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Chances are you’ve received Facebook event invites for concerts, parties or public gatherings. How often do you click accept to an event invite but have no idea what it is and have no intention of going? Or if you’re bombarded with events, maybe you’re someone who automatically hits “decline” whenever you get an invite. How often do you miss events that you’re actually interested in?
While the Events function has come a long way since it was debuted on Facebook back in 2005, then called “My Parties”, the interface and functionality still confuses users and often turns people away. 450 million people use Facebook’s event service, but even Facebook admits there’s room for improvement, as it’s been in “maintenance mode” for almost its entire existence.
Facebook recently released its end-of-year update to Events, which make it easier for people to find something that interests them and is in their area. The update is designed with a specific focus on helping users meet up with friends or colleagues, and even find people with similar interests.
Many users are unsure if they can attend a business’ event, and worry that saying “No” would be harsh, “Yes” might be a lie, and “Maybe” might be misleading (or read as “No”). Facebook has eased this social struggle by rolling out a replacement for “Maybe” with “Interested,” which can be interpreted as a soft yes. Interested users can stay in the loop with updates and notifications from the event admin.
Other changes include:
After the party or event ends, Facebook wants to add features to help you look back fondly on your experience. Lily Jolly, a product manager at Facebook focussing on events, said that Facebook “wanted to help bring those good feelings back more often” and implied that soon we can expect to see new features that will.
Perhaps most importantly, Facebook is tweaking its algorithm that determines if and when it will show you information about a public event that might be appealing to you. The algorithm considers your interests, previously attended events and location and weighs them against the event’s popularity, time and place.
According to Aditya Koolwal, a product manager at Facebook, “We have a good sense of how people look for things to do,” Facebook product manager Aditya Koolwal said. “The social signals we have, the friends who are interested in going, the friends you can potentially go with… so we’re going to try and take advantage of that as much as we possibly can as we roll out more discovery features.”
With the new features for the often overlooked Facebook Events comes new opportunity to market your business’ events, fundraisers, galas, parties and gatherings. Here’s how to make the most out of Events:
1. Keep your event updates rolling, even when all the admins have finished inviting everyone. Anyone who isn’t sure about attending (marked as interested) will receive updates. The more useful information you publish to the event, the better you are able to engage and include those who are on the fence.
2. Invite non-network friends with an email address. This isn’t a new update to events, but it is little known – You can invite friends who aren’t on Facebook just by inputting their email address. While their experience without an account is more limited, they can still RSVP and view updates.
3. Read and analyze receipts. Similarly to Messages, Events gives you the option to see who has received an invitation and seen updates from the event’s admins. Keep track to help inform you how to tweak your marketing strategies and language.
4. Include all location and timing information, so users can take advantage of the new feature to see nearby events. The more details that you include, the more accurately Facebook will be able to catalogue your event and suggest it to interested users.
5. Limit the length of your event name. Push notifications have a character limit. Be sure your title is able to communicate everything it needs to in the size of one single notification.
6. Use CTAs like ticket-purchasing buttons to shorten the funnel and make it easier for viewers to become event-going customers.
The above, from Facebook’s Developer Conference’s website, features their event plugin, which embeds the event page on their website.
7. Take advantage of the event plugin for your website. The event plugin updates in real time on your website as you make changes in Facebook, and people can subscribe directly from your site. Embedding the event on your site will help to increase the social value for your web viewers, and bring in traffic that might not have been connected to you on Facebook.
FRANKLIN – Facebook hosted a seminar for female small business owners Monday.
The Boost Your Business event is one of several sessions Facebook is hosting in cities across the United States in celebration of Women’s History Month.
The event featured a presentation from Facebook Community Engagement Coordinator Meghna Mahadevan, who showed the attendees advertising features and strategies. There was also a question-and- answer session with local entrepreneurs and marketers.
Make your business personal
Mahadevan pulled up a personal Facebook page and business Facebook page and said there shouldn’t be much difference between the two.
“The way you’re interacting with your customers should be human and authentic — the same way that you’re connecting with your friends and family,” she said.
She said advertisers should remember that ads on Facebook go between posts on a user’s timeline.
“This is a really personal, intimate space, so you want to make sure you’re really interacting with your audience,” Mahadevan said. “You want to make them respond, feel something, emote.”
