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The Internet in general censors conservatives. It always has. It likely always will. No, I’m not suggesting that sites like Red State or National Review are invisible. That would be too obvious, too outrageous. The censorship that happens across the internet is so subtle that it takes a former employee to blow the whistle before it can even become news.
In reality, this has been discussed often pertaining to many high-volume websites for years. On social media, sites like Twitter and YouTube have been under scrutiny well before the recent Facebook revelation. In search, Google is notorious for blaming the algorithm for its clear left tilt. Then, there are the major publications like the New York Times and Reuters who routinely link to left-leaning sentiment on “news” issues when neutral or right-leaning sentiment better serves the purpose. This is why progressive sites like Salon, Slate, and Alternet pop up as the “news” for Ted Cruz and other conservatives. Hit pieces against conservatives tend to appear more readily on nearly every major traffic-driving website. Meanwhile, puff pieces about Hillary Clinton fill the exact same venues.
Yes, the Internet is against us. It’s against Christians. The conspiracy theorists would blame the New World Order for controlling media at every level to push a leftist agenda of globalism. The end times watchers will blame manipulations from “rulers of the darkness of this world” for this disastrous trend in the media. I’m not sure what the cause is, exactly, but one does not have to be a conspiracy theorist to realize that there’s a conspiracy of some sorts arrayed against conservative Christians on the Internet.
Unfortunately, it’s worse than most even realize. The left is creeping into alleged “alternative media” sites like InfoWars and BeforeItsNews. These sites are not the beacons of counter-culture conservatism that they appear to be. They’re good for a chuckle, but their tilt always ends up leaning to the left in the long run.
Here are a few safe sites. Be warned: just as Breitbart and Drudge took their turns to the left, we have to make certain that we watch for the same trends everywhere. I hate to come across as paranoid but I’ve been burned too many times by “conservative” websites that were actually wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Redstate
National Review (usually)
The Resurgent
Daily Wire
Heritage
The Daily Signal
There are others, of course, but I’m compiling a comprehensive list on another site.
Now’s not the time for a deep dive. Instead, be aware and look for alternatives in order to get your daily dose of news. The “trusted” sources are not what they appear to be. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Bing – they all lean very much to the left.
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Shows like CSI and its many spinoffs and copycats helped to introduce the concept of forensic science to mainstream American culture. We know that anything can be tested, prodded, enhanced, and analyzed until it yields the results we desire. In the end, it’s all about the scientific method.
In the world of social media marketing, there’s no better way to the true benefits than to apply the same principles as forensics. You’re given information and data. You can establish a hypothesis and test it in your ‘lab.” Then, you can improve on your testing and enhance your results. That’s forensic social media in a nutshell.
Here’s how it plays out in the world of social media marketing:
Use the Data
Facebook and Twitter offer incredible targeting data. You know where people live, how much money they likely make, in which direction their political opinions lean, how they prefer to shop, and what they’re most likely to buy. This gives you a basis for creating multiple data sets for targeting.
You can take it a step further by creating custom audiences on Facebook based upon other data that you have at your fingertips. For example, you can take an email list that you’ve built over time or purchased and cross-reference those email addresses to identify targeted Facebook or Twitter users. This is extremely useful in creating custom campaigns that go after specific individuals within a group.
Finally, you can enhance it all even further through retargeting. By taking your website visitors and putting a message in front of them that is compelling. Since they’ve already been on your website, you will want to put a different type of message in front of them instead of a message that would draw the in for the first time.
Establish Your Hypothesis
Once you know who to target, it’s time to put the data to work. Your various hypotheses should be based upon your knowledge of your industry and product and then guided to fit the individual campaigns to target your specified audiences. The reason we’re calling them hypothetical campaigns at this point is because we don’t know if they’re going to be effective or not based upon what we know right now. Once you get done with the next step, you’ll have established campaigns that work. If there’s one thing we’ve learned doing social media marketing for so long, it’s that campaigns rarely perform the way we expect them to initially.
