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Explained: The curious case of fake views, ghost followers and buying influence online

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By Maryam Farooqui.

While buying followers and likes is not new in India, Badshah’s involvement in this social media scam is leading to questioning of all high-profile accounts.

Many found it hard to believe that Indian rapper Badshah’s song ‘Paagal’ last year recorded 75 million views in a day and surpassed the mark set by Korean band BTS for their video ‘Biy with Luv’ that had hit 74.6 million views in 24 hours in April last year.

Even YouTube had rejected the claim of the Indian rapper.

In the Indian music space, there were murmurs of Badshah benefitting from fake followers and fake views.

In July 2020, when Mumbai Police started investigating the issue of fake profiles following the complaint of Bollywood singer Bhoomi Trivedi about a fake Instagram profile posing as her official account, it brought to light the social media scam in India.

In fact, Mumbai Police so far have investigated 20 high-profile celebrities including actors, directors, models, sports personalities, among others. Reportedly, Mumbai Police have found over 200 celebrities involved in buying fake or ghost followers.

A 2019 report by the Institute of Contemporary Music Performance (ICMP) revealed that actresses such as Deepika Padukone and Priyanka Chopra are among the top Bollywood celebrities in India who have bought fake followers.

Now, the first question that comes to mind is why the need to buy followers? Aren’t these celebrities famous enough?

For a song to be declared a hit, it needs at least two million views on YouTube in 24 hours; you are considered an influencer if you have millions of followers, and if you wish to be a mega influencer you need to have over five million followers but the number varies from platform to platform.

A lot of views and many followers mean more popularity and stronger influence on social media. For influencers, then be it a social media star or a film star, these metrics result in more brands showing interest in their profile which in turn results in higher value for their posts.

For example, the ICMP report pointed out that while Deepika Padukone charges over Rs 1 crore for a social media post, Priyanka Chopra charges double of Padukone at Rs 2 crore.

But who are these fake followers?

It’s a mix of man and machine. So, there is botting which is automated fake accounts or bots. On Twitter, there are three types of bots. A scheduled bot keeps posting at regular intervals like every hour in a day. A watcher bot posts messages depending on new posts on Twitter. And amplification bot follows, tweets and retweets.

Along with bots, there are real people but with a fake identity who do all that a bot does for their clients. So, companies selling fake followers get people on board to make fake profiles with fake names and random profile pictures. There are companies across the globe that are offering fake followers.

What is the cost of buying fake followers? And who are selling fake followers?

Buying fake followers doesn’t seem to be an expensive affair. A Delhi-based firm Social King offers 100 followers for Rs 250 and 20,000 followers are available for Rs 17,500. The rates seem affordable when compared to the kind of money influencers make from brands for their social media posts.

Along with fake followers, one can buy likes as well, which come at a cost of Rs 12,000 for 10,000 likes on Facebook and Rs 34,000 for 200,000 likes on Instagram. And if someone is looking to get 10,000 video views then that would cost around Rs 1,361.

There are variations in rates depending on the kind of fake followers a client expects. So, for a steady base of followers which means that these followers won’t unfollow later, the cost could start at Rs 150 for 100 followers.

When it comes to bots, low-quality followers can be bought at Rs 2,500 for 10,000 followers; the same number of mid-quality and high-quality followers come at the price of Rs 3,500 and Rs 4,500 respectively.

Like Social King, there are many companies including followerskart.com that are selling fake followers in India. In fact, Mumbai Police have identified 100 websites in India that are selling ghost followers.

How does the issue of ghost followers affect brands?

Brands associate with followers for engagement. But what engagement with consumers can brands expect when most of the followers an influencer has on the profile are fake? This has led many brands to wonder if spending on influencer marketing is beneficial at all.

When brands consider metrics like trending and views for the success of a campaign, it becomes difficult to gauge how effective the campaign was as we know how these metrics can be easily bought.

Hence, such metrics do not give the right impact to the brand as brands are engaging with a limited number of people. And this also means that while brands are paying huge sums to influencers for large engagements thanks to their huge follower base, brands may not be getting the right returns.

Why fake followers or fake views is a big issue for influencer marketing?

In times of COVID-19, influencer marketing has picked up pace as spends on other mediums like print and outdoor have gone down drastically. Even on TV, advertisers are cautious due to the tough times. Plus, people are online now more than ever which is giving brands to advertise a stronger reason to take the help of influencers to market their products. But the issue of fake views or followers can be a big blow to influencer marketing space which saw a 20-30 percent increase in spends during the lockdown. While connecting with an influencer, most brands look for quantity and the social media scam of buying followers tells us that a huge number of followers not necessarily mean more engagement for brands.

How to recognise fake accounts?

According to Sandeep Goyal, Chief Mentor of the Indian Institute of Human Brands (IIHB), the fake element in the follower data for politicians, television stars and TikTokers would be as high as 90 percent and 80 percent for Bollywood and cricketers.

But there are ways one can spot a fake account or a fake follower.

So watch out for—-

Sudden spike in followers: A large follower base is achieved not overnight but over a period. A TikTok influencer had said in an interview to Moneycontrol that she managed to get 40,000 followers after working hard for over a year.

Check profile of followers: Recent accounts engaging with only influencers could be fake followers. Plus, their bio would also be basic.

Look out for likes and follower ratio. So, if an account has more followers and less likes, they have bought followers. Similarly, if an account has more likes and less followers, the likes were bought.

Can those buying fake likes and followers be punished?

While there is no specific law, Goyal points out that the option is to take recourse to Section 468 of the Indian Penal Code, which deals with committing forgery of a document or electronic record for the purposes of cheating.

By Maryam Farooqui

Sourced from money control

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Facebook Still Doesn’t Get It

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Sourced from Intelligencer

Rashad Robinson, who has helped organize a high-profile advertising boycott of Facebook during the month of July, believes the social-media giant doesn’t really care about getting rid of hate on its platform. On the latest episode of New York’s Pivot Podcast, Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway talk to Robinson, who has helped spearhead the effort, about the gap between the company’s rhetoric and its actions.

Kara Swisher: Rashad Robinson is the executive director of Color of Change, the country’s largest racial-justice organization. Last week, he was part of a meeting with Facebook executives about the July ad boycott of Facebook, to discuss the demands he and those companies have made to the social-media platform. Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg were on the call, and he was not impressed by Zuckerberg’s performance. So Rashad, why don’t you give us a rundown of what happened.

Rashad Robinson: Before the meeting, we had shared the list of demands again, and the demands are not complicated. They’d been part of ongoing meetings and protests. Some of them have been highlighted in previous versions of the civil-rights audit that have come out over the past year and a half, two years. So we got there really with the goal of having them tell us what they thought and where they were heading, because they actually requested the meeting.

And you know, I’ve been in a lot of meetings with Facebook. I’m going to meetings with a lot of corporations, and they get trained on how to run out the clock. They have these strategies on how to have a meeting where they get you to talk a lot and then they don’t actually have to tell you anything new. And so I took the lead. I really sort of pushed him, like, “Hey, you’ve got the demands. We actually want to go through them.”

Robinson: So one is bringing in a C-suite civil-rights leader that has the budget and the ability to oversee and weigh in on product and new policy. Another was specifically to deal with their political-exemption policy and the way they talk out of both sides of their mouth.