Kim Leggett of City Farmhouse in Franklin said the natural tone of her advertising helped her gain customers.
“I tried not to make my content sound like ads. I just talked in my own voice,” she said.
Get attention quickly
Mahadevan said she recommended video and photo posts over text posts, and advertisers should remember how content is delivered on the site.
“You may not have noticed this, but they actually autoplay without sound,” Mahadevan said about Facebook videos. “That means that when you’re creating a video, you want to make sure that the first three to five seconds are captivating without any sound.”
“I’m a big believer in quality over quantity,” Julie Walton of Walton’s Jewelry said. “Take the time to take a really great photograph and keep it in your arsenal.”
Tailor ad content to audiences
Facebook tailors ads based on interests, demographics, behavior and location, Mahadevan said. Business owners can create custom audiences by uploading customer or mailing lists.
With custom audiences, users can expand their reach. Mahadevan said Facebook creates lookalike audiences based on the existing populations business owners already contact.
“You’re able to target a group with similar interests based on people you already know,” she said.
Take advantage of Facebook’s technology
Facebook Pixel is a code that tracks visitors to a business’ website.
“Every time someone new visits your website, the pixel fires and creates a list of people you can now connect with on Facebook,” Mahadevan said.
Business owners can track people who visited specific pages, people who only visited once or other options, and then tailor advertisements accordingly.
“You can optimize that delivery by targeting people who have already taken the action you wanted them to take,” Mahadevan said.
Ad Manager can be accessed on Facebook’s site and downloaded as a mobile application. It gives an overview of how ads are performing, with reports, breakdowns and an overall relevance score from one to 10.
“This is a great way to understand what’s really working,” Mahadevan said.
Another Facebook feature that can be used as an app is Page Insights, which tracks demographics of visitors to a page. Mahadevan said she recommends business owners use the tools Facebook provides to figure out which ads are most effective.
“It’s really important that you’re repeating your successes and learning from the things that didn’t work so well,” she said.
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Ad fraud is a big problem for everyone, not just Facebook.
A recent report from the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) and White Ops, a digital ad fraud mitigation company, predicts that advertisers will lose $7.2 billion to fraudulent ad bot impressions in 2016. Two areas of digital advertising in particular were found to be especially vulnerable to bot fraud: Display media with CPMs over $10 had 30% more fraud than lower CPM media, and programmatic ads had higher bot fraud at 14% for display ads and 73% for video ads.
Facebook had been testing the programmatic ad buying platform on its ad serving platform Atlas, allowing marketers to use Facebook’s targeting power to buy ads programmatically on other websites and mobile apps. The company shut down the pilot after discovering too much wasteful or fraudulent inventory, especially with the banner ads being served through the platform.
Despite that, Facebook did discover that native and video ads were delivering significant value. According to The Information, Facebook plans to ultimately build a new ad buying platform for these types of ads.
The Atlas ad tech project represents Facebook’s bid to compete with Google’s DoubleClick ad tracking platform, according to Fast Company. Google’s market-leading DoubleClick platform could be vulnerable to a Facebook competitor as it was built for desktop, not mobile.
The ANA report offered marketers suggestions to address ad bot fraud, including understanding the programmatic supply chain, requesting transparency for inventory and traffic sourcing, and using third-party monitoring for all traffic.
Atlas: Facebook has pulled a big ad-tech project because there were too many bots and bad-quality ads
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Are search engines turning into personal assistants? Are you searching more with your voice than typing text? That’s one of the topics that we covered today during the third episode of our live video chat show, Marketing Land Live.
Marketing Land’s Amy Gesenhues, Barry Levine and Greg Finn joined me for an almost hour-long discussion that also covered Twitter ads, the use of live video on Periscope vs. Facebook, Snapchat geofilters and much more. If you missed it, the video is embedded below, and we’ve added some links to the topics that we talked about in the Show Notes below the video. (Note: We had occasional internet connectivity issues during the show; apologies for that.)
Our plan is to record new episodes of Marketing Land Live every Friday at 12:00 p.m. ET / 9:00 a.m. PT on Blab, so we hope you’ll make plans to join us live in the future. You can send in questions/comments/ideas at any time during the week by tweeting with the #HeyML (as in “Hey, Marketing Land!”) hashtag.
