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How to make your visuals stand out on social media news feeds

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Sourced from Smart Insights.

Average just won’t cut it…

95 million images and videos are posted to Instagram every day, and more than 250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook since its conception. The need for brands to stand out in the digital era is obvious, yet every day you’ll see generic and uninspiring images carelessly repurposed across the web.

 

Even household brands fall into the trap: at Picfair, we frequently run reverse image searches of globally-distributed magazine covers to show just how frequently an image has been used. This lack of care shown when selecting imagery runs the risk of brands not only appearing inauthentic but also minimising cut-through on crowded news feeds.

So how can brands ensure their visuals stand out?

1. Be bold

Tapping into trends can work wonders, but it’s also good to break the rules sometimes. Find images that will disrupt the news feed and provoke emotions people aren’t expecting. Imagine how many travel brands are promoting the same destinations and how many of them choose the same cliched postcard photo instead of seizing a creative opportunity. Consider conceptual photography to illustrate your story, encouraging audiences to engage with your content in a different way. Create a mood board featuring competitor content and visuals you’ve shortlisted — you’ll then be able to identify which photos truly stand out.

 

2. Own your assets

Use simple graphic design and photo editing apps like Canva or Over to access a huge range of templates to ensure your visual storytelling is unique. It can be as simple as adding a text overlay on visuals or using blocks of colour to break up space. There is an endless selection of styles you can play with.

With a risk of the same images surfacing on the web telling multiple brand stories, the rise in stress-free design apps are becoming the go-to tool for the likes of Amnesty International who need striking and engaging graphic content to be produced in minutes. A quick skim of their Facebook page immediately displays a clear visual style. Having ownable and distinctive assets means audiences can identify your content within seconds.

3. Source content from local creators

Global media startup The Culture Trip based their model on sourcing content from local content creators, delivering personalised and authentic recommendations. Their global hub spanning 130 countries is comprised of photographers, writers and videographers, allowing them to create a distinct and engaging experience for their “culturally curious” audience.

Similarly, a recent campaign Picfair produced with Canon sourced content straight from the heart of one of the most diverse continents in the world. #CelebrateAfrica encouraged African residents from all walks of life to upload images challenging stereotypes and hoary cliches. Entries were submitted from photographers of all levels in 42 countries, uncovering a valuable new stream of content for Picfair’s publisher customers looking to tell African stories with conviction and authenticity.

With online news feeds becoming more crowded and competitive than ever, brands need to up their game in the battle to come out on top. Be bold, don’t be afraid to take risks which may very well reverse preconceptions you had about your audience, use time-saving design apps to develop a visual style for your brand, and capitalise on local, authentic content where you can.

Gemma is Content & Community Manager at Picfair, a modern-day photo marketplace on a mission to make image licensing easy. Gemma and her team are documenting Picfair’s global community stories, as well as producing content to help image buyers make a bigger impact with their visual storytelling. Gemma’s background is in digital marketing and she has worked in various advertising and digital agencies to help brands tell their stories in the ever-changing social media landscape. You can follow her on Twitter and connect on Linkedin
Sourced from Smart Insights.

 

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Will Surveillance Features be the Death of Social Media?

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Social media monitoring gives journalists more power to verify that stories coming in are real. However, it also gives others power to track where our kids are, right down to the exact address. Is it too much of a trade-off?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

While social media has wild benefits and is currently seen as the place to put ads in front of captive markets, there are uncomfortable trade-offs. Take for example, Snapchat. While this app is wildly popular with kids, tweens and 20-somethings, it has been criticised for a new feature that makes parents feel really panicked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQMxcbZ2iIg

The controversial Snap Map app enables Snapchat users to track their “friends.” This is the latest in a series of monitoring tools to be built on social media platforms. The Snap Map app has provoked widespread concern among parents, and protests from child protection agencies. So much so that boffins at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich decided to study the benefits and risks associated with the use of such technologies.

Snap Map enables users to monitor their friends’ movements, and determine – in real time – exactly where their posts are coming from (down to the address). Many social media users also expressed their indignation, referring to the app as ‘stalking software’.

