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#when twitter and social media as a whole wasn’t as engaging and analytical as it is now
pop-punklouis · 2 months
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fbaccountsselling · 3 years
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Importance of Social Media promoting
Importance of Social Media promoting
Social media promoting provides your business with one in every of the foremost direct lines of communication beside your audience potential. having the flexibility to connect with customers, answer their queries and address their issues in real time is valuable, particularly whereas customers ar disbursal longer on-line than ever. Before we tend to break down the importance of social media promoting,
let’s discuss some overarching benefits:
If you’re providing groundbreaking merchandise with top-of-the-line client service however your audience hasn’t detected of you, will your business very exist? Technically affirmative – however not at intervals the minds of your ideal patronage. believe however times you’ve created a procurement supported name recognition alone, or what share times you’ve aforesaid “I simply saw an advert for that on Facebook!”
Having a broad digital footprint is correct for businesses of all sizes altogether industries as a result of it will increase your complete awareness on the web and on the far side. whenever a social media follower shares one in every of your posts, your business is being place directly prior their distinctive social network, exposing your complete to new populations World Health Organization won't have discovered your business otherwise. this sort of fast and widespread organic exposure would value a wonderful deal of it slow and cash to duplicate through alternative promoting mediums, however social media affords it to you at very little to no value.
It Puts You wherever Your Customers are
Approximately several folks use social media worldwide, that variety is foreseen to grow to most by 2025. whereas it’s exhausting to say uncalled-for to mention , one might create associate degree enlightened guess that your business’ web site in all probability isn’t receiving three.8 billion distinctive visits once a year .
“Build it which they're going to come” doesn’t importance apply to businesses. Instead, meet your audience wherever they are . customers utilize social media to make enlightened getting selections, notably with relation to the manner a complete interacts with their followers at the side of reviews left by previous customers. Some social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram even enable e-commerce businesses to connect their look to their profile. This simplifies the sales funnel by enabling customers to make instant in-app purchases. It’s necessary to note that your business doesn’t essentially ought to have a presence on each social media platform, however a lot of on that later.
It Provides You With Insights
How do you really skills impactful your digital promoting efforts ar if you don’t have the numbers to back it up? fortunately, you’re in luck – most social media platforms offer businesses with the analytics behind their posts.
What: What quite posts ar liked , shared and commented on the foremost oftentimes – photos, videos or text-based?
When: Do your posts perform higher or worse hoping on the day or time of day they are posted?
Where: ar your posts generating interest throughout a selected state, region or country?
Having these analytics offered provides you with the valuable insights required to tailor your social media promoting campaign around what’s already operating and wherever there is area for improvement.
Which Social Media Platforms ar Right For My Business?
Not all social media platforms ar created equal. As antecedently mentioned, your business will not fancy having a presence on each social media platform offered. Before you produce associate degree account on each social app at intervals the app store, let’s take a deep dive into four social media powerhouses to figure out which could be the foremost impactful for your business needs:
Facebook
What It Is:
When you think about social media promoting for businesses, Facebook is maybe the first platform that involves mind. With 2.8 billion users each single month, Facebook is unarguably the foremost common social media platform at intervals the planet. what is it that makes Facebook therefore popular? There ar several factors that contribute to Facebook’s world success, however one in every of the foremost impactful ones is it’s temperament to evolve to satisfy the wants of its users. Facebook has evolved so much on the far side the primary days wherever the app’s primary purpose was to stay in-tuned with previous classmates and distant relatives. Today, Facebook users believe the platform to remain up with the news, watch video amusement and inform their getting selections.
Why It Matters:
Facebook provides businesses with a large platform from that to connect and act with current and potential customers. There area unit sixty million active business accounts on Facebook as of 2019. As if that wasn’t reason enough to trust change of integrity, 2 thirds of Facebook users admit to visiting a district business’ Facebook page a minimum of once each week . Simply put, if your business isn’t on Facebook, you will be missing out on virtually several potential customers.
Vary Your Content: one thing that sets Facebook apart from alternative social media platforms is that it isn’t glorious for one kind of post – it really will host virtually each kind offered. From text posts to picture posts and video posts to live streams, Facebook provides your business with a large chance to examine the waters with the forms of content that resonate along with your audience. Vary your content, and keep tabs on your analytics to establish that of them generate the best possible engagement and click-through rates.
Twitter
What It Is:
Twitter is that the last word platform for short-form content. With simply 280 characters at your disposal, Twitter is supposed throughout the way that encourages compendious electronic messaging at a fast hearth pace. usually|this can be} often a winning formula for his or her 326 million monthly users worldwide UN agency use Twitter to remain up with breaking news stories quite the opposite platform. Like Facebook, Twitter is free however offers users the selection to amplify their reach through paid advertising.
Why It Matters:
93% of users UN agency follow a whole on Twitter conceive to purchase from them, and sixty seven of them have already. That’s large. Secure a follow on Twitter, and your business is nearer to securing a conversion than on the opposite social media platform. Twitter is especially helpful for B2B corporations, and seventy fifth of B2Bs utilize it already. this implies if your business isn’t interacting along with your audience there, your competitors most likely area unit.
How To appear the fodder Well
Post Often: The period of time of a tweet is simply concerning eighteen minutes – the shortest of any social media post. this implies if your company solely tweets once per day, you are allotting yourself however twenty minutes to make a unforgettable impression before your message is buried. Social media powerhouse Buffer suggests five tweets per day is that the sweet spot to maximise your visibility while not turning off your followers by posting too ofttimes.
Engage along with your Followers: The informal nature of Twitter provides businesses with an opportunity to act with their customers a lot of|much more|way more} informally than they might on more structured forms of social media. This opens the door to humanizing your whole. often check the “mentions” section of your notifications possibility, reply & retweet any post wherever your company’s handle is mentioned. simply confirm to need the time to with expertise craft your response before you respond – you'd presumably dream of obtaining your microorganism Twitter moment, however the last item you'd like is for it to be for the inaccurate reasons.
Engage With alternative Brands: Curating the proper Twitter feed for your whole is kind of simply what you post – it’s additionally what you share. If another company links to a motivating web log on their account, retweet it. If you discover a cool piece of interactive content kind of a calculator or infographic, tweet it bent your followers and “@” tag the company that denote it originally. Building this sense of sociableness and familiarity with similar (though not competing) brands at intervals the Twittersphere will increase the chance that they are about to share your tweets reciprocally , that expands your reach to their network of followers.
The importance of social media doesn’t solely reach Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and LinkedIn. Your business ought to have a social media presence on whichever apps your audience spends the foremost time, which could embrace rising platforms like TikTok or Pinterest. Trouble is, several digital promoting agencies area unit unwilling to expand their social media services on the far side the “big four” platforms. If you discover yourself throughout this example, it's about to be time to work with a digital promoting agency with the pliability to expand your social media strategy.
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andreacaskey · 3 years
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Breaking down President Biden’s data-driven social media strategy
Just days before the 2020 Presidential election, we reported that Joe Biden was outperforming Donald Trump on social media by certain key metrics. Despite the penetrating volume of Trump’s Twitter feed, Biden was earning more interactions per tweet, and far more interactions per user.
Not only was Biden winning on Twitter, but his campaign was making an impact on YouTube and even on Twitch. And, of course, he won the election. But this wasn’t a social media campaign based on flair and instinct: it was tightly driven by social analytics. No-one can better explain how that worked in practice than Sarah Galvez, Director of Social Media and Audience Development at Biden for President.
