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Advertising in Fashion Magazines is Dead to us Now

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

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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Understanding Facebook Emoticons Can Impact How You Advertise on Social Media

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Not all “likes” are equal.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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Small Businesses Use Social Media Instead of a Website, Despite Risks

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A new survey indicates that 1 in 5 small businesses use social media in place of a website. Many assume a website is cost-prohibitive and may not consider the risks of not having one.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

More than one-third (36%) of small businesses do not have a website, according to the websites section of the fourth annual Small Business Survey conducted by Clutch, a B2B research firm. One in five small businesses (21%) selectively use social media instead of a website in an effort to engage customers.

The survey indicates that small businesses consider cost a bigger concern than the potential repercussions of not having a website.

 

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram attract small businesses by cultivating a highly engaged user base. However, relying solely on social media may be a risky strategy for businesses.

“Whenever you put all of your eggs into someone else’s basket, it’s risky,” said Judd Mercer, Creative Director of Elevated Third, a web development firm. “If Facebook changes their algorithm, there’s nothing you can do.”

Facebook recently announced changes that potentially increase the risk of using social media in place of a website. The social media platform plans to prioritise posts from family and friends over posts from brands.

This new policy may make it more difficult for small businesses to reach their audiences through social media. As a result, websites are expected to regain importance among businesses – as long as cost is not considered an obstacle.

Among small businesses that do not currently have a website, more than half (58%) plan to build one in 2018.

Some Small Businesses Say Website Cost is Prohibitive, But Others Cite Costs of $500 or Less

More than a quarter (26%) of small businesses surveyed say cost is a key factor that prevents them from having a website. However, nearly one-third of small businesses with websites (28%) report spending $500 or less.

Small businesses may not be aware that some web development agencies offer packages that defray costs by dividing website construction into multiple phases or sliding rates for small businesses. “You don’t necessarily need to launch with your first-generation website,” said Vanessa Petersen, Executive Director of Strategy at ArtVersion Interactive Agency, a web design and branding agency based in Chicago. “Maybe just start small.”

Mobile-Friendly Websites Becoming Standard
Businesses that do have websites are moving en mass to mobile friendly ones, the survey found. Over 90% of respondents said their company websites will be optimised for viewing on mobile devices by the end of this year.

In addition to the 81% of company websites that are already optimised for mobile, an additional 13% that say they plan to optimise for mobile in 2018.

Clutch’s 2018 Small Business Survey included 351 small business owners. The small businesses surveyed have between 1 and 500 employees, with 55% indicating that they have 10 or fewer employees.

To read the full report and source the survey data, click here.

 

 

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Three things to avoid in a corporate social media campaign

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By Hajra Rahim.

Here are some of the main mistakes that big businesses make when it comes to using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the rest.

Social media is a vital tool for large corporates to market their products and communicate with their vast audiences, but even with big budgets and top teams, they can still get it totally wrong.

For example, Charlie Cottrell, head of editorial at media agency,
We Are Social, thinks that big brands are still offending audiences on social media with worrying frequency.

Part of this stems from them being told that a millennial audience prefers companies that stand for something and reflect their progressive values, she explains. It’s likely because of this advice that campaigns have gone after stories with a strong social or cultural theme.

However, businesses run the risk of being accused of exploitation by not having a genuine connection to the cultural subject matter, thinks Ms Cottrell.

She says that “it’s better to be an ally, not a protagonist, and it’s important to remember that people have fought and suffered for lifetimes to see change on subjects such as civil and marriage rights.”

Brands and agencies must ensure that teams reflect the breadth of contemporary culture and stop trying to guess at it, she adds.

Don’t oversell

Mícheál Nagle, head of social and digital content at Paddy Power, advises businesses not to populate their social accounts with constant offers and products.

“Nobody wants to follow a business that does that,” he explains.

So what does a good social media content strategy look like? Paddy Power tries to create fun posts that engage with customers for 80pc of the time – and then try to upsell with products or offers for the remaining 20pc.

Just because memes are popular and easy to share, doesn’t mean that you shouldDavid Brady, TalkTalk

“It’s about cultivating a value exchange between a business and a consumer,” says TalkTalk’s senior digital marketing manager, David Brady. “If it’s not relevant, it’s not engaging.”

Mr Brady says that firms can find out what’s relevant to consumers by profiling them based on behaviours and needs (not by sales targets) and by asking what they need and how your business can help.

“You can then combine your first-party data with the wealth of personal and interest-based social data,” he says.

