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Facebook News Feed Armageddon Survival Guide: 6 Loopholes to Stay Alive

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Sourced from MobileMonkey

Last week Facebook declared organic post reach dead for pages. Publishers and brands who used to connect to people via their Facebook pages need to figure out how to people going forward.

Of course, you can use conventional Facebook news feed hacks to mitigate a small extent of the damage, but in order to survive, we’re going to need to make much bigger changes.

In my article today, I want to highlight the top 6 strategies you must deploy this year in order to survive the Facebook News Feed Armageddon.

1. Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups are the unicorn of Facebook engagement loopholes.

Going forward, the Facebook news feed intends to prioritize posts based on how much meaningful discussion they spark – this is exactly the type of updates that tend to do fantastically well in Facebook Groups.

In fact, lively FB group discussions end up getting featured in the user notification tab, which drives an enormous amount of “free” post visibility.

We believe that Facebook groups, unlike some of the other loopholes discussed here, are likely here to stay, as they are a perfect fit for Facebook’s new News Feed mission statement.

2. Instagram

Publishers and brands haven’t nearly contaminated Instagram to the degree they had on Facebook using Facebook pages. In fact, the notion of having a “Business Page” on Instagram is a relatively new concept that just appeared in the last year.

Thus, especially if you operate in certain verticals like: travel, fitness, entertainment, food, consumer goods (etc.) you absolutely should be spending time connecting with folks here as there is plenty of “free” organic engagement to be had here.

Unfortunately, I fully expect Instagram publishers to suffer a similar fate to Facebook Pages at some point in time, though it may be several years from now.

3. Facebook Ads

While technically not a loophole, Facebook ads are now the only way for businesses to reliably connecting with specific people on Facebook.

Ad costs have gone up like crazy over the last few years, and we expect this trend to continue. But for most companies, it’s not necessary to drive “mad hits” to your website.

Instead, be super picky.

Focus your Facebook advertising on these areas in particular:

  • Promotion of Unicorns: Sponsored posts with unusually high post engagement rates (+10%) are still remarkably cheap (1-4 cents per click).
  • Remarketing: People who visited your site recently are the most likely folks to buy your stuff in the future.
  • Custom Audiences: It’s like email marketing on Facebook. Just upload the emails and phone numbers of people in your customer database and they’ll see your ads.

4. Facebook Messenger

Facebook Messenger presents a fantastic opportunity for marketers to message directly to their customers without ever showing up on anyone’s News Feed.

Like email marketing, you can get people to opt into receiving updates from your company page via Facebook Messenger. From there, you can use an automated chatbot to send updates to subscribers and respond to inquiries.

This is an exciting space and is what my new company, MobileMonkey helps companies with.

5. Try out other Publishing Channels

While Facebook organic reach is dead, other (smaller) channels still exist. I personally still invest time in the following networks:

6. Building your own brand

The Unicorn of growth marketing channels is not Facebook, nor Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, SEO, etc.

Brand affinity, like gravity, is an invisible, unstoppable force of marketing.

It compels prospects to consume & recall your message, rave about your products, and pay a premium, too.

This year, before you decide on what channels to invest more in, and what to cut, ask:

  • Do you truly understand the needs of your target market?
  • Does your product/service offer compelling & uniquely differentiated value?
  • Is its essence conveyed in an unusually memorable/inspirational way?

These form the essence of a brand, which is just amplified though your marketing channels.

Focus here 1st, or it’s just garbage in, garbage out.

Larry Kim

Larry Kim is the CEO of MobileMonkey, Inc. a leading provider of Mobile Messaging Software for Marketers.

Sourced from MobileMonkey

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High Impact Digital Marketing Tips to Sell More

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If you have a sales event coming up, like the end-of-season sales, then here are the tips you need to know.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

The actual benefits of designing commercial strategies around events like America’s Black Friday or China’s Singles Day improve market platforms and strengthen the domestic economic market because it’s a great opportunity to encourage consumption and sales.

