Nice work by Twitter to have live video of local press conferences and local news up top of the feed (as we wait out the slow arrival of Hurricane Florence here in Columbia). I’ve always used Twitter for live news and updates in text form, so it’s interesting to see them move more into the mobile video side of things…
Within the advertising industry, the debate about whether advertising works on Facebook is not new. A survey last year showed over 60 percent of small business owners felt advertising on Facebook was ineffective. The lawsuit takes it a step further, saying Facebook is misleading advertisers.
Source: Does Facebook Really Work? People Question Effectiveness Of Ads : NPR
Like anything else, you do need some expertise to make Facebook or Instagram or Snap or Google or Pinterest ads work. We are finishing a period where these advertising companies have held that “ANYONE CAN DO IT! IT’S SO EASY! JUST SIGN UP AND TELL US WHO YOU WANT TO TARGET!” with regards to their ads and effectiveness.
But that’s simply not true. I could probably re-roof our home. But I’m not going to spend the time, effort, and money trying to do that job myself. I’m going to hire someone who knows what they are doing.
Same with social media advertising and marketing. That’s how I pay our mortgage (and for our new roof) every month!
Who would have thought the annoying little service that lit up my text messages in 2006 with updates from other text nerds posting to 40404 would go on to become the political and media juggernaut it is today…
President Donald Trump on Saturday took to Twitter to allege social media companies are discriminating against prominent conservatives, saying “we won’t let that happen.”
Let’s just all go back to our blogs…
“Or maybe it’s time to admit the open forum for everything that Twitter – and social media, really – has promised is failing? Maybe it’s time to close the apps – third-party and otherwise. Maybe it’s time to go dark. Get off the feeds. Take a break. Move on.”
Twitter company email addresses why it’s #BreakingMyTwitter | TechCrunch — Read on techcrunch.com/2018/08/16/twitter-company-email-addresses-why-its-breakingmytwitter/
You should blog more…
“Twitter is not the public square. It just wants you to think it is. The web itself is the public square.”
I still firmly believe we’ll see a reckoning of sorts for social media giants such as Facebook and Twitter (and even Instagram and its lovely filters) where the network effect takes a backseat to quality interactions and we move away from hegemonic one-size-fits-all walled gardens towards decentralized and specified communities based on our preferences. Reddit is already pointing the way on this (partly):
The internet of old — composed largely of thousands of scattered communities populated by people who shared interests, identities, causes or hatreds — has been mostly paved over by the social-media giants. In this new landscape, basic intelligible concepts of community become alien: The member becomes the user; the peer becomes the follower; and the ban becomes not exile, but death. It is not surprising that the angriest spirits of the old web occasionally manifest in the new one. But what’s striking is how effectively they can haunt it, and how ill-equipped it is to deal with them.
Source: Twitter’s Misguided Quest to Become a Forum for Everything – The New York Times
I’ve been using RSS as my primary way to read news, blogs, thoughts, and ideas since 2005 or so (I currently use a mix of Feedly and NewsBlur as my RSS readers, and both are excellent in their own ways).
There’s a growing rumbling going on in the tech-thinkers space I follow (mostly through my RSS readers). Twitter is great for quick fleeting thoughts that you write on the back of a leaf and watch float away down the river. Facebook is great for sharing pictures and updates with those who you are close with in real life. RSS and feed readers serve a much different purpose and I have no doubt they’ll be back in the mainstream soon enough given the current tensions around walled gardens, security, and advertising…
Now fight against the machine and go start your blog. You’ll be glad you did.
The tension between walled gardens (or lock-in, or whatever you want to call it) and a decentralized web will likely never end. But, it feels like we are in for another significant turn of the crank on how all of this works, and that means lots of innovation is coming.
— Read on www.feld.com/archives/2018/08/rss-the-persistent-protocol.html
Interesting numbers From the Knight Foundation and Gallup that, if enacted, would have huge ramifications for the advertising and marketing industries (especially for nonprofits)…
A new survey says yes — almost eight in 10 Americans agree that these companies should be subject to the same rules and regulations as newspapers and television networks that are responsible for the content they publish. The survey is part of a series of reports released by Knight Foundation and Gallup over the course of the year exploring American perceptions of trust, media and democracy.