Google Would Like You To Buy Products Using Voice Search
Amazon Expands Echo Family With Mini Version & Mobile Speaker
Twitter’s User Growth Stalled And Advertisers Don’t Care (Yet)
Facebook Uses News Feed Algorithm To Rival Twitter, Periscope In Live Video
Live Streaming Video Survey Finds 44% Of Brands Have Produced Live Video & 20% Plan To
Facebook Plans To Open Messenger To Publishers At F8 In April
DiCaprio’s Oscar Win Sets New Twitter Record
How Much A Snapchat Geofilter Costs At The Oscars & 5 Other Big Events
With The Physical Web, You Become The Search Engine
Thanks to all who watched the live show today — we hope to see you and lots of new viewers next week and beyond!
Facebook has been stepping up its outreach to small businesses, adding features to make it easier for these
businesses that maintain “pages” on Facebook to get noticed by and respond to consumers, especially on
mobile devices.
You’ll want to pick a profile picture that will be easy for your potential fans to recognize. This could be
anything from a company logo for a big brand to a headshot of yourself if you’re a solopreneur or
consultant.
Summary facebook marketing | Facebook Business Search , Facebook has been stepping up its outreach to small businesses, adding features to make it easier for these businesses that maintain “pages” on Facebook to get noticed by and respond to consumers, especially on mobile devices.
You’ll want to pick a profile picture that will be easy for your potential fans to recognize. This could be anything from a company logo for a big brand to a headshot of yourself if you’re a solopreneur or consultant. watch video now : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB4zVjdA5GM
website : http://thenewtimes.info/news/facebook-marketing-facebook-business-search/
The last time you went to a major publisher’s website – say, for instance, The New York Times – how did you arrive there? Is typing in their website’s URL into your browser an entrenched part of your morning routine (much like picking up the Times from a newsstand might’ve been in a bygone era)? This may be the case, but it’s more likely you arrived at that publisher’s site from another platform.
The two largest sources of referral traffic for publishing (and pretty much all) sites are Facebook and Google.
Google has established itself as the reigning King of Search, revolutionizing the way we use the internet along the way. Because of Google, we no longer think in terms of website URLs; remembering whether an organization’s site ends with a “.com” or “.org” is no longer a concern. As long as you know the name of the business or organization you’d like to visit, you can simply type it in and hit “Enter” before going off on the magic carpet ride powered by Google.
This simple and streamlined functionality has allowed Google to establish itself as the king of something else besides search: referral traffic. Search engines and referral traffic go hand in hand. Whenever we use Google as a shortcut to reaching our desired destination (instead of typing in the URL directly ourselves), we help them build on that dominance.
But now Facebook has established itself as a major player in referral traffic – particularly for big publishers like the Times. In fact, they surpassed Google in referral traffic for large publications for the first time last year. This was reported by Parse.ly, a company that tracks detailed audience data for 400 of the web’s largest publishers, including Wired, The Atlantic, and Mashable. So, while the data set is by no means universal, it represents a large enough sample size to be taken seriously. But, while catching up to Google’s referral traffic numbers is no small feat, it doesn’t mean that Facebook has “overtaken” the search engine.
The development was discussed by Parse.ly’s Algorithms Lead, Martin Laprise. When interviewed by Marketing Land about the referral traffic trends, he expounded on what he sees the results implying for the future:
One thing that is easily overlooked in this graph is that Google’s share of referral traffic didn’t decrease significantly when Facebook referral traffic overtook it. This suggests that Facebook is ‘stealing’ referral traffic from other sources.
This puts Facebook’s recent referral traffic growth in a different perspective because, while they did catch up to Google, their success had no significant negative impact on Google’s traffic.
Another mitigating factor of the data is that, towards the end of last year, some major publishers saw their Facebook referral numbers drop again. Some have suggested that this drop can be directly attributed to Facebook’s introduction of Instant Articles, which supports publisher-created content but keeps that content housed within Facebook’s app, so less users are making their way to the publishers’ actual websites. These distinctions may soon become a matter of mere semantics, though, as Google Analytics is now capable of measuring traffic and user data (things like referrer, device type, language and locale) within Instant Articles and combining it with general referral traffic. For more specific user engagement metrics (scroll depth, time spent on article, etc.), marketers will be forced to use Facebook’s own analytics platform. So, in many ways, the competition isn’t merely over who can drive the most referral traffic, but also over who can keep more marketers tied to its analytics platform. Both companies are well aware of this and seem to be using every possible source of leverage to maintain competitiveness.
