Political Social Media Grab Bag, April 2016

Political Social Grab Bag
April 2016

What's new to think about?

There’s a lot I’d like to talk about this month but March was heavy on great articles to read and platform updates so I’ll save it for next month and let you get right to the good stuff!

Training & Webinar alert:
There are still a few seats available for the Austin Trainings:
Social Media Strategy - Mon. April 11 & Tues. April 12
Advanced Digital Workshop - Wed. April 13 & Thurs. April 14
Just announced: Raleigh, North Carolina June 11 & 11...co sponsored by the North Carolina Democratic Party and Senate Democratic Whip Terry Van Duyn... Digital Organizing Workshop
I'll be leading a bunch of trainings at the annual Organizing 2.0 conference in New York City April 29 & 30...hope to see you there!

What I'm Reading

The most informative or thought-provoking articles of the month (IMHO)

Are Algorithmic Feeds Becoming the Norm on Social Media? & The real reason all the big social networks have introduced filtered feeds - Both of these articles are good reads on the state of social algorithms
4 ways to misinterpret your measurement - “Data are like political prisoners: Torture them long enough and they’ll say anything”. Just read it
Why "Go Viral" Is Not An Effective Content Marketing Strategy - we ALL know this but in case you need something to show your boss when they ask you for their own ice bucket challenge
It's time for charities to stop wasting money on social media - In which the guardian proves they don’t really get the true value of social media for a non profit
Viewing of long-form content is on the rise - Good read on long form content in a short attention span world- and Repurpose like a pro: 3 ways to extend your long-form content
What's the state of social media in 2016? - Just read this one
Impressions are a sham: the path to better media metrics - Agreed

Tools

Make yourself look good with the most interesting and promising tools of the month.

CrowdTangle Chrome Extension - I’ve been using this for a while. Check any link to see share counts, referrals sources and even comments
ActionSprout Profile Campaigns - note these are now available in a more limited capacity on Facebook itself but the AS version is more customizable for our uses in the political space imho
Designfeed.io - Type in any text and it will find fair use images and overlay it with all kinds of fonts etc that you can then go in and customize even further. Use THIS link to directly bypass the beta invite phase and start using it right away
Crowdskout - Just had a demo of this one today so I haven’t used it yet but it looks to be a very robust toolbox for managing data across platforms
If you must use stock photos

Platform Updates

As social media practitioners, one of our biggest challenges is keeping up with changes to the platforms we all use. I’ll try to provide info on the bigger updates to help you keep pace.

Facebook:

Facebook Live & the Algorithm - Long story short- Live videos are given newsfeed priority but not necessarily increased signal importance

Messaging for Pages grows up!

Big Messenger changes coming at F8 this month and thus launches the not official war with Snapchat including Messenger Bot Store

Conversion lift metric beefs up

Video metrics get a facelift with mixed results...some good stuff now gone but some new good stuff appears

Instagram:

We need a name for the new Instagram algorithm - we already have Phred, Tom & Ethel- tweet at me and let’s see if we can find a name for this pronto

Updated Instagram action ad overlays

60 second videos

Twitter

Twitter walks back the 10,000 character experiment

Otherwise known as foreshadowing

Universal tags for ads

Snapchat