Social Media Training for Marketers

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.

After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources confirm that Facebook has spent months building LOL, a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips.

LOL is currently in private beta with around 100 high school students who signed non-disclosure agreements with parental consent to do focus groups and one-on-one testing with Facebook staff.

Facebook confirmed it is privately testing LOL as a home for funny meme content with a very small number of US users. While those testers experience LOL as a replacement for their Watch tab, Facebook says there’s no plans to roll out LOL in Watch and the team is still finalizing whether it will become a separate feature in one of Facebook’s main app or a standalone app. Facebook declined to give a formal statement but told us the details we had were accurate.With teens increasingly turning to ephemeral Stories for sharing and content consumption, Facebook is desperate to lure them back to its easily-monetizable feeds.

Zuckerberg says “People share more photos, videos, and links on WhatsApp and Messenger than they do on social networks.” 

“Our biggest competitor by far is iMessage. In important countries like the US where the iPhone is strong, Apple bundles iMesssage as the default texting app, and it’s still ahead” Zuckerberg notes.

Mark Zuckerberg stressed that sharing is shifting to private chat, where people send 100 billion messages per day on Facebook’s family of apps, and Stories, where he says people share 1 billion of these slideshows per day (though it’s unclear if that includes third-party apps like Snapchat).

Starting today, users will be able to add music stickers to their Facebook Stories. You can search for songs, pick out the part you want to share, and add the sticker with the artist and song name. It works exactly the same way as it does on Instagram Stories, which introduced the feature in June.

Facebook is also expanding Lip Sync Live, its TikTok competitor (RIP Musical.ly), to Pages, so creators and artists can “connect with their fans.” It’ll most likely be useful for artists in promoting their singles, as Jess Glynne recently did. Lip Sync Live is also adding onscreen lyrics, creating a more karaoke-like experience.

We are now going further in our efforts to limit low-quality ads on our platforms by disapproving more of them and reducing distribution for more ads in our auction."

1. Engagement bait These are your typical 'like and share' posts, re-purposed as ads. Facebook has specific rules against using such methods in contests, but they also don't like them in promotions.

2. Withholding information Facebook also dislikes ads which lure clicks by alluding to the full detail of the post without being clear on what that detail actually is.

Dozens of advertisements removed from Facebook for being political ahead of the November midterm elections did not appear to express any political view, a USA TODAY analysis showed. The Facebook ads from businesses, universities, nonprofits and other organizations did seem to have something in common: They mentioned "African-American," "Latino," "Hispanic," "Mexican," "women," "LGBT" or were written in Spanish.

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.

Today, we’re releasing a new free tool to help anyone discover what percent of an any Twitter account’s followers are fake vs. real: The Fake Followers Audit.

The tool is designed to estimate the percentage of a given account’s followers that fit one or more of the following buckets: Spam accounts (those that purely send spam tweets) Bot accounts (those that have no real human actively operating them) Propaganda accounts (those designed to propagate dis/misinformation) Inactive accounts (those that no longer use Twitter or see tweets)

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.

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.”

Research from Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs indicates content marketers with a documented strategy are: Much more likely to consider themselves effective at content marketing Far less challenged with the many aspects of content marketing Able to justify why a higher percentage of the marketing budget should be spent on content marketin

Consider documenting one or more of the following goals as a starting point for your strategy: Improve brand awareness Increase engagement Generate more website traffic Expand the email list Increase marketing ROI Achieve higher customer retention, loyalty and referrals

A buyer persona reveals what prospective customers are thinking and doing as they weigh their options to solve a problem.