Above all, listen to what your customers are saying, he adds:

“Make it engaging by educating them about how your product or service solves a problem – don’t just shout about its features.

“Be conversational, but to the point.”

And remember, he says: you’re representing your business and its values, so just because memes are popular and easy to share, it doesn’t mean that you should.

Don’t blur the personal-professional line

Nick Masters, head of online at PwC, says that it’s important to consider the difference between a corporate social media account that shares company updates and info, and one manned by vocal or visible members of staff.

It’s an issue, he thinks, when employees post through company accounts, signing off posts with their initials or saying as such at the beginning of their shift.

Deliberately or not, accounts run in this way can become too
chatty (“cheers!”) and personal (“Hi Joe, love the post!”)
which Mr Masters thinks can sound inauthentic.

He says: “By their nature, organisations can’t express emotions or engage in public debate.

“We encourage PwC staff to have a personal presence on social media and engage directly through their accounts.

“It’s about real people responding in a more appropriate way.”

Feature Image: Implement an 80/20 rule, says Paddy Power’s Mícheál Nagle: ‘engage 80pc of the time, then upsell with products or offers for the remaining 20pc’ Credit: PA/Dominic Lipinski

By Hajra Rahim

Sourced from The Telegraph

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The Media is Now the Least-Trusted Institution Globally

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So, which citizens trust their media the most? And the least?

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Let’s start with the USA. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer reveals that trust in the U.S. has suffered the largest-ever-recorded drop in the survey’s history among the general population. Trust among the general population fell nine points to 43, placing it in the lower quarter of the 28-country Trust Index. It is now the lowest of the 28 countries surveyed, below Russia and South Africa.

The collapse of trust in the U.S. is driven by a staggering lack of faith in government, which fell 14 points to 33 percent among the general population, and 30 points to 33 percent among the informed public. The remaining institutions of business, media and NGOs also experienced declines of 10 to 20 points. These decreases have all but eliminated last year’s 21-point trust gap between the general population and informed public in the U.S.

“The United States is enduring an unprecedented crisis of trust,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman. “This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economic issue or catastrophe like the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, it’s the ultimate irony that it’s happening at a time of prosperity, with the stock market and employment rates in the U.S. at record highs. The root cause of this fall is the lack of objective facts and rational discourse.”

Conversely, China finds itself atop the Trust Index for both the general population (74) and the informed public (83). Institutions within China saw significant increases in trust led by government, which jumped eight points to 84 percent among the general population, and three points to 89 percent within the informed public. Joining China at the top of the Trust Index are India, Indonesia, UAE and Singapore.

For the first time media is the least trusted institution globally. In 22 of the 28 countries surveyed it is now distrusted. The demise of confidence in the Fourth Estate is driven primarily by a significant drop in trust in platforms, notably search engines and social media. Sixty-three percent of respondents say they do not know how to tell good journalism from rumour or falsehoods or if a piece of news was produced by a respected media organisation. The lack of faith in media has also led to an inability to identify the truth (59 percent), trust government leaders (56 percent) and trust business (42 percent).

This year saw a revival of faith in experts and decline in peers. Technical (63 percent) and academic (61 percent) experts distanced themselves as the most credible spokesperson from “a person like yourself,” which dropped six points to an all-time low of 54 percent.

“In a world where facts are under siege, credentialed sources are proving more important than ever,” said Stephen Kehoe, Global chair, Reputation. “There are credibility problems for both platforms and sources. People’s trust in them is collapsing, leaving a vacuum and an opportunity for bona fide experts to fill.”

Business is now expected to be an agent of change. The employer is the new safe house in global governance, with 72 percent of respondents saying that they trust their own company. And 64 percent believe a company can take actions that both increase profits and improve economic and social conditions in the community where it operates.

This past year saw CEO credibility rise sharply by seven points to 44 percent after a number of high-profile business leaders voiced their positions on the issues of the day. Nearly two-thirds of respondents say they want CEOs to take the lead on policy change instead of waiting for government, which now ranks significantly below business in trust in 20 markets. This show of faith comes with new expectations; building trust (69 percent) is now the No. 1 job for CEOs, surpassing producing high-quality products and services (68 percent).

“Silence is a tax on the truth,” said Edelman. “Trust is only going to be regained when the truth moves back to centre stage. Institutions must answer the public’s call for providing factually accurate, timely information and joining the public debate. Media cannot do it alone because of political and financial constraints. Every institution must contribute to the education of the populace.”