I use Twitter heavily for work and personal reasons. It’s been a service I turn to for news, socializing, brainstorming, and promoting services (including mine). That all will change on Thursday.
One of the changes being pushed through is the removal of the “streaming API.” Most Twitter users don’t use 3rd party apps and stick to the default apps. One of the greatest features of 3rd party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific is streaming timeline.
It’s been in place for years and allowed Tweetbot etc to cater to “power users” like me who use something like an iPad to watch Twitter stream by in real time. There is no streaming in the default app, so you have to constantly refresh your timeline. That’s fine if you’re just dipping in or looking for something specific (or the Moments feature that Twitter is always pushing on me), but I think of Twitter as a river that is constantly flowing.
I enjoy seeing the nonstop flow over on the side of the screen on my iPad and it’s something I’ve done for years. As I’ve said before, Twitter has paid our mortgage a number of times over the years because I caught a tweet out of the corner of my eye and made a quick action on it. Don’t @ me about being a distracted ADHD-riddled Gen Xer. I know. But it works for me.
There is still Tweetdeck that will offer streaming tweets (for now) but that doesn’t work on iPads or iPhones or Android devices. Before I became so iPad centric, I used Tweetdeck for years on its own monitor. Yes, I’m that guy. But again, it worked for me.
I’ve been following the developer discussions closely over the last few months, and I’m incredibly sad that it’s come to this point and not quite sure why Twitter continues to tighten the noose around developers and its most devoted users that it could easily tap into if it cared about things like, oh… say, monetizing beyond advertising.
So starting on Thursday I guess I’ll be using the default Twitter app on my iPad a great deal more. That means I’ll definitely be using the service less. Thanks, Twitter.
Core functionality like access to your timeline and the ability to post tweets will remain, but several basic features will be limited or removed. Alerts for mentions and direct messages in third-party apps are expected to be delayed, and timeline streaming which populates your timeline with new tweets in real time is expected to go away.
Source: Twitter API change strikes next week, Tweetbot and Twitterrific affected | 9to5Mac
For years, marketers have tried to attribute social directly to sales, but industry standards and consumer data reveal that their true focus should be expanding awareness and consideration.Think long-term, not quick fix. Think relationships, not attribution.
Source: The 2018 Sprout Social Index | Sprout Social
The biggest mistake I see churches and nonprofits make when engaging in an intentional “social media campaign” is counting the likes and hearts on Facebook, Twitter, or Twitter rather than measuring the engagement factor of relationships.
Only 14% of marketers polled say that they can attribute any revenue from social media. The same is true when a church or nonprofit creates a social campaign… focus on long-term relational signals, not short-term likes and favs.
Dave Winer:
1. Eliminate the character limit, allow for linking, simple styles, titles and enclosures (for podcasting). The move to 280 chars was so successful, that should be a clue. Remove the barriers to expression and let the whole web in via linking. Handle length the way Facebook does with a see more link. It’s good prior art.
— Read on scripting.com/2018/07/22/155344.html
I remember having a conversation with Tris Hussey over breakfast at some conference or other in early 2007 where we discussed Twitter and its future possibilities. I was convinced at the time that Twitter would go on to see the light and open itself up as a protocol for the internet to facilitate public micro-messaging, similar to what IMAP and POP were for email. I was wrong, of course. Twitter actually reversed course from its early openness with developers and a flexible API and shifted towards the advertising platform model around 2009 as it sought out a way to monetize the service.
I’m still an avid user of Twitter, much more so than Facebook, ten years later. I remember the early talks and discussions about the need for more editing features and the ability to post longer entries and I always thought that was antithetical to what Twitter was. I still think that’s the case (think Old Man Yelling At the Clouds). What makes Twitter such an interesting and valuable platform for news and social interaction to me in 2018 is the brevity of content. Going from 140 characters to 280 characters is less of a paradigm shift and more of a realization that the perception of too much information density has changed in the post-SMS messaging world. Whereas a long text message was seen as rude and inconsiderate in 2007, a long iMessage is considered the norm in 2018.
So, I have to disagree with Dave here on his point that Twitter should eliminate the character limit and promote features such as styles, titles, and even enclosures. What makes Twitter so unique in a world of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, FaceTime, Signal, WeChat etc is the constraint of expression. People use Signal for privacy. We use Snapchat for its ephemeral and whimsical nature. Instagram is how we share visuals. Twitter is how we share quick thoughts.
