Tag: social media

What The Spread Of Private Social Network Signifies

Posted on by Lab Team

Nextdoor, a private social network platform for local communities, has reportedly infiltrated over a quarter of neighborhoods across the nation. Functioning less like an exclusive Facebook, and more like a community-based web forum with real names and verified addresses, Nextdoor excels in its capability in forging a neighborly bond that is usually lost nowadays.

The rapid growth of Nextdoor corresponds nicely to that of the messaging apps, as both substitute the one-to-many communication model that most social media perpetrate with a one-to-one, sometimes one-to-few approach of connecting with friends and neighbors. The spread of Nextdoor signifies the rising demand for a more intimate mode of communication and social connectivity.

What Happens When You “Like” Everything You See On Facebook

Posted on by Lab Team

Facebook recently received a considerable amount of flak for conducting experiments on its users, so it is only fair that Mat Honan from Wired ran an experiment on Facebook by indiscriminatingly “liking” everything that the platform served up. The result reveals just how much Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes branded content, especially so on the mobile app, while implicitly underscoring how greatly its business model depends on it.

The number of “Likes” on Facebook and Instagram, along with their counterpart “Favorites” on Twitter and Tumblr, has long served as a fundamental metric in measuring the success of brand campaigns on social media. It offers a direct and frictionless way for the audience to express their sentiments and an easy and quantified measurement for marketers. By messing with the data acquisition, this experiment rendered Facebook’s algorithm useless and raises concerns on the dependency of this easily manipulated metric.

What Is The Invisible Audience

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About three-fourths of the social media  audience are just silent observers: they contribute to impressions, but don’t factor into the other measurement that marketers care about. However, some of this invisible audience might just be sharing the posts on the so-called “dark social” channels such as emails, IMs, or texting, making it extremely difficult to measure engagement accurately.

Pinterest Finally Adds an Important Social Feature

Posted on by Lab Team

At long last, moms on Pinterest can swap their secret family recipes via private messages! Building upon its “send-a-pin” feature, Pinterest has finally added a long-overdue messaging function. This is not the first time a social media platform has tried to appropriate the one-on-one conversational feature of messaging apps, as Facebook keeps pushing its messenger app and Instagram starts testing Bolt, and it certainly won’t be the last. Any feature beneficial to building a community among connected users should be of high priority for every social media platform.

Tumblr: Better for Brands Than Facebook or Twitter?

Posted on by Lab Team

Facebook and Twitter are the go-to channels that emarketers usually choose for social media marketing, but Tumblr says it just might have certain advantages over those two when it comes to brand engagement.

In comparison to Facebook and Twitter, branded content, especially the creative ones, enjoys a significantly longer shelf-life on Tumblr. As a result, this allows for greater earned engagement long after the content would have expired on other platforms. Furthermore, Tumblr offers a mix of video, text, and image-sharing tools that brands are utilizing to better engage with their audience. 

Facebook Is Now Worth $190 Billion Thanks To Mobile Ads

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Following the glowing earnings report released yesterday, major news outlets are now reporting on Facebook’s record high market capitalization, which is estimated at around $190 billion, putting it ahead of Amazon’s $165 billion. And its performance on mobile is being cited as the major force behind its recent commercial success. Given that nearly 400 million users access Facebook only via mobile devices, it is not surprising to find that mobile ads now account for 62 percent of Facebook’s overall ad revenue, which is up by two-thirds compared to the same time last year. The social media giant’s remarkable success since going public could be largely credited to their smooth transition into the mobile world, and all web-based-only digital marketers need to take notes.

Facebook Starts Testing “Buy Button” In News Feed Ads

Posted on by Lab Team

In a predicable yet still interesting move, Facebook has started testing a new feature on its news feed ads and page posts: a native “Buy” button designed for enabling one-click purchase without leaving the site. Diving deeper into e-commerce integration, the social giant is working with some select small business partners in the US to try out this new direct purchase function, aiming for further roll-out if the trial proves successful. With Facebook taking the lead, we expect to see more and more digital platforms joining in the trend of build-in e-commerce infrastructure.

MTV Using Snapchat To Announce VMA Nominations

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Ever the chaser of youth culture trend, MTV channel is now turning to ephemeral messaging app Snapchat to generate hype for its VMA nominations, after doing practically the same thing on Instagram and Vine last year. While still a desperate attempt by MTV to stay culturally relevant, this move to turn away from established social media channels and embrace the burgeoning messaging app does make perfect sense. By engaging Snapchat’s massive teen population base, MTV is reaching it core audience in their new digital habitat. As our previous white paper on messaging apps concluded, they are the new face of social media, and brands have to follow where their audience goes.

Twitter Launches New Analytics Dashboard

Posted on by Lab Team

Twitter has launched some brand new analytics to help digital advertisers and marketers alike to gain better insights on their tweeting efforts. For years, Twitter has been lagging behind Facebook in terms of providing a built-in native analytic platform that goes beyond simple favorites and retweets. Now available to Twitter advertisers, Twitter Card publishers, and certified users, this much-needed new dashboard features an impression count, i.e. how many people have seen your each individual tweet. Meanwhile, all click-throughs to profile pages, clicks on hashtags, retweets, replies, and link clicks are counted to generate an “Engagement Figure” for each tweet. Overall, this comes off as a move in the right direction for Twitter to offer a more detailed measurement tool to compete with other social media for the attention of brands and marketers.

ThinkUP Aims To Attract Regular Social Media Users

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eBy and large, almost all social media analyzing tools available today caters to the brands seeking a better understanding of their online marketing efforts. But in this age of big data, would such service interest regular individual user as well? ThinkUp, a creation of Gina Trapani, Lifehacker’s founding editor, seems to be positive about building a regular-consumer-facing social media analyzing service. It offers a variety of features that “archive, analyze, and give you control over your online social life”. Whether there be enough power users on social media who would pay subscription to support this business model remains open to debate, but this is certainly one way to escape the oversaturated market of business-oriented social media analyzing platforms.