Social Media Training for Marketers

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

“This consumer complaint raises a number of concerns about Facebook’s privacy policies and practices,” the committee leaders wrote in the letter. “Facebook’s systems lack transparency as to how they are able to gather personal information and synthesize that information into suggestions of relevant medical condition support groups. Labeling these groups as closed or anonymous potentially misled Facebook users into joining these groups and revealing more personal information than they otherwise would have. And Facebook may have failed to properly notify group members that their personal health information may have been accessed by health insurance companies and online bullies, among others.”

Create Rich Cards Rich cards are a form of structured data; they give users visually appealing information that is easy to understand and provides a flawless mobile search experience. They are Google’s way of taking advantage of the rise in mobile usages, which has surpassed desktop. They aren’t just easy on the eyes though. Analysts at Google state that Schema markups will become more important when it comes to search ranking as time goes on.

Create Skyscraper Content If you haven’t heard of or don’t use skyscraper content, then you’re missing out on a lot of SEO juice. The term was coined by  Brian Dean, who used it to boost his traffic by 110% in 14 days. Skyscraper content involves finding high performing content in your niche and creating something better, and then shamelessly promoting it.

Take Advantage of High-Performing Posts You know that internal linking is a good SEO practice. But, do you optimize your internal linking for maximum effect? At the beginning of this post, I told you that 73% of users don’t click past the first page. That means that your pages with less authority will be left out in the cold and will receive only the occasional stray or lucky click. You can remedy this pretty quickly. If you have pages with high authority showing up on the first page of the search results, take advantage of this and link to lower ranking posts from these high-performing posts. This strategy can lead to more clicks and higher rankings.

Below are the full details from our study on everything from our vertical video hypothesis to the surprising results! Here’s a quick look at what we’ll cover: The vertical video and mobile hypothesis 3 important video marketing takeaways Other key video marketing learnings Overall vertical video research conclusion What’s next for video marketing?

mobile phones (smartphones) alone accounted for 65% of total digital usage, up from 62% in Q1 2018:

In all of the experiments we conducted, we consistently found that vertical video outperformed square video within the Facebook News Feed.

PR campaigns have always targeted those with this nom de guerre. But we didn’t always call them influencers. And calling them influencers is a huge mistake.

What many people call influencers on social media are simply their own media brand. A major newspaper is an organized team of influencers, whose opinions and content carries value in certain communities. The top Instagrammers, nationally distributed magazines and the dad down the block who posts his garage projects on Pinterest, are all just media properties as well

The biggest shortcoming in marketing measurement is that we judge the value of the influencer by their reach and engagement, versus audience, relevance and message

86% of journalists like when PR pros follow them on social media When asked, why do you immediately reject otherwise relevant pitches, 22% of journalists cited lack of personalization 72% of journalists wish PR pros would stop calling them to pitch story ideas 78% of journalists don’t like pitches with emojis

On social media 70% of journalists said they saw Twitter as their most valuable social network. 72% of journalists track how many times their own stories are shared on social media

Preparing for a crisis takes place long before a crisis actually occurs. “Act like a post-crisis company pre-crisis,”

“Build a solid brand narrative so that when people are googling your company it’s not just your crises news that comes up.”

"Build relationships before pitching, especially in a crisis. Have the foundation laid so that when the time comes you can have resources to utilize in the media," she says.

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.