On one hand, they’ll say there’s a political exemption, but they don’t really use it, and no one ever gets exempted. And then Donald Trump will get exempted. And then they’ll say, “Well, that’s because he didn’t violate the policy,” but they can’t ever tell you when he will violate the policy. It’s just like you’re talking in circles. That’s just another example of how you end up with the situation where we have spent years working on getting rules in place only for them to not enforce them when it actually matters.

And so I wanted them to go through this. My last meeting with Mark and Sheryl was on June 1, right after the “looters and shooters” post, right after those posts around voter suppression, where I, at the end of the meeting, was like, “What are we doing here? Why are we continuing to meet if I don’t feel like anything’s happening and if you’re trying to just explain to us why you’re working hard?” They spent a lot of time in the meeting telling us why they’re doing more than all the other social-media platforms.

Swisher: They’ve gone around to advertisers and said that too.

Robinson: They’re so much better. They’re working so much harder. They have done things that other folks won’t do. This is the kind of constant line. At some point, someone in the meeting said, “So, I guess what you’re saying is that you’re doing everything right and that we’re just crazy.” They’re like, “No, no, that’s not what we’re saying.” I’m like, “Well, what are you saying?”

Swisher: Their own audit said exactly what you were saying, which was that they have created a really dangerous situation by favoring their version of free speech over civil rights. Why do you think that is? You have spent time with them. If you were them, what would you do to fix their structure?

Robinson: I would separate the decisions about moderation and content from his global policy shop. There is not a scenario moving forward where Joel Kaplan overseeing this is going to be fine with anyone. If Zuckerberg replaces Joel Kaplan with someone else that has to oversee their relationships in Washington, other folks are not going to be comfortable with that.

The fact of the matter is if these decisions are made through the lens of how to keep policy-makers and policy leaders happy, then you’ve actually violated one of the tenets of fermenting connection, because you are making decisions rooted in keeping powerful people and powerful forces comfortable and happy. It happens here in the United States, and we have a particular experience with it. But folks in other parts of the world have a different experience, where protests might be illegal, where speaking out might be illegal. The fact of the matter is that Facebook will tell us one thing about their intentions, but every single decision is rooted in profit and growth. Every single decision is through that lens.

Galloway: 100 percent.

Robinson: And so in order to keep profit and growth going, they actually have to stay friends with those in power.

Swisher: This is Scott’s opening, because this is one of the main points he makes all the time.

Galloway: First off, kudos to you and Color of Change. I was really skeptical that this boycott was going to have any impact, but it’s had more impact than almost any other effort I can see today. So first off, well done. Secondly, quite frankly, I’m not sure it’s going to do anything. Let’s speculate that if you call on Facebook’s better angels, that no one’s home — and that you have to move back to applying financial pressure. Can you give us a sense of the state of the boycott and how you put pressure on the better angels of the people at organizations that spend money on Facebook?

Robinson: I think financial pressure is important as well as hopefully changing the political levers in Washington. That to me is the long game, because even this type of effort feels like something that we just can’t be constantly doing, going against the largest advertising platform the world has ever known. It just can’t simply be about asking advertisers to walk away. I’ve had a lot of conversation with advertisers, a lot of conversations recently with the Madison Avenue firms who manage advertisers, trying to continue to get a pulse of where folks are at. I think one thing that’s been really helpful here is that this conversation has trickled up to the board level at a lot of companies.

I also think that some of the things that Mark has said about advertisers coming back, some of the flip ways he has responded to this — it’s one thing for Mark to call us weak, for us to say he doesn’t have to think about what we are demanding. But you know, a bunch of corporate CEOs, at what point are you all going to stand up? At what point are you going to say that you’re not going to let this person walk all over you? I think that has been part of Facebook’s missteps. They have stepped on the ego of a lot of folks who have ego and who don’t want to be treated like that they’re not valuable or their opinions don’t matter.

Swisher: One of the things is they don’t like Facebook. You can talk to most of them — they tolerate it because they need it, because it’s the only game in town.

So, two things I’d love to know. What do you think the impact right now is of what Facebook is doing on people of color? Because you have a group that’s not just people of color — you have the ADL, you’ve got the NAACP, you’ve got so many groups you’re working with. What is the impact on society right now for these continued — I would call them — abuses by Facebook?

Robinson: The technology that’s supposed to bring us into the future is in so many ways dragging us into the past. We had created a sense of social contracts around the ways that white nationalists could organize, right? They can’t organize at the Starbucks in a public space and have a meeting. They couldn’t do things out in public, but the incentive structures at Facebook have allowed people to not only organize, but … A 15-year-old that is searching for one thing runs into some white-nationalist content and then goes down a hole because they get served more and more of this content. Because the ways that the algorithms are set up, people are almost indoctrinated into these ideas that we’ve tried to put at the margins. Facebook has created a space that feels like home, that makes these things comfortable, that makes these things acceptable. And to that extent, they’ve been damaging.

At the same time, Facebook has refused to be accountable. I was having a conversation with Alicia Garza, who’s one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter. Alicia famously posted “Black Lives Matter” on Facebook right after the Zimmerman verdict.

Kara Swisher: Which got it started.

Robinson: Mark talks about it. He talked about it in his free-expression speech at Georgetown. And Alicia gets regular death threats on Facebook. She has to go through the same decision tree that anyone else has to go through. She’s had about 20 death threats over the last several months. And Facebook has declined to take action on every one of them through automation. They say something about how it doesn’t violate terms. And she’s never gotten a phone call from Facebook, no outreach, no engagement that one would expect. This is Alicia, who’s on TV, who is well known — and Facebook actually uses her name. They use her work in the cases they make around this, and they don’t even respond to the attacks that she’s getting. It’s because they don’t care. The same way Mark can say that these Fortune 500 advertisers don’t matter, he’s on the other hand saying that Black activists’ voices don’t matter either.

This is one would imagine how he would have treated SNCC organizers, how he would have treated the civil-rights leaders that we lionize today in terms of the ways in which they were attacked and targeted. All of this is because you’ve got this person that has far too much control and believes that they, and they alone, understand what’s right. We don’t actually have the leverage to challenge them. And so I really appreciate what you said around the boycott. I feel really proud of what we’ve been able to do. But part of this, from my perspective, has always been about raising the level of attention and energy and focus so that we can advance the real conversation about 21st-century rules of the road. It’s not just Facebook. It is that all of these platforms, if left to their own devices, will rely on the wrong set of incentive structures because profit and growth are key drivers to why they exist.

Galloway: What are the one or two things any of the 3 and a half billion Facebook users could do right now if they wanted to be supportive of your actions? What’s the call to action?

Robinson: A couple of things, I think that folks need to, first and foremost, vote in this upcoming election. I think that people need to make sure that politicians know that we want to hold big institutions accountable and that we vote, because the long game is a new set of rules and we just don’t get that by wishing. The second thing, I think, for folks who are actively using Facebook, is that if they see negative content, if they see content that’s hateful and they see an advertiser next to it, send that to the advertiser. Advertisers need to consistently hear from consumers — why are you sponsoring this type of content? Why do you have your brands next to this type of content? The vast majority, the overwhelming majority of advertisers are not trying to have their stuff next to this.

