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This week’s link herd February 17, 2014

February 17, 2014 by Andrew Leave a Comment

Every Monday Zebra Eclipse updates with a new Herd. The Herd is a digest of related links to stories appropriate to the blog. The goal is to show the common evolution of agency and publisher and to highlight the influence of creators, curators and community moderators.

Dropping the A-Bomb on publishing
Simon Appleby’s essay on the division within publishing. This division, according to Appleby, is between narrative publishing and information publishing. The two are different, require different skills and so will have a different evolution. Publishers, he says, should split themselves along these lines.
Why 2014 will change everything for video advertising
Affiliate video platform Coull have a feature written by CEO Irfon Watkins about the future of video. Business seems to be booming and pre-roll inventory sells out — but Watkins writes that around 54% of video ads are never seen. The industry is ripe for change and Watkins predicts more merchant integration, more mobile and publishers finally getting involved. Who’s doing well already? The Guardian.
Why Brands Need to Pay Attention to Upworthy’s Battle With Facebook
Upworthy lost about 40m views in a quarter because of the change Facebook made to their newsfeed algorithm. The company is fighting back with a new metric “attention minutes” designed to show that even if page views are down the time people are spending with Upworthy content is increasing.
Google Europe Blog: Working with Spanish Publishers
An interesting blog post from Google insofar as it doesn’t say very much except that they’re teaching SEO to Spanish newspapers.
Content economics, part 5: news
“It is almost impossible to exaggerate the degree to which Facebook has changed the news business.” With Zebra Eclipse I argue that we’re all publishers now. In this article Felix Salmon suggests everybody is a journalist to some extent. An insightful piece.
BuzzFeed's native advertising: are they really making ads you want to share?
The Media Briefing’s study into Buzzfeed’s native ad shows that they really do get shared. On average they enjoy 263 Facebook shares, 36 tweets, 7 Google +1s, 44 Pins and 2 LinkedIn shares. Facebook comes out as the clear lead for driving their traffic. That said, Buzzfeed is sculpted to suit Facebook style shares and is rarely appropriate for LinkedIn.
Q&A with Justin Smith, CEO of Bloomberg Media
The new CEO of Bloomberg Media Group is about to announce his 100-day review of the company. It comes at a time when growth is “softening”. Already we’ve seen a move towards more video – with a whopping $75 CPM I can see why – and away from judging properties in silo. Ad Age have an interview.

Dead weight audiences are bad for you

January 30, 2014 by Andrew 3 Comments

It’s not uncommon to see competitions in which an entry requirement is to like a Page on Facebook. In fact, some people spend money encouraging social media influencers to sign up and like their Page.

This is often a bad idea that can harm your Facebook success.

Facebook very seriously limits the number of people who see posts. I have one blog with 300+ Facebook followers where, on average, only about 2 people are even shown link updates that include a full width image. In other words; that’s the preferred and recommended Facebook posting style with about 0.6% of followers seeing the post.

That particular blog is in that situation because many of the 300 followers came from a competition. This is a lesson I’ve learnt the hard way.

The situation is worse than a chunk of people not seeing the updates. They have a negative effect on everyone else. Facebook’s current algorithm sees a Page that tends to get low user engagement. The result of that poor performance, for everyone competition earned or natural fans, is that the news feed exposure reduces.

Dead weight audiences are bad for you.

Facebook say on their help page;

The best way to have your posts show up in News Feed for the people who like your Page is to post things you think your audience will like, comment on, or share with their friends. Use your Page Insights to learn more about the types of posts that your audience is most interested in.

Once that realisation settles in then it becomes easy to see where other dead weight comes from and worry about it. Invite your friends to follow the Page? I’d rather not; not unless I was sure they might interact.

This is a concern for many, last month Facebook admitted that organic reach is dropping. AdAge reported;

The drop-off in organic reach continues to be a touchy subject for brands — especially those who invested in growing their fan bases. And it’s going to oblige them to up their content creation game in order to emerge organically from the morass of stories eligible to enter users’ news feeds, according to Digitas VP-Social Marketing Alex Jacobs.

Facebook is very important to content publishers. It’s the social network that moves the needle when it comes to traffic; far higher than Pinterest, Twitter or Google+.

In a world where we’re all publishers and the role of the agent or publisher a “gatekeeper of quality” has been sidestepped we’ll see the platforms like Facebook step up to fill the gap. The challenge platforms have isn’t exclusively about discovery serendipity but also about determined obfuscation.