Other key findings from the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer include:

  • Technology (75 percent) remains the most trusted industry sector followed by Education (70 percent), professional services (68 percent) and transportation (67 percent). Financial services (54 percent) was once again the least trusted sector along with consumer packaged goods (60 percent) and automotive (62 percent).
  • Companies headquartered in Canada (68 percent), Switzerland (66 percent), Sweden (65 percent) and Australia (63 percent) are most trusted. The least trusted country brands are Mexico (32 percent), India (32 percent), Brazil (34 percent) and China (36 percent). Trust in brand U.S. (50 percent) dropped five points, the biggest decline of the countries surveyed.
  • Nearly seven in 10 respondents worry about fake news and false information being used as a weapon.
  • Exactly half of those surveyed indicate that they interact with mainstream media less than once a week, while 25 percent said they read no media at all because it is too upsetting. And the majority of respondents believe that news organizations are overly focused on attracting large audiences (66 percent), breaking news (65 percent) and politics (59 percent).

It’s a brave new world, and we as marketers must realise that placing any marketing cash with distrusted media outlets could mean a very big waste of our advertising spending power.

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How Twitter Made Me A Marketing Pro

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By Susanna Gebauer

A few years back when we founded our publishing platform exploreB2B I had my first contact with Twitter. And to be honest, I had no clue. I created my personal Twitter account for the single purpose of giving our new company account a first follower. I did not plan to use my personal account for the simple reason that I did not know what I know now about Twitter.

If I had known six years back what I know today, I would have created my Twitter account the minute we decided on founding a company and I would have started to build a following actively. And this seemingly simple and unimportant step would have solved (or helped to solve) all our marketing problems we encountered while building exploreB2B.To market successfully, I had to learn Twitter. Twitter made me a marketing pro and enabled me to grow traffic for any business without advertising it

Do you believe that Twitter is not that important to marketing? You are right: Twitter may not necessarily be the most important marketing channel. That is what we thought, too. So we tried everything else first:

  • PR: we threw a lot of money out the window by paying for a PR agency that did not give us any results at all
  • Google Advertising: We worked directly together with Google. One of their Adwords experts tried and failed to provide us with the success we needed
  • LinkedIn and Facebook Advertising: This gave us some success, but our budget was limited, and this could only provide us with an initial push but was not the way to scale our business
  • Social Media Marketing on various channels: We were no experts, we had no strategy. Results were meager, and our presence was growing too slow

So, it was a simple need that made us learn marketing. We had to figure out Twitter, which is a reliable channel once you figured out the fundamental processes. And these processes work for everyone. Plus you can do everything without a huge budget. We never paid one cent for advertising on Twitter.

About two years after starting exploreB2B my Twitter account had around 500 followers. Looking at Twitter you will find many accounts like that: With a handful of followers, growing very slowly. 500 followers on my account are not huge, and it shows one thing: I still had no clue how to build a following on Twitter. And it is not enough for real impact.

So: How did I grow my Twitter account to almost 200k followers?

Content and Guest Posts for growing on Twitter

We started to engage in content marketing. That was the first step towards success on Twitter. Because on Twitter, you need content to be successful. Twitter and content are a match made in marketing heaven. Without content you have nothing to tweet about, you have nothing to provide value with. You can curate content to grow your account, but you cannot have marketing success without your content.

In addition to publishing content on our site (the publishing platform exploreB2B), we wrote guest posts, and I learned to utilize the author bio for Twitter growth. Some of my best-running guest posts helped me gain a few hundred new followers for my Twitter account.

But that still was not the solution to our marketing problems.

Steady growth

Jonathan then figured out the way some of the most famous social media influencers used (and some still use) to grow their Twitter account. It is called the follow-unfollow algorithm. At first glance this routine sounds pretty straight forward: You follow people you want to follow you, some of them will follow you back. You unfollow the ones who do not follow you back and repeat the process.

The secret to success with the follow- unfollow routine lies in the targeting. The better you target your followers, the more people will follow you back, and the more of your new followers will be interested in your content and engage with it.

There is much more you can do on Twitter to grow:

Conversations are a great way to connect. Twitter is the place where you can talk to almost everyone from influencer to a newbie. Utilizing these possibilities will help you get followers, but it can also get you guest post opportunities, interview partners, business partners or even clients.

Back when we were building exploreB2B we were looking for two things: Traffic and new signups for the platform. For traffic, we just shared the great content published on the platform. Getting signups was a little more tricky. In the end, something that many consider spam, proved to be the key to unlocking growth for the publishing platform. We used the direct messages to invite people to publish on the platform.