But Facebook is telling them one story and there’s a totally different story that’s actually happening. And then finally, I think that all of us have to be really active users about the content that’s coming our way. What are we clicking on? What are we sharing? What are we engaging with? Because the level of disinformation and misinformation that’s going to be on platform as we head into this election is going to be outrageous. We all, in our day-to-day lives, can play a role in disrupting that and pushing back on that.

Swisher: And what is your next move? More boycotts? Continuing the pressure?

Robinson: Continuing the pressure. July 27, Mark testifies in front of Congress on antitrust issues. A corporation that has become so big and powerful where they don’t listen to major corporations, where they don’t have to listen to social-justice leaders, means that there are questions about whether the platform has become too powerful. And whether it needs new rules. I think that’s the next phase in this work. The problem for Facebook is that they are asking people to trust them and big companies to trust them. And I think the message I have for big companies is: Do you think that they’re going to embarrass you? Because I have a quick answer for you. They will. And so just know that time and time again, they have no problem with embarrassing you, embarrassing your brand.

Swisher: Rashad, thank you so much. I don’t know what to say. It’s great to hear a voice like you. Your whole group is fantastic. You all should pay attention and advertisers should absolutely be paying attention to this as we’re going forward. And anything we can do to help, we certainly will.

Robinson: Appreciate you. Thank you.

Pivot is produced by Rebecca Sananes. Erica Anderson is the executive producer. 

Feature Image Credit: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Sourced from Intelligencer

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10 Fresh Social Media Marketing Tools To Boost Brand Storytelling

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By Lane Ellis,

Are you using the latest social media marketing tools that help you create a new variety of remarkable campaign experiences?

We’ve got you covered with a look at our 10 latest featured social media marketing tools to help you refine and expand your marketing efforts and boost brand storytelling.

Sifting through tens of thousands of available tools can be a hit and miss proposition, but these 10 fresh marketing tools let you skip a lot of the research queue and get right into useful tools for helping you tell marketing stories in new ways.

Let’s dive right in with our collection of 10 fresh tools to boost your social media marketing experiences, including image and video manipulation tools, headline analysis utilities, and social media monitoring apps.

1 — DxO’s Nik Collection 3 Tools

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DxO’s updated Nik Collection 3 offers an array of photo editing features for its popular suite of economical plug-ins for Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and DxO’s own Photo Lab.

Coming three years after acquiring the technology from Google, this latest major release offers a new horizon-correcting perspective plug-in — Perspective Efex — and brings Adobe Lightroom Classic users non-destructive editing using a special variety of TIFF files.

Marketers looking to test the new features can try DxO’s new collection using a fully-functional 30-day trial.

2 — CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer Tool

” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />Headline Analyzer Screenshot

Marketers looking for a fresh take on potential new headlines for articles, case studies, eBooks, or other forms of B2B marketing content can try CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer tool.

This tool offers numerous recommendations, visual previews, and ratings for potential headline choices, including sentiment and length analysis, keyword insight, and a word balance feature showing a particular headline’s emotional power and whether it is particularly common or on the rare side.

3 — Prisma Lab’s Photo Editor

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Marketing designers looking to push the boundaries of imagery that stands out for B2B brands can check out Prisma Lab’s Photo Editor app for Apple iOS and Android users, an award-winning photo-editing tool.

Noted for its user-friendly functionality and daily art filters, Prisma’s Photo Editor offers marketers a quick way to try various what-if image manipulations — from merely unusual to otherworldly alterations that might just be the look a B2B brand is looking for.

4 — digiKam RAW Format Processor & Manager

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A rare open source tool offering marketers and designers full functionality in RAW camera format processing and photo management, digiKam’s open nature may appeal to organizations not wanting to get locked in to any one software ecosystem, while still being able to use a slew of powerful features.

Available for Windows, macOS and Linux, digiKam has a slick and easy-to-use user interface, and import and export utilities for smooth social media formatting and sharing.

5 — Biteable Video Tool

” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />Biteable Screenshot

Biteable is an online video maker tied in to a large library of built-in footage and including many helpful templates that combine with the service’s editor functions to create quick and easy marketing assets.

Biteable also allows marketers to create video infographics, explainer videos, animated logos, and dozens of other formats driven by the template-based system, and offers a free trial.

6 — The PhotoGIMP Alternative by Diolinux

” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />Diolinux PhotoGIMP Screenshot

Diolinux’s PhotoGIMP brings a new look and feel to the popular free open-source image editing tool GIMP — short for GNU Image Manipulation Program — coming up on its 25th anniversary in 2021.

This add-on is intended to make the transition to GIMP easier, purposely bringing a look much more like Adobe’s Photoshop, which might be just what some marketers need when trying alternatives to industry-standard software. The tool’s GitHub repository page in English is here — the tool’s main site is in Portuguese.

7 — Unreal’s Live Link Face 3D Live-Motion Tool

” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />Unreal Engine Live Link Screenshot

Epic Games’ Unreal Engine has released Live Link Face for Unreal Engine,  a live motion-capture app that uses an iPhone’s Face ID sensors to create 3D facial animation — cutting-edge technology useful for adding catchy motion to many campaign types, and a glimpse at what is likely coming down the pike for marketers.

The tool uses an iPhone’s TrueDepth sensor array to bring a technology once only available to major motion picture or game designers such as Adam Dunn.

8 — Weave New Digital Stories with Bazaart

” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />Bazaart Screenshot

The fascinating iOS-only app-based tool offered by Bazaart allows marketers to weave together and manipulate photos, text and other elements, and through the use of layers, cut-outs, background-removal and other technology, to create unusual collages and other forms of digital work.

Bazaart also uses numerous templates and example pages to show what the tool is capable of, and has been especially popular for the creation of Instagram Story imagery.

9 — VSCO’s Montage Multimedia Video Editing Tool

” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />VSCO Montage Screenshot

Multimedia video editing software VSCO has been busy adding creative features to its popular mobile app, especially since it released its Montage tool earlier this year.

VSCO’s Montage emphasizes video storytelling, an increasingly important aspect of successful digital marketing, using multi-layered video, images, sound, and other elements to pull viewers into collage-like video content. The tool is available to try for free.

10 — Mentionlytics

” alt=”” aria-hidden=”true” />Mentionlytics Screenshot

Software as a service (SaaS) platform Mentionlytics monitors global social media references and mentions and presents results in a robust dashboard including sentiment analysis, social engagement and reach, competitor comparisons, web mentions and more.

Competition in this segment of social media monitoring tools is fierce, with established players such as Traackr and others, however.

Craft Experiences With Happy Little Apps & Marketing Tools

via GIPHY

We hope that you’ll find several new-to-you social media marketing tools among those we’ve explored here, and that you’ll continue to keep your campaigns full of engaging and fresh stories, whatever software you may be using at any one time.

This is the latest in our multi-year history of highlighting helpful marketing tools, and here are some of the other most recent articles we’ve published on the subject:

By Lane Ellis

Lane R. Ellis (@lanerellis), TopRank Marketing Social Media and Content Marketing Manager, has over 36 years’ experience working with and writing about the Internet. Lane spent more than a decade as Lead Editor for prestigious conference firm Pubcon. When he’s not writing, Lane enjoys distance running (11 marathons including two ultras so far), genealogical research, cross-country skate skiing, vegetarian cooking, and spending time with his wonderful wife Julie Ahasay and their three cats in beautiful Duluth, Minnesota.

Sourced from TopRank Marketing

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What’s next for social ad spend as one third of brands plot hate-speech boycott?