On Black Friday, for example, thousands of companies from different industries tag along with the commercial event and offer large discounts on their goods and services. However, competition is rife. An offer can lose its meaning when another company offers a better one, and what’s more, businesses must not only participate in Black Friday, but really know how to stand out and attract consumers.

So how do you as a marketer get your business to stand out?

Here are some tips from Adext. They deploy and optimise online advertising campaigns on Google, Facebook, Instagram and thousands of websites to increase the sales of SMEs that have limited resources for the activities.

1) Plan a strategy: It’s not enough to offer irresistible discounts on events like Black Friday… You need a promotion strategy with a clear action plan and execution dates. You must be clear on what discounts and incentives you’ll promote, how you’re going to put them across, the digital platforms you’ll use, who you’ll target, when and why. The what, how, where, when and why questions are key to developing any action plan. Come up with answers to them while always keeping the goal you want to achieve in mind. In this case, it’s sales.

2) Research your competition and make sure to offer something really attractive: You could offer a 10% discount, but if your main competitor offers 25%… You can imagine the outcome. If you want to take the lead, look at what they’re doing and ask yourself how you can beat their discount and/or add more value (without affecting your profit margins). You could give your prospects something of value like a gift for their loyalty, or an extra incentive for them to buy more. Also, don’t forget to let your imagination roam and build your offer or promotion around a creative concept.

3) Build Anticipation: Teaser campaigns are wonderful for building your target audience’s curiosity. Don’t reveal your discounts, offers or incentives too soon… Let your prospects discover what they are as anticipation builds. They should be interested and intrigued to find out what you’ll offer them on your sales event day. There are several examples of clever, catchy strategies where they invite their prospects to go to Snapchat to discover what the 10 star products reduced to €10 are.

4) Send your prospects emails: You can send a few emails before the big sales day (to build anticipation), and other reminders before the day arrives.

Here are three tips to make your email marketing campaign a success:

  • Make sure to add an attention-grabbing title or subject line to your email. An email subject line you see all the time, like “Check out our discounts!” will go unnoticed. But if you can entice the reader with something like “I don’t want to freak you out, but you’ll regret it if you don’t take advantage of this” will definitely pique their curiosity and make your open rates go up.
  • Once they open your email, there must be something of interest for them to look at and read… The body of the email must be pleasant to look at, and easy to read and scan. Use short paragraphs, bold letters, headlines, subtitles, vignettes, images, and of course: good copywriting.
  • Add a CTA (Call-To-Action), where you specify what you want the reader to do once they’ve read your email. For example, you might write: “Our discounted products will be available in store until we’re out of stock. We’ll be ready to serve you when you arrive” or “Buy your Christmas gifts NOW and make sure you don’t get burned in January”. This action-oriented copy should stand out on the page. And if you have an online store, add a link to it.

5) Take advantage of the power of social networks: There is no doubt that you need to be where consumers spend most of their time. Where’s that? In this digital world, it’s on social media. Join the conversation and interact with your audience. Include the most relevant hashtags (e.g. #Black Friday or #SinglesDay or #Summersales) on your posts, so that prospects looking for discounts and deals can easily find you.

6) Let digital advertising bring you the clients you need: Digital advertising no longer has to be complicated. And it can give you the results you’re hoping for. Adext is the first Artificial Intelligence platform in the digital advertising space that can automate the entire process of creating, managing and optimising your ad campaigns on Google, Facebook and Instagram.

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Using Facebook Videos to Grow Your Business Online

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By Brian Edmondson

Facebook is a social media giant, best known for connecting world events (e.g. sports, politics, entertainment etc.) into a common space and giving people the power to connect with family, friends and kindred spirits around the world. From its founding in 2004, it has became the place to share experiences, knowledge and opinions about what matters to them.

Increasingly, Internet marketers are turning to Facebook to achieve their video marketing goals.

Here are the reasons why Facebook video marketing has become a viable option in such a short period.

1.  High Volume Traffic that cannot be Ignored

As the second busiest website in the United States and globally as measured by Alexa (behind Google.com), Facebook offers online entrepreneurs a super opportunity to define and pursue target audiences based on “ideal candidate” criteria. Each of Facebook’s half a billion active users come into the social network with hungry eyes, even if being sold is not necessarily on their mind.

