Tag: facebook marketing

Social media marketing prefers Facebook 54 percent of the time

| July 10, 2014

A Social Media Examiner report has revealed a strong preference for this specific network in advertising.

Nearly every social network – including the current reigning king, Facebook, as well as Twitter and LinkedIn – have entered into a massive advertising war around the world, as each one attempts to become the leader in social media marketing.

This highly lucrative advertising channel has turned into a fierce battleground for brands of all size.

Marketers have been considerably increasing their social media marketing activities over the various different networking websites in order to be able to acquire new customers and maintain relationships with existing ones. Now, Social Media Examiner has published a document authored by Michael A. Steltzner entitled “2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report”, which involved an analysis of a massive global study.

This social media marketing study involved the participation of 2,800 marketers around the globe.

social media preferenceAmong them, 92 percent felt that the use of social media for advertising purpose was considered to be critical for their businesses. This is a meaningful increase over the 2013 figure, which was 86 percent. Of the respondents, 89 percent felt that it was important for them to learn various different types of tactics that would allow them to use these channels for better results from their various ad campaigns.

Facebook was by far the “most important marketing platform”, as 54 percent of the survey respondents labeled it as such. In a very second place was LinkedIn, which was deemed most important by 17 percent of the respondents. Another 12 percent felt that Twitter was the most important. Not only is this good news for Facebook, on its own, but it also represents meaningful growth over last year’s figures, at which time only 40 percent felt that this social network was the most important for marketing.

In fourth place in terms of overall social media marketing was blogging, which was the top vote of only 8 percent of the participants in the survey. While some analysts have been predicting an impending death of Facebook, it appears as though the network is continuing to hold its own for the moment.

Facebook faces unwanted social media marketing and a US regulator complaint

| July 9, 2014

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.

Social Media Marketing - FacebookThe 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.