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By Rebecca Stewart

As brands continue to add their name to the growing list of companies boycotting Facebook, fresh research from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) has painted a sobering picture of how marketers view the social network and its rivals.

Volkswagen and Mars are the latest corporations to halt ad spend with Facebook over its handling of damaging content and misinformation. The car marque and food giant join Levi’s, Coca-Cola, Unilever and more in signing up to the ‘Stop Profit for Hate campaign’ which is backed by civil rights groups including the NAACP, Color of Change and the Anti-Defamation League.

The coalition has been calling on major corporations to put a pause on advertising on Facebook for the month of July, citing its “repeated failure to meaningfully address the vast proliferation of hate on its platforms”.

Some brands have gone further, pulling the plug on all investment for the foreseeable future across all social networks.

The WFA’s research has revealed a diminishing faith in not only Facebook, but also its bedfellows, to address the issue at hand.

What did the WFA’s research find?

  • The WFA’s members control nearly $100bn in global ad spend. Following on from the news of the Facebook boycott, the trade body asked members about their policies on social media ad spend. The WFA’s research asked advertiser views on all social media platforms.
  • 76 responded, representing 58 companies and $92bn in marketing dollars.
  • Almost one-third of these marketers (31%) said they will, or are likely to, suspend advertising on social media over platforms’ failure to police hate speech. A further 40% said they were also considering doing so.
  • 17% said they were unlikely to withhold spend. 12% said they had no plans to withhold spend.
  • Brands were also asked which other actions they’d taken or had considered. 53% said they’d already had direct conversations with social platforms about hate speech. 48% said their main approach was to work through industry bodies to deal with the issue. 32% said they weren’t taking action for now and 13% said they were taking other actions.

What does the data show?

  • If anything, the survey shows how divided the industry is on how to handle the issue. Some brands are set on pulling spend, where others remain undecided.
  • The WFA also released some anonymised qualitative responses as part of the research. Again, these are a mixed bag: one marketer laments that it’s “simply depressing” how much the platforms are still falling short and says they would “appreciate support with identifying and viable alternatives for investments”.
  • Another pointed out that neither the platforms nor the advertisers propping them up are perfect: “Advertisers may pull out of these platforms,” the brand marketer continues, “but consumers will not.

What’s next?

  • Hate speech and how brands inadvertently fund it is an issue that has been on the WFA’s radar for some time. Working with social networks to find a solution to the problem is already being prioritised by the trade body’s Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM).
  • For its part, Facebook has promised “new policies to connect people with authoritative information about voting, crack down on voter suppression, and fight hate speech”.
  • Actions include labelling posts that are potentially harmful and even in violation of the platform’s policies but are not censored by the platform because they are deemed newsworthy.
  • Facebook will also add a link to its voting information centre to posts that reference voting, including those made by politicians such as President Trump.
  • Speaking to the Financial Times earlier this week, chief executive of the WFA Stephen Loerke noted how this moment feels like a turning point amid the pressure of the ‘Stop Hate for Profit’ campaign.
  • “What’s striking is the number of brands who are saying they are reassessing their longer-term media allocation strategies and demanding structural changes in the way platforms address racial intolerance, hate speech and harmful content,” he explained.
  • The magnitude of the brand exodus won’t really be clear until Facebook releases its Q3 results in October.

Feature Image Credit: Volkswagen and Mars are the latest corporations to halt ad spend with Facebook over its handling of damaging content / Unsplash

By Rebecca Stewart

Sourced from The Drum

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Pandemic Exacts Toll: Digital Strategies Pay Off And Marketers Expect Them To Pay Forward

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By Christine Moorman

Optimism among marketers plummets to levels last witnessed during the Great Recession. Optimism about the economy is 50.9 (out of 100) compared to just three months ago when it was 62.7. In February 2009, following the Great Recession of 2008, this rating was 47.7. B2C companies are more pessimistic than their B2B counterparts, as are larger revenue companies (>$10B) compared to their smaller counterparts (<$25M).

Against this backdrop, The CMO Survey conducted a Special Covid-19 Edition survey, asking marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies to share their survival strategies, KPIs, and predictions about the future. Here are the top results.

1. Marketing jobs lost: Although 62% of marketing leaders reported no job losses in their companies, 9% of marketing jobs have been lost, on average, due the pandemic. The largest percentage of marketers (24%) anticipate these jobs will never return. Planned marketing hiring drops to the lowest point in CMO Survey history, going negative for the first time ever with average hiring predicted to be -3.5% in the next year.

2.    Customer prioritize digital experiences: Marketers report increased openness among customers to new digital offerings introduced during the pandemic (85%), increased value placed on digital experiences (84%), and greater acknowledgements of companies’ attempts to “do good” (79%). Marketers expect this increased focus on digital to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.

3.    Marketers pivot digital: Given customer shifts, marketers are, in turn, adjusting their offerings and pivoting their businesses. Some 60.8% indicate they have “shifted resources to building customer-facing digital interfaces” and 56.2% are “transforming their go-to-market business models to focus on digital opportunities.” Consistent with this, CMO Survey results show the largest single drop in traditional advertising spending (-5.3% expected over the next year), further solidifying the shift toward digital.

4.    Marketing budgets hold: Despite headcount loss, 30.3% of marketers—the largest segment—have experienced no change in their overall marketing budgets during the pandemic with 41.3% reporting gains and 28.4% reporting losses. On average, marketers report they have gained about 5% in their budgets during the pandemic and expect an 8.4% increase in digital marketing spending over the next year.

5.    Marketing objectives remain modest: When asked what objectives they are focused on during the pandemic, the #1 and #2 responses from marketers are “building brand value that connects with customers” and “retaining current customers.” Consistent with this, marketing employees were leveraged more for “getting active online to promote the company and its offerings” (69%) and “reaching out to current customers with information” (65%) compared to growth objectives such as “generating new products and service ideas” (44%) or “building partnerships” (41%).

6.    Marketing leadership promoted: 62.3% of marketers report that the marketing function has increased in importance during the pandemic. Building brand and customer retention through digital, mobile, and social strategies are reported to be key to that heightened role. This importance is striking given 9% marketing job losses—marketers are doing more with fewer people.

7.    Social media shines bright: 84.2% of marketers say they have used social media for brand building and 54.3% say they have used it for customer retention during the pandemic. Given this focus, marketers have increased investment social media budgets 74% since February—an increase as a percent of marketing budgets from 13.3% to 23.2%. This strategy appears to have worked: For the first time in CMO Survey history, the rated contributions of social media to company performance rose—up 24% since February. This is an important finding because social media contributions have previously remained flat and at average levels since 2016 despite rising investments.

8.    Online sales performance increases: Online sales have grown to the highest level in The CMO Survey history. They now constitute 19.3% of sales—a 43% increase over just three months ago. Small companies (with fewer than 500 employees) are taking advantage of selling online, with ecommerce accounting for 26.1% of sales.

9.    Overall sales revenue drop 17%: Despite online sales gains, marketers report major losses across sales revenue, profits, and customer acquisition during the pandemic. Biggest reductions are to sales revenue, which dropped 17.8% on average, with 16.9% of marketers reporting the loss of over 50% of their revenues. Considering winners and losers, 64% of marketers report sales losses compared to 30.3% that report gains and 5.2% reporting no change. Marketers expect these sales revenues to increase 4.2% in the next year driven by the view that consumers’ current lower likelihood to purchase (67%) and unwillingness to pay full price (43%) will return to pre-pandemic levels within 6-12 months.