Even a short fifteen or thirty (30) second video clip can be enough to trigger interest and follow-up.

 

2. Fantastic Opportunities to go Viral

After YouTube, Facebook houses the most source referred videos on the Internet. This means that making a good impression with even a few people can mean exponential exposure via sharing in a matter of days, if not hours.

Learning to market with Facebook videos can work whether your aim is educational, instructional or social (relationship-oriented).

3. Facebook Embraces Mobile Marketing

Over one-hundred fifty million people carry Facebook with them on their mobile devices, which makes it especially important to reach this active demographic whenever they go. Mobile device growth far exceeds that of desktops and laptops, making Facebook ideally positioned as a “goto” app to connect with prospects via mobile-friendly video.

4. Advertising Optimization for Multiple Goals

Facebook supports a number of video marketing goals that are self-contained within the website itself:

  • Boost your posts.
  • Get installs of your app.
  • Get video views.
  • Increase conversions on your website.
  • Increase engagement in your app.
  • Promote your Page.
  • Send people to your website.

5. Strong Level of Actual Face Time on Website

The average Facebook user remains on the site for over twenty-one minutes per session, and views about thirteen pages. You can take advantage of this devotion by offering valuable content that hooks visitors and encourages them to share your content with others (see above).

With up to twenty (20) minutes per video, cater the length to your target audience and the type of message you want to send.

6. Visibility that Leads to More Conversions

Today, Facebook videos are visible within Google searches which adds credibility to your marketing efforts. In addition to search engine optimization (SEO) benefits, you have keyword or hashtag capabilities similar to what Twitter offers. In order to encourage visitor action, you can add triggers at strategic moments of your video presentations.

Facebook video marketing can be a boon to your online business efforts, regardless of your current level of marketing experience. It is the behemoth among social media websites, offering both advertising and relationship-building chances on an ongoing basis.

Regardless of platform (desktop, laptop, tablet, mobile) Facebook deserves to be a part of your video marketing mix.

Feature Image: Jose Luis Pelaez Inc/Blend Images/Getty Images Prestige

By Brian Edmondson

Sourced from the balance

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Are you a Tourism Marketer? Here’s What Travellers are Hashtagging the Most

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If you are marketing anything in the tourism game, this is what you need to know.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

For those that are lucky enough to get away on holiday or go on an extended travel stint, we can predict what actvities you might be doing after a new study has been published by Hotels.com

The company have used a data-crunching bot to track what people are hashtagging the most on their sojourns. More than five million brags globally were analysed using a combination of Tweet data, Instagram posts and travel keywords and destinations mentioned on other social media. So here are the results.

Worldwide travellers are all about the culture: they enjoy musing around museums (300,000 brags), old-town charm (170,000 brags) and a spot of sunshine (130,000 brags), but they can also be found in floating restaurants, erotic museums and night markets.

TOP 10 GLOBAL THEMES

  1. Museum
  2. Rooftop bar
  3. Old Town
  4. Modern Art
  5. Opera
  6. Sunshine
  7. Olympic Games
  8. Cathedral
  9. Gallery
  10. Ballet

This travel bragging trend echoes the findings from the recent Hotels.com Mobile Travel Tracker report, which revealed that one in six travellers search social media before their trip to plan the photos they’ll take. And 56% of people surveyed admit to spending more than an hour a day on their smartphones while on holiday.

While travellers naturally brag about taking in the tourist hotspots and cultural offerings, more people than ever are sharing foodie ‘grams, shopping stories and luxe posts.

#Foodporn
You’re never more than an Insta-scroll away from #FoodPorn and the brag lists are brimming with culinary treats. Cakes in Stockholm and curry in Toronto spice up the brag lists, and New York steak and pizza both made the cut. Perhaps more surprisingly, enchiladas proved twice as popular as modern art in Mexico City, ice cream scooped 10% of all San Francisco brags and Jumbo Kingdom floating restaurant in Hong Kong took second place in the Hong Kong chart with more than 20,000 brags.