“However, Snap Map is just one of a range of apps that allows social network users to be monitored without their knowledge and with pin-point accuracy,” says Professor Neil Thurman of LMU. “Indeed some of these apps far exceed Snap Map in their surveillance capabilities, and are able to track individuals over time and across multiple social networks.”

In his latest study, which has been published in Digital Journalism, Thurman lists a range of such apps – including Echosec, Dataminr, Picodash, and SAM. While Snapchat’s Snap Map is aimed at the public, many of the other social media monitoring apps are aimed at professional users, including the security forces, journalists, and marketeers.

Thurman analysed how journalists reacted to these new tools for locating and filtering content on social networks, and monitoring the activities and movements of its authors. It turns out that these apps are particularly useful in verification, enabling journalists to judge whether witness accounts were actually posted from the supposed scene of the action.

“These apps have been welcomed by some journalists who see them as an ‘early warning system'” says Thurman. But, he says, they also have consequences for users’ personal privacy. In the course of his study, he interviewed journalists who were given an opportunity to experiment with some of these apps professionally. One said that being able to track the locations of individual social media users felt “slightly morally wrong and stalkeresque.”

However, reservations like this are apparently not universal. “One of the apps my report describes – Geofeedia – was used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies, promoted as giving the police the power to “monitor” – via social media – trade union members, protesters, and activist groups, who the company described as being an overt threat. “The Geofeedia controversy led to its demise, with social networks refusing to persist in supplying the app with a pipeline of posts for fear of further negative publicity.”

According to an article in the business magazine Forbes, cited by Thurman, the sheer number of apps that have been built on their platforms makes it impossible for the leading social media networks to prevent this form of social surveillance.

“As we’ve seen with the launch of Snap Map, social media surveillance is not going to go away,” he warns. “Although we might now know how to go ‘ghost’ on Snapchat, how many of us know that our other social media posts could be betraying our whereabouts to the thousands of organisations around the world using social media monitoring apps most have never heard of?”

Does this make you think about where your marketing spend is going?

 

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8 signs social media is f*cking with your mental health

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By Kenya Foy.

o your social media feeds have you feeling down and like less than your typically fabulous self? It may be time to take a step back from the web and completely disconnect. A telltale sign that social media is screwing with your mental health is when what you absorb online begins to negatively impact how you feel in IRL. That much you probably know — but how does social media overdose look in real life?

Whether your preferred platform is Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, or a combination of all of them them, there’s plenty of evidence to support the fact that social media has the potential to damage mental health. Sure, science links selfie-snapping to happiness, but many of us are paying a heavy price when it comes to curating all those picture perfect images for followers, many whom we may never even get to know in reality.

Obviously, there are positive aspects to engaging online, but it’s also extremely important to recognize the signs that social media may be effing with your mental health.

1 You feel sad, stressed, drained, or depressed after being online.

via giphy

After scrolling through all your feeds, you might feel overwhelmed by a profound sense of sadness, envy, frustration or an intense loneliness that you can’t quite explain. However, it isn’t all in your head. Multiple studies and research have found a direct correlation between your mental health and social media use, including symptoms such as depression and lower self-esteem.

2 You struggle to define your own goals.

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You had solid plan to reach a particular goal — until you logged on. Now you can’t decide whether you want to build a brand, become a blogger, a musician, a photographer, or all of the above. And by the way, all of these career moves should’ve happened, like, yesterday according to what you’re picking up from the TL.

You had at least a semblance of direction before you checked out your Twitter feed, but now your brain is all bogged down to the point that you can’t separate your aspirations and plans from those of your online friends.

3 You constantly play the comparison game.

 

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Not that we needed the confirmation, but there’s scientific proof that comparing yourself to your Facebook friends is harmful to your mental health. There are a million reasons why we compare ourselves on social media, but no matter the cause, it’s a dangerous trap that many of us fall into. At some point, it becomes almost second nature to see someone else’s post or photo and immediately begin a mental rundown of how you do or don’t measure up to them.

Suddenly, whatever interesting/thrilling/inspiring activity they post online makes your life look like a total snoozefest with zero purpose. What’s worse is we tend to completely disregard the fact that people (including ourselves) intentionally curate the best images of themselves and their lives, and that #nofilter hashtag simply may not be truthful.