We have blogs for the other features that Dave mentions here. Open the API’s and get the app developers back on board if we want to Make Twitter Great Again.
Stumbleupon was one of those services that I loved to talk about on my blog or during a conference presentation back in the ’00s when describing the glorious democratized future that web2.0 would bring us. Twitter was still a texting service called twttr and Facebook was still at Harvard. You could edit the CSS on your MySpace page and make your profile ugly. We all had blogrolls. Forums still mattered and mods were there to keep the conversation in line. It was a fun and engaging period of time to be on the web. Unfortunately, things didn’t go as I thought they would and here we are in the Digital Dark Age of commodified social interactions and proprietary human farms built on the back of unmoderated advertising based on avarice and attention.
I wasn’t a particularly heavy user of Stumbleupon, but it was a fun service that helped me discover quite a few sites and resources over the years. I’m sad to see it go.
But now there’s no more of Stumbleupon’s pure, unadulterated content. All we have is angst-filled social media with a new monster around every corner. Sad stumbling through the interwebs now, everyone. Sad stumbling and watch your step.
I’m admittedly from a generation that grew up with a web that didn’t include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even Google. I look back fondly on the early 2000’s when we all had our own blogs and shared thoughts and pictures and quotes there.
I was just reminiscing about blogrolls this week with a client as we reminded ourselves about the joy of finding new and interesting people to subscribe to because of a link on a blog that we liked. Of course, there was Blogger and Live Journal and then Flickr and the rise of Google and MySpace and eventually Twitter and Facebook arrived in 2006. But for a while, it was a magical time not ruled over by corporate content silos… in my mind at least.
That’s a major reason why I still blog and share thoughts and links here. I’m not going to convert anyone but maybe I’ll share some of that old time religion. There’s incredible freedom and a sense of adventure to having your “own” site. Try it, rather than just relying on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Fun read here:
“For those of you born into the siloed world of the centralised web, RSS is an ancient technology from Web 1.0 (“the naïve Web?”). Like most things back then, it does what it says on the tin: it enables you to easily syndicate the content of your site. People interested in following your posts subscribe to your feed and receive updates using their RSS readers. There is no Twitter or Facebook in the middle to algorithmically
censor… ahem … “curate” your posts.”
Some good points in this post regarding churches using social media as outreach, particularly for youth. It’s important to keep in mind the “how’s” and “why’s” and “where’s” of different age groups and social media use as well.
I tell my clients all the time that just like we don’t all listen to music or watch “TV” the same (in the Spotify, Netflix, and Hulu age), we all don’t use social media for the same reason to accomplish the same things. Not to mention the often overlooked variable of geography and place when using social media. Churches really need to think through their approaches and goals with these in mind.
Setting up an Instagram account is easy. Using it in a way that authentically tells your story and engages current members is tough. Figuring out if its targeted towards youth or adults and why that matters is even more difficult. Don’t put all of that responsibility on a youth minister or Associate Pastor in this age of data-driven accountability.
So do the math and don’t believe in “build it and they will come.” That philosophy might have worked for ballparks in the middle of Iowa to attract the ghosts of the past, but it won’t work to attract engagement with very socially alive people in 2018 and beyond.
“I encourage you to count the cost,” Carey said. “It’s going to take time and effort to do this.”
Churches and ministries also must focus on storytelling to foster relationships between viewers and churches.
— Read on baptistnews.com/article/churches-must-count-the-cost-of-pursuing-youth-on-social-media/
I’m a little confused by this…
Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of Twitter Media, a new website for publishers to learn how to get the most out of Twitter. Twitter Media allows us to scale our team’s work by giving content publishers a resource that’s both inspirational and practical…
Wow, these stats are really quite something. Facebook dominates the social media landscape for older Americans, but teens have moved on to YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat over the last 3-4 years.
Astonishing changes in usage percentages and something Facebook, and marketers, should really be concerned about (yes, Instagram is owned by Facebook but the Newsfeed is still the bulk of $$ for Facebook).
It’s hard to earn back users once young people start leaving, as Friendster and MySpace found out.
The social media landscape in which teens reside looks markedly different than it did as recently as three years ago. In the Center’s 2014-2015 survey of teen social media use, 71% of teens reported being Facebook users. No other platform was used by a clear majority of teens at the time: Around half (52%) of teens said they used Instagram, while 41% reported using Snapchat.