Shop ’til you drop
Shopping is a must-do for most travellers. Those visiting Paris brag more about the Rue Vieille du Temple, famous for its boutiques, than Le Louvre! Other top shop-spots included Bal Harbour in Miami, the Harbour City mall in Hong Kong, vintage shops in Melbourne and the stylish Cecile Copenhagen fashion brand made the Danish capital’s top 10.

Five-star luxury
When travellers check into a posh, luxury hotel they naturally want the world to know. The stunning 5-star Ritz Carlton in San Francisco topped the city’s brag list, the Four Seasons in Singapore proved brag-worthy and the Park Hyatt came in at number one in Seoul – most likely for its awe-inspiring rooftop pool.

Scott Ludwig at Hotels.com said, “Bragging about your travel experiences on social media has become the norm – if you didn’t get social kudos out of it, it didn’t happen!”

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Advertising in Fashion Magazines is Dead to us Now

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Now? Fashion brands are meeting with social media influencers directly.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Hundreds of NY Fashion Week influencers were invited to a party specifically held to put them in front of brands that want some of the spotlight. The party was held by a company called Influence, which connects brands and influencers. Together, they create social campaigns that expand visibility and engage new audiences for brands. The influencer gets paid, and the brands get to reach audiences that they might not be able to access using other methods. Welcome to the “now” of fashion and brand marketing.

Influence is a sister company to the already-successful operation called Newswire. Newswire currently have an online portal that publishes thousands of press releases every day. Journalists and influencers can go straight to company news, by keyword or subject search. This means that they can get their news directly from the companies, rather than have the interaction brokered through a PR agency. This renders the traditional PR agency almost obsolete.

The way the PR industry is changing is similar to the way that fashion magazines are going. Teen magazines and fashion publications are no longer the huge, powerful entities that brokered deals between brands/fashion houses and their audiences. Now, it is the online fashion influencers who have huge sway with their fans, and brands can contact them directly. This circumvents the hugely expensive fashion magazines, whose circulations are falling dramatically.

As an example, a top YouTube fashion influencer is Chriselle Lim. Her channel is growing at a breakneck pace. Her videos reveal how to transform basic pieces of clothing into stylish apparel. Chriselle has support from global brands such as Target and Estee Lauder.

The change in the way brands and fashion are marketed has been incredibly rapid. Fashion magazines? Pah. Now Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube are the place to put brand marketing spend.

But back to the party. The event hosted hundreds of NY Fashion Week Influencers at Manhattan’s chic Sixty Soho Hotel. Influencers and brands from across the globe arrived to share in networking and developing opportunities for campaign partnerships that strengthen an Influencer’s channel and widen content reach for brands. The party was also used to promote Influence.com itself. And it worked, because here you are, reading about this new company.

Said Director of Influencer Marketing, Magnolia Sevenler, “Whether you are an influencer or marketer, the Influence by Newswire platform provides a community to build your campaigns.”

According to Sevenler, the platform has been well-received from both marketers and creators for its simplicity and reach. “It’s exciting to see all the positive feedback…as we enter a new era of marketing, where micro-influencers can be rewarded for their passions and brands can reach new untapped audiences.”

The company has plans to expand its network and add additional features to enhance users’ experience. And it is doing this all because the fashion magazine industry is destined for a papery grave. It’s time to move on, people, and bring your marketing spend with you.

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Facebook’s Feed Changes, Cold Shoulder For Publishers

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To kick off 2018, Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a list of “resolutions” on the site, mostly vowing to fix what he’d broken. Coming off a tumultuous two years, beginning with the 2016 election and ending with the charges of fake news on the platform in 2017—Facebook announced Thursday new changes to its feed to make interactions more “meaningful.”

What this means for publishers and news outlet is up in the air.

The New York Times reported the changes, which include prioritizing content from friends on the platform and downgrading posts from news outlets, publications and brands.

 

“This big wave of public content has really made us reflect: What are we really here to do? If what we’re here to do is help people build relationships, then we need to adjust,” Zuckerberg is quoted in the Times story.

