Social Media News: August, 2017

We’re playing catch-up this month, but Beth Becker’s latest “Political Social Grab Bag” e-newsletter came out a few weeks ago and we have it here for your enjoyment. An Epolitics.com online exclusive! Sign up now to get the next Political Social Grab Bag delivered straight to your inbox. And, follow Beth on Twitter — she’ll make it worth your while…

Political-Social Grab Bag: August, 2017

What’s New to Think About?

I spent almost 20 hours last week watching (or trying to watch demos) of a variety of social listening platforms for a client. Out of that I have two observations to share:

• First, many of these platforms seem to think that if you aren’t spending $20k a year for their tool, then you aren’t worth the time to do a demo for you in a timely fashion.
• Second, there still isn’t a platform for social listening that really answers the needs for political organizing, imho.

The good news- I found one who is willing to listen to what we have to say and try to build out a module just for organizing at an affordable pricing model…so what features would you want in such a tool?

Tweet at me or email me and I’ll put the list together and share with them. Stay tuned!

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What I’m Reading:

• How Brands can Engineer Social Content — This month’s must-read.
• Cyber populism: is social media damaging democracy? — Another must-read for this month.
• Social Media Users Encounter More, Not Less, Political Diversity. This shouldn’t surprise anyone reading this newsletter.
• TV + Facebook – Turn up the volume on your media campaigns. The effects of layering digital ads with mail and robocalls are by now established fact. Now we have data that shows similar effects when layering digital ads with TV.
• We Analyzed 100 Million Headlines. Here’s What We Learned (New Research). Data! Best Practices!
• How to use emotions to create viral and shareable Facebook videos. Generally true for all social video, not just Facebook.

Platform Updates

Facebook

• BIG YUGE Change: No more modifying link previews as part of the war on fake news. Here are some workarounds.
• More info on the new Facebook Group Insights. And, now all pages have the ability to create Linked groups (no word yet if you can link an already existing group).
• Stories now sharable to public, if you have followers enabled (how long until Stories come to pages, though?).
• Soon entering beta: Paid subscriptions for publishers — might this be a first step toward paywalled content on social? Time will tell.
• Some updates to Messenger Chat Bots.
• Changes to video metrics on shared videos.

Twitter

• $99/month subscription model for people who run ad campaigns. The catch? The user doesn’t get to pick which tweets get turned into ads.