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Sarah J. Galvez
“I started out like many millennials as a consumer of the internet and social media,” Galvez told us. “I think I started my Twitter account in a computer lab while I was in high school. I became obsessed with YouTube in particular, and in college started creating content for YouTube for the admissions and communications office — directing, writing and producing — and learned a lot about how to use social media for a specific purpose and goal, which was helping people to understand what it was like to attend an all-women’s college in Massachusetts.”
Dropping everything for Hillary Clinton
Moving to Los Angeles, she started working at Maker Studio, a Disney subsidiary, focused on working with YouTube creators. She helped creators understand back-end analytics, and optimize content based on those analytics. “When Hillary Clinton decided to run for President, I dropped everything to go and work as a field organizer in Iowa or Ohio.” Then she decided to cold-call the campaign, and managed to convince them that it was imperative to have someone focused on audience growth, particularly in the video space.
Read about how engagement trumps headlines.
She was invited to join what turned out to be the first ever audience development team on a political campaign. Since then, she’s cycled back and forth between politics and the private sector, where her clients have included Bloomberg Philanthropies, Planned Parenthood, Hardpin Media, and Harmony Labs. “I’ve also worked at a couple of super-pacs, including the largest Democratic super-pac in the country, Priorities USA Action.”
Re-vamping Biden’s social strategy
She joined the Biden campaign to help it pivot from the primaries to the general election. “I came in, re-vamped the team and the strategy, pulled in a bunch of people from outside of politics — places like Paramount Pictures and ABC, to make a strong team of strategists who were doing organic social content every day.”
It was important, Galvez said, to bring in people who were fresh to the campaign to supplement political operatives who had been through the 2016 cycle, and then the long grind of Trump’s first term. “It allowed us to bring in new ideas, and innovative and creative thinking.” She also broke down responsibilities for social platforms into component parts: for example, treating Instagram stories separately from Instagram.
“The woman we brought in to help us with our video and live strategy was a huge fan of Twitch,” said Galvez, “and started thinking about new and interesting ways to do it — new ways which didn’t always include putting a candidate on there who is a 77-year-old man who wouldn’t authentically be on Twitch.”
Gen Z and millenials, she said, can sniff out inauthentic content very quickly. What’s more, in some cases the platform algorithms are set to surface content which is raw and unpolished.
Biden meets Twitch
“As a result, we had to be conscious that everyone knew who Joe Biden was, and that he probably wouldn’t be scrolling through Twitch on an everyday basis. But you know what Joe Biden really loves? He has always been a huge proponent of Amtrak and infrastructure. There’s a whole community who just watch train streams — cameras on the back of a train, aesthetic and low key.”
Biden was set to undertake a train tour between Ohio and Pennsylvania . The team put a camera on the back of his train, with a soundtrack of lo-fi hip hop music, and streamed it on Twitch: authentic Joe Biden, optimized for the platform. “It’s about mixing the two worlds in a way that makes sense, rather than just trying to force something on the audience.”
In addition, a partnerships team, headed by Christian Tom of Group Nine Media, focused on digital influencers, while a completely separate surrogates team worked with high-level celebrity influences and elected officials.
Driven by the data
We asked Galvez what success metrics she was using to optimize these various initiatives. “The KPI depended on what the actual piece of content was. If it’s a fund-raising tweet, we’re going to optimize to getting donations through the door. But on an everyday basis, we were very focused on shareable content in particular; we knew that if people were sharing it, we were getting that megaphone and amplification, whether it be a re-tweet or a share on Instagram. A campaign is a very hectic environment, and there’s not a lot of time to stop and do a full analytics pull.” For quick daily snapshots of performance, Galvez leaned heavily on Measure Studio.
Galvez had known Measure’s co-founder and COO Thomas Kramer since her days at Maker Studio. “I knew he had a platform which could help us out.” The team was under constant pressure to report on how specific pieces of content were performing, and Galvez didn’t have time to spend an hour or two assembling data.
We asked Kramer about the evolution of Measure Studio. “I started in digital ten years ago, managing paid media campaigns on YouTube, and from there went to Maker Studio where I focused on organic growth for some of the top YouTubers, and then later for those Disney brands which were struggling on YouTube while they were succeeding on other platforms.”
Knowing a content strategy is working
This led to an interest in the challenges growth strategists like Galvez have in working with data. Disparate data across multiple platforms is burdensome to track, and Kramer came across digital publishers, brand marketers, and performance-based marketers like Galvez, who were looking for data solutions that existing social media management platforms were not providing.
“There are a lot of solutions out there for really two things,” said Kramer. “One is social media management in general — your Sprouts and Hootsuites, hyper-focused on how to make publishing and workflow around publishing easy — and the second is social listening tools like Tubular Labs.” These are great tools, said Kramer, but are limited in the information they provide on social content performance.
“A lot of people are focused on whether they did better or worse than a competitor, but a healthier way to look at the growth game, in my opinion, is how do I do a little better than I did last time.” That’s the philosophical underpinning for Measure Studio, said Kramer.
One thing Measure Studio doesn’t do is attempt to combine the metrics from different platforms to provide, for instance, overall engagement scores. “That’s just smoke and mirrors,” said Kramer. “Each of these platforms is unique in the way people consume. The content is unique. The affinities between different content types — like hip hop music on the back of a train — is unique. We focused on bench-marking performance uniquely per format and per platform.” It’s more important to know how to make a successful Instagram story than know how a piece of content performed in aggregate, across platforms.
A large part of Biden’s win
To manage scheduling of content, Galvez’s team used a project management tool, Monday.com. “Particularly towards the end of the campaign, we had days when we were publishing once or twice every hour around the clock,” Galvez said.
“One of the final things I’ll say,” she continued, “is that in 2016 there were a lot of conversations about the tools used on both sides to win it or lose it. For us, what it came down to was not talking about big, fancy tools, but really good content strategists given the exact tools needed to understand what was performing well and what wasn’t.” This time around, the winning combination was: “Good tech, good smart people, a really sound message, and message discipline. This propelled us to great growth and engagement online during the election season, and was a large part of the reason Joe Biden won the Presidency.”
  This story first appeared on MarTech Today.
The post Breaking down President Biden’s data-driven social media strategy appeared first on Search Engine Land.
Breaking down President Biden’s data-driven social media strategy published first on https://likesandfollowersclub.weebly.com/
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The Intermediate Guide To Seo For Photographers
Little Known Facts About How To Blog In 2020.
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Starting a blog for the very first time can be a nerve-wrecking experience. There's a lot of enjoyment, however at the exact same time there's a worry of unknown. You wish to do everything the proper way and prevent all significant mistakes, so your blog can be effective. In our 12+ years of blogging, we have actually made many errors and found out from them.
In today's post, we will share the "skilled tips" that we wish we understood prior to beginning our very first blog site. We have a step by step guide on how to begin a blog site (properly) from setting it up, to optimizing it, securing it, and then generating income from it.
Having that stated, here are the lessons that WPBeginner creator, Syed Balkhi, has more than the last 12+ years of blogging. A lot of folks start with popular complimentary blogging platforms like Blogger, Medium, or WordPress.com, however these blogging platforms are restricted. You don't desire to waste your time there if you're major about blogging.
Likewise there's no warranty that you will have the ability to export your material must they turn off your blog. You can only utilize the features offered on their platform which are restricted. A lot of totally free platforms likewise limit you from earning money blogging. WordPress.org, on the other hand, gives you total flexibility and control of your blog site.