To Facebook, this change means dubious “news” outlets spreading fake information will be less likely to show up on the feeds of its users. Last month, the company dropped the “disputed” flag that had come to denote a fake story, with little information about what comes next. The tweaks to the feed appear to be that answer.

The problem, though, is that Facebook built much of its current feed through teaching brands and outlets to cater to its algorithmic code, bolstering its business with advertising and sponsored content.

The monetary repercussions for publications and brands that have come to rely on the site as part of their revenue will have a negative temporary effect, according to analysts. However, the long-term effect could be positive, with brands learning how to target specific audiences rather than sending out a watered-down message to the entirety of a feed.

With rumored changes looming on the horizon, some outlets began to readjust ahead of the announcement. Publications planned to partially mitigate losses and navigate the changes through the use of groups.

While the group aspect of Facebook severely limits the number of people who see a post and may not drive the same amount of traffic back to a publication’s homepage, members will continue to see a publication or brand’s presence.

The changes to Facebook again illustrate how difficult it is for brands to establish consistent, reliable avenues of revenue. What once seemed like a great avenue for stability—social media—has become a new hurdle to surmount. But brands may pivot to a better strategy with greater effect.

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Sourced from MediaPost

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Facebook news feed changes shift publisher audience development priorities

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By Lucia Moses

Audience development pros have become critical to how publishers reach new readers and make money. But now that Facebook is all but turning off publishers’ reach in the news feed, audience development groups feel both vindication and new pressures.

For many, there’s a sense of relief and triumph. The role of audience development is often misunderstood as posting links to social platforms. Now, suddenly, audience development is seen as far more strategic. But with great power comes great responsibility.

For Kurt Gessler, deputy digital editor at the Chicago Tribune, there was “panic initially,” followed by vindication and, he allowed, “a little smugness.” That’s because the Tribune only posts about 10 percent of its content on Facebook, and its audience development experts do other tasks in the newsroom so they’re not isolated or working at cross-purposes with editorial.

“It reinforces a lot of the things we and others have been saying,” Gessler said of the news feed change, which Facebook said will prioritize users’ posts over news. “We were always much more interested in quality over quantity. We were never firehosing into Facebook.”

Arguably, the role of audience development — some prefer the fancier “audience engagement” — is more important than ever. The old time-tested practice of using Facebook to drive massive traffic on the cheap to build audiences and fulfill ad campaigns is going away. Building audience in a sustainable way means mastering other distributed platforms and getting direct traffic, too.

One audience exec at a major publisher likened the algorithm change to “the end of an abusive relationship. Facebook abused us for so long and we just kept going back to them, and you finally are like, ‘OK, I’m going to walk away.’”

“I think this gives them more freedom to not worry about the click but think about the engagement,” Keith Hernandez, svp of strategy at Bleacher Report, said of audience development teams. Audience development’s importance at the sports publisher has already been growing; the branded content team has been bringing audience staffers into its pitch meetings for the past six months to advise on editorial trends.

If audience people are more important, they also face more insecurity and pressure than ever. Some will have to answer for their reliance on Facebook. (Cue the schadenfreude among publishers that say they saw the writing on the wall and already weaned themselves off Facebook dependence.) They’re aware that some people think their jobs could be done just as well by tweet-writing robots. They have to figure out new rules for success at a time when Facebook reach is declining.

By Lucia Moses

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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Targeting Teenagers with Your ads? Here are the Four Personas to Appeal to

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Academics have identified four distinct personas of social media user that teenagers describe as shaping how they behave on social media.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Young social media users are categorised as either acting like the Geek, the Internet Celebrity, the Victim or the Lurker depending on their levels of online activity and visibility, University of Sussex academics say.

The categorisations are based on interviews the researchers conducted with children aged between 10 and 15-years-old for a new book, Researching Everyday Childhoods, published by Bloomsbury last month.

The interviews revealed many youngsters were increasingly savvy about maintaining their privacy online, often being motivated to protect themselves by unpleasant past personal experiences or negative incidents that affected classmates.