Direct messages can be a very efficient tool. But it takes more than a single sales message to be successful with direct messages. You need to test different messages, and you need to figure out what your audience likes. For us, the simple message: “We invite you to publish on exploreB2B” proved to be very efficient. Apparently, a lot of people on Twitter were looking for exactly that: A place to publish their great content to find a larger audience.

The combination of a fast-growing Twitter account and an automated direct message sent to every new follower put us on our path to success with exploreB2B. We even found a way to scale this method.

Learn more about using Twitter to build a business! Learn how to “Grow Your Twitter Account Like A Pro” with our ebook.

twitter-ebook

Finding Success Too Late and Facing failure

In the end, it took us too long to figure all of this out. We had taken too long until we managed growth for the platform. We had to face defeat. Closing down the platform was inevitable. It didn’t need to come like this if only we had known what we know about Twitter now when we started out. If we had found our path to growth on Twitter and with our business faster, we would probably not have had to give it all up.

How about doing it again with a different kind of business?

We had to give up the publishing platform. But we still learned a lot. We made the best out of it and used the same methods again to grow The Social Ms. We took our new blog in roughly half a year from a new blog with a handful of readers to over 40.000 visitors in March 2015 – in one of the most crowded niches on the Internet: Social Media Marketing. And a large part of that traffic came from Twitter.

And what I love most about Twitter: These methods work and they are accessible to everyone. There is no need for a huge advertising budget. In truth, you do not require any budget at all – apart from your own time. These methods work for almost any niche because you can find an audience on Twitter for virtually any niche. You will see first results fast, you do not need to wait months or years for some impact to encourage your efforts. And once you figured out how to utilize Twitter, you can use your Twitter presence to help you grow on other social networks, too.

By Susanna Gebauer

Sourced from The Social Ms

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Twitter warns it may strip users of their ‘verified’ status as it rethinks who deserves the blue badge

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  • Twitter is reviewing all of its verified accounts and plans to remove verification from accounts that don’t adhere to its new rules.
  • Verified badges won’t be given to any accounts until Twitter completely revamps its verification program.
  • The company was met with backlash recently for verifying the organizer of August’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Twitter said that it was conducting a wide-sweeping review of its verified accounts with the goal of removing verification from accounts that don’t adhere to its new policies.

The move follows recent backlash Twitter received for awarding its coveted blue “verified” badge to the organizer of August’s white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. Twitter stopped verifying accounts altogether in response to the outcry.

“Verification has long been perceived as an endorsement,” Twitter said in a series of tweets on Wednesday. “This perception became worse when we opened up verification for public submissions and verified people who we in no way endorse.”

Twitter’s newly-updated guidelines for verified accounts say the company “reserves the right to remove verification at any time without notice,” and that removal could occur for actions like “misleading people” with fake names, promoting hate speech or violence, and harassing others.

Twitter started notifying users of their verification removal via email on Wednesday. One of the first accounts to lose its blue checkmark was Laura Loomer’s, the far-right activist whom Uber and Lyft recently banned following her complaints about Muslim drivers.

Other accounts that appeared to have lost their checkmarks on Wednesday included known white nationalist Richard Spencer and the organizer of Charlottesville’s white supremacist rally, Jason Kessler.

By clamping down on verified accounts, Twitter is attempting to stymie the mounting criticism it’s historically faced for not effectively combating abuse and hate speech on its network.

Twitter said that its verification program would remain paused until it revamps the criteria and system it uses to verify accounts.

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Feature Image:  Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Getty      

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Sourced from BUSINESS INSIDER UK

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As Facebook Live video dreams fade, publishers look again to Twitter

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By Lucia Moses

Some publishers have been disappointed with Facebook Live video, but they are hopeful as Twitter embraces the format.

Twitter has been getting into live video in a big way. It’s already live streamed events and announced a streaming video service with Bloomberg Media, in addition to other live news, sports and entertainment programs from content creators including BuzzFeed, Vox Media’s The Verge and the WNBA.

The Verge has done a lot of live video and just launched a new live show, “Circuit Breaker,” on Twitter. The focus on Twitter comes as The Verge has dramatically scaled back the number of live videos it does on Facebook, where it used to do as many as four a week.

“It definitely seems like Twitter’s putting a ton of focus on it this year,” said Helen Havlak, editorial director at The Verge.