4 You feel guilty about what you share.

via giphy

Oopsies, you totally overshared or kinda sorta fudged the truth about that time you… Well, it’s out there for everyone to see so no need to go into detail. Either way, if sharing your world online is causing you to feel guilty or anxious, maybe consider scaling back and editing to only post things that make you feel positive and uplifted.

5 When you spend the majority of your time online.

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If you can’t disengage yourself from social media to be an active participant in your real life, social media can definitely take a toll on your mental health. Researchers have discovered that people who self-reported more social media use have higher self-reports of depression. Additionally, studies found a link between loneliness and increased Facebook use among first-year college students.

6 When you rely on likes, follows, or frequent engagement from others to boost your confidence.

via giphy
If someone you admire doesn’t like your post, you feel down in the dumps, and when you share a really cool photo that doesn’t earn a ton of likes, you find yourself questioning why you even posted it in the first place. Does anything you think/do/say/feel/like even matter?!

7 When you do EVERYTHING with social media in mind.

via giphy

You can’t enjoy a meal without thinking about how the lighting will look in a photo, every moment is a missed opportunity to frame for social media, and you’d prefer it if you spent the rest of your life communicating with people online instead of IRL. Ever again.

8When your social media starts to negatively affect your diet and body image.

According to experts, eating poorly can be an effect of social media use. Between the abundance of online detoxing trends, dieting crazes, and the barrage of photos of from your favorite Instagram fitness star, many are placing an incredible amount of pressure on themselves to mimic the #fitspo lifestyles they see online, going to dangerous extremes that lead to body dysmorphia, eating disorders, and overall body image insecurities.

Social media can be a great tool to connect with like-minded people, share your life and stay on top of trends, but if it becomes too overwhelming, prioritize your mental health by giving yourself permission to disconnect and detox.

By Kenya Foy

Sourced from Hello Giggles

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Email marketing up 83% since 2015 as B2B marketing grows by 200%

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By Laurie Fullerton

Never underestimate the power of email – a cornerstone for both traditional marketing and consumer-facing market strategies that has seen an 83% growth in B2B and B2C markets since 2015.

According to new research released by Salesforce, who polled 3,500 global marketing leaders, at either a manger level or higher position for its fourth annual State of Marketing report, email experienced the largest surge in consumer-facing marketing programs, with email use by B2C marketers rising 106%. This surge indicates that marketers may be testing new channels in conjunction with proven ones to find combinations that work for their consumers. Marketers also report higher levels of awareness, engagement, and acquisition when combining email with additional marketing channels according to Salesforce.

The Salesforce report also found that video advertising has experienced the largest two-year growth in B2B marketing, with video use growing 204%. Email was the second-highest advertising channel in growth for B2C marketers, but trailed video advertising’s growth of 141%.

Video advertising was closely followed by SMS/text messaging, a channel that grew 197% in the B2B market. B2B email marketing, on the other hand, has only grown 56% since 2015.

A marked trend among high-performing marketers is that they are 12.8 times more likely to combine marketing efforts across channels such as email, mobile, and social. On average, marketing leaders today say that 34% of their budget is spent on channels they didn’t know existed five years ago and they expect that to reach 40% by 2019.

The reports also suggests that about half (51%) of the emails are identical messages to what they have broadcast in other channels. This is considered to be a missed opportunity for most marketers who may not be evolving fast enough between email and other channels based on customer behaviors or actions.

Additionally, 51% of respondents said their emails contain the same messages as other marketing channels, while 29% of email messages evolve across channels and customer actions.

As in previous report iterations, Salesforce analyzed the differences between self-identifying high-performing and low-performing marketers.

By Laurie Fullerton

Sourced from THE DRUM

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Instagram – Boost Your Social Media & Digital Marketing

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Social media – who doesn’t know about it? In this digital tech savvy world, social media has gained a massive toehold. Various social media platforms are explored in-depth for digital marketing. No doubt, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are the most receptive social platforms for business; however, various platforms, including Instagram, are preferred for various marketing activities; they are:

 

Facebook dominates among all social media marketing platforms as a source of social traffic and sales.

Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms. The name Instagram is derived from a combination of “Instant Photo” and “Telegram.” Instagram, an incredible social media platform for sharing pictures, was launched in the Spring Season of 2010. In a less than decade, this platform has grown into a powerful social media force, not to be overlooked.

Since 2012, Instagram is owned by Facebook. This acquisition of Instagram by Facebook shows where the digital marketing trends are heading. Since both social media platforms are owned by the same owner, you can easily connect these two to boost your digital marketing strategies.

In the recent past, Instagram has literally competed extremely well with the dominant top four platforms viz. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest. Instagram has more than 500 million users.

Instagram is a great platform for online marketing since it is more popular on mobile; moreover, mobile is gaining huge traction day by day by both users and search engines.

People are prioritizing visual content over plain, and hence, Instagram is considered as one of the most effective social media marketing platforms for the coming days. As a business owner, you should use Instagram to market your products and services. Apart from product images, you can also share videos. Its ‘LIVE recording and sharing’ feature is getting way popular bit by bit.

Explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform

Social media management starts with the base of your followers and followings. To boost your Instagram marketing, first of all, you need to boost your followers on a constant and stable basis. The more people are aware of your brand, the greater your chances are to potentially reach your target audience.

Let’s run through the tips and tactics how to explore Instagram as a social media marketing platform to make your brand more popular.

1. Hashtags – use unique, crisp, meaningful, and attractive

Hashtags are not only important for Twitter; they also play a prominent role on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google plus.

According to Dominique Jackson, the beauty of hashtags for Instagram is they make your content discoverable and increase your chances of engagement.

It’s a big way of how users can find you through their mobile Instagram searches. As compared to Twitter, here you’re not restricted by character count. You can include a few tags in your posts to get connected. While deciding on hashtag for branding, it is advisable to create brand specific hashtags. Try to keep it as unique and crisp as possible.

Make usage of both sort of hashtags; brand specific hashtags and community specific hashtags. Brand hashtags help you to popularize your brand and community hashtags help you to become more discoverable.

Try multiple variant of hashtags such as brand specific hashtags, general hashtags, and trending hashtags, to get noticed in searches.

Examples of brand specific hashtags are:

#PutACanOnIt—Red Bull

#ShareaCoke—Coca Cola

#SpeakBeautiful – Dove

#TweetFromTheSeat—Charmin

#OreoHorrorStories—Oreo

#WantAnR8—Audi

An ideal general hashtag should be prepared with two words over a single word to make it meaningful e.g. rather than #QL, #AskQL is a better hashtag.

2. Emojis – use the right Emojis to keep your audience engaged

In any sort of online communication, Emojis is the best substitute for the absence of facial expression, tonal inflection, and body language.

Nearly 50 percent of all captions and comments on Instagram now have an emoji or two.

 
The same source has mentioned that posts with Emojis bring 17% higher interaction rates on Instagram.Based on the fact that 80% of smartphone users regularly use Emojis in their daily communication, their use has been quoted as the highest growing ‘language’ in some of the countries across the globe. Worldwide brands are obviously energized and enthusiastic to cash on this new form of communication.

3. Interaction – consistently interact with your followers

Once you get follower/s, do not shy away to stay engaged. Constantly post impressive content which your followers find relevant to their interest and business. Avoid throwing random posts, i.e. once in a week or ten in a go, as far as possible. At least, twice a day posting is requisite. Once your followers start increasing, you can start posting three to four times a day. Consistency matters most!

According to Anthony Carbone, “If you stick to a niche and show authenticity and passion in your posts, you will find a strong following”

The more people you can dynamically involve and persuade to comment on your content (images/videos), the better for you. Since, it will inculcate the interest for others who want to contribute or comment on your content as well.

A good example on how to stay engaged with your customers is well set by Starbucks. It is considered as one of the top brands on Instagram. Starbucks often appreciates their followers / customers by giving a shout-out with cool images. This is how they had updated their Facebook cover image using Instagram post.

4. Networking – create a positive community

Once you will have an active profile, you will surely start getting followers of your niche. But the main question here is retention! You need to retain them as your dedicated followers.