10. Pandemic weakens environmental focus: Covid-19 has also dampened marketers’ likelihood to make changes to reduce their offerings’ negative impact on the ecological environment. The number of marketers indicating a willingness to change their products or services to reduce their negative environmental impact has dropped from 72.9% to 52.7% with attention shifting to easier-to-implement marketing promotions (58%). More marketers report that Covid-19 makes sustainability efforts seem “like a luxury” than it “created opportunities to increase sustainability efforts” in their companies.

11. Use of influencers expected to rise: Marketers report that 7.5% of their marketing budgets is focused on online influencers, mostly on LinkedIn, company blogs, Instagram, and Facebook, and that they anticipate large gains in the use of influencers in the next three years (up to 12.7%).

Detailed analysis of these and other results are available here. I hope these findings from our Special Covid-19 Edition of The CMO Survey are useful as you navigate these next few months and beyond. I will be taking a deeper dive into these findings during a webinar on June 25th at 1PM Eastern sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the American Marketing Association. You can register by following this link. I look forward answering your questions and taking your comments.

THE CMO SURVEYSurvey Results Archive – The CMO Survey

By Christine Moorman

Sourced from Forbes

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Now You Can Opt Out of Seeing Political Ads on Facebook

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By Mike Isaac

The change lets Facebook play both sides of the debate about political advertising on social media.

SAN FRANCISCO — For months, Facebook has weathered criticism for its willingness to show all types of political advertising to its billions of users, even if those ads contained lies.

Now the company is changing tack — sort of.

2020 ELECTION
Facebook removes Trump ad displaying symbol used by Nazis.

 

The social network said it would allow people in the United States to opt out of seeing social issue, electoral or political ads from candidates or political action committees in their Facebook or Instagram feeds. The ability to hide those ads will begin with a small group of users, before rolling out in the coming weeks to the rest of the United States and later to several other countries.

“Everyone wants to see politicians held accountable for what they say — and I know many people want us to moderate and remove more of their content,” Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive of Facebook, wrote in an op-ed piece in USA Today on Tuesday. “For those of you who’ve already made up your minds and just want the election to be over, we hear you — so we’re also introducing the ability to turn off seeing political ads. We’ll still remind you to vote.”

The move allows Facebook to play both sides of a complicated debate about the role of political advertising on social media ahead of the November presidential election. With the change, Facebook can continue allowing political ads to flow across its network, while also finding a way to reduce the reach of those ads and to offer a concession to critics who have said the company should do more to moderate noxious speech on its platform.

Mr. Zuckerberg has long said that Facebook would not police and moderate political ads. That’s because the company does not want to limit the speech of candidates, he has said, especially in smaller elections and those candidates who do not have the deep pockets of the major campaigns.

But critics, including the Biden presidential campaign, have argued that Facebook’s laissez-faire approach has dangerous consequences, with untruthful political ads leading to the spreading of disinformation and potential voter disenfranchisement. Some Republicans have argued that Facebook should not act as an arbiter of what can and cannot be posted in ads, and that the company’s intervention amounts to censorship.

The Biden presidential campaign lashed out at Facebook over its hands-off policy on political ads last October after the Trump campaign released ads on the social network that falsely claimed that Mr. Biden had offered to bribe Ukrainian officials to drop an investigation into his son. Since then, the Biden campaign has called for the company to fact-check ads from candidates and their campaigns.

Last week, Mr. Biden’s campaign also began an online petition and letter to Mr. Zuckerberg to demand changes to its speech policies ahead of the 2020 presidential contest. At the same time, the Biden campaign also spent $5 million in advertising on Facebook, surging past political ad spending by Mr. Trump on the platform.

By Mike Isaac

Sourced from The New York Times

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A Complete Overview of Social Media Advertising for Small Business

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By Anders Hjorth

Social media advertising allows businesses to reach users during their prime time and in pleasant, entertaining and engaging ways. Find out which platform suits your needs.

Social media has become a mass media, but a personalized one. Remember that scene from the film Minority Report where Tom Cruise walks through a shopping mall and the interactive ad displays address him as a different person, because they scanned his new eyes and took him for someone else?

Social advertising is moving in that direction: No user experience is ever identical to another on social media.

Each screen a user sees comprises numerous elements, that are all optimized by algorithms, which in turn feed on data the user has declared, and on behavior the social network has detected. Some of these elements are advertising. Personalized to the user’s profile, and designed to be a part of the experience.

Overview: What is social advertising?

Social media provides a useful and entertaining experience to its members for free. In return, social media platforms monetize user data by providing powerful digital advertising solutions to advertisers.

Advertising through social media takes the form of banners, posts or videos. Social media ads, many very creative, blend in with the context and appeal to the user.

Snapchat campaign for Bacardi

In a Snapchat campaign for Bacardi, branded filters were used to enable users to send branded postcard-like snaps to their friends from the music festival they were attending. Source:

Snapchat

Benefits of advertising on social media

One of the great benefits social media provides to businesses is the establishment of a direct relationship between you and the user. Advertising through social media creates, extends and activates these relationships. Let’s look at social advertising benefits for businesses.

1. Audiences can be precisely targeted

Users enter their data into social platforms: names, photos, job titles, location, marital status, friends, and much more. Social platforms monitor behavior and interest.

This data enables advertisers to reach the right audience and create targeted ads for it. If an advertiser has a well-defined target market, they can deliver it via social media advertising. Advertisers no longer target media channels, they target audiences via media platforms.

2. Social ads address “awareness”

The “hierarchy of effects” model, often used in marketing and advertising to describe the mental stages a user moves through before purchasing a product, contains three stages:

  • Cognitive (awareness and knowledge)
  • Affective (liking and preference)
  • Conative (conviction and purchase)

Social media advertising is good at addressing the cognitive and affective stages. This makes advertising on social media complementary to direct mail, search marketing, or retail media, which have their strengths at the conative stage.

3. Everything is measurable

Every social media ad impression leaves a digital trace. Every click can be tracked. User characteristics and user behavior can be related to each instance of advertising within a social platform.

So much data exists that it becomes challenging to figure out what is significant and what isn’t. Once advertisers choose the right social media metrics, however, this data will be easy to track and optimize via the social platforms.

4. Social advertising is scalable

Social media advertising costs for a campaign can start as low as $10, and the advertiser has control over timespan, targeting and creative. It can also cost $10 million and cover the globe. Between the two, advertisers have ample room to test, learn and adjust.

Marketers, mainly using social media advertising to boost and enhance their content strategy, can monitor and manage it directly through their favorite social media management tool.

5. Social ads can trigger actions

Whereas social media advertising is often used for building awareness, it can also trigger actions. It generates likes and follows, and can also generate clicks to your website and create leads for your sales and marketing teams.

There is even a rising social commerce trend, where social media advertising feeds directly into the conative stage: users can buy products directly on social media.

The 5 best social media platforms to advertise your small business

The Facebook Ads platform is dedicated to social media advertising, and the Google Ads platform also spans other forms of digital advertising. We will focus on the social media advertising aspects of seven digital advertising platforms.

Platform 1: Facebook Ads: Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger

Facebook controls the most powerful advertising platform in the world, as it combines Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger together on the same infrastructure.

