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A Successful Social Media Post DOES Drive Consumer Spending

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Whether the post is positive or negative, the more attention it gets, the more you will sell.

For businesses using social media, posts with high engagement have the greatest impact on customer spending. This is according to new research from the University at Buffalo School of Management.

Published in the Journal of Marketing, the study assessed social media posts for sentiment (positive, neutral or negative), popularity (engagement) and customers’ likelihood to use social media, and found the popularity of a social media post had the greatest effect on purchases.

“A neutral or even negative social media post with high engagement will impact sales more than a positive post that draws no likes, comments or shares,” says study co-author Ram Bezawada, PhD, associate professor of marketing in the UB School of Management. “This is true even among customers who say their purchase decisions are not swayed by what they read on social media.”

The researchers studied data from a large specialty retailer with multiple locations in the northeast United States. They combined data about customer participation on the company’s social media page with in-store purchases before and after the retailer’s social media engagement efforts. They also conducted a survey to determine customers’ attitudes toward technology and social media.

The study also found that businesses’ social posts significantly strengthen the effect of traditional television and email marketing efforts. When social media is combined with TV marketing, customer spending increased by 1.03 percent and cross buying by 0.84 percent. When combined with email marketing, customer spending increased by 2.02 percent and cross buying by 1.22 percent. Cross buying refers to when a customer purchases additional products or services from the same firm.

“The clear message here is that social media marketing matters, and managers should embrace it to build relationships with customers,” says Bezawada. “Developing a community with a dedicated fan base can lead to a definitive impact on revenues and profits.”

 

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Will Facebook be the ‘New’ YouTube?

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It seems that Facebook is trying to muscle in on YouTube territory.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Facebook is indirectly becoming a solid source of user-generated content, often replacing time otherwise spent viewing similar videos on YouTube.

A new report from the UXS group at Strategy Analytics has been investigating the needs, behaviours and expectations of consumers regarding video consumption. The result? While consumers look to Facebook to see what friends/family are up to and to gain information overall, videos are being increasingly consumed as a part of this experience.

According to the report:

  • Social platforms are becoming the main source of consumption of ad-hoc short-form video. Sites such as Facebook and Instagram are increasingly sources to communicate new content availability; while sites such as Snapchat, IG stories and Boomerang are leading the drive towards social video creation and sharing.
  • Socially shared and discovered ‘viral’ content not only serves as entertainment on its own but can impact an unintended direction for users and their video consumption.
  • Ongoing live video streaming and posting of temporary ‘stories’ across Facebook and Instagram are also driving users to return.

Says Christopher Dodge, report author, “Content is ‘finding’ the user within social media: consumers no longer have to search for videos themselves. Furthermore, new ‘live’ video, along with countless shared video content, is shifting behaviours and resulting in more unintended video consumption.”

Chris Schreiner, Director of Syndicated Research, UXIP, agrees. “Identifying Facebook as a solid source for video – inclusive of professional, user-generated, and ‘viral’-type videos – not only makes Facebook’s experience even more compelling for users, but also drives advertisement revenues for this platform.”

There’s plenty of ways to use facebook video to advertise products.

But will they take YouTube’s thunder? Perhaps this is wishful thinking at this point. But, stranger things have happened. We will stay tuned.

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In News

Deceptive Marketing Can Backfire For Companies Caught In The Act

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The truth always comes out and it will make you look stupid.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

In the era of fake news, less scrupulous businesses are using deceptive tactics to smear their rivals. But companies that spread fake news against their competitors ultimately experience the brunt of negative publicity and reputational damage.

That’s a key finding of new research co-authored by the UBC Sauder School of Business. The researchers examined a real-life case from 2012 in South Korea, when a customer reportedly found a dead rat in a loaf of bread made by one of the country’s most popular bakery brands. The company’s business plummeted, until a reporter discovered that a rival bakery had whipped up the fake story. Suddenly, the offending franchise found itself in the hot seat, in the media and online.

“People doubted the credibility of this firm and its management practices,” said study co-author Gene Moo Lee, assistant professor of information systems at UBC Sauder. “What’s more, the offender was a franchisee, which ultimately tarnished the reputation of the larger company. This study showed that deceptive marketing just doesn’t pay.”

The researchers examined three years’ worth of blog posts, news articles and social media exchanges, and counted how many positive and negative words were used in reference to each company.

They found that, while the fake story damaged the victim company at first, it caused far more significant and lasting damage to the firm that originally concocted the story. In fact, damage to the victim company lasted one year, while the effects for the offender lingered for more than two years.

For businesses that practice these smear tactics, the researchers caution that fake news detection technology is becoming increasingly more precise.

“Social media services like Facebook, Google and Twitter are building very sophisticated fake news detection algorithms now, which means it’s increasingly easy to be caught,” said study co-author Sungha Jang, assistant professor of marketing at Kansas State University. “Practically speaking and also ethically speaking, you don’t want to do that. Ultimately the truth prevails.”

According to study co-author Ho Kim, assistant professor of digital and social media marketing at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the findings serve as a warning to companies to avoid using smear tactics.