This is, in fact, the most important, most tricky, and most significant matter for any social media account. You need to build a network of your domain and keep them engaged. Interact with them, share their posts, give opinion / comments on their posts, ask them relevant questions, reply to their questions, and keep having all such sort of communication. In addition, stay away from controversial posts. It can badly impact your brand value. Build a vast network of your industry and create a positive community through your posts and engagement.

Follow your followers and work hard to turn your following into followers.

5. Amount of information – do not bore your audience with information overload

No doubt consistency is inevitable, but if it lacks harmony and relevancy of content, it results in either spamming or information overload. Keep your frequency correct and consistent. Rather than preaching them, engage with them. It’s better to ask sometimes, they should feel being valued. Dig out meaningful interaction from them.

The ideal proportion of posts based on followers suggested by industry experts are:

6. Free tools – make the most use of Instagram marketing tools that are free

Instagram also provides free analytics tools for business profiles; prudently and sensibly make the most use of them to market your products and services.

For example, “insights”, an analytical tool, provides you access to engagement data. If your account is initially signed up as a personal account for your business, do get switched to a business profile. That’s how you can cash advantage of the free tools that businesses use to track the shape of their brand on Instagram. ‘Insights’ assists you understand your audience, provides you data on posts with most impressions, engagements, and shares. Ultimately, you will conclude which posts are effective and which ones are not working well with your audience.

With SocialBakers, you can get a FREE report on the most engaged Instagram posts. If your Instagram followers are below 25,000, you can use Simply Measured to check your highly popularized posts.

Alternatively, there are many other scheduling tools available. With the help of tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Autogrammer, and others post your content when your audiences are online and earn more engagement.

7. Promotion – utilize cross posting function

As a business, one normally stays active and present on all possible platforms. Now, practically speaking, not all your Twitter followers are your LinkedIn buddies and not all your Instagram followers know about your presence on Google Plus.

Here, to expand your relevant reach and knock your target audience from all possible angles, you need to do cross promotion of your own posts.

A research conducted by Harvard Business School reported that retailers using cross-media marketing are more profitable than those that use only one channel for promotion.

Invite your followers from other networks to visit your Instagram profile and build your network. Whatever posts get better engagement on Twitter or Facebook, repost them on Instagram too and vice-versa.

8. Content – repurpose content from other related sources

As stated in earlier paragraphs, effective and successful Instagram marketing

needs consistent posts related to your products and services. It is well obvious that every time coming up with creative and engaging posts is not as easy as it seems. That’s where re-purposing content or curating content offers a hand of help.

As per Amanda DiSilvestro, Content repurposing is your hidden online marketing gem.

It’s absolutely fine to use others content which is relevant to your products and services provided you either have tagged or mentioned the original poster. Tagging is the best way, you need to give the credit to the original creator; and that’s how it becomes a completely ethical marketing practice and does not fall under the black clouds of plagiarism.

Tagging provides you with another major benefit of engagement. You may receive like or repost from the person whom you have tagged and your post can easily reach to their audience. You need to ensure that the posts which you wither repurpose or curate are relevant to your followers.

9. Engage with influencers – you need them!!

According to KISSmetrics, 70% of Instagram users have already looked up various brands on the platform and actually want to consume their content

Here comes power of Instagram influencers in the picture. Instagram beats all other massive social networks like Facebook and Twitter when it comes to influencer marketing. This is because the other platforms share information whereas Instagram is about sharing experiences with the help of visual content.

Your content shared, acknowledged, or praised by any influencer can embark a real positive image on your followers.

To reach on peak in no time, we suggest you make a use of tool, Revfluence. The Revfluence platform enables you to create original content with influential content creators that can drive new customers and followers for your brand.

Closing thoughts

If you have online business, why can’t you have a strong social media presence too? Social media marketing via Instagram can assist you achieve your targeted business goals with much of the ease.

Instagram has very dedicated users, who often use it daily. It provides a great social media marketing platform to reach potential customers across the world. Use Instagram extensively and appropriately, and grow bigger!

By

Sophie helps QL Tech look good on the online platform and helps the company reach out far and wide in the online realm. Being a SEO Professional and a part-time blogger, she is responsible for producing content that is optimized to ensure maximum reach. With over five years of expertise in the field of SEO and digital marketing, Sophie also delves into blogging, online reputation management, and social media marketing.