The potential value represented by these different sets of users – those seeing your content on your website versus those seeing it within Facebook – differs for every marketer and every business, so it’s important to set concrete, identifiable goals to build your social strategy around.
For marketers, understanding referral traffic is a vital element of understanding your audience. While Parse.ly’s data set is comprised of results from a particular set of publishers, they are publishers with enough size and influence to remain relevant to businesses of all sizes. As resources for marketing (as with resources for anything, for that matter) are limited, the issue turns into an opportunity-cost equation: how much return will I get from marketing for SEO/search engines versus how much return will I get from social media strategizing. It’s not as though choosing one over the other means you are doing so with any kind of finality, but it’s still an issue that presents countless little crossroads for marketers to navigate every day.
Every marketer will approach that issue with a different set of skills and tools, but one constant remains: successful digital marketing is heavily dependent on knowing your audience and understanding how they are finding your site. Parse.ly’s job is to do this for 400 major publishing outlets – these are their clients. For smaller businesses and their marketers, the lesson still rings true: Use software like HubSpot to carefully track the genesis of your leads. Where are they coming from? Did they engage with your site via search engine or social media? Of the audiences from both categories, with which group did you have more success?
For example, recent research has found that certain engagement measurements (like time spent reading articles) from social referrals has been lower than search referrals in the past. This could indicate that referral traffic from social media is less meaningful or qualified than traffic from search engines, but it’s too early to make concrete assessments yet. Check to see if this is true for your content.
These are examples of some of the analyses that will help you nurture leads into customers and brand promoters. I think that’s the most important takeaway from the news of Facebook’s increased referral traffic. Even though SEO and social media marketing don’t have to be mutually exclusive, Parse.ly’s data highlights the importance of segmenting your data so you know which strategies are leading to which leads, and how those leads are panning out respectively. One of the cornerstones of successful inbound marketing is listening to your customers before you launch into a sales pitch. Data segmentation – especially the kind that teaches you about how people are finding your site – will allow you to do just that. It will establish an immediate platform for connection and give you insights into what types of marketing your audience wants to engage with most consistently.
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Facebook at Work, a professional version of Facebook social media network should launch during the upcoming months after spending just over one year in tests, an executive at the company said.
What users share via their work accounts can only be seen by other people in the company, and what they share on their personal accounts can only be seen by friends and others based on their privacy settings.
“I would say 95 percent of what we developed for Facebook is also adopted for Facebook at Work”, Julien Codorniou, director of global platform partnerships at Facebook, told Reuters.
The fact that Facebook is more than likely already used by most employees and employers for personal use can only be a good thing.
The French resort company will offer the service to all its 13,000 employees through summer 2016, Anne Browaeys-Level, Club Mediterranee’s chief marketing & digital officer, told Reuters.
Facebook’s Codorniou said nearly everything on Facebook at Work is the same as the regular Facebook social network, with some minor exceptions. However, he noted, Candy Crush won’t be available on the work platform.
Eventually Facebook is aiming to build a great product that can be a “one-stop shop for all collaboration and communication needs – and that can in theory replace e-mail, messaging tools, newsletters etc.”, the spokesperson added.
If it achieves those goals, Facebook at Work could prove a substantial threat to other business-focused networking sites like LinkedIn or Microsoft’s Yammer. Like Facebook itself, Facebook at Work will be free to use.
Once launched, the service will be open to all companies and there are plans to charge “a few dollars per month per user” for premium services such as analytics and support.
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A Facebook executive said Monday that Facebook’s Messenger would be opening itself up to marketing — though he avoided using the word “ads” to describe the service — in what appeared to be a subtle correction of a report released last week that Facebook will soon “launch ads” within Messenger.
That report, published by TechCrunch, cited leaked documents that outlined how Messenger is getting ready to allow businesses to send messages to people who had previously initiated a chat thread.
Above: Facebook VP Brad Smallwood
TechCrunch’s report used the word “ad” multiple times to depict the messaging provided by the coming service. The report also noted that it somewhat contradicted comments by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he said in 2014 that he didn’t think ads are the right way to monetize messaging.