“It’s a lesson we all learned in kindergarten: don’t tell a lie,” said Kim. “It’s not surprising, but a lot of people spread fake news. When it’s uncovered as fake news, it brings lasting reputational damage for the offender.”

 

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In News

A Small Change on Facebook May Require Major Updates for Your Website

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By Peter Roesler.
Facebook to Remove the Ability to Edit Link Previews in Attempt to Curb Spam and Fake News

Have you ever wanted to share a link for your website on Facebook, only to discover you weren’t happy with the automatically generated preview? Normally, you would just change the headline, description and pop in a better picture. But in the near future, that won’t be option for many Facebook pages, and possible all of them in the future. This may sound like a minor thing, but it actually means that many website owners need to update their websites if they intend to continue using Facebook as part of a content marketing and link sharing campaign.

Over the next few weeks and months, Facebook will make changes to its Graph API, which determines how your website or app interacts with Facebook to produce link previews. Removing the ability to edit link previews is part of Facebook’s larger campaign to prevent the platform’s use in misinformation campaigns. But using such a sweeping measure means that regular business owners will be prevented from editing their links for legitimate reasons.

“By removing the ability to customize link metadata (i.e. headline, description, image) from all link sharing entry points on Facebook, we are eliminating a channel that has been abused to post false news,” explains Matthew Robertson in a post on the Facebook Developers Blog. “We also understand that many publishers have workflows that rely on overwriting link preview metadata to customize how their content appears to audiences on Facebook. We’re committed to a solution that supports them.”

Facebook first announced the changes at a conference earlier this year, but these changes to editing links went into effect 90 days from that announcement. Even with the advanced notice, publishers weren’t pleased as the time to implementation grew closer. Many of the comments on the Developers Blog post were negative. But since the changes have yet to be fully implemented, it’s hard to know what the effect will be.

Facebook is aware of the challenges this will cause for content creators and they seem to be searching for a workaround that would satisfy all sides. Though, they say that such a solution will have to wait.

“We’re working to find other solutions that allow publishers to share customized content on our platform, and we will have more to share in the coming weeks,” said Robertson.

In the meantime, this change means that website owners may need to update their sites. If your site’s links don’t automatically fill with the proper information, then you need to update the metadata for the pages on your website. Otherwise, the automatically created link box for certain posts may not look right.

Depending on how the site is structured, this can be very easy or extremely hard. Most content management systems, like WordPress, have plugins that handle all the snippet generation for social media. These plugins will need to be updated so they meet the new guidelines from Facebook. So long as your plugin developer is up to date and your plugin has the latest version, everything should be fine.

However, if a site doesn’t have automatically generated snippets or they were highly customized for the old format, then the site may need an overhaul to make sure all the pages have proper previews. Either way, it’s important to know your site’s status.

Remember, having the correct preview on social media isn’t just about the business’s social media page. If someone visits a site and tries to share a link with their friends, it’s important that the automatically generated preview creates the best impression. This is how things spread on social media. Without an interesting headline, description and image, most people aren’t going to pay attention to or click on the link.

So make sure your site is ready for changes to Facebook’s Open Graph. It may sound all technical, but the implications for your business’s advertising and marketing campaigns are big.

For more recent news about social media marketing, read this article on the benefits of using social media to spread video content.

By Peter Roesler.

Sourced from Inc.

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In News

Facebook And Google Shareholders Make Noise About Fake News

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Fake news was “both widely shared and heavily tilted in favour of Donald Trump” in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, according to a March 2017 NYU/Stanford study. Their database detected 115 pro-Trump fake stories shared on Facebook 30 million times, and 41 pro-Clinton fake stories shared 7.6 million times. Nearly a quarter of web content shared on Twitter by users in the battleground state of Michigan during the final days of last year’s U.S. election campaign was fake news, according to a University of Oxford study.

These are mind-boggling statistics.

Facebook and Alphabet Inc. (the parent company of Google) are now currently under pressure. The perception is that they have not done enough to curb the online epidemic of “fake news.” And shareholders are starting to worry. They are pressing for Facebook and Alphabet Inc. to issue detailed reports.

Investment advisor Arjuna Capital engaged both companies to evaluate the impact that fabricated content is having on their platforms and business. Arjuna Capital is an investment firm focused on sustainable and impact investing.

Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital, said: “Fake news is not about spin or confirmation bias – It’s about fabrication.  And when fabrication is disseminated so easily at scale, the way we have seen through social media, it represents a threat to our democracy. If Facebook maintains a platform of confusion and distortion it will lose the trust of its users, in which case they will simply move on to the next thing. And that’s what concerns long-term investors. We need to know this is being handled responsibly over time. It will not be solved through a simple algorithm tweak or better user education—those are merely pieces of a larger puzzle.  Right now, we think the issue is being fumbled.”

Michael Connor, executive director of Open MIC, a non-profit organisation that works with investors on media and technology issues said: “Issues like fake news and hate speech aren’t going to go away any time soon – and Facebook’s responses to them thus far are perfect examples of too little, too late. The company needs to start reporting regularly – and in a consistent fashion – about the impact its policies and practices have on billions of Facebook users all around the globe.”

