This week on the Digital Coffee. Is it all over
for Facebook page likes?
TikTok wants to be completely transparent about its algorithm
and about its moderation policies.
And you'll soon be able to broadcast your Facebook
Room live a bit like Blab. Remember Blab?
All that and more after this.
Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. And welcome to the Digital Coffee.
This is your weekly dose of digital marketing and social media news
for small business. My name is Amanda Webb.
What's the difference between a Facebook page like and a Facebook
page follow? Well, actually not much, not much.
And I think that might be the reason that Facebook has
decided to depreciate one of them. So just to be clear,
a Facebook page like is when somebody comes and they click a like button on the
top of your page and then they are,
will see content from your page when the algorithm decides to,
but somebody who likes a page can
also choose to unfollow all your posts. So the like stays there,
but they don't see things.
Followers are people who have subscribed to your page to see content
whenever you post content on your page, depending on the algorithm.
So actually follows is a better metric.
Likes is a bit pants, to be honest,
because you could have hundreds of people liking your page and they've all
unfollowed. So it doesn't make any sense.
And you may have noticed for a little while that Facebook
has been kind of declassifying likes.
It's been harder to see how many people like a page.
It's been harder to see the like button.
I know somebody in my group was talking about this the other day follows seems
to be it. And this week they started testing a new page layout.
And this is it.
The one on the right one on the left is the current page out out.
Layout and the one.
On the right is the new one. So you can see a few things have changed.
The profile pictures become more prominent, larger centralized.
There's a little space underneath there that you can put in a
Tagline, you can put it in a tagline.
And you can also see that that big thumbs up button
has disappeared. It's gone. It's all about following now.
And that's what it is encouraging people to do. So why,
oh why may they be doing this? Well, like I say, Facebook likes,
is a pants metric. If you're following that,
you could get a completely wrong idea of how well your
page is doing. By followers,
you know,those people have actually signed up and some of those people will
see your content in the future. Also,
I think the word like, you know,
it's not great because it means two things on Facebook. Doesn't it?
It means when you go and see a post, you might click the like button.
I know it's a reaction, but now,
but we still call it a like button to like that post.
That's what it means.
It means we're favouriting where we're giving appreciation for the post.
Liking on a page meant you were following a page.
So even the language is a bit convoluted.
So I think this is a good move from Facebook.
Also isn't the word follow
just a little bit more grown up. I think,
I think it used to be back in the old days, become a fan of a page,
which was even more bizarre.
Have you ever had a conversation,
a private conversation that was so good that you wanted
to broadcast it live? Initially when I asked myself that question, I thought,
well, maybe when I was drunk, I thought it was a good idea.
And then I remembered Blab who remembers Blab?
Is anyone remember the social network Blab?
Blab was a space where you could go live with a group
of other people and just have a conversation. And it was broadcast. Live.
People could join in. People could jump into your blab.
There were four spaces they could ask you questions. They could get involved.
It was really fabulous and it was really addictive and sadly,
it was never going to work.
It was never going to work money-wise it kept crashing.
There were a few issues with it, so it went away.
But I think Facebook is trying to replicate Blab with a
new function for Facebook rooms. So you may remember Facebook rooms.
If you haven't used them were a few months ago,
they were a way that you could have a group video call with members of a group
or with friends by messenger. And it's actually, you know,
it's not perfect, but it's quite good.
We've been using it in my Facebook group for our weekly meetups.
And that's been really good.
It's been a really nice way to get to know people face to face.
I really am a fan of rooms. Yes, we were doing it on Zoom before,
but this meant that there was less friction.
Somebody in the Facebook group could just click a button and join in.
So now Facebook are looking at being,
giving you the opportunity to push those rooms live.
What could be the advantage of this? Well,
first that you're going to be able to broadcast them live anywhere to a group,
to a page or to a profile,
which is good because rooms aren't available as pages.
Don't worry. If you're participating in a room you won't suddenly appear live.
You will be given a notification and an opportunity either to be part of the
live broadcast or not.