Havlak ticked off a number of benefits of Twitter’s live show approach. After each episode of “Circuit Breaker,” which run 60 to 90 minutes, The Verge can use a Twitter tool to cut the episode into several clips and publish them independently on Twitter, “things you can’t do easily on Facebook Live,” she said. Those shorter videos can get monetized with pre-roll ads, a format that’s absent from Facebook. Because live video on Twitter hasn’t reached a saturation point, these new shows are getting a lot of promotion from Twitter, while Facebook seems to have de-emphasized live video.

The only metric that really matters is revenue, though. Twitter is scoring points here, too. The revenue share for Twitter’s live shows varies by content creator. But Twitter’s monetization approach is far more favorable than other platforms, said Scott Havens, global head of digital at Bloomberg Media. Twitter is giving Bloomberg the option to do the selling as well as co-selling, which gives the creators more control over the sales process and revenue outcome. (He didn’t explicitly mention Facebook, but that approach is in contrast to Facebook, which is writing checks to just cover the costs and sharing ad sales revenue with publishers, but not much has materialized.)

“Twitter has the scale and the platform; the publisher has the content and brand trust,” Havens said. “It’s a nice marriage.”

Twitter’s live experiment is young; it’s too early to say how big the audience is for live video on the platform, so it’s too soon to tell what the effective ad rates will be. BuzzFeed has said its new Twitter live show, “AM to DM,” which started on Sept. 25, has averaged about 1 million unique viewers each day, with clips being viewed a total of 10 million times.

All platforms are looking for high-quality video content to attract TV-like dollars. Twitter, because it’s much smaller in audience than Facebook and Google and its user base has stagnated, has to make itself that much more appealing to creators than other platforms. “Facebook’s attitude has been much more, ‘We’re going to do it our way,’” said Bernard Gershon, president of GershonMedia, which consults to publishers. Twitter, meanwhile, threw publishers a big bone in 2016 when it agreed to let them keep 70 percent of the revenue from their video ads posted through Twitter’s Amplify program, in contrast with YouTube and Facebook, which share 55 percent.

One criticism of Amplify is the unpredictability. “We love syndicating our original video content across Twitter audiences and being able to monetize via Amplify ads, but publishers have a lack of insight into Twitter’s pipeline, which means we cannot predict ad fill or revenue against this syndication opportunity,” said Chris Pirrone, gm of sports digital properties at USA Today’s Sports Media Group.

“We are always in listening mode with our Amplify partners, and it is our goal to help them drive meaningful and consistent revenue,” Mike Park, vp of emerging content products at Twitter, said in a statement. “A healthy publisher ecosystem is an essential part of the equation as we continue to develop our video products and scale advertiser demand.”

By Lucia Moses

Sourced from DIGIDAY UK

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More Time on Social Media is NOT Linked to Poor Mental Health

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HOW people use social media is more important than the time they spend using it. Let’s stop the moral panic.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

There has so far been no evidence supporting the view that the amount of time spent on social media affects mental health in young people, says Chloe Berryman of the University of Central Florida. In fact, she says that there are very few links between different aspects of social media use among young adults and possible mental health problems such as loneliness, decreased empathy and social anxiety.

“We do not deny the potential for some online behaviours to be associated with mental health problems, rather we propose that research focus on the behaviour of individuals rather than assume media is the root cause of all socio-personal problems,” says Berryman, who compared the response that some people have to social media to a form of ‘moral panic’ such as that surrounding video games, comic books and rock music.

Berryman and her colleagues analysed the responses of 467 young adults to a variety of questionnaires. They were questioned about the amount of time per day they spent using social media, the importance it has in their lives, and the way they used social media. Their current mental health state, levels of social anxiety, the quality of their relationship with their parents and the amount of social support that they could count on were also assessed. Aspects such as general mental health symptoms, suicidal ideation, loneliness, social anxiety and decreased empathy were also considered.

The only worrying trend found had to do with ‘vaguebooking,’ which refers to a person’s tendency to write social media posts that contain little actual and clear information, but are worded in such a way as to solicit attention and concern from potential readers. Young people who tended to often write such posts were found to be lonelier, and to have more suicidal thoughts than others.

“Vaguebooking was slightly predictive of suicidal ideation, suggesting this particular behaviour could be a warning sign for serious issues,” says Berryman. “It is therefore possible that some forms of social media use may function as a ‘cry for help’ among individuals with pre-existing mental health problems.”

“Overall, results from this study suggest that, with the exception of vaguebooking, concerns regarding social media use may be misplaced,” she adds. “Our results are generally consistent with other studies which suggests that how people use social media is more critical than the actual time they spend online with regards to their mental health.”

There you go, readers. Go forth and Facebook obsessively… it’s all good.

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