According to Pew, 64 percent of U.S. adults say fabricated news stories cause a great deal of confusion about the basic facts of current issues and events. The confusion cuts across political lines: 57 percent of Republicans say completely made-up news causes a great deal of confusion compared to 64 percent of Democrats.

Fake news is a problem. But since the beginning of news media, there has always been a problem with subjective bias. Are we ever going to be able to argue that some news, any news, is more genuine than other news? Probably not.

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In News

Artificial Intelligence is Going to Destroy Fake News

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By Rosalie Chan.

With the rise of email came came the rise of spam filling inboxes.

Email has become sophisticated faster than spamming technology and now, the internet’s junk mail is often caught in a folder; out of sight and out of mind are messages with the subject line “Kindly get back to me urgently” and the greeting “Dear Beneficiary.”

There’s good news for anybody who sees fake news — not the sort that’s simply true but politically difficult for the president; but actual, fake, conspiracy theory-baiting chum — as another form of spam.

At least that’s what Dean Pomerleau, research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, said recently during a panel in New York on the proliferation of fake news. We solved the spam problem using artificial intelligence, he argued, and with A.I., we can solve the problem of fake news by filtering out credible news from the misinformation. Wheat from chaff, etc.

Also on the panel, put on by the New York Daily News Innovation Lab in Manhattan, was CNN political commentator Sally Kohn, who was well aware of her network’s reputation as purveyors of fakery over its coverage of the notoriously sensitive President Donald Trump.

“According to half the country, that means I’m an expert on fake news,” Kohn said. “As a citizen, I’m invested in facts. As a journalist, even an opinion journalist, I’m grounded in facts.”

At the panel, Pomerleau spoke about ways A.I. can combat fake news. He co-directs the Fake News Challenge, a competition to create a fact-checking tool. The idea for the challenge started shortly after the election. So far, there are almost 200 teams signed up and 300 people who registered for the Fake News Challenge Slack channel.

“We were speculating among friends, what could we as machine-learning people do to improve the situation moving forward? That was the genesis of the idea,” Pomerleau tells Inverse.

Even the challenge problem for the annual International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation is fake news and propaganda. “Simulation studies, data science studies, machine learning studies, and network science studies are all encouraged,” the prompt announced when it was posted recently.

Inverse asked Pomerleau just how fake news will be killed and here’s what he said.

How do we see A.I. creating fake news in the future?

I think in the near future, technology is likely to help in the creative process. It won’t be too long before generated video can be created, very much like PhotoShop. Those two things together will really undermine our ability to believe what we see. Image processing and audio processing tools will foster easy creation by just about anyone to create fake news.

How can A.I. fight fake news?

Using smart filtering and content analysis and natural language processing — these can all be used as signals to an algorithm that’s attuned to detect fake news, just like we have filters for spam to prevent it from getting into your inbox. There are ways A.I. can assist humans in identifying fake news, or in the future, do it automatically.

What are some ways the Fake News Challenge has addressed fake news so far?

We kicked it off as a casual wager on Twitter, thinking naively we can jump to the end stage and build a system that can classify real news versus fake news. It turns out it’s a much more subtle problem than that. You run into problems like opinion pieces or satire that falls into a gray area that makes it a much more challenging task that so far requires some human judgment.

We backed off the task of trying to predict the fake versus real distinction to focus on a tool to help fact-checkers by solving a problem. It will allow fact-checkers or journalists to gather the best stories on both sides of an issue. By gathering those pro-con arguments quickly, human fact checkers will be able to quickly assess what the truth is and debunking things that are clearly made up.

How can A.I. help the average user who might read or run into fake news?

We’ve actually started brainstorming about how the kind of tool we’re building can assist the average individual rather than news organizations. Suppose you read an article that makes a claim about a fact in the article. You can imagine that if you highlight it or click a button, you can use our detection tool that finds other content on the internet that takes the pro or con stance and find out just how credible the claim is in the story you’re currently reading.

How might tech companies respond to fake news?

I would love to see a more concerted effort for tech companies. They’ve set up industry groups for other things. They recently created partnerships for A.I., and I’d like to see them do something similar and do a best practices industry group to address fake news.

I think one of the biggest problems is the economy has made it quite lucrative to game the system and get more clicks and eyeballs because that’s how you make money on the Internet now. The model that tech giants have created has seriously undermined the news media industry to make it almost incumbent for news media creators to create tantalizing headlines that get people to click on them for whatever reason.

[The Fake News Challenge has] caught the attention of well-meaning people who see fake news as a big problem and use their machine learning skills and try to address it. I’ve been a little disappointed that the tech community and machine learning community haven’t faced up to the responsibility of using their skills in development to benefit society.

One of the reasons we’ve attracted so many smart people from the tech community is it does offer the opportunity to use some of the cutting-edge machine learning and natural language processing work in A.I. to do something for the social good right here and right now.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Photos via Flickr / The Public Domain Review

By Rosalie Chan

Rosalie is an editorial intern at Inverse. She grew up in the Chicago area and studies journalism and computer science at Northwestern University. She has previously worked for TIME and the Chicago Reporter. She likes writing, books, podcasts and running.

Sourced from Inverse Innovation

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