Dr Liam Berriman, lecturer in digital humanities at the University of Sussex, said: “Our research found that concerns about staying safe online created an atmosphere of intense anxiety for young people, even if they had not directly experienced any problems themselves. The young people we spoke to felt a great weight of responsibility for their safety online and were often motivated by the concern of being labelled a victim.”

“While there has been a lot of negative media coverage around teenagers’ interaction with social media, our findings are more hopeful that teenagers are responsible users of social media, are very conscious of the dangers and make considerable efforts to protect themselves against those risks.”

Teenagers navigate between the desire to be praised and recognised online and anxieties over the risk of opening themselves up to criticism and trolling. Among the four personas is the Internet Celebrity who is able to best use the latest trends and increasingly values “visibility of the self” through Instagram, Snapchat, the selfie and YouTube vlogging.

The internet celebrity

But academics also identified how young people are experimenting with and enjoying invisibility online. They describe the Lurker as someone able to avoid peer dramas arising through platforms such as Facebook, whilst still engaging in fun peer activities such as stalking their favourite music bands online.

The lurker

The Geek, meanwhile, uses invisibility to anonymously share and promote their amateur media creations online, such as music videos or fan fiction writing. The academics described how the Geeks’ long hours of labour on projects risked parental concern that their behaviour was obsessive or addictive.

The geek

Professor Rachel Thomson, professor of childhood and youth studies at the University of Sussex, said, “What is distinctive about these active social media users was the entrepreneurial character of their practice, with ‘play’ re-envisaged as a form of economically rewarding work. By gaining an audience, young people are aware that they could capture advertising and corporate sponsorship. The dream is to ‘go viral’, establishing a career as a cultural creator.”

The research also highlights the risks contained in a world dominated by personal visibility with the Victim left to suffer personal exposure and shame following the creation and display of intimate material such as sexting and the loss of control of this material.

The victim

The Victim’s high visibility is often out of their control with their presence and heightened without their consent as private material is extracted from them and exchanged under false premises.

This can vary from the frustration of being tagged in photographs and the creation of an unflattering digital footprint through the activities of others to the more invasive techniques of fraping, where a person’s online identity is hijacked without their permission, or sharing of intimate photographs.

Dr Berriman said, “These examples reveal the impossibility of non- participation in the world of social media. A teenager does not necessarily have to create an online persona, it is something that can be created by others.”

This is great food for thought for anyone trying to catch the attention of teenagers online. You may even need to consider four different approaches when targeting the teen market. Thanks, science!

 

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You Might be Paying too Much for ads on Google and Bing

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Before you dish out money to bid for a top-ranked ad position on a search engine, you may want to pause and make sure it’s actually going to pay off.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

New research out of Binghamton University, State University of New York suggests that instead of just spending to get that top spot, advertisers should be considering other factors as well to ensure they are getting the best results from their sponsored search advertising campaigns.

Sponsored search advertising involves paying search engines, like Google and Bing, to bid for placements on the search results pages for specific keywords and terms. The ads appear in sponsored sections, separate from the organic search results, on those pages.

“The common belief in sponsored search advertising is that you should buy the top ad position to get more clicks, because that will lead to more sales,” said Binghamton University Assistant Professor of Marketing Chang Hee Park. “But the fee for the top position could be larger than the expected sales you’d get off that top position.”

Park, with the help of Binghamton University Professor of Marketing Manoj Agarwal, analysed data collected from a search engine and created a model that can forecast the number of clicks advertisers could expect in sponsored search markets based on four factors:

  • Rank in the sponsored listings
  • Website quality
  • Brand equity
  • Selling proposition

The model gives advertisers a way to quantify the expected clicks they’d get by adjusting these four factors, while also taking into consideration how their competitors are managing these four factors. This could enable advertisers to find a perfect blend of the four factors to ensure they are getting the most out of what they are paying for their ad positions.

It may also indicate that they should be spending more money to bolster their brand or website rather than amplifying their offers in top ad positions.

