are siphoning budgets from display campaigns on Twitter to its video ads, which when synchronised with TV media buys can lead to a 10 per cent lift in their return-on-investment from the legacy medium.

To propel its own video offering, Twitter is working on features such as demographic targeting and validation, gross rating point and target rating point as well as reporting.

We are focused on live premium content in all sports, news and politics as well as entertainment to bring together for our users what they are already talking about, what they already care about," added Bain.  The company will be hoping live streaming help lift its monthly active users. It’s been an ongoing problem for the social network and while it moved up slightly in the quarter, up to 310 million compared to 305 million in the previous one, growth has been fairly stagnant for the last year.