Let’s say you’re a car dealer wanting to run a retargeting campaign on Facebook. It’s easy to think that you want to put specials in front of them, but we’ve found that it’s not always the best way to convert them into leads and sales. Instead, we’ve seen success retargeting people to visit a page on the website that calls for a direct action. In other words, rather than convincing them to do business because of price or anything else, it’s a matter of convincing them that you’re the right dealership to work with for other reasons. You’re the nicer dealership. You deliver the best experience. You care for your customers beyond the initial sale. They’ve probably visited several dealer websites during their car buying journey. Now it’s time to stand out.
Enhance Results
Sometimes, you’ll find that your initial instincts were correct. Other times, you’ll go through several iterations of different campaigns before finding the ones that perform the best. Trust your gut to start but trust the data to finish.
Thankfully, testing and improving on social media is not a long process. Depending on your budget, a couple of weeks of data is often enough to get a feel for whether a campaign is working well or not. Try multiple images. Change the wording. Try different landing pages. Do whatever you can to mix and match.
The most important thing to remember is that wholesale changes are the biggest mistake that people make when testing different hypothetical campaigns. If something is working a little but not at its best level, don’t change the whole thing. Change one thing at a time and see how that changes performance. If you change more than one thing, you won’t know which change had the effect you desired. In fact, one change could be negative while the other is positive. This could yield a wash. When you test changes one at a time, you’ll be able to see which individual changes had the most benefit.
The art and science of forensic social media might seem like something that requires a lot of time. It isn’t. Once you get going, you’ll find that your process improves and becomes more efficient over time. In the end, you’ll have the best possible campaigns based upon data rather than relying solely on your gut instincts.
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Facebook has been known to revolutionize the way we communicate with our friends, family and other loved ones, as well as meet new people online. With the vast bankroll, and technological knowhow, is too far off to think that Facebook may want in on the autonomous car action? It doesn’t really seem so if you think about it. Google and Apple have been dabbling in the driverless car market, so why not Facebook?
The people at Facebook are busy fending off the rumours of an autonomous vehicle and have said that this project is not happening. Mark Zuckerberg has been on the record about not creating their own car, but insiders say otherwise. What is unknown is whether the vehicle will simply be electric, or autonomous, and how far along they are on the project. Are they ahead of the race, or far behind? No one really knows.
A Facebook employee advised that they do in fact have a project in the works and it is code named Movingbox. It is said that 200 people are on the project and that Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson has been consulting on the project since being fired from the company for punching a producer in the face. Ouch!
So what kind of vehicle would Facebook bring to the Movingbox project? None other than a Ford Shelby Cobra of course. It is rumoured that the Shelby Cobra has been the vehicle that is in testing by an employee who wished to remain anonymous. An announcement is expected to be made on April 1st, 2016. Whether it is about project Movingbox, no one knows. Maybe it will all be a big planned April Fool’s joke, but I suppose we will have to wait and see.
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It’s hard to pick a better Joker from the Batman movies. The original Jack Nicholson version was dark and funny and had the psychopathic flare that only Jack can bring to the table. Heath Ledger’s Joker brought critical acclaim and an Oscar win because of the raw grittiness in the way he threw himself into the role.
We shouldn’t choose. We shouldn’t have to. Both performances can thrive on their own merits and be watched for generations to come.
The same sort of toss-up applies to Facebook and Twitter posting, particularly when it comes to advertising for business. Everyone knows about the public posting component. These are the posts that appear on the Facebook pages or Twitter profiles of the business and fill the news feeds and timelines of the business’ followers. The unpublished side, known to some as “dark posts”, are usually not known by the business community and often ignored by marketing companies.
If a social media company isn’t taking advantage of both of them, you should run away and pretend like they don’t exist. Both are extremely important to the success of a business’ social media presence. If anything, the dark posts are even more important than the public posts. Let’s define them, then go into why they’re both so important.