“Using this model, you may find that paying less for a lower ad position while investing more in improving your website is more effective than spending all of that money strictly on securing top ad positions,” said Agarwal.

This applies especially if your competitor has a poorer-quality website, but is spending more than you on securing top ad positions.

Their model found that poor-quality advertisers that are ranked higher in ad positions drive consumers back to the search results page, leading consumers to then click on advertisers in lower ad positions to find what they are looking for.

In contrast, they also found that a highly-ranked good-quality advertiser results in significantly less clicks for all the advertisers ranked below them.

“It’s more likely that in the top position, all advertisers being equal, you’ll get more clicks. But depending on these four factors, as well as the quality of your competitors, you may find that you’ll get more clicks in the second or the third position,” said Park.

“Conceptually, this is not a new idea, but now the model can help determine this by accounting for multiple factors at play at the same time.”

Advertisers aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this research.

Park and Agarwal’s model found that simply reordering the listed advertisers could result in significant changes in overall click volume (the total number of clicks across all advertisers) for search engines.

“Because they often charge on a pay-per-click model, search engines can now simulate which ordering of advertisers in a sponsored search market results in the most overall clicks and, therefore, most revenue” said Park. “Search engines may want to consider charging advertisers in a way that gives the search engine more flexibility in determining the order in which the ads in sponsored sections are displayed.”

 

 

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Understanding Facebook Emoticons Can Impact How You Advertise on Social Media

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Not all “likes” are equal.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

While the trusty “like” button is still the most popular way to signal approval for Facebook posts, a computer model may help users and businesses navigate the increasingly complicated way people are expressing how they feel on social media.

In a study, researchers developed a social emotion mining computer model that one day could be used to better predict people’s emotional reactions to Facebook posts, said Jason Zhang, a research assistant in Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology. While Facebook once featured only one official emoticon reaction – the like button – the social media site added five more buttons – love, haha, wow, sad and angry – in early 2016.

“We want to understand the user’s reactions behind these clicks on the emoticons by modelling the problem as the ranking problem – given a Facebook post, can an algorithm predict the right ordering among six emoticons in terms of votes?” said Zhang. “But, what we found out was that existing solutions predict the user’s emotions and their rankings poorly in some times.”

Zhang added that merely counting clicks fails to acknowledge that some emoticons are less likely to be clicked than others, which is called the imbalance issue. For example, users tend to click the like button the most because it signals a positive interaction and it is also the default emoticon on Facebook.

“When we post something on Facebook, our friends tend to click the positive reactions, usually love, haha, or, simply, like, but they’ll seldom click angry,” said Zhang. “And this causes the severe imbalance issue.”

For social media managers and advertisers, who spend billions buying Facebook advertisements each year, this imbalance may skew their analysis on how their content is actually performing on Facebook, said Dongwon Lee, associate professor of information sciences and technology. The new model – which they call robust label ranking, or ROAR – could lead to better analytic packages for social media analysts and researchers.

“A lot of the commercial advertisements on Facebook are driven by likes,” said Lee. “Eventually, if we can predict these emoticons more accurately using six emoticons, we can build a better model that can discern more precise distribution of emotions in the social platforms with only one emoticon – like – such as on Facebook before 2016. This is a step in the direction of creating a model that could tell, for instance, that a Facebook posting made in 2015 with a million likes in fact consists only 80 percent likes and 20 percent angry. If such a precise understanding on social emotions is possible, that may impact how you advertise.”

The researchers used an AI technique called “supervised machine learning” to evaluate their newly-developed solution. In this study, the researchers trained the model using four Facebook post data sets including public posts from ordinary users, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, and showed that their solution significantly outperformed existing solutions. All four sets of data were analysed after Facebook introduced the six emoticons in 2016.

The researchers suggest future research may explore the multiple meanings for liking a post.

“Coming up with right taxonomy for the meanings of like is another step in the research,” said Lee. “When you click on the like button, you could really be signalling several emotions – maybe you agree with it, or you’re adding your support, or you just like it.”

And we as marketers know, the more you understand how your market feels, the better you can tailor your advertising to them.

 

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