What Is Blogging for Beginners
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How to Make a WordPress Website: Step ...
All of our blog sites now utilize WordPress consisting of WPBeginner. WordPress powers over 31% of all sites on the internet. If you are believing how WordPress.org compares to other free blogging platforms, then we have actually done the research for you: Choosing the ideal domain is very essential. I have a hugely successful blog site called List25.com which has over 2.3 million YouTube subscribers and over 500 million video views.
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build responsive website with WordPress ...
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WordPress for Beginners: How to Build a ...
Here are some fast ideas on picking the finest domain for your website. Stick to . com domain extension Select a domain name that is simple to pronounce, spell, and as brief as possible. Use your keywords and brand name in the domain. For instance, stargardeninghouston.com is more search engine friendly, than stargardeningcompany.com See our list of the best domain registrars to choose your domain.
Choosing the right webhosting is by far among the most important decisions when beginning a blog due to the fact that https://dylanmhowell.com/seo-for-photographers/ this is where your website files are saved. Many beginners like the idea of getting free hosting, however selecting a complimentary site hosting is always a bad idea, and it will wind up costing you more money and time in completion.
My whole site was chosen no other way to restore it. I lost months of tough work. This is why it is very important to select a trustworthy hosting company. Here are a few things you require to think about: There are different types of hosting strategies like shared hosting, handled hosting, VPS, and more.
How To Blog In 2020 - An Overview
Compare evaluations of various hosting companies. Assistance is essential for newbies, and you desire ensure that there are a lot of choices to get help when you require it. For those who're simply starting, we advise utilizing Bluehost since they're a main WordPress suggested hosting service provider. They're also using our readers a totally free domain name + 65% discount rate on hosting.
They're likewise officially suggested by WordPress, and they're known for terrific assistance. For more on this topic, see our guide on how to select the best WordPress hosting. Typically users don't think of backups up until it's far too late. In the early days, I chose an inexpensive web hosting provider that wasn't very widely known, and they had hardware failure.
Many hosting business use restricted backups. Nevertheless, these backups are not guaranteed, and a hardware failure can cause you to lose data as well as the backup. Backups are your first line of defense against brute force attacks, hacking, and information theft. They are the initial step to enhance your WordPress security and keeping your website safe.
Required to setup WordPress backups now? Here is an action by action tutorial on how to backup your WordPress site using UpdraftPlus. You can't grow your site if you don't know how people find and use your website. Like many beginners, I too depend on "guess-work" and "winging-it" to get the job done till I discovered the importance of website analytics.
The Best Strategy To Use For Blogging Techniques
It enables you to see your most popular material, where your visitors are coming from, and more. It likewise assists you track user engagement across your site, which assists you enhance your business utilizing real numbers rather of guesswork. If you are running an online store, then you can utilize it to track clients and increase your conversions.
If you're major about your blog, then it is very important to have an expert branded email address. This goes a long way in negotiating handle a marketer since they believe you're a legit operation. Here is how to quickly get a expert branded e-mail address free of charge. Plus it also assists with e-mail deliverability when sending out email newsletters.
Over 70% of people deserting your site never ever return. You require a way to correspond with them. This is why you require to start constructing an e-mail list. Now you may think, why not simply develop a following on socials media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more? While you should absolutely work on constructing a following on social networks, you do not own these platforms.
On the other hand, email is still the most effective internet marketing tool. You own your email list, and you can reach your audience with no limitation. For more on this subject, see our post on why you should start building your e-mail list right now. Not building an email list from day 1 is still my # 1 regret, and this is a common remorse shared by lots of blogging professionals.
http://edition.cnn.com/search/?text=photography http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=photography
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saraseo · 4 years
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suzanneshannon · 4 years
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Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips
As a little experiment, I shared a development tip on three different social networks. I also tried to post it in a format that was most suitable for that particular social network:
On Twitter, I made it a thread.
On Instagram, I made it a series of images.
On YouTube, I made it a video.
How did each of them “do”? Let’s take a look. But bear in mind… this ain’t scientific. This is just me having a glance at one isolated example to get a feel for things across different social media sites.
The Twitter Thread
The Tweet
A little journey with lists, as a 🧵 thread. `list-style-position: outside;` is the default for lists, and is a pretty decent default. The best part about it is that both the markers *and* the content are aligned. pic.twitter.com/CkQv1hIt6q
— CSS-Tricks (@css) April 27, 2020
Twitter is probably our largest social media outlet. Despite the fact that I’ve done absolutely nothing with it this year other than auto-tweeting posts from this site (via our Jetpack Integration), those tweets do just about as well as it ever did when I was writing each tweet. These numbers are bound to change, but at the time of writing:
Views
102,501
Followers
~446,000
Retweets
108
Engagements
3,753
Likes
428 (first tweet)
Twitter provides analytics on tweets
Going off that engagements number, a little bit less than 1% of the followers had anything to do with it. I’d say this was a very average tweet for us, if not on the low side.
The Instagram Post
The Post
View this post on Instagram
There are alignment things to consider with lists like an <ol>. The markers and the content. Outside positioning does well. But it uses the edge of the box as alignment and renders markers outside the box which can be bad for getting cut off. There is a solution with custom counters and subgrid though!
A post shared by Chris Coyier (@real_css_tricks) on Apr 26, 2020 at 5:44pm PDT
Instagram is by far the smallest of our social media outlets, being newer and not something I stay particularly active or consistent on. No auto-posting there just yet.
Followers
~2,800
Likes
308
Reached
2,685
Instagram provides analytics (“insights”) on posts.
Using Reach, that’s 96% of the followers. That’s pretty incredible compared t 1% of followers on Twitter. Although, on Twitter. I can easily put URLs to tweets and send people places, where my only options on Instagram are “check out the link in my profile” or use a swipe-up thing in an Instagram Story. So, despite the high engagement of Instagram, I’m mostly just getting the satisfaction of teaching something as well as a little brand awareness. It’s much harder for me to get you to directly do something from Instagram.
The YouTube Video
The Video
youtube
YouTube is in the middle for us, much bigger than Instagram but not as big as Twitter. YouTube is a little unique in that there can be (and are) advertising directly on the videos and that get’s a “revenue share” from YouTube. That’s very much not driving motivation for using YouTube (I make 50 cents a day, but it is unique compared to the others.
Subscribers
51,300
Likes
116
Views
2,455
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YouTube provides video analytics
Facebook?
We do have a Facebook page but it’s the most neglected of all of them. We auto-post new articles to it, but this experiment didn’t really have a blog post. I published the video to our site, but that doesn’t get auto-posted to Facebook, so the tip never made it there.
I used to feel a little guilty about not taking as much advantage of Facebook as I could, but whenever I look at overall analytics, I’m reminded that all of social media accounts combine for ~2% of traffic to this site. Spending any more time on this stuff is foolish for me, when that time could be spent on content for this site and information architecture for what we already have. And for Facebook specifically, whatever time we have spent there has never seemed to pan out. Just not a hive for developers.
CodePen?
I probably should have factored CodePen into this more, since it’s something of a social network itself with similar metrics. I worked on the examples in CodePen and the whole video was done in CodePen. But in this case, it was more about the journey than the destination. I did ultimately link to a demo at the end of the Twitter thread, but Instagram can’t link to it and I wasn’t as compelled to link to it on YouTube as the video itself to me was the important information.