Sourced from QL Tech

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Small Businesses Say Getting Fans and Followers on Social Media is a Struggle

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By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Canadian company Little Dragon Media recently surveyed 500 small business owners and asked: “What part of your company’s digital marketing do you struggle with the most?” The survey discovered that “Getting fans and followers on social media” was the most popular response, overthrowing SEO.

Female business owners struggle with social media, while their male counterparts struggle with SEO more.

“The results were a bit surprising to me,” states Amine Rahal, CEO of Little Dragon Media. “When we launched the survey, I assumed that most businesses would choose SEO as being the hardest, since it can take years to rank high organically on search engines, especially in competitive niches.”

“Ranking high on search engines” was the second most popular option, measuring at 26.2%. Blogging came in third at 19.4%.

Reputation management swept in fourth swallowing up 13.4% of the survey pie, and “Finding a trustworthy agency to help us” came in last place measuring at 11%, suggesting that this was a non-issue for many businesses.

Social media marketing’s lead over SEO signals that small business owners today highly value social media community development. They also show signs of struggle in efforts to figure out how to get the best results when compared to SEO, an established digital marketing service which is now also influenced by social media community development.

According to Rahal, survey results show how social media has swept into the forefront of the overall digital marketing landscape.

Says survey moderator Monica Guan, “In the current digital era, having a strong social media presence and ranking on Google are the best and low-cost ways to reach your local audience. Just by the fact that business owners are struggling with these aspects show that they do realise the importance of these factors to their business, but may not have the know-how to succeed in these areas.”

55.7% female small business owners report social media community development being the most difficult struggle when compared to their male counterparts who reported at 44.3%.

Guan says, “Female business owners may care more for the social media of their business and sees it as a priority that needs to be improved on. This shows that not only do many business owners require more education about how to use their social media and gain more fans and followers, but more education to male business owners on the importance of social media to their business.”

The full survey is here.

 

 

 

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Twitter chief Jack Dorsey: ‘We’re doubling down on adtech’

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By Jennifer Faull.

witter’s co-founder and chief executive Jack Dorsey said he plans to “double down” on adtech investment, saying the company has learned lessons from past mistakes that could see it pivot towards forging partnerships with third parties rather than acquiring or building its own offering.

“Advertising is our business and technology is how we manifest that,” said Dorsey at the Cannes Lions festival today (21 June.) “We’re definitely not out of the adtech investment phase. We’re doubling down. Especially with the hire of Bruce [Falck]. He’s taken right to it.”

After an exhaustive search, Bruce Falck joined the company earlier this year as general manager of revenue product, reporting directly to Dorsey (previously he was the chief executive of adtech outfit Turn). That hire was very much seen as a push by Twitter to bring a advertisers a more targeted and measurable offering as well as stand up against the Google and Facebook, which control in excess of 70% of the market.

Falck joined having spent much of his career working for adtech businesses. Prior to his tenure at Turn, he served as chief operating officer at video ad company BrightRoll and developed display advertising products at Google.

According to reports, not confirmed by Twitter, it has since been reconsidering several of its advertising products, including the direct response business, parts of the Promoted Tweets product, and TellApart, the digital ad platform it acquired in 2015.

Speaking on what has went wrong in the past on the advertising side, Dorsey said that it simply “didn’t always prioritize [it] in the right way.”

“We acquired companies or platforms and didn’t give them the options that they needed or tie it together with everything else that we’re doing,” he said. “And that doesn’t set up the acquisition for success. So, we’re [now] being really deliberate in what we look at and why.”

He went on to say that moving forward it would look to “buy versus build” its adtech offering, although he did add that it may also look to pursue this strategy by partnering with third-party tie-ups.

“We’ve tended to build a lot in the company. When we started it was before there was a public cloud that we could use and that set the DNA of the company. But we need to change that mindset. We don’t need to build everything, but we also don’t need to acquire everything. We can go through third parties and just really focus on what our strengths are,” he said.

Rebuilding from the inside out

At the beginning of the year, Twitter set about on a rebuild of the company to “get back to basics” and redefine itself around one core mission – being “the best and fastest place to see what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about.”