In 2018, three online platforms other than Facebook – YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat – are used by sizable majorities of this age group. Meanwhile, 51% of teens now say they use Facebook. The shares of teens who use Twitter and Tumblr are largely comparable to the shares who did so in the 2014-2015 survey.
Source: Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018 | Pew Research Center
My clients often don’t realize that Facebook, Instagram or Twitter place content directly in front of users eyeballs based on when things are posted.
We live in the “attention” era and you have to not only produce worthwhile content to get noticed but also maintain interest and relationship.
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.
What a time to be alive.
It is unconstitutional for public officials, including the president, to block Twitter followers who criticize them, a court ruled today in a legal dispute over President Trump’s account.
— Read on www.theverge.com/2018/5/23/17385298/trump-blocking-twitter-unconstitutional-court-ruling
In fact, research shows that there isn’t a high correlation between reading time and social sharing.
As you can see from the graph, the high read time doesn’t translate to shares. Just because someone clicked a share button, it doesn’t mean that they were engaged with the content.
Source: How to Effectively Manage Engagement for Stronger Influence
“Nearly all marketers (83%+) who’ve been employing social media marketing for 1 year or longer report it generates exposure for their businesses.”
I’m skeptical of these sorts of reports generally, but SME does a good job of presenting digestible data. There are certainly some good takeaways here for businesses of all sizes, nonprofits, and churches looking to do more with their social media profiles.
The PDF download is free.
In our tenth-annual social media study, more than 5,700 marketers reveal where they’ll focus their social media efforts.
Source: 2018 Social Media Marketing Industry Report : Social Media Examiner
Can we all agree that passwords have outlived their usefulness and we need a new system of credentialing?
money.cnn.com/2018/05/03/technology/twitter-password-bug/index.html
Good read about what to do “now” with Facebook advertising…
The Facebook privacy quake has already forced the Facebook to change the way they handle and collect consumer data. That’s changing their advertising platform. And there’s more to come.
Source: Facebook Advertising: What’s Changing, What’s Not, & What To Do
Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction.
We could say goodbye to the creepy targeted ads and the algorithms, to the Nazis and bots and propagandists, to the harassers and the people selling hate. We could stop being spied-on for profit…
Or we can make the moral choice of renewal, of planting new bulbs and helping this old tree, a little bigger now, flower again.
Our hearts may end up broken. Again.
So?
Source: inessential: weblog
There’s so much wrong with this post, but I’ll point out my biggest gripe here… RSS (like podcasting) doesn’t need the metrics of behavior tracking for it to be a success. It’s distributed. It’s not commercialized. It’s not tracked with clicks based on eCPM’s or eCPC’s or brand quality engagement views.
And that’s ok.
It serves a heck of an important purpose.
Let’s all start using RSS readers again, btw. The internet will be a much better space.
RSS’ true failings though are on the publisher side, with the most obvious issue being analytics. RSS doesn’t allow publishers to track user behavior. It’s nearly impossible to get a sense of how many RSS subscribers there are, due to the way that RSS readers cache feeds. No one knows how much time someone reads an article, or whether they opened an article at all. In this way, RSS shares a similar product design problem with podcasting, in that user behavior is essentially a black box.
Source: RSS is undead | TechCrunch
While Facebook continues to stumble through its public relations crisis over how it has handled developer access to user data, Twitter has been having its own issues with its developer base … just in a self-inflicted manner.
Twitter’ developer problem goes back to its decision to pivot the service into an advertising mechanism back in 2010 as it faced questions about monetization and shareholder returns. It’s simply shocking to me that Twitter executives are still struggling with these same issues 8 years later.
What made Twitter exciting and compelling in 2007 and 2008 was the rapidly expanding developer base that became attracted to the platform because of its rather open API that encouraged a healthy ecosystem of apps that built off of the Twitter coral reef.
So, it’s disappointing to see this struggle continue:
It’s good news that Twitter is backing down, but there are still open questions about whether its new Account Activity API is robust enough for third party Twitter apps to provide the same streaming services they now offer. So far Twitter hasn’t allowed outside developers to participate in the beta testing of that API.
Source: Twitter postpones platform change that would cut off third-party apps – The Verge