So there's no fear that you're going to accidentally end up live,
but I thought this could be fabulous. Firstly,
for all the virtual events that happening,
you could have a Q&A as an extra feature with somebody,
one of the speakers and you yourself,
and a speaker could go live and other people could join in the room and ask
their questions, live on screen, which I think would be brilliant.
You could use it for panels for virtual events.
And then I thought maybe those open discussions like we used to have
on Blab would be something we could use it for.
There's definite business benefit.
Particularly if you are in the events when we do real events or virtual
event space. But can you think of anything else that you use it for?
and you're watching the Digital Coffee with Amanda Webb.
What do you do when governments around the world suddenly
decide they want to get into your business model.
They want to assess your privacy.
They want to know what you're doing with your data.
They want to completely tear your network apart and see if there is
anything interesting happening there. Well,
you could do what TikTok have done this week.
TikTok have decided that under extra scrutiny from businesses
that they are going to, or governments,
they are going to completely be transparent about their algorithm and how it
works. And about the moderation policies.
There was a memo posted from, I think it's Kevin Mayer,
who is the new American CEO of TikTok.
And I think this was kind of throwing down the gauntlet to other social networks
as well.
He was saying that they believe transparency should be at the heart of their
business. So they were going to let us know how everything worked. Now.
The weren't any links in that memo, just an announcement, just an announcement.
So I went searching and they did actually about a month ago,
they let us know what was going on with our algorithm.
How did the algorithm work?
How do they decide what videos they're going to show us in the 'for you' feed?
And it wasn't anything exciting.
It wasn't anything you wouldn't see in any other social network. For example,
what you see in the feed is based on your activity,
the videos that you've liked and commented and saved and favorited
all of those oh and shared,
that would effect just like every other social network.
It would be depend on who you follow.
So just like other social networks,
it will depend on your personal interests,
which you actually plug in when you set up your TikTok account,
but it will start to learn as well from your behavior, what your interests are.
And it also adds diversity in so that your feed doesn't get stale.
It will throw in some wild cards now and then.
All of that's pretty standard algorithm stuff.
There's nothing groundbreaking there.
There's nothing different to other social networks.
So I'm wondering what we're going to see when their moderation centres opened
up.
What I think is most interesting about this and what I think we can learn from
TikTok here is can we be more transparent?
Can we let people know how our business works?
Can we let people know more about our processes?
What are we hiding that is kind of shameful? Can we fix that?
Hopefully we're not hiding anything that's shameful.
I don't think I'm hiding anything that's shameful,
but I think the more transparent we are, the more people will trust us.
And this move could really make a difference to the UK government,
the Australian government and the American government,
all of whom have been considering banning TikTok.
Pinterest has traditionally been a place where people go to and
share tutorials. At the beginning it was those big long instructographics,
which would take you through photo by photo, how to create something,
how to construct something.
And we know more recently they've been encouraging people to share tutorial
videos. But It's a huge part of what Pinterest does.
And I just want to put it out there.
Pinterest are absolutely rocking it at their marketing.
They are so good at marketing.
And one of the things they had noticed from their own data was that a lot of
people were obviously creating tutorials on how to create your own
mask. And some of them were creating some really interesting and bizarre mass.
This was something that was becoming really popular on the network.
So they've launched a campaign to embrace it,
'Make a Statement. Mask' is the campaign.
And what they're doing is they're encouraging creators to put up tutorials on
creating quirky and interesting masks. So you can visit this page.
You can find some masks, you can give it a go yourself.
And it really taps into the creativity.
It taps into the crafter element and why I think this is smart marketing.
Why did I say it that beginning?
That Pinterest we're really rocking marketing is they are looking at
trends and that's really important for all of us to start looking
particularly now when the whole landscape has changed,
we need to look at trends within our own businesses that our audience is
interested in.
What are they talking about now and tap into them and start creating content and
campaigns around them. And that's exactly what Pinterest has done.