In a three-pronged attack, it set about re-establishing its execution of the product (“we needed a lot more discipline”), better marketing to “tell the story of what Twitter is” and focusing “our energy on our strengths” on the users already had, rather than trying to attract more.

During this reset phase, it was forced to layoff nearly a tenth of its global workforce – around 350 people – which Dorsey said was one of his darkest periods at the company.

“It was heartbreaking,” he explained. “I remember the night before, I hand wrote thank you cards to everyone we were letting go. I was up until 2am although, unfortunately, there was mishap with mailing and we couldn’t get them to everyone on time. But it was really the toughest thing. It’s still so painful to think about and I wasn’t expecting to do anything like that in my life.”

However, he said it’s now seeing results from the changes. Twitter surprised analysts with a strong performance for the first quarter for the year, seeing a spike in both user growth and earning.

“It now gives us breathing room to take bigger steps and do some non-linear things,” he hinted. “We want to bring a whole lot more creativity back into the organization and more playfulness with what we’re focused on. I’m really excited about this year.”

For more news from Cannes Lions follow the dedicated news stream on The Drum website

Feature Image: Jack Dorsey, Twitter co-founder and chief executive, was speaking at Cannes Lions 2017

By Jennifer Faull

Jen Faull is deputy news editor at The Drum with a remit to cover the latest developments in the retail and FMCG sectors. Based in London, she has interviewed major business figures including top marketers from Mondelez, Unilever, Tesco, and Lidl.

Sourced from THE DRUM

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Positive Emotions Are More Contagious Than Negative Ones on Twitter

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Sharing happy news with your Twitter followers? Odds are, they’re more likely to share it than a negative post according to a recent study.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

An analysis of 3,800 randomly chosen Twitter users found that emotions spread virally through Twitter feeds – with positive emotions far more likely to spread than negative ones.

“What you tweet and share on social media outlets matters. Often, you’re not just expressing yourself – you’re influencing others,” said Emilio Ferrara, lead author of the study and a computer scientist at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering’s Information Sciences Institute. Ferrara collaborated with Zeyao Yang of Indiana University.

Ferrara and Yang used an algorithm that measures the emotional value of tweets, rating them as positive, negative or neutral. They compared the sentiment of a user’s tweet to the ratio of the sentiments of all of the tweets that appeared in that user’s feed during the hour before. Higher-than-average numbers of positive tweets in the feed were associated with the production of positive tweets, and higher-than-average numbers of negative tweets were associated with the production of negative tweets.

About 20 percent of Twitter users were deemed highly susceptible to what the researchers described as “emotional contagion” – with more than half of their tweets affected. Those users were four times more likely to be affected by positive tweets than negative ones.

Those least likely to be affected by emotional contagion were still a little less than twice as likely to be affected by positive tweets as negative ones. Over all users, regardless of susceptibility, positive emotions were found to be more contagious than negative emotions.

The study builds on decades of research demonstrating first that emotions can be spread through person-to-person contacts, and now finding that they can spread through online interactions as well.

Facebook drew criticism last year for attempting to demonstrate a similar effect by tweaking 700,000 users’ news feeds. Unlike that experiment, Ferrara and Yang did not manipulate what Twitter users were experiencing – rather, they simply observed what was already happening and analysed it.

So what does that mean for marketers? Positive news tweets are more likely to go viral than negative tweets…especially if they contain positive emotions! Get that smiley emoji ready for lauch!

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What Kind of Facebook User Are You?

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There are selfies, relationship builders, town criers, and window shoppers.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

On an average day, 1.28 billion people check it. Monthly? Nearly 2 billion. And according to one recent estimate, the average Facebook user spends 35 minutes a day on the platform – which makes for a whole lot of daily and monthly minutes.

In a recently published study, a trio of Brigham Young University communications professors explores why.

“What is it about this social-media platform that has taken over the world?” asked lead author Tom Robinson. “Why are people so willing to put their lives on display? Nobody has ever really asked the question, ‘Why do you like this?'”

Based on subject responses, the research team identified four categories of Facebook users: relationship builders, town criers, selfies and window shoppers.

Relationship Builders

Relationship builders post, respond to others’ posts and use additional Facebook features primarily in an attempt to fortify relationships that exist beyond their virtual world. “They use it as an extension of their real life, with their family and real-life friends,” Robinson said. People in this group identified strongly with such statements as “Facebook helps me to express love to my family and lets my family express love to me.”