Most advertisers, however, will consider Facebook and Instagram to be two advertising platforms, and WhatsApp and Messenger to be additional features.

Characteristics of the Facebook ads platform:

  • Massive reach
  • Very powerful targeting
  • Innovative and adaptive ad formats
  • Machine learning used to improve performance
  • Most controversial use of user data

Facebook Ads by, itself, is probably the strongest social ads platform and is now also the backbone for advertising on Instagram. Depending on your campaign objective, the platform can activate one or more of its advertising channels.

Platform 2: LinkedIn Ads

The LinkedIn advertising platform stands out for its strong business focus. It’s increasingly integrating with the Microsoft Advertising platform and has access to a powerful technological backbone in its mother company, Microsoft.

Characteristics of LinkedIn Ads:

  • Clear business focus
  • Strong targeting of professional audiences
  • Maturing platform
  • Reputation for high cost

Platform 3: Twitter Ads

The Twitter advertising platform is not as powerful as the two above platforms, but Twitter has an interesting positioning as a great add-on for other social networks. The quality of its user data is not as good as the other platforms, but it is strong on topical and thematic targeting and for events.

Characteristics of the Twitter ad platform:

  • Lower volumes
  • Strong topical targeting
  • Specific communities and events
  • Reputation for low costs
  • Complementary to business activity on Twitter

Platform 4: Google Ads: YouTube and Google My Business

Google never created its own social network despite the efforts put into Google Plus and other initiatives. However, many consider YouTube to be a social media platform and the more recent Google My Business platform also has some social media resemblance.

Characteristics of the social media dimension of Google Ads (YouTube and Google My Business):

  • Massive video reach on YouTube
  • Low cost per view on YouTube and innovative ad formats
  • Strong integration with the Google advertising technology stack
  • Effective social-local advertising on Google My Business

Emerging platforms: Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat

The social media landscape is constantly changing. Recently the video-driven social media platform TikTok has entered the scene in a significant way. Its closest competitor, Snapchat, had experienced spectacular growth.

The emergence of new players like TikTok and Snapchat makes it hard for existing players like Pinterest or Twitter to keep growing because they are all fighting for the attention (and dollars) of the same audience.

Emerging social advertising platforms:

  • Pinterest: The creator of pin boards where users can gather images from around the web thematically and share with others, is still going strong. It’s finding itself a positioning on social commerce, as it has the power to inspire users for their purchases. If the platform can generate sales and connect to its advertising, it has strong arguments for attracting more advertisement.
  • TikTok is reaching a young audience massively and strongly influences this group. Its recent advertising offering is creative, including formats like stickers, filters, and overlays.
  • Snapchat has also seduced a large young audience which can be difficult for advertisers to reach. Its creative, innovative, and fun use of digital media shines through in its advertising formats.

Campaign on TikTok in Thailand

In a campaign on TikTok in Thailand, Colgate used an innovative ad format. They designed a clickable “branded effect” triggering a visual effect of exploding hearts when users made a “kissy face”. Source: TikTok

Social ads are a world of opportunity

Social media advertising is a mass media that can entertain, influence and seduce its audiences. Social media platforms provide powerful targeting capabilities and innovative ad formats.

Advertisers can start small and scale infinitely, but need to be very clear about their objectives, to reap the benefits of social ads. Finding the right social network and reaching the right audience can be challenging, but the opportunity is huge and the benefits can be significant.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

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A Complete Guide to Using Social Media for Your Small Business

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By Anders Hjorth

Social media has revolutionized human relations and transformed the way we communicate. It has created a new type of celebrity thanks to the power of personal branding.

And businesses are increasingly realizing how direct person-to-person relations via digital channels can be beneficial to their sales and marketing.

To master this new type of business communication, most companies could use a bit of social media advice and some digital marketing tips. So, we’ve gathered a collection of social media tips for business in this article.

They’re easy to understand, easy to execute, and should prove valuable for any small business social media marketing operation.

8 effective social media tips for your small business:

  • Learn about your audience
  • Choose your primary and secondary social networks
  • Use a mix of hero, hub and help content
  • Repurpose your content
  • Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships
  • Set up social commerce
  • Evolve your content from articles to video to live
  • Plan and automate

8 social media marketing tips for small businesses to try

Whereas social media marketing has become an advanced marketing discipline where experts compete for excellence and for outstanding results, it’s also a playground where any business — big or small — can make a difference for itself.

The following social media marketing tips can be implemented by practically any business. (Take special note of Nos. 4 and 8, which are our favorite social media tips on this list.)

1. Learn about your audience

One of the great benefits of social media is the access to market data it provides. Social media platforms are data-driven platforms designed to tailor advertising to their users. In the process, they provide access to some of that data to businesses.

As a business owner, you’ll get access to the social media metrics you need to steer your business, but you’ll also get insights into your audience that you can use for a social media audit or for defining your target market.

How to put your audience insights into action:

While running your social media activity, you’re constantly learning more about your audience. However, you can gather audience insights for a marketing plan in a more structured way.

  • Define your target: First, define what characterizes your target market. Perhaps you have several segments with different characteristics you can outline.
  • Estimate segment sizes: Go to Facebook audience insights and enter the characteristics for each segment to gather an estimate of the audience size.
  • Learn about their media consumption: Identify which publications your audience reads, what they watch, and who they listen to and follow on the internet by looking up their media preferences with SparkToro.

2. Choose your primary and secondary social networks

There are so many communication opportunities via social media marketing that you can easily spread your efforts too thin. By choosing one primary social network where you concentrate your efforts, you’ll get the biggest return on investment.

Other networks can be part of your small business social media strategy as secondary networks that you utilize in a more opportunistic way.

How to select your primary social network:

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is to pick one social media network and stick with it. Here’s one approach.

  • Analyze the options: Analyze the user characteristics of the various social networks via information they share with you. Make a list of candidates for your primary social network.
  • Compare with your target audience: Compare and contrast the characteristics of the users on each platform with the characteristics of your target audience to find the best fit.
  • Evaluate your strengths: You probably have more affinities and more reach with one or more of the social networks on your list. Objectively evaluate your strengths on each platform.
  • Apply weights: Set up a simple spreadsheet where you can score each social network on attractivity, audience fit, and strengths. You can weight each score to account for the most important elements. Then pick your primary network, and mark the others as secondary. Build your social media strategy around this primary social network.

3. Use a mix of hero, hub, and help content

Google has a challenge. Its advertisers were brought up with search marketing but were not necessarily educated on how to use Google’s other great advertising channel: YouTube.

Google therefore created a conceptual framework for working with YouTube. This framework helps define the role of video content, which by nature is more expensive to produce and distribute.

Whether you plan to use video or not, the YouTube strategy playbook — which uses the three Hs of “hero,” “hub,” and “help” — can be of great use when planning social media activity for your business.

How to establish your content mix:

Creating a mix of content with the three Hs is very focused on the hero content, or the driving elements of your business’s storyline that you want your broadest audience to see. Let’s look at what you need to do to establish your content mix with this in mind.