Public Posts
Not much to say here since you all already know what they are. If you post to your “wall” on Facebook or to your Twitter profile, you’re posting publicly. These posts appear whenever anyone visits your page or profile. They also appear on the Facebook news feeds and Twitter timelines of those who are following you (though your actual reach with advertising on either platform is normally pretty abysmal, even embarrassing).
Dark Posts
These are the unpublished posts on Facebook and Twitter. They’re the ads that don’t appear on your page or profile, but fill the news feeds and timelines of the audiences you select. They aren’t bound by time – they run until you replace them or tell them to stop.
Dark posts are avoided by many companies for three reasons:
They aren’t automated. You can’t schedule them with Buffer or Hootsuite, for example, and an API feed doesn’t work. This makes them non-scalable, which means that only nimble companies like the automotive social media folks, our friends at Dealer Authority, have the ability to manage them for their clients.
They aren’t popular. For whatever reason, both Facebook and Twitter have done terrible jobs at letting businesses know the power of dark posts. This is good for those who are taking advantage of them because the competition in most industries is minimal. Of course, that also means social media companies can get away with not selling them because few businesses are asking about them.
They aren’t profitable… for the social media company. Unlike Google PPC where even small businesses can have monthly budgets in the thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, social media dark post advertising is usually in the hundreds or thousands per month. Those charging a percentage can’t make much money and those charging a flat often have to overcharge to make them worthwhile.
The thing is that these types of posts have the strongest ROI, higher than with public posts. For this reason, social media companies must offer them if their goal is to truly help their clients.
Why You Need Both
By themselves, neither is exceptionally effective. Sure, you can get incredible branding and exposure through a public posting strategy with a small advertising budget and you can get great traffic to your website through a dark posting campaign with a slightly higher budget, but it’s in the combination of both types of posting that a proper strategy can be delivered.
Get the buzz with public posts. Get the traffic with dark posts. It’s not a hard concept to understand, but it’s strangely a hard service (for some) to deliver.
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The trends have been pointing to older generations jumping on Facebook for a while. Now, the latest numbers from Pew show that over half of internet users over 65 use Facebook.
Overall, Facebook’s growth slowed but engagement levels increased. On other networks such as Twitter and Pinterest, the number of users rose more dramatically but engagement decreased. While some say this is due to fatigue and accounts going dormant, we speculate that the users are getting more efficient at using the networks. The can be seen in the dramatic rise of adults using multiple networks – 52% in 2014 versus 42% the year before.
The most important finding of the study surrounds the rise in Facebook engagement. 70% of users access the site daily. That’s huge. That means that once Facebook gets its hooks into users, they tend to crave it in much the same way that people watch television daily. This is a sharp contrast to recent speculation that Facebook is suffering from being antiquated and too “uncool” for younger users.
That may be the case, but as they get older and are forced to expand their social circles through work and adult groups, it’s likely that they will be forced to come back to the “old person’s social network” if they want to engage with their adult peers.
There are definitely some gems in the exhaustive study, but overall it’s not really anything new. Facebook is huge. We knew that already.
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Someday, I will have the opportunity to prove to a client or prospect beyond any reasonable doubt that this is true. In the meantime, I will continue to write about it in hopes that the facts will win out.
To prove it beyond a reasonable doubt, I would have to take a page that has zero fans and send massive engagement and traffic with a small budget. Then, we’d need to look at the statistics to show that a page that starts off with zero likes can have more than just paid reach. It can have more organic reach than pages that have tons of likes.
We do have examples, not to the extreme of having zero fans, but by demonstrating that through strong content and proper use of advertising we can get strong organic reach. Here’s a quick one that’s pretty clear:
As you can see, this page has 2,458 people liking it. However, you’ll see that the small budget, in this case around $15, was able to get it good paid exposure. More importantly, it generated more organic reach than the number of people who like the page.
Now, let’s look at a different page. It has nearly 8 times as many likes, but the reach is minimal.
