Tag: facebook social media marketing

The highly controversial “emotional contagion” study has led a digital privacy group to file a complaint with the FTC.

A digital privacy group is now landing Facebook with some negative social media marketing as it filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), with a request that those regulators look into the psychological experiments that were conducted on some of the users of the social network in 2012, without their knowledge or direct permission.

Facebook did not obtain permission before it went ahead with the social media research on user profiles.

The study altered the number of negative and positive comments in the news feeds that were seen by about 700,000 members of the site, said the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s complaint. This study has already created quite a stir and has drawn a lot of negative social media marketing attention to the network giant. The privacy group stated that sanctions should be imposed, including those that would require Facebook to disclose the formulas used within its software for determining the way in which the posts displayed in user news feeds are chosen.

Social media marketing for the company appears to have backfired, somewhat, as a result of the experiment.

The complaint filed to the FTC explained that “the company purposefully messed with people’s minds.” It also pointed out that the company made no attempt to advise the users of the social network that their data would be shared with the third party researchers for this or any other purpose.

The report that resulted from the experiment was published within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in its June 17 edition and has been generating a massive amount of controversy since that time. It has exploded the concerns that had already been rising regarding the data privacy practices at Facebook within the United States as well as in other countries.

Last week, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office released a statement that generated additional negative social media marketing for Facebook when it said that it wished to work with the company and the Irish Data Commissioner – the lead regulator for the company in Europe – in order to gain more information regarding the circumstances of the data collection and use.

Though the network’s new suite of ad products have been greatly hyped their performance is still lagging.

Even though Twitter’s newest suite of social media marketing products for mobile has experienced massive hype, it still appears that the microblogging network is falling behind its two giant competitors over this channel.

A recent report has shown that the ads from Twitter aren’t doing as well as Facebook and LinkedIn.

John Blackledge, an analyst from Cowen & Co. has reported that social media marketing ads on Twitter mobile are not performing as well as those that are posted on Facebook and LinkedIn. This suggests that Twitter may not be the dream ad opportunity that many of its investors have come to believe it to be. Blackledge explained that “Twitter is a popular social platform, but shares are too rich in our view.”

The focus on mobile social media marketing has reflected very positively in Twitter’s share prices.

The fall IPO price for Twitter shares in 2013 was $26. That said, by the end of December, that stock had exploded to $74 per share. Equally, though, the social network has not sustained the valuation.

Blackledge conducted some research making social media news, that involved fifty buyers and their opinions regarding the effectiveness of social media companies such as Twitter, and their mobile ads. Only 5 percent of the participants stated that Twitter provided the best ROI. Comparatively, the ads over Facebook were considered to provide the best performance by 60 percent of the participants, with 25 percent giving their applause to LinkedIn.

Those figures suggest that the low ROI is linked to pricing. Blackledge also pointed out that the respondents to his survey commented that some of the downsides of Twitter’s social media marketing tools with regard to advertising value proposition were “high minimum ad spend” and the “cost of campaigns”.

This year is supposed to be a defining one for Twitter, as its numbers and usage continues to grow. It will be interesting to see how today’s figures compare to those that will be generated later on in 2014 or those at the same time next year.