  • Content audit: The first thing you need is an overview of your existing content and events that can be used in your content strategy.
  • Brainstorm: The fun part of the process is the brainstorming and idea-testing for your hero content. Aim to find a unique and remarkable content idea that resonates strongly with your audience and emphasizes your brand’s differentiation.
  • Plan around the hero content: Some of the other content you use in your social media strategy can be built around the hero content. Other content pieces act as “hubs” and will simply help your brand stay top of mind. And “help” content is more traditional company information that you place around and between the more story-driven hero content.
  • Build a content calendar: The three types of content come together in a social media content calendar, which helps you stay organized and share your content in a consistent and effective way.

4. Repurpose your content

If you’ve followed our second tip, you may be wondering how to best utilize your secondary social networks. You may also be overwhelmed by the thought of needing to publish content to your social networks multiple times a week.

This is why content repurposing is an important strategy. A publication has a limited life span on social media, and in order to generate a return on your investment in a piece of content, you need to maximize its usage.

How to thoughtfully and effectively repurpose your content:

The initial version of your content should be optimized for your primary social network. Subsequent versions can be formatted to suit other networks, perhaps using a more visual angle, a different perspective, or simply different text.

  • Optimize for your primary network: The first time you publish a piece of content, it should be optimized for your primary social network. Each social network has its own ideal mix of image, video, text, emojis, and hashtags.
  • Adapt to secondary networks: You will likely need to make changes to the format of your content when publishing it on your secondary social networks. Perhaps you’ll only use parts of the content you prepared for your primary network.
  • Republication: One piece of content can typically be presented several times to your primary audience. This is useful as you never reach 100% of your followers with one post since everyone is online at different times. Using different text and images for subsequent publications is a good way to make sure your content doesn’t appear stale or repetitive.
  • Repurposing: Content in which you have invested significant time or money can be repurposed at a later stage. Perhaps you can update a survey you ran, provide a new editorial angle, or redo the graphics. A good way to organize the use and reuse of content is to build a social media content calendar.

5. Leverage inbound marketing and partnerships

Inbound marketing is an approach by which you create and publish content that will drive interested users closer to your offering.

It’s a structured process using planning, scoring, and automation to manage long customer interaction processes. It’s a great approach to marketing for small business, especially in the B2B space.

How to put inbound marketing into action:

Inbound marketing is about using content to drive users to your offering without reaching out to them with advertising.

  • Analyze the user journey: Users travel through various stages before they become prospects for your offering. You first need to identify what questions the user is asking before they’re ready to move to the next step in the user journey.
  • Create and publish content: With the stages of the user journey in mind, create content that corresponds to each stage, and think of mechanisms that will bring the user to the next stage: Newsletter subscription, whitepaper download, webinar registration, etc. This is the stage where you’ll actually use social media platforms to publish your content and engage with your audience.
  • Automate the funnel: One of the aims of inbound marketing is to create an automated lead generation process. It uses content and publications on social media to generate interest and subsequently works like a content relationship management tool. You’ll need a technical solution such as HubSpot or Salesforce Pardot to pursue this approach seriously.

6. Set up social commerce

Users can be strongly influenced by social media but may not be used to buying products there. There is, however, a rising trend of social commerce on social networks like Instagram and Pinterest.

Facebook also recently launched its Page shops, adding e-commerce functionality to business pages on its platform.

How to use social commerce in your social media strategy:

Social commerce is a shortcut from social media to e-commerce. It can be an interesting opportunity for companies with strong social media activity and the possibility to sell online.

  • Prepare product information: In order to sell online via social media, you need the same information as for any other e-commerce activity: product titles and descriptions, images, prices, and an order fulfillment solution.
  • Choose your platform: If your primary social network has e-commerce functionality, go with that platform. If it doesn’t, consider trying one of the leading social commerce platforms: Instagram, Pinterest, or Facebook.
  • Build the e-commerce functionality: It’s fairly easy to set up social commerce. Products and prices can be entered individually or as a product feed so your shop is up to date.

7. Evolve your content from articles to video to live

When you first consider content for your social media marketing plan, you might think about articles and images.

But video content has become accessible to small businesses now that platforms like the Facebook Live Producer empower you to create professional-looking live video content. You might even want to make video your hero content, as we saw in tip No. 3.

How to make smart use of video:

All you need is a smartphone with a good camera to start producing live video. We also recommend adding a good-quality microphone or headset.

  • Plan your video content: For video content, you need to create a title, write a script, and find the right filming location with good lighting and an appropriate background.
  • Test-run your video: To overcome the fear of looking silly and get used to speaking to the camera, do at least one test run. A teleprompter software tool can be helpful as well.
  • Set it up as an event: You can create video content for later publication or create a live event. Whichever you choose, make sure to build awareness before publication to drive more views and more engagement.

8. Plan and automate

Running social media activities is about efficiently using resources. The best way to organize any social media activity is to plan ahead and automate as much as possible.

There are a number of simple social tools to help with automation that each perform specific tasks, or it can be done using a more complete social media software suite that covers all of your automation needs.

How to plan and automate your social media activity:

If you’ve built your content mix using tip No. 4, you may have started using a content calendar as the nervous system of your social media strategy. Now, all you need to do is connect your primary and secondary social networks to your content via automation.

  • Define your primary social network: As described in the first tip, you should first define your social network set-up and decide where primary content goes.
  • Build your content calendar: A content calendar is a key component of a social media strategy. Build your calendar by placing the hero content first and scheduling supporting content around it. You will likely have a regular flow of hub content, and the amount of help content you produce will depend on your business activity and commercial calendar.
  • Automate publication: Bring it all together with automation software that allows you to connect your content to your social media accounts. Schedule posts to each of your social networks in advance, keeping your content calendar moving like a well-oiled machine.

The best social media tools for small business

Social media automation tools will help your business automate the implementation of your content strategy. In the tips above, we’ve mentioned various tasks for which these tools are useful: in implementing a content calendar, automating publications, and planning ahead.

Let’s look at a few tools that work in different ways.

1. Later

The core functionality of Later is to build a visual content calendar and schedule image posts to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Later’s visual overview of the calendar is one of the best we’ve seen.

Screenshot of Later Calendar View

The content calendar view of Later is visual and well adapted to planning Instagram posts.

2. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is great for getting the most out of your content. It’s the content repurposing, recycling, and automation champion.

MeetEdgar&#x27;s automatic post creation tool.

A unique feature of MeetEdgar is the automatic creation of post variations submitted for approval.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one the best and most complete social media management tools covering the entire spectrum of automation, management, research, and reporting functionalities for your social media activity.

Sprout Social&#x27;s reporting options

Sprout Social provides a wide variety of reporting options, including content performance across the social media channels you are using.

Learn from what you do and focus on where you win

Most social media activity only pays off in the medium to long run, which can be frustrating to businesses looking for quick wins or a rapid return on their investment.

But some of the above tips are sure to generate value for your business even in the short run as they can help you focus on what’s essential and what tasks are the best use of your time.

Focus your efforts, optimize your content output, plan ahead, and automate where you can in order to get the most out of your small business’s social media strategy.

By Anders Hjorth

Sourced from the blueprint

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Is Social Media Analytics Redundant Today?

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Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in social media data, and at the same time, AI/ML models are also getting better at predicting people’s interests and purchasing habits. For example, social media data can be processed and analysed using AI models to find meaningful correlations to precisely target products and services to specific users.

Businesses can also leverage analytics models on data collected from social networks and use computational frameworks like Apache Hadoop for analysing large volumes of data.  A lot of companies have been using social media data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn, Snapchat to improve their marketing ROI and target consumers by analysing users’ platform behaviour in relation to demographics.