But the monetization effort for Messenger won’t look like what we typically think of as advertising, said Brad Smallwood, vice president of Measurement and Insights at Facebook, although he stopped short of offering specific details.
Smallwood’s comments came during a portion of a talk yesterday at VentureBeat’s Marketing.Fwd event in New York, which I moderated. At this event, he and fellow panelist, Booking.com’s Pepijn Rijvers, discussed how consumers in China are ahead of U.S. consumers in the way they use messaging services like WeChat.
Smallwood first responded to a question about how Facebook is planning to monetize WhatsApp — Facebook’s other big messaging property. “It is not advertising, but is marketing,” he said “It is utility that is being created by businesses inside the chat environment. It’s not directly what we consider to be advertising.”
I followed up by asking him to comment specifically about Facebook’s other chat app, Messenger, and whether “ads” are planned there or monetization would come in the form of chat bots — that allow businesses to communicate only through messaging. Smallwood again avoided the term “ads,” saying only: “It will fit with the consumer experience, of what their expectations are.”
He continued by saying that standard ad and marketing customs have become outmoded for the messaging experience. He explained that the U.S advertising and marketing communities are used to consumers engaging with content in a certain way, but stressed that marketers need to adapt.
“We need to accept that [consumers] have moved to these new experiences and ask how do we build great marketing and how do we create great touch-points within those, as opposed to forcing what we’re used to in those new environments.”
Fellow panelist Pepijn Rijvers, chief marketing officer of Booking.com, provoked the conversation around messaging when he said Messenger and WhatsApp are the only answers in the West to what China’s WeChat is doing in that country.
“In China, if you look at what WeChat is doing, they are an online operating system of life through their phone,” he said. “You can buy theater tickets, You can pay grocery stores, you can literally do everything, including as a small merchant, making sure your products gets shipped from A to B and that this is connected to payment.” He continued: “China is light years of where we are here in the Western world, and definitely the only two brands that can make a dent in the messaging arena are WhatsApp and Messenger.”
Smallwood chimed in, saying consumers in U.S and other markets are eventually going to be in the same mindset as Chinese consumers when it comes to messaging and with things like ecommerce and service transactions that happen within chat. “We have to figure out how to talk to them in that environment,” he said.
WeChat limits the number of messages brands can send their users in a single day. That’s created a precedent it’s easy to imagine Facebook might follow with WhatsApp and Messenger.
There’s a ton of interest in how Facebook plans to monetize Messenger, which says it now has more than 800 million monthly unique users, and Whatsapp, which just crossed a billion users.
WhatsApp said last month it would monetize its service by testing tools that let you communicate with businesses that “you want to hear from,” including banks, where you may want to check on your existing account, or airlines, where you may want to learn about the status of an upcoming flight.
The comments by Smallwood and Rijvers came amid discussion from other top marketers about the need to move to marketing formats that can engage users based on their current emotional modes, rather than relying merely on online actions as indicators.
Notably, Rijvers said Booking.com has soft-launched its own product, called “Passion Search,” in an effort to get more users to engage with travel content that is related to their interests. Booking.com is one the largest travel companies in the world, and the largest advertiser on Google.
One VentureBeat source has speculated that Facebook may announce more of its plans at its F8 event in April. Facebook has refused to comment.
For now, based on what we’ve seen said so far, it’s highly likely that Facebook will only allow a business to communicate with users if it has a preexisting relationship with those consumers — namely, if those consumers have first initiated contact with the business.
The question is just how aggressive Facebook will allow businesses to become. For example, a consumer might start a shopping transaction but then abandon it when it comes time to pay. Might Messenger let businesses nudge people who have abandoned their orders? And would Messenger set a cap for how many messages such businesses can send to their users in a given day? And how much will Messenger charge for this service? We don’t have those answers.
At its F8 conference in March 2015, Facebook already announced its Businesses on Messenger service, which lets ecommerce businesses contact customers after they exit a transaction — with updates like order confirmations and shipping status updates — and engage with customers in free-form questions about the order. It also allows business to integrate with third-party tools like Zendesk. Facebook is clearly hoping to supplant the 1-800 support numbers many businesses have for their customers, and much of the infrastructure is already in place.