If I was trying to compare CodePen stats here, I would have created the Pen in a step-by-step educational format so I could deliver the same idea. That actually sounds fun and I should probably still do that!
Winner?
Eh.
The problem is that there isn’t anything particularly useful to measure. What would have been way more interesting is if I had some really important call to action in each one where I’m like trying to sell you something or get you to sign up for something or whatever. I feel like that’s the real world of developer marketing. You gotta do 100 things for someone for free if you want them to do something for you on that 101st time. And on the 101st time, you should probably measure it somehow to see if the effort is worth it.
Here’s the very basic data together though…
FollowersEngagements%Twitter~446,0003,7530.08%Instagram~2,8002,68596%YouTube~51,3002,4555%
One interesting thing is that I find the effort was about equal for all of them. You’d think a video would be hardest, but at least that’s just hit-record-hit-stop and minor editing. The other formats take longer to craft with custom text and graphics.
These would be my takeaways from this limited experiment:
You need big numbers on Twitter to do much. That’s because the engagement is pretty low. Still, it’s probably our best outlet for getting people to click a link and do something.
Instagram has amazing engagement, but it’s hard to send anyone anywhere. It’s still no wonder why people use it. You really do reach your audience there. If you had a strong call to action, I bet you could still get people do to it even with the absence of links (since people know how to search for stuff on the web).
While I mentioned that for this example the effort level was fairly even, in general, YouTube is going to require much higher effort. Video production just isn’t the same as farting out a couple of words or a screenshot. With that, and knowing that you’d need absolutely massive numbers to earn anything directly from YouTube, it’s pretty similar to other social networks in that you need to derive value from it abstractly.
This was not an idea that “went viral” in any sense. This is just standard-grade engagement, which was good for this experiment. I’m always super surprised at the type of developer tips that go viral. It’s always something I don’t expect, and often something I’m like awwwww we have an article about that too! I’d never bet on or expect anything going viral. Making stuff that your normal audience likes is the ticket.
Being active is pretty important. Any chart I’ve seen has big peaks when posts go out regularly and valleys when they don’t. Post regularly = riding the peaks.
None of this compares anywhere close to the real jewel of making things: blogging. Blogging is where you have full control and full benefit. The most important thing social media can do is get people over to your own site.
The post Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/
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recruitmentdubai · 4 years
Text
Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips
As a little experiment, I shared a development tip on three different social networks. I also tried to post it in a format that was most suitable for that particular social network:
On Twitter, I made it a thread.
On Instagram, I made it a series of images.
On YouTube, I made it a video.
How did each of them “do”? Let’s take a look. But bear in mind… this ain’t scientific. This is just me having a glance at one isolated example to get a feel for things across different social media sites.
The Twitter Thread
The Tweet
A little journey with lists, as a
Tumblr media
thread.
`list-style-position: outside;` is the default for lists, and is a pretty decent default. The best part about it is that both the markers *and* the content are aligned. pic.twitter.com/CkQv1hIt6q
— CSS-Tricks (@css) April 27, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Twitter is probably our largest social media outlet. Despite the fact that I’ve done absolutely nothing with it this year other than auto-tweeting posts from this site (via our Jetpack Integration), those tweets do just about as well as it ever did when I was writing each tweet. These numbers are bound to change, but at the time of writing:
Views
102,501
Followers
~446,000
Retweets
108
Engagements
3,753
Likes
428 (first tweet)
Twitter provides analytics on tweets
Going off that engagements number, a little bit less than 1% of the followers had anything to do with it. I’d say this was a very average tweet for us, if not on the low side.
The Instagram Post
The Post
View this post on Instagram
There are alignment things to consider with lists like an <ol>. The markers and the content. Outside positioning does well. But it uses the edge of the box as alignment and renders markers outside the box which can be bad for getting cut off. There is a solution with custom counters and subgrid though!
A post shared by Chris Coyier (@real_css_tricks) on Apr 26, 2020 at 5:44pm PDT
//www.instagram.com/embed.js
Instagram is by far the smallest of our social media outlets, being newer and not something I stay particularly active or consistent on. No auto-posting there just yet.
Followers
~2,800
Likes
308
Reached
2,685
Instagram provides analytics (“insights”) on posts.
Using Reach, that’s 96% of the followers. That’s pretty incredible compared t 1% of followers on Twitter. Although, on Twitter. I can easily put URLs to tweets and send people places, where my only options on Instagram are “check out the link in my profile” or use a swipe-up thing in an Instagram Story. So, despite the high engagement of Instagram, I’m mostly just getting the satisfaction of teaching something as well as a little brand awareness. It’s much harder for me to get you to directly do something from Instagram.
The YouTube Video
The Video
youtube
YouTube is in the middle for us, much bigger than Instagram but not as big as Twitter. YouTube is a little unique in that there can be (and are) advertising directly on the videos and that get’s a “revenue share” from YouTube. That’s very much not driving motivation for using YouTube (I make 50 cents a day, but it is unique compared to the others.
Subscribers
51,300
Likes
116
Views
2,455
Tumblr media
YouTube provides video analytics
Facebook?
We do have a Facebook page but it’s the most neglected of all of them. We auto-post new articles to it, but this experiment didn’t really have a blog post. I published the video to our site, but that doesn’t get auto-posted to Facebook, so the tip never made it there.
I used to feel a little guilty about not taking as much advantage of Facebook as I could, but whenever I look at overall analytics, I’m reminded that all of social media accounts combine for ~2% of traffic to this site. Spending any more time on this stuff is foolish for me, when that time could be spent on content for this site and information architecture for what we already have. And for Facebook specifically, whatever time we have spent there has never seemed to pan out. Just not a hive for developers.
CodePen?
I probably should have factored CodePen into this more, since it’s something of a social network itself with similar metrics. I worked on the examples in CodePen and the whole video was done in CodePen. But in this case, it was more about the journey than the destination. I did ultimately link to a demo at the end of the Twitter thread, but Instagram can’t link to it and I wasn’t as compelled to link to it on YouTube as the video itself to me was the important information.
If I was trying to compare CodePen stats here, I would have created the Pen in a step-by-step educational format so I could deliver the same idea. That actually sounds fun and I should probably still do that!
Winner?
Eh.
The problem is that there isn’t anything particularly useful to measure. What would have been way more interesting is if I had some really important call to action in each one where I’m like trying to sell you something or get you to sign up for something or whatever. I feel like that’s the real world of developer marketing. You gotta do 100 things for someone for free if you want them to do something for you on that 101st time. And on the 101st time, you should probably measure it somehow to see if the effort is worth it.
Here’s the very basic data together though…
Followers Engagements % Twitter ~446,000 3,753 0.08% Instagram ~2,800 2,685 96% YouTube ~51,300 2,455 5%
One interesting thing is that I find the effort was about equal for all of them. You’d think a video would be hardest, but at least that’s just hit-record-hit-stop and minor editing. The other formats take longer to craft with custom text and graphics.
These would be my takeaways from this limited experiment:
You need big numbers on Twitter to do much. That’s because the engagement is pretty low. Still, it’s probably our best outlet for getting people to click a link and do something.
Instagram has amazing engagement, but it’s hard to send anyone anywhere. It’s still no wonder why people use it. You really do reach your audience there. If you had a strong call to action, I bet you could still get people do to it even with the absence of links (since people know how to search for stuff on the web).