But, there’s a caveat! While social media data provides great insights into the behaviour of users, they may also face user privacy-related issues.

Social Media Analytics Vs Privacy Violations

Ever since the Cambridge Analytical scandal and the introduction of regulations such as GDPR, it has become more stringent for companies to leverage social media analytics for targeted advertising. The impact of the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a catalyst in this regard when it was found that third-party applications on Facebook were mining users’ data for political campaign profiling.

In the past, third-party data aggregators scraped social media sites and collected personal sensitive data, which was then resold to companies. Now, with the introduction of regulations that prohibit that practice, will social media analytics become redundant or less effective for companies?

Events such as the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook scandal, massive security incidents like Equifax breach, and later on GDPR paved the way to tighten the norms on how personal data is collected, stored, and processed. In the past few years, the lawsuits against these tech companies on privacy norms have only strengthened the trend. 

Companies around are therefore preparing to become more compliant with the regulations and what data they collect of users. Facebook, for example, has now become more transparent to users specifying what data they collect and what information they provide third-parties for their advertising campaigns.

Social media profiles have personally identifiable information and other sensitive data that can be used by data scientists to create models for specific products, which can generate more sales. The challenges with collecting social media data can depend on the kind of data collected (non-personal social data or personal data) and how the data is utilised. It also depends on the applicable laws and regulations in geography. For instance, in Europe, It will be more difficult for social media analytics companies to execute to their full potential using the data, versus Asian countries where privacy laws are less stringent.

Privacy Compliant Social Data Analytics

Without having to profile users using digital identifiers like IP or Mac addresses and cookies, there is still a lot which can be done. Companies are looking at GDPR compliant data processing on social media data, with proper consent and transparency for how personal data is collected and utilised for analytics. Here non-sensitive social media data is used for increasing sales or generating marketing insights with CRM integration, which is an appropriate use of social media ‘likes’ to achieve specific business goals. On the other hand, if sensitive personal data is mined to track users or survey their purchase habits, then that could be a violation at least in some global geographies.

For companies, it is important to be careful about the nature of data collected for analytics and ensure it’s not personal in nature, as it can attract penalties. To counter this, proper data governance programs have been put in place for analysing social media trends and making sure that there is no violation.

Even if there are fewer datasets available for social media analytics on personally identifiable data, social media analytics companies are expected to keep utilising non-personal data for sentiment analysis, sales trends, visualisation, and acquiring sales leads, all within the boundaries of regulations. For example, by monitoring social media, one can determine customer sentiment analysis on non-personal data, which can be converted into actionable insights.

The Roadmap For Social Media Analytics

The bottom line is that the collection and utilisation of social media data are complex, involving multiple sources and data management challenges. This is confusing for analytics professionals and social data analytics companies to identify the legality of collecting such kind of social media data.

This means that companies will continue to use popular products such as Google Analytics to track social media campaign performance, conversions, and ultimately understand the return on investment from social media marketing efforts. Other large companies like Salesforce, IBM, SAS have products for social media data analytics.

While social media analytics will continue to play a role in sales and marketing, other areas like risk management and fraud detection are also becoming more prominent. Here, law enforcement companies are leveraging social media analytics to extract and analyse the data generated from various data sources.

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Brands can turn the tide during coronavirus by building new consumer journeys

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By Shawn Lim

Brands need to focus on hyper-localisation by connecting with consumers where they are, as Covid-19 has dramatically changed consumer behaviour and altered the path-to-purchase, according to Facebook and Boston Consulting Group.

According to a new report called ‘Turn the Tide’, released by Facebook India and Boston Consulting Group, the use of micro-targeting can help brands get the first-mover advantage. This is because countries are being divided into different zones, with distinct restrictions due to the pandemic, so they need to build social connections despite social distancing, by engaging with consumers in their context

To cope with pandemic lockdown, which has caused significant disruption for communities and businesses, people are spending more time on social media platforms. This means brands have an opportunity to build stronger dialogues and deeper connections with users.

The aim of the guide, according to Facebook India and Boston Consulting Group, is to guide brands to adapt to the pandemic and ensure business continuity.

Nimisha Jain, the managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, says: “We are experiencing unprecedented shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviours as 80%+ consumers will continue to practice social distancing and are bringing the outside inside, over 40% of consumers are dialling up on health and wellness spends, e-commerce adoption has already advanced by two-three years, to name a few.”

“These aren’t just temporary surges, and many will last longer and become more defining traits. Our analysis reveals that only one in six companies emerged stronger in past crises. Players who show the agility to reinvent their value propositions, go-to-market plans and business models to address these demand shifts, will be the ones that set themselves apart from the pack.”

In addition, the report also shares actionable guidance for brands to build for the new consumer journeys in times of Covid-19 and beyond.

For example, brands can bring alive experiences through virtual launches and product demos as people turn to virtual experiences for every facet of their life. Facebook said it is already seeing more brands explore Facebook and Instagram ‘Live’ to connect with their followers and customers, with brands now thinking about using social media platforms for new product launches too.

Heeru Dingra, the chief executive officer at WATConsult tells The Drum the agency has modified its planning and strategy around the new consumer journeys, urging its clients to follow a simple mantra of ‘solve, serve and sell’.

She explains brands should focus on solving the problems their consumers face, serve their purpose and the result thereof could be the sale of services or products. She notes a lot of brands have understood this concept and have already started altering their approach to fit this mantra.

“We leveraged the power of gaming and re-created one of the most iconic games of all time, Ludo, for our client Tata Motors. Titled #SafetyFirst Ludo, this version aims to spread awareness about the importance of personal hygiene and social distancing amid the Covid-19 outbreak,” she says.

She also calls out work by Bajaj Allianz General Insurance called #CareWillOvercome, which salutes frontline workers, while a #ReconnectWithStarbucks campaign turned the act of baristas calling out people’s names into a digital phenomenon.

She adds: “These examples summarize how we integrated the need of the hour that is to maintain social distancing, continue to concentrate on personal hygiene and at the same time have our heartfelt appreciation for the ones who have been fighting for us day and night, into our brand approach in some way. This helps to amplify the brand message while being sensitive to the current situation, serving the purpose of extending the required communication and increasing as well as sustaining brand recall.”

The report also advised brands to look at their media mix models to drive growth by aligning to new media landscapes. According to the report, when brands, especially those with traditional product categories, start spending more online, they need to understand incremental outcomes, as well as cross-platform efficiency.

This would increase the need for digital measurement standards, such as custom mix modelling (CMM) by Nielsen, which Facebook said it had piloted last year.

Gautam Mehra, the chief data officer for South Asia and chief executive officer of programmatic at Dentsu Aegis Network observes the importance of moving away from traditional marketing metrics to real business metrics that can be measured and improved on an ongoing basis.

“With the impetus of commerce, CRM and digital transformation, I think, every company will now have a direct-to-consumer line of business and will want to bring themselves closer to the consumer, and rely less on the intermediaries,” he explains.

While most brands are dealing with huge change across many aspects of business, focusing on the changing customer journey is a good place for marketing to focus attention.

Feature Image Credit: the report also shares actionable guidance for brands to build for the new consumer journeys in times of Covid-19 and beyond.

By Shawn Lim

Sourced from The Drum

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