And this will put a nice shine on Pinterest from a reputational point of view.
It will also attract more people back into Pinterest to go and look at things.
It will have more people using it actively.
So that will mean that there is more in there for other Pinterest users that are
selling stuff. So I think it's so smart. I think it's a really good idea.
Working from home is a trend that is not going away.
We can see that a lot of big organizations aren't intending to bring their
workforce back until 2021.
And I think Google said it was going to be September 2021 before they brought
people back home.
And this means that more and more people are going to be isolated working
from home. And this means there is an opportunity for
company based social networks. So these are things, there's a Microsoft one,
I think there's one called Jing.
There's a whole lot of them out there that are a way of connecting employees.
And this is going to become so important. As people work remotely,
people need to feel connected to the organization they're working with.
They need to have those water cooler moments. They need to see each other.
They need to feel like they are part of something.
And of course these internal social networks will do that. Well,
Facebook has their own internal social network called Workplace and they
have been making updates to it recently. They know, again,
this is a trend they're tapping into and they've launched some new features for
that this week,
including some updates to the messenger service and
also dark mode. They've added dark mode.
Now I know a load of you immediately went, why is dark mode a big deal?
It's ugly. It's dark. Well, actually,
and this is why I think it's important for workplace.
It shown that dark mode is actually better for your eyes.
So if you're sitting at your computer all day,
working intensely in your home office space,
actually having a dark screen is going to save your eyesight in the future,
which I think is important because that's one other thing working from home.
When you work in the office,
they can put light screens on your computers to protect your eyes,
but not there. So once again,
we're learning from this is that we need to look at the opportunities that are
there in this ever changing landscape.
There's a difference between personal fundraisers and charity causes.
So for a long time,
we have been able to raise money for a charity via Facebook,
via Instagram, via all those tools,
but a personal cause or a personal fundraiser might be when we want
to create something that isn't related to a charity.
So maybe we want to start a fund to support local businesses who are
just hanging in by the, the edge of their fingers.
Is that a good metaphor to, to stay in business?
Or maybe we want to, as a business, create or
want to donate a whole load of toys to a local
homeless charity, or maybe we want to make cakes for first responders.
So all of that could be opportunities to fundraise.
And when we've done those personally, or as a business in the past,
we've had to use a tool like GoFundMe,
GoFundMe would be the key tool for doing those things.
And we go into GoFundMe,
we set up a fundraiser and we broadcast it on all our socials to try and get
people to donate. But now,
because Facebook just wants to own the internet.
Instagram is launching fundraisers, personal fundraisers itself.
So you will be able to add a fundraiser via your profile.
And what's interesting about this is it will put a post in your feed with a
button on to help people donate.
And why I say it's interesting is this is the first time I've seen this actually
then promote something like this in the feed,
rather than it being in stories. You may have it now,
if you are an Android user.
So that counts me out and you are based in the USA,
the UK and good news for us in Ireland,
in Ireland and anywhere else that has a donation sticker option.
So go and have a look at your profile.
See if that there is this something that you could run running a fundraiser like
this could put a nice little shine and a feelgood factor on your business when
people see you contributing, particularly now,
when there's so many people in need,
Are we looking for more positivity on line? Pinterest says,
yes, we are.
People who are searching on Pinterest are looking for
positivity. This is the graph,
which shows that searches for positivity are up
42% searches for gratitude are up by
60% and searches for meditation are up by
44%.
So people are actively looking for positive news online.
And actually when I look through my feed,
apart from the odd little barney that you see, even on Twitter,
people do seem to be more positive. Why does this matter to us?
This matters to us because we should be planning our future campaigns.
If Christmas isn't a thing for you,
you should still be looking at tapping into these trends that are happening
online, creating content related to those trends.
So can you bring meditation into your business at all?
Can you bring gratitude into your business at all?
And if you can create content along those lines,
you're going to get more traffic, not just from Pinterest,
but from other social networks and through SEO,
because you can bet if they're searching, Pinterest,
people are looking elsewhere.