While I mentioned that for this example the effort level was fairly even, in general, YouTube is going to require much higher effort. Video production just isn’t the same as farting out a couple of words or a screenshot. With that, and knowing that you’d need absolutely massive numbers to earn anything directly from YouTube, it’s pretty similar to other social networks in that you need to derive value from it abstractly.
This was not an idea that “went viral” in any sense. This is just standard-grade engagement, which was good for this experiment. I’m always super surprised at the type of developer tips that go viral. It’s always something I don’t expect, and often something I’m like awwwww we have an article about that too! I’d never bet on or expect anything going viral. Making stuff that your normal audience likes is the ticket.
Being active is pretty important. Any chart I’ve seen has big peaks when posts go out regularly and valleys when they don’t. Post regularly = riding the peaks.
None of this compares anywhere close to the real jewel of making things: blogging. Blogging is where you have full control and full benefit. The most important thing social media can do is get people over to your own site.
The post Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips appeared first on CSS-Tricks.
source https://css-tricks.com/comparing-social-media-outlets-for-developer-tips/
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un-enfant-immature · 4 years
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SocialRank sells biz to Trufan, pivots to a mobile LinkedIn
What do you do when your startup idea doesn’t prove big enough? Run it as a scrawny but profitable lifestyle business? Or sell it to a competitor and take another swing at the fences. Social audience analytics and ad targeting startup SocialRank chose the latter is going for glory.
Today, SocialRank announced it’s sold its business, brand, assets, and customers to influencer marketing campaign composer and distributor Trufan which will run it as a standalone product. But SocialRank’s team isn’t joining up. Instead, the whole staff are sticking together to work on a mobile-first professional social network called Upstream aiming to unbundle LinkedIn.
Started in 2014 amidst a flurry of marketing analytics tools, SocialRank had raised $2.1 million from Rainfall Ventures and others before hitting profitability in 2017. But as the business plateaued, the team saw potential to use data science about people’s identity to get them better jobs.
“A few months ago we decided to start building a new product (what has become Upstream). And when we came to the conclusion to go all-in on Upstream, we knew we couldn’t run two businesses at the same time” SocialRank co-founder and CEO Alex Taub tells me. “We decided then to run a bit of a process. We ended up with a few offers but ultimately felt like Trufan was the best one to continue the business into the future.
The move lets SocialRank avoid stranding its existing customers like the NFL, Netflix, and Samsung that rely on its audience segmentation software. Instead, they’ll continue to be supported by Trufan where Taub and fellow co-founder Michael Schonfeld will become advisors.
“While we built a sustainable business we essentially knew that if we wanted to go real big, we would need to go to the drawing board” Taub explains.
Two-year-old Trufan has raised $1.8 million Canadian from Round13 Capital, local Toronto startup Clearbanc’s founders, and several NBA players. Trufan helps brands like Western Union and Kay Jewellers design marketing initiatives that engage their customer communities through social media. It’s raising an extra $400,000 USD from Round13 to finance the acquisition, which should make Trufan cash-flow positive by the end of the year.
Why isn’t the SocialRank team going along for the ride? Taub said LinkedIn was leaving too much opportunity on the table. While it’s good for putting resumes online and searching for people, “All the social stuff are sort of bolt-ons that came after Facebook and Twitter arrived. People forget but LinkedIn is the oldest active social network out there”, Taub tells me, meaning it’s a bit outdated.
Rather than attack head-on, the newly forged Upstream plans to pick the Microsoft-owned professional networkapart with better approaches to certain features. “I love the idea of ‘the unbundling of LinkedIn’, ala what’s been happening with Craigslist for the past few years” says Taub. “The first foundational piece we are building is a social professional network around giving and getting help. We’ll also be focused on the unbundling of the groups aspect of LinkedIn.”
Taub concludes that entrepreneurs can shackle themselves to impossible goals if they take too much venture capital for the wrong business. As we’ve seen with SoftBank, investors demand huge returns that can require pursuing risky and unsustainable expansion strategies.
“We realized that SocialRank had potential to be a few hundred million dollar in revenue business but venture growth wasn’t exactly the model for it” Taub says. “You need the potential of billions in revenue and a steep growth curve.” A professional network for the smartphone age has that kind of addressable market. And the team might feel better getting out of bed each day knowing their trying to unlock career paths for people instead of just getting them to click ads.
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activebodi-blog · 4 years
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How I got over 2.1 Million visitors to my website
It’s been 5 years.
5 Years, over 2 million visitors and a hell of a lot of fun (and traffic!).
No, I’m not talking about this website, but another one I own which talks about Martial Arts movies. It’s had it’s up and downs and experienced a lot of publicity in it’s time.
Over the years this website has range from 1000-2000 visits per day, mostly from SEO, and despite me putting far less effort into it these days it seems to keep following that trend.
It’s reached a fairly passive level of work and is a cool asset to have up my sleeve.
But how did I grow this website to 1000-2000 visits per day?
It was a lot of work, but more importantly a lot of learning.
There is a pretty basic formula I was able to discover through trial and error, playing around with content ideas, keeping active and always pushing forward.
So I thought I’d share with you here exactly what I did so you can grow your traffic and hopefully get even better results than I did. Some tips may apply to you and some may not.
So here we go!
Below I have a video discussing this, but also the written tips underneath.
Please Note: By playing any videos on this page, you hereby consent to the use of YouTube’s Cookies.
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel Here
Now, onto the written post!
I aimed for low competition
As I mentioned much earlier, this website is about Martial Arts movies.
When I first got interested in watching martial art movies I went online and did a search. Whilst there were plenty of movie reviews around, there were hardly websites specifically any dedicated Martial Arts films.
So I considered throwing my hat into the ring to start watching movies and writing reviews – but I wanted to make sure I could compete so I did some solid research and still it seemed to be a low competition topic.
Beyond that, I also searched for certain things to see if anyone had written about them, both in the beginning and whilst growing the website.
So I started the website about a topic in a space that had hardly any other websites and I also wrote posts that had little or low competition in Google Search Results.
These days more of these sites are up, but getting in early definitely helped secure my spot :)
I started a blog
It may seem obvious but yeah, I started a blog.
Blogging is an easy platform for really pumping out articles and reviews without having to find a home somewhere on your website for them, since they all end up in your blog feed.
But there’s more to it than that.
The blog has a theme and a mission. The first post I wrote introduced the website and a concept behind the whole blog. I found a list of the top Martial Arts Movies (250 movies) and my mission was to review them all.
So now people weren’t just reading movie reviews, they followed me on a personal challenge and then connected with me as I went.
People don’t just want an anonymous voice, they want a person to connect to and get information from. But that leads me to my next point.
The focus was on offering value
I know, I watched a tonne of TV – but I built my reviews based around informing people of the style of action they would find and if I would recommend the film.
The website was about suggesting good movies to watch.
So people had a resource of finding recommendations for martial arts movies as I slowly ranked all of these films on my own list they could refer back to. I offered a central and easy spot to see which movies I recommended, linking off to each review.
I further expanded on this by writing about the actors themselves and useful blog posts full of recommendations based on a theme. I offered valuable information for anyone who was looking to see some quality martial arts films.
I sought out people willing to promote me – and many did
Now getting onto the fun stuff!
Sure, I created a Facebook page and Twitter Profile and posted there, but being new I had no fans whatsoever. So I needed to leverage someone else’s audience. I looked up a number of people in the space, such as actors and fan pages,leaving comments and sending messages.