You could also imagine additional actions being permitted in future, like allowing businesses to ping an existing mobile customer if the user comes within, say, half a mile of the store.
Letting businesses re-engage with those existing customers would be a sensible addition to the current service and would also be a subtle way for Facebook to monetize WhatsApp and Messenger, both of which have huge audiences.
Messaging services — and how businesses are using them — will be one of the topics of our upcoming Mobile Summit event, April 4-5. Facebook and Kik are among those who will be speaking to executives there on the future of mobile marketing.
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Facebook has recently launched an aggressive campaign to rid its sites of some cannabis-related material, deleting or suspending dozens of accounts operated by marijuana businesses, most of which had operated for years without so much as a warning about offensive material.
“We tried to log into Instagram, and a message said we violated their policy, but they won’t say what that violation is,” said Rick Scarpello, CEO of Incredibles, a Denver-based edible company. “I’ve written them every day, saying I’m not doing anything illegal and please reinstate my account.”
Over the last five years, social media has become essential in the movement to legalize marijuana and as an advertising tool for the industry. Large groups of pot-loving activists on the sites can be mobilized during an election or marketed to by a galaxy of startup companies.
So shutting down accounts can be a significant setback for the companies – not just dispensaries, but also ancillary businesses.
Despite the fact that it doesn’t sell marijuana, Center Mass Media, a cannabis marketing company, said it has had multiple Instagram accounts deleted.
John Ramsay, Center Mass’s CEO, said there was a direct correlation between profits and the number of followers his company has, and starting over on social media has caused a significant dip. Deleting such accounts “has a monumental impact on businesses, after you spent so much time building up a network of followers”.
Additionally, social media has become the primary resource for marijuana consumers looking for information on changes in laws, product recalls, forthcoming elections and new medical studies. “The type of posts with the highest engagement on Facebook for us has been news and information,” says Joe Hodas, chief marketing officer of Dixie Brands. “It’s not the products or partying – it’s the news that does the best for us.”
Olivia Mannix, cofounder of the Cannabrand marketing agency, said that two years ago she found a way to run banner ads for marijuana businesses on Facebook by avoiding words like “weed” and “pot” along with any pictures of the product, before Facebook cut off her ability to run any ads. Now, she said, in addition to shutting down cannabis related pages, “they’ve begun deleting the profiles of the people running the pages”. She added that one client received a note from Facebook suggesting that person see a drug counselor.
A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment on the record about any of these cases or the specifics of their policies toward legal marijuana businesses, only offering: “These pages have been removed for violating our community standards, which outline what is and is not allowed on Facebook.”
The only mention of marijuana on Facebook’s community standards page comes under the “Regulated Goods” section, which states: “We prohibit any attempts by unauthorized dealers to purchase, sell, or trade prescription drugs, marijuana, or firearms.”
The owners of accounts that were deleted say they never engaged in selling marijuana online, and while marijuana remains federally illegal, their companies physically exist within states that have legalized marijuana in some form.
It’s also unclear why ancillary companies have lost their accounts. Stash Tagz, an apparel company that sells cannabis-themed t-shirts, said its Instagram account was deleted after it posted a meme featuring a Rastafarian Santa Claus, which did not contain any marijuana use or products.
Instagram’s guidelines are somewhat more direct than Facebook’s: “Offering sexual services, buying or selling illegal or prescription drugs (even if it’s legal in your region), as well as promoting recreational drug use is also not allowed.” Instagram did not respond to requests for comment.
Considering that both sites are loaded with marijuana posts, the sites clearly can’t remove all of them or delete all the accounts associated with pot. A search for the hashtag #weed on Instagram returns a large number of pictures featuring cannabis products, plants, and smoldering joints, though the bottom of the page reads: “Recent posts from #weed are currently hidden because the community has reported some content that may not meet Instagram’s community guidelines.”
Several theories about why accounts are being shut down are being discussed in the industry. Some say Facebook is afraid of racketeering charges from the federal government (the same reason most banks won’t touch pot money), while others believe it is people within the industry flagging their competition’s posts and getting them shut down.
The crackdown on marijuana businesses on Facebook and Instagram could benefit marijuana-centric social media sites like Social High or MassRoots, where naysayers aren’t likely to complain about cannabis content.