The gap is crystal clear. Facebook has been pulling back on organic reach for some time. While many will say that it’s all about greed and the bottom line to force pages to use money to get exposure, it’s more likely about what the users want. When they see page posts on their news feeds, they are much less likely to engage with those posts than the posts of their friends and family. Still, they’re a business, so the reduction of organic reach and the rise of sponsoring posts is the end result.
You’ll notice that I said that page likes are 99% worthless. There’s one minor benefit. Some would call it credibility. Others would call it ego. Either way, having a page that people are liking gives a psychological boost to the page to let people demonstrate how popular their page really is. While likes are infinitesimal in importance compared to reach, it’s still a benefit.
Focus on content. Put a budget behind it. Give your page real reach rather than the artificial benefits associated with page popularity.
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The trends have been pointing in this direction for a while, but now many social media companies are making it official. The “pay to play” model is in full swing, and despite how this might make social media content companies feel, this is a really good thing for businesses.
Facebook is the most recent to announce that spam from businesses won’t be tolerated. This has really been the unspoken case for a while, but now they’re upping the ante by threatening to remove posts from brands that are too promotional.
For businesses, it really comes down to two options: pay to play or keep it simple. Some are proposing abandoning the site altogether, but until search engines and the users stop putting so much credibility in the site (it ranks for most businesses on Google and Bing when people search for the company by name), abandoning the site would be a poor idea.
Here is a breakdown of the two options:
Pay-to-Play
If Facebook is going to prevent unpaid posts from being seen or even allowed on its site from brands, then the first valid option is to start paying for placement. The bad news is that the platform has been free for many businesses for a while, so paying is a hard pill to swallow. The good news is that it’s cheap, especially when you compare it to other forms of digital advertising like banner or PPC advertising.
Businesses that adopt pay-to-play can take advantage of social media without it hitting their advertising budget too hard.
Automate
Yes, I said it. For years, I’ve been against automation on social media. I’ve written about how bad of an idea it is. Today, there’s a valid reason for the right type of automation to fill the gap for those who do not want to advertise.
Let’s look at the automotive industry as an example. The social solution by LotVantage is a perfect way for dealers to make it happen without spending much money. It fulfills the three basic needs of automation: relevant content, diversity of sources, and scaling levels of control by the user.
The content is relevant; it focuses on automotive websites, a dealership’s videos, their blogs, and the inventory from their website. This wide range of content types also fulfills the diversity of sources necessity for proper automation. Lastly, it allows dealers to set it and forget it, manually vet every post, or anywhere in between. This last part is important because the goal of automation in the first place is to be able to establish a strong presence without investing much money or time into social media.
The Future
This is a trend that isn’t going to change. Those who believe that they can work their way into social media success without spending money are not being realistic. It’s spreading to other networks. It’s the end game that has always been planned (in some cases unwittingly) by social sites since the dawn of Web 2.0.
Even though the direction of social media has been set, there are still very valid options available for businesses. That won’t change until they start charging users or decide to become non-profit… and those things will likely never happen.
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I remember the first “social media is dying” post that I read. It was early 2008 and MySpace was already showing signs of starting to implode upon itself. The article I read (wish I would have saved it) gave a very compelling argument about how social media was a fad and that privacy would eventually prevail once the glow of the “look at me” mentality that drives social media wears off.
It never did. It never will.
There’s no going back. Social media is the ultimate legal voyeurism into the lives of those we care about, whether we like them or not. We can see what our old high school friends are doing now. We can monitor the activities of our friends, family, coworkers, and anyone else of interest. We can keep track of the news as it’s unfolding, not told by a news anchor but told by the reactions of people we may or may not know.
Most importantly, it gives a permanence to our escapades that the majority of humans like. We want to show everyone the cake we made for our kids. We want to let everyone know that we’re at the big concert and they’re not. We want to show off our dog (because everyone has the most awesome dog in the world).
I used to be one who believed that social media would eventually be replaced. It will change, but the concept has grown on us and will stay in one form or another throughout our lives until a major event changes everything. That major event would need to be extremely major – a cataclysmic infrastructure meltdown that takes out the grid, a meteor, the end times, etc.
Even as technology evolves to the point of near sentience, we’re still going to be social online (or through whatever eventually replaces the internet). The cat is out of the bag. The genie is out of the bottle. Pandora’s box has been broken down and tossed in the cardboard recycling bin.
For people, this is a good and bad thing. It’s good that we can communicate with more people. It’s bad that we’re no longer communicating as much or as meaningfully with the people who are close by.
For businesses, it’s a rockier road. There are too many factors that could take out the business benefits of social media long before the actual medium itself ever dies. This isn’t a warning to tell people that they shouldn’t be investing in social media for their business. It’s a statement of complete transparency; we’re one major hack, sustained outage, or obtuse piece of legislature away from Facebook crumbling to business-relevant dust.
It won’t be dying in the foreseeable future, but even something as sustainable as social media will eventually end.
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Recently, some social media users have been in an uproar after Facebook admitted to carrying out a secret experiment in which the news feeds of more than 600,000 users were filtered to see if those individuals would have differing emotions based upon what they saw on the screen. For example, it was determined if a person was exposed to more positive news from friends, he or she would be less likely to post something negative as a status update. The opposite was also found to be true.
“Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion”
On a smaller scale, most of us are already familiar with this phenomenon. Spending time with a friend who is in an abundantly good mood probably makes you feel similar, even if you were previously feeling a little down in the dumps.
For the purposes of this study, the changes in a person’s emotions were collectively called “massive-scale emotional contagion.” Put simply, scientists determined it was not necessary for a person to interact on a face-to-face basis, and that an individual only needed to read about an emotion being expressed in order to be potentially influenced.
Fears About Future Data
As soon as the study made it into the public realm, it was met with a great deal of concern. As quoted in a piece from The Guardian, a spokeswoman for Facebook clarified how the study took place in order “to improve our services and to make the content people see on Facebook as relevant and engaging as possible.”
However, some people around the world have protested in earnest, especially considering the experiment took place without a user’s knowledge. Selection for the experiment was randomized and based on a person’s user ID. Some people worried future manipulation of news feeds could potentially be very powerful, especially if it occurs in conjunction with political campaigns.
Attempts to Influence Emotions Are Not New
It’s important to remember that ever since advertising has existed, there have been efforts made to create emotional responses in people who see the campaigns. Usually, the most memorable advertisements are ones that resonate with you on a deep level.
Trying to tap into the emotions of a user base certainly doesn’t have to be connected with sinister goals. If you’re an athlete who’s thinking about using a therapy pool during a rehabilitation process, you’d probably really appreciate if the respective website had testimonials from fellow athletes who have depended on aquatic therapy to get back to top form.
Reading about the experiences of people who might have been in similar situations to the one you’re now facing would almost certainly incite a sense of hope, especially if you’re already wrestling with a lot of doubt and are wondering if you’ll ever be able to perform well again.
Carefully Read the Terms and Conditions
Facebook, like other social media websites, has terms and conditions that users must agree with before getting permission to use the site. If news of Facebook’s experiment makes you feel uneasy, maybe that’s a good reminder that it’s time to revisit the user agreements for all the sites you frequent, and make sure you’re still OK with what’s stated there.
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There was a dream that was Rome. You could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish, it was so fragile.
Okay, so that’s not really original. Any opportunity to plug in a line from Gladiator, I’ll take it. Despite the overly serious tone of the quote, it plays well with the dream that was social media. The idea of having a set of free venues through which businesses could interact with consumers and the consumers could interact back presented itself as a grand concept to be desired and cherished. Unfortunately, the dream is dead. Success on modern social media requires one of two things: serious fame or cash invested.
Unless you’re Justin Bieber, your brand needs money in order to be relevant on sites like Facebook. There’s no other way to look at it. Even Twitter gets exponentially more useful when a little money is applied to it. LinkedIn, YouTube, and possibly Pinterest and Instagram are all heading down the road of pay-to-play if you really want to find success.
It’s not the evil plan of social media sites come through to their end game. In fact, most of the social sites outside of YouTube went in with the hopes of not having to apply advertising as a primary source of revenue, at least not in the formats they’re presenting themselves in today. “Advertising” was a dirty word in social media startup circles just four or five years ago. Today, they’ve accepted that their dreams of making money through networking and data are simply no long realistic. As their dreams died, so did ours.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the cost of playing the game right is, for now, extremely low when compared to the potential results. For a fraction of the cost of Google Adwords or display advertising, campaigns can be set up through social media that bring in similar results. In some cases, depending on the goals and campaigns, the results can actually be better despite the lower spend. Let’s take a look at the recent past, the way it works today, and the near future:
It All Blew Up
For better or for worse, the people muscled out the businesses. On Facebook, for example, the feedback from users was that they simply weren’t interested in seeing as many posts from pages as from profiles. They might like the show Game of Thrones and they might not mind occasionally seeing updates posted on their news feed, but for the most part they go to Facebook to see videos of little nephew Timmy sliding into 3rd base. Facebook obliged recently (and really, for a long time they’ve been creeping in this direction) and made it less likely that posts from pages were visible in news feeds.
There’s a silver lining to this, though. While users were not as accepting of posts in their news feeds from pages that showed up organically, they’ve demonstrated a tolerance for sponsored posts. In essence, they know instinctively that they have these services for free and that Facebook is a business. As long as they have some sense of control over what they’re presented, they don’t mind ads on Facebook any more than they mind television commercials. They tolerate them. At least on Facebook, they have the ability to let Facebook know which posts they don’t want to see on their news feeds.
Social media blew up. It got too big for brands, at least from an organic perspective. On Facebook and Twitter in particular, the feeds are too cluttered with personal posts to allow the business posts to come through naturally. That’s okay. We should be paying. If anything, this makes it to where the aggressive businesses can take advantage of the exceptionally low cost of entry without being muscled out by popular pages with their organic reach.
Today
Now that we know that organic reach is dead, we can move forward with the benefits of this. Facebook has done a terrible job at educating businesses about their advertising powers and Twitter has done even worse. Google+ – don’t get me started there. This is bad for them. It’s great for us. It’s great for companies that are starting to take advantage of it.
There are caveats, most notably that the ad types used to bring people to the table and try advertising are the worst ones. On Facebook, the “Boost” and “Promote Your Page” buttons are the easiest to get you started and the worst at achieving results.
Data. That’s the power of social media. Unfortunately, both of the basic types of advertising have trouble thinking about scratching the surface of the data components. This isn’t the place to go into details about how the data works, but suffice to say that it’s extremely powerful when used appropriately.
That’s today. Get involved and use the data that you have as well as the data that Facebook has. With that understood, what will the future look like?
Shifting Towards Mobile First
Everything is shifting to mobile.
Everything is shifting to mobile.
Everything is shifting to mobile.
It cannot be overstated and it doesn’t matter where you put the emphasis. Mobile will eclipse desktop soon for nearly all forms of internet browsing. It already does with social media. This is why, no matter what you think about social media, you must make sure that your digital marketing strategy focuses on mobile first and allows the desktop experience to happen as a secondary course. That’s not to say that desktops are dying or that they don’t need to be considered. They simply need to reside in a mobile world as if they’re big mobile devices without the touchscreen. Heck, there are plenty of desktops and laptops that already do have touchscreens.
As social media continues to evolve and mobile grows in eyeball share, so too do the advertising strategies need to match appropriately.
Social media is no longer organic, at least not for businesses. To move ahead, you have to either use social media from a defensive posture or go full force with the advertising component. The in-between strategies will do nothing more than waste time and energy.