I didn’t straight up ask for a share, I instead focused on talking to them first and creating a connection. With one person in particular (an actor named Scott Adkins) sharing my page. More on that here.
This lead to about 500 page likes that day and kick starting the blog at about 200 visits per day. Which gave me a solid start instead of trying to reach a single person at a time and building that way.
I then listened to my audience and tailored a lot of the social media content to their liking, which gave my page a very high engagement rate and lead to a lot of traffic. But the real growth came from search engines afterward as Google’s algorithm recognized the social signals and gave me a good boost.
I hit a wall, analyzed and made adjustments
The initial boost took me so far, but things began to plateau.
As the initial novelty of my reviews started to wear off, a small group of people kept reading but a lot of people dropped off. I still had decent traffic but growth had stopped since I wasn’t getting the social signals.
This was a sign that the content I producing wasn’t something people really wanted that badly.
So I experimented with a bunch of different ideas and also checked my analytics to see what was performing best. I then moved my focus to a couple of areas, including top lists (more on that down the page).
I started a small YouTube channel
I noticed that videos I posted on social media, made by other people, were getting the most interaction and engagement – especially short music videos with a mixture of fight clips.
So I made my own!
These videos did relatively well with one of the videos getting millions of views (currently just under 5 million views).
The medium worked well since video was the same medium as the martial arts movies themselves. I linked off to the website and it still drives traffic to this day. The key for me here was to share and reshare videos and prompt other people to share also.
However, I did stop at one stage because the next tip really took me to the next level.
I limited writing reviews and focused on lists
I phased out the movie reviews almost entirely.
I accomplished my goal of reviewing the films on the list as my analytics clearly said one thing – film reviews get hardly any traffic while a few ‘Top List ‘ posts I wrote brought in most of the traffic.
So I wrote a series of list posts and took the traffic of the size well over 2000 visitors per day.
This works because people on search engines quite often want quick answers – like which “Donnie Yen movie to watch next?” and lists give people a number of quick and easy answers whilst being SEO friendly.
These same list posts went completely viral on social media despite, at this stage, having a bit of competition to work against (this was no longer low hanging fruit). I learned a few things about blog posts and SEO, leading to the next tip…
I made a point to write 3000 – 5000 word posts more frequently
I noticed my longer posts often performed better, but they were also top list posts.
So I investigated and found a number of articles talking about how blog posts with over 2000 words often performed the best. Backlinko touches on this here, although the word count has dropped a little in recent years.
So I aimed to make my blog posts comprehensive.
A good tip for this is to turn each item in a top list into a short 300 word article, or make each subheading a short 300 – 500 word article. So instead of writing a 3000 word article, you write 10 short 300 word articles.
I started an email list
“The money is in the list”
Creating an email list is one of the best things you can do for you existing traffic. Once people sign up you drastically increase their chances or returning (assuming you actually email them).
Email gives you the option to touch base with your audience far more effectively than using Social Media as it doesn’t come down to algorithms and likes as much.
People who have signed up to an email list that offers value will continue to read those emails, so you can strengthen your connection with them.
I created an autoresponder series
I created an automated funnel that sends out a series of emails over six months, starting frequently (every 2 or 3 days initially, and slowly dialing it back to once every 10 – 14 days, in order avoid being too aggressive and prompting people to unsubscribe.
Email can easily turn 1 visit into 10 or 20 repeat visits. That’s a powerful factor in increasing traffic.
This auto-responder series has a number of emails within it designed to sell affiliate products and means that for every visitor that signs up, they are likely to return a number of times over 6 months (the current length of the series of emails).
I send out occasional updates between this to keep things fresh, but it’s only about once per month at this stage.
While this still isn’t the highest source of traffic for me, it is definitely making me the most money as my audience is used to me, trusts me and follows through with purchases via my affiliate links.
I constantly promoted old posts
You may note that I mentioned the sharing of older content on my email list once people signed up.
This is a great way to get people onto those old posts but I also promoted old posts on Social Media using tool like Buffer and Revive Old Post.
You can also make a point of linking back to older posts within your new posts so that when people land, they continue to explore your website and consume your old content. This will decrease your bounce rate and improve the quality of your traffic.
This is something a lot of people don’t do but it has really helped me rank a lot of the articles on my site.
I have more information here about promoting old posts if you’re interested.
I worked on my website speed
A slow website sucks and people don’t hang around waiting just to read from it.
I took a lot of steps to drop the load time of my site right down so that less people would bounce and I’d get more traffic from search engines.
I wrote a post on this exact process right here called How I Managed to Speed up WordPress – from 20 to 2 Seconds Load Time.
Basically, I removed all of the useless BS from my design.
I redesigned, moved all content above the fold.
I started off with a really tall header/navigation and elements above each blog post.
After getting my hands on the Divi Theme, I simplified the blog layout and put more effort into the other pages. I brought the post content up as high as possible, and simplified it.
When I discovered over half of my users were using phones, I made the design dead simple and put effort into the logo to sharpen up the appearance without having too many crazy design elements distracting on the page.
This meant people could land and see what they wanted straight away. This helped to keep people on the website.
I decreased posting frequency, but continued to update old posts
Since the website has hundreds of decent posts already, there was no need to update so frequently.
As most people finding the site now are new visitors, it’s more efficient to funnel them through the email list and show them existing content as the value remains the same as I keep the posts relatively up to date.
I started with 3 or 4 posts per week and was pouring everything into this website. I now batch a number of posts with the aim of posting one per month since I covered so much ground with the site and have reached a point of diminishing returns when it comes trying to think up with new topics.
There’s always more that can be done, but not making this my whole life was important as it wasn’t intended to be a business that replaces my fulltime income (despite the fact I do make a nice little chunk of passive income from it).
To grow and move onto other things to make online business more manageable, I have been slowly converting this site into more of a niche site that is less hands on but updated enough to keep delivering value to my audience.
I built an asset, both for myself and martial arts movie fans and now I do my best to maintain that asset.
Now it ticks over seamlessly…
The only reason it worked was value and, for a while, consistency.
I found the most searched for topics and personalities in my niche and wrote resourceful articles about them, giving people an easy place to stop and learn more.
I do my best to keep up engagement, but overall it’s a very passive website now and I believe sometimes it’s best to move onto other things. Every so often there might be a little surge of interest and work to breathe a little more life into it, but otherwise keeping a consistent monthly update seems to be working for now.
You can do that same!
The above property wasn’t only a good project, but it was a fantastic learning curve that allowed me grow as an online blogger and content creator.
Experience speaks volumes so all I can say to you is give it a go!
If you already have a website, hopefully this has helped you to learn how to grow it. If you haven’t got a website yet, check out my free email course to get started.
Otherwise I’d love to hear any questions or thought you may have below! Thanks for reading and let’s keep the conversation going :)
The post How I got over 2.1 Million visitors to my website first appeared on Creator Impact.
source https://creatorimpact.com/2million-visitors-to-my-website/
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7 Things You Need To Know About SEO 2019 Today
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latestnews2018-blog · 6 years
Text
UK watchdog orders Cambridge Analytica to give up data in US voter test case
New Post has been published on https://latestnews2018.com/uk-watchdog-orders-cambridge-analytica-to-give-up-data-in-us-voter-test-case/
UK watchdog orders Cambridge Analytica to give up data in US voter test case
Another big development in the personal data misuse saga attached to the controversial Trump campaign-linked UK-based political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica — which could lead to fresh light being shed on how the company and its multiple affiliates acquired and processed US citizens’ personal data to build profiles on millions of voters for political targeting purposes.
The UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, has today announced that it’s served an enforcement notice on Cambridge Analytica affiliate SCL Elections, under the UK’s 1998 Data Protection Act.
The company has been ordered to give up all the data it holds on one US academic within 30 days — with the ICO warning that: “Failure to do so is a criminal offence, punishable in the courts by an unlimited fine.”
The notice follows a subject access request (SAR) filed in January last year by US-based academic, David Carroll after he became suspicious about how the company was able to build psychographic profiles of US voters. And while Carroll is not a UK citizen, he discovered his personal data had been processed in the UK — so decided to bring a test case by requesting his personal data under UK law.
Carroll’s complaint, and the ICO’s decision to issue an enforcement notice in support of it, looks to have paved the way for millions of US voters to also ask Cambridge Analytica for their data (the company claimed to have up to 7,000 data points on the entire US electorate, circa 240M people — so just imagine the class action that could be filed here… ).
The Guardian reports that Cambridge Analytica had tried to dismiss Carroll’s argument by claiming he had no more rights “than a member of the Taliban sitting in a cave in the remotest corner of Afghanistan”. The ICO clearly disagrees.
Cambridge Analytica/SCL Group responded to Carroll’s original SAR in March 2017 but he was unimpressed by the partial data they sent him — which ranked his interests on a selection of topics (including gun rights, immigration, healthcare, education and the environment) yet did not explain how the scores had been calculated.
It also listed his likely partisanship and propensity to vote in the 2016 US election — again without explaining how those predictions had been generated.
So Carroll complained to the UK’s data watchdog in September 2017 — which began sending its own letters to CA/SCL, leading to further unsatisfactory responses.
“The company’s reply refused to address the ICO’s questions and incorrectly stated Prof Caroll had no legal entitlement to it because he wasn’t a UK citizen or based in this country. The ICO reiterated this was not legally correct in a letter to SCL the following month,” the ICO writes today. “In November 2017, the company replied, denying that the ICO had any jurisdiction or that Prof Carroll was legally entitled to his data, adding that SCL did “.. not expect to be further harassed with this sort of correspondence”.”
In a strongly worded statement, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham further adds:
The company has consistently refused to co-operate with our investigation into this case and has refused to answer our specific enquiries in relation to the complainant’s personal data — what they had, where they got it from and on what legal basis they held it.
The right to request personal data that an organisation holds about you is a cornerstone right in data protection law and it is important that Professor Carroll, and other members of the public, understand what personal data Cambridge Analytica held and how they analysed it.
We are aware of recent media reports concerning Cambridge Analytica’s future but whether or not the people behind the company decide to fold their operation, a continued refusal to engage with the ICO will potentially breach an Enforcement Notice and that then becomes a criminal matter.
Since mid-March this year, Cambridge Analytica’s name (along with the names of various affiliates) has been all over headlines relating to a major Facebook data misuse scandal, after press reports revealed in granular detail how an app developer had used the social media’s platform’s 2014 API structure to extract and process large amounts of users’ personal data, passing psychometrically modeled scores on US voters to Cambridge Analytica for political targeting.
But Carroll’s curiosity about what data Cambridge Analytica might hold about him predates the scandal blowing up last month. Although journalists had actually raised questions about the company as far back as December 2015 — when the Guardian reported that the company was working for the Ted Cruz campaign, using detailed psychological profiles of voters derived from tens of millions of Facebook users’ data.
Though it was not until last month that Facebook confirmed as many as 87 million users could have had personal data misappropriated.
Carroll, who has studied the Internet ad tech industry as part of his academic work, reckons Facebook is not the sole source of the data in this case, telling the Guardian he expects to find a whole host of other companies are also implicated in this murky data economy where people’s personal information is quietly traded and passed around for highly charged political purposes — bankrolled by billionaires.
“I think we’re going to find that this goes way beyond Facebook and that all sorts of things are being inferred about us and then used for political purposes,” he told the newspaper.
Under mounting political, legal and public pressure, Cambridge Analytica claimed to be shutting down this week — but the move appears more like a rebranding exercise, as parent entity, SCL Group, maintains a sprawling network of companies and linked entities. (Such as one called Emerdata, which was founded in mid-2017 and is listed at the same address as SCL Elections, and has many of the same investors and management as Cambridge Analytica… But presumably hasn’t yet been barred from social media giants’ ad platforms, as its predecessor has.)
Closing one of the entities embroiled in the scandal could also be a tactic to impede ongoing investigations, such as the one by the ICO — as Denham’s statement alludes, by warning that any breach of the enforcement notice could lead to criminal proceedings being brought against the owners and operators of Cambridge Analytica’s parent entity.
In March ICO officials obtained a warrant to enter and search Cambridge Analytica’s London offices, removing documents and computers for examination as part of a wider, year-long investigation into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns, parties, social media companies and other commercial actors. And last month the watchdog said 30 organizations — including Facebook — were now part of that investigation.
The Guardian also reports that the ICO has suggested to Cambridge Analytica that if it has difficulties complying with the enforcement notice it should hand over passwords for the servers seized during the March raid on its London office – raising questions about how much data the watchdog has been able to retrieve from the seized servers.
SCL Group’s website contains no obvious contact details beyond a company LinkedIn profile — a link which appears to be defunct. But we reached out to SCL Group’s CEO Nigel Oakes, who has maintained a public LinkedIn presence, to ask if he has any response to the ICO enforcement notice.
Meanwhile Cambridge Analytica continues to use its public Twitter account to distribute a stream of rebuttals and alternative ‘facts’.
http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
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endenogatai · 6 years
Text
UK watchdog orders Cambridge Analytica to give up data in US voter test case
Another big development in the personal data misuse saga attached to the controversial Trump campaign-linked UK-based political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica — which could lead to fresh light being shed on how the company and its multiple affiliates acquired and processed US citizens’ personal data to build profiles on millions of voters for political targeting purposes.
The UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, has today announced that it’s served an enforcement notice on Cambridge Analytica affiliate SCL Elections, under the UK’s 1998 Data Protection Act.
The company has been ordered to give up all the data it holds on one US academic within 30 days — with the ICO warning that: “Failure to do so is a criminal offence, punishable in the courts by an unlimited fine.”
The notice follows a subject access request (SAR) filed in January last year by US-based academic, David Carroll after he became suspicious about how the company was able to build psychographic profiles of US voters. And while Carroll is not a UK citizen, he discovered his personal data had been processed in the UK — so decided to bring a test case by requesting his personal data under UK law.
Carroll’s complaint, and the ICO’s decision to issue an enforcement notice in support of it, looks to have paved the way for millions of US voters to also ask Cambridge Analytica for their data (the company claimed to have up to 7,000 data points on the entire US electorate, circa 240M people — so just imagine the class action that could be filed here… ).
The Guardian reports that Cambridge Analytica had tried to dismiss Carroll’s argument by claiming he had no more rights “than a member of the Taliban sitting in a cave in the remotest corner of Afghanistan”. The ICO clearly disagrees.
Important development. @ICOnews agrees with our complaint and orders full disclosure to @profcarroll following findings of non-cooperation by Cambridge Analytica / SCL. We look forward to full disclosure within 30 days. Decision here: https://t.co/X5g1FY95j0 https://t.co/ZsonQhPsKQ
— Ravi Naik (@RaviNa1k) May 5, 2018
Cambridge Analytica/SCL Group responded to Carroll’s original SAR in March 2017 but he was unimpressed by the partial data they sent him — which ranked his interests on a selection of topics (including gun rights, immigration, healthcare, education and the environment) yet did not explain how the scores had been calculated.