Town Criers

Town criers, on the other hand, experience a much larger gap between their real and virtual worlds. Unconcerned with sharing photos, stories or other information about themselves, they instead “want to inform everybody about what’s going on,” Robinson said. Like town criers from days of yore, “they’re pushing out information.” They repost news stories, announce events – but may otherwise neglect their profile pages, preferring to update family and friends through alternative means.

Selfies

Selfies use Facebook to self-promote. Like relationship builders, they post pictures, videos and text updates – but unlike relationship builders, they’re focused on getting attention, likes and comments. Study participants in this category identified highly with the statement “The more ‘like’ notification alarms I receive, the more I feel approved by my peers.” Selfies, said study co-author Kris Boyle, use the platform “to present an image of themselves, whether it’s accurate or not.”

Window Shoppers

Window shoppers, like town criers, feel a sense of social obligation to be on Facebook but rarely post personal information. Unlike town criers, these users, said study co-author Clark Callahan, “want to see what other people are doing. It’s the social-media equivalent of people watching.” Window shoppers identified with such statements as “I can freely look at the Facebook profile of someone I have a crush on and know their interests and relationship status.”

Though previous Facebook-related research has explored users with relationship-builder and selfie characteristics, Robinson said, the town criers and window shoppers were an unexpected find. “Nobody had really talked about these users before, but when we thought about it, they both made a lot of sense.”

Facebook users may identify to some degree with more than one category. Boyle noted that most people have at least some selfie tendencies, for example. But users typically identify more with one than others. “Everybody we’ve talked to will say, ‘I’m part of this and part of this, but I’m mostly this.'”

 

Photo credit: Nate Edwards/BYU Photo

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Social Media Data Crunching Contains Pitfalls for Marketers

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Researchers urged to hone methods for mining social-media data, or investment in marketing will be wasted.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A growing number of people, from marketers to academic researchers, are mining social media data to learn about both online and offline human behaviour. In recent years, studies have claimed the ability to predict everything from summer blockbusters to fluctuations in the stock market.

But mounting evidence of flaws in many of these studies points to a need for researchers to be wary of serious pitfalls that arise when working with huge social media data sets. This is according to computer scientists at McGill University and Carnegie Mellon University.

Such erroneous results can have huge implications on data gleaned from social media. A lot of marketing investment could be placed in the wrong areas.

The challenges involved in using data mined from social media include:

  • Different social media platforms attract different users – Pinterest, for example, is dominated by females aged 25-34 – yet researchers rarely correct for the distorted picture these populations can produce.
  • Publicly available data feeds used in social media research don’t always provide an accurate representation of the platform’s overall data – and researchers are generally in the dark about when and how social media providers filter their data streams.
  • The design of social media platforms can dictate how users behave and, therefore, what behaviour can be measured. For instance, on Facebook the absence of a “dislike” button makes negative responses to content harder to detect than positive “likes.”
  • Large numbers of spammers and bots, which masquerade as normal users on social media, get mistakenly incorporated into many measurements and predictions of human behaviour.
  • Researchers often report results for groups of easy-to-classify users, topics, and events, making new methods seem more accurate than they actually are. For instance, efforts to infer political orientation of Twitter users achieve barely 65% accuracy for typical users – even though studies (focusing on politically active users) have claimed 90% accuracy.

Many of these problems have well-known solutions from other fields such as epidemiology, statistics, and machine learning. The common thread in all these issues is the need for researchers to be more acutely aware of what they’re actually analysing when working with social media data.

Social scientists have honed their techniques and standards to deal with this sort of challenge before. Says Derek Ruths, an assistant professor in McGill’s School of Computer Science, “The infamous ‘Dewey Defeats Truman’ headline of 1948 stemmed from telephone surveys that under-sampled Truman supporters in the general population. Rather than permanently discrediting the practice of polling, that glaring error led to today’s more sophisticated techniques, higher standards, and more accurate polls. Now, we’re poised at a similar technological inflection point. By tackling the issues we face, we’ll be able to realise the tremendous potential for good promised by social media-based research.”

 

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