“I had been advocating [for marijuana legalization] on Facebook, and noticed that friends weren’t interacting with me on the topic,” said Scott Bettano, CEO of Social High, which launched last year. “They were afraid of co-workers and family seeing them talking about it on Facebook. And that’s when I said the cannabis community needs their own social media platform where they can talk about it openly.”
Though these companies don’t exist in a social media vacuum. MassRoots, which launched in 2013 and has amassed over 775,000 users, uses Facebook and Instagram to promote its site’s content. After it collected more than 390,000 followers on Instagram within two years, Instagram pulled the MassRoots account three weeks ago. (This reporter wrote a news article for the MassRoots blog in January.)
There is concern that an industry-wide exodus from Facebook to sites like MassRoots and Social High would be crippling not just to the economics of legal weed, but also the culture.
“Social media provides the opportunity for a dialogue about cannabis, showing people that it’s normal. A lot of people still aren’t comfortable walking into a dispensary, but with social media you can create an image of a company that people can relate to and feel comfortable with their product,” said Lauren Gibbs, president of Rise Above Social Strategies, which helps marijuana companies cultivate an online presence.
Isaac Dietrich of MassRoots believes that there are policies that mainstream social media sites could implement to stay on the right side of the law when it comes to legalized marijuana.
“Alcohol companies have Instagram accounts that Instagram restricts to users that are 21 and older, and we would be more than open to those types of controls. But they don’t give us those options.” He added that MassRoots is currently only available in states that have legalized marijuana, a policy he says Instagram could implement “overnight”.
It’s possible that the wave of deleted accounts derived from a policy change regarding the companies, as many of them occurred within a matter of weeks of each other. Denver Relief Dispensary says its Facebook account was deleted two weeks ago after seven years of no incidents; the deletion was followed by the removal of its Instagram account days later.
And three weeks ago, three separate dispensaries in New Jersey lost their Facebook accounts on the same day. “We tried to take down anything we thought they objected to, like pictures or prices [of products], but we didn’t get reinstated,” said Andrew Zaleski of Breakwater Treatment and Wellness in New Jersey.
“These small businesses invest tens of thousands of dollars in building an organic following,” Dietrich said, “and that in turn drives a significant amount of business to these dispensaries. And then, all of the sudden, all of that money and time flies right out the window. It’s killing jobs and the growth of the industry, and it may well be holding back the progression of cannabis legalization in the United States. All we’re asking for is clear guidelines.”
Survey: 13 million U.S. Facebook users don’t use privacy controls
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Social media giant Facebook is doing everything it can to tap into the video ad spending whirlwind, including adding new features to attract businesses to spend more money on its platform. Facebook is now rolling out a new captioned video captioning tool for marketers that will make those embedded ads nearly impossible to ignore.
Research from the company found that 80 per cent of users react negatively when an ad overtakes control of the audio output and captions have been positioned as the solution to this issue. Facebook conducted an internal study, revealing that video view times increased by as much as 12% when the ads came with subtitles. Facebook is looking to change that with automated captions, as well as by advising advertisers to create a visually striking, easy to follow ad that will catch a user’s attention and perhaps even garner a push of the play button.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) might have stumbled on the flawless formula for increasing user engagement with advertisements by enabling automatic captioning for Facebook advertisements. That is why video ads blasting out sound the second you reach them are frowned upon by consumers. This means, according to Facebook, 100% in-view impressoin buying with verification from analytics provider Moat.
Nearly one billion people (934 million) accessed Facebook on a mobile device daily during the final three months of past year, according to the company’s most recent financial results.
If advertisers are able to do that, then the chances of the users watching the entire video are greater. Users meanwhile, will have more buying and reporting options within video ads to help ad makers understand users’ preferences.
TV commercials still account for a large part of the advertising budgets for brands as compared to mobile video formats.
Facebook’s native video player often leads to users uploading third party videos rather than just sharing links to them.
“Numerous studies and campaigns have made it clear that capturing people’s attention at the very beginning of a video is the most effective way to advertise in a mobile feed environment”, Matt Idema, vice president, monetization product marketing at Facebook, said. These would include Facebook, Messenger, Bing Search, and several others.
Except now you don"t even need a new app–you can just chat your way to a richer … Facebook Messenger is also going down the humans-and-bots path. … the scale of Facebook it"s well ahead in selling bots as a marketing service.