It also listed his likely partisanship and propensity to vote in the 2016 US election — again without explaining how those predictions had been generated.
So Carroll complained to the UK’s data watchdog in September 2017 — which began sending its own letters to CA/SCL, leading to further unsatisfactory responses.
“The company’s reply refused to address the ICO’s questions and incorrectly stated Prof Caroll had no legal entitlement to it because he wasn’t a UK citizen or based in this country. The ICO reiterated this was not legally correct in a letter to SCL the following month,” the ICO writes today. “In November 2017, the company replied, denying that the ICO had any jurisdiction or that Prof Carroll was legally entitled to his data, adding that SCL did “.. not expect to be further harassed with this sort of correspondence”.”
In a strongly worded statement, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham further adds:
The company has consistently refused to co-operate with our investigation into this case and has refused to answer our specific enquiries in relation to the complainant’s personal data — what they had, where they got it from and on what legal basis they held it.
The right to request personal data that an organisation holds about you is a cornerstone right in data protection law and it is important that Professor Carroll, and other members of the public, understand what personal data Cambridge Analytica held and how they analysed it.
We are aware of recent media reports concerning Cambridge Analytica’s future but whether or not the people behind the company decide to fold their operation, a continued refusal to engage with the ICO will potentially breach an Enforcement Notice and that then becomes a criminal matter.
Since mid-March this year, Cambridge Analytica’s name (along with the names of various affiliates) has been all over headlines relating to a major Facebook data misuse scandal, after press reports revealed in granular detail how an app developer had used the social media’s platform’s 2014 API structure to extract and process large amounts of users’ personal data, passing psychometrically modeled scores on US voters to Cambridge Analytica for political targeting.
But Carroll’s curiosity about what data Cambridge Analytica might hold about him predates the scandal blowing up last month. Although journalists had actually raised questions about the company as far back as December 2015 — when the Guardian reported that the company was working for the Ted Cruz campaign, using detailed psychological profiles of voters derived from tens of millions of Facebook users’ data.
Though it was not until last month that Facebook confirmed as many as 87 million users could have had personal data misappropriated.
Carroll, who has studied the Internet ad tech industry as part of his academic work, reckons Facebook is not the sole source of the data in this case, telling the Guardian he expects to find a whole host of other companies are also implicated in this murky data economy where people’s personal information is quietly traded and passed around for highly charged political purposes — bankrolled by billionaires.
“I think we’re going to find that this goes way beyond Facebook and that all sorts of things are being inferred about us and then used for political purposes,” he told the newspaper.
Under mounting political, legal and public pressure, Cambridge Analytica claimed to be shutting down this week — but the move appears more like a rebranding exercise, as parent entity, SCL Group, maintains a sprawling network of companies and linked entities. (Such as one called Emerdata, which was founded in mid-2017 and is listed at the same address as SCL Elections, and has many of the same investors and management as Cambridge Analytica… But presumably hasn’t yet been barred from social media giants’ ad platforms, as its predecessor has.)
Closing one of the entities embroiled in the scandal could also be a tactic to impede ongoing investigations, such as the one by the ICO — as Denham’s statement alludes, by warning that any breach of the enforcement notice could lead to criminal proceedings being brought against the owners and operators of Cambridge Analytica’s parent entity.
In March ICO officials obtained a warrant to enter and search Cambridge Analytica’s London offices, removing documents and computers for examination as part of a wider, year-long investigation into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns, parties, social media companies and other commercial actors. And last month the watchdog said 30 organizations — including Facebook — were now part of that investigation.
The Guardian also reports that the ICO has suggested to Cambridge Analytica that if it has difficulties complying with the enforcement notice it should hand over passwords for the servers seized during the March raid on its London office – raising questions about how much data the watchdog has been able to retrieve from the seized servers.
SCL Group’s website contains no obvious contact details beyond a company LinkedIn profile — a link which appears to be defunct. But we reached out to SCL Group’s CEO Nigel Oakes, who has maintained a public LinkedIn presence, to ask if he has any response to the ICO enforcement notice.
Meanwhile Cambridge Analytica continues to use its public Twitter account to distribute a stream of rebuttals and alternative ‘facts’.
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1nebest · 6 years
Text
UK watchdog orders Cambridge Analytica to give up data in US voter test case
UK watchdog orders Cambridge Analytica to give up data in US voter test case
Another big development in the personal data misuse saga attached to the controversial Trump campaign-linked UK-based political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica — which could lead to fresh light being shed on how the company and its multiple affiliates acquired and processed US citizens’ personal data to build profiles on millions of voters for political targeting purposes.
The UK’s data watchdog, the ICO, has today announced that it’s served an enforcement notice on Cambridge Analytica affiliate SCL Elections, under the UK’s 1998 Data Protection Act.
The company has been ordered to give up all the data it holds on one US academic within 30 days — with the ICO warning that: “Failure to do so is a criminal offence, punishable in the courts by an unlimited fine.”
The notice follows a subject access request (SAR) filed in January last year by US-based academic, David Carroll after he became suspicious about how the company was able to build psychographic profiles of US voters. And while Carroll is not a UK citizen, he discovered his personal data had been processed in the UK — so decided to bring a test case by requesting his personal data under UK law.
Carroll’s complaint, and the ICO’s decision to issue an enforcement notice in support of it, looks to have paved the way for millions of US voters to also ask Cambridge Analytica for their data (the company claimed to have up to 7,000 data points on the entire US electorate, circa 240M people — so just imagine the class action that could be filed here… ).
The Guardian reports that Cambridge Analytica had tried to dismiss Carroll’s argument by claiming he had no more rights “than a member of the Taliban sitting in a cave in the remotest corner of Afghanistan”. The ICO clearly disagrees.
Important development. @ICOnews agrees with our complaint and orders full disclosure to @profcarroll following findings of non-cooperation by Cambridge Analytica / SCL. We look forward to full disclosure within 30 days. Decision here: https://t.co/X5g1FY95j0 https://t.co/ZsonQhPsKQ
— Ravi Naik (@RaviNa1k) May 5, 2018
Cambridge Analytica/SCL Group responded to Carroll’s original SAR in March 2017 but he was unimpressed by the partial data they sent him — which ranked his interests on a selection of topics (including gun rights, immigration, healthcare, education and the environment) yet did not explain how the scores had been calculated.
It also listed his likely partisanship and propensity to vote in the 2016 US election — again without explaining how those predictions had been generated.
So Carroll complained to the UK’s data watchdog in September 2017 — which began sending its own letters to CA/SCL, leading to further unsatisfactory responses.
“The company’s reply refused to address the ICO’s questions and incorrectly stated Prof Caroll had no legal entitlement to it because he wasn’t a UK citizen or based in this country. The ICO reiterated this was not legally correct in a letter to SCL the following month,” the ICO writes today. “In November 2017, the company replied, denying that the ICO had any jurisdiction or that Prof Carroll was legally entitled to his data, adding that SCL did “.. not expect to be further harassed with this sort of correspondence”.”
In a strongly worded statement, information commissioner Elizabeth Denham further adds:
The company has consistently refused to co-operate with our investigation into this case and has refused to answer our specific enquiries in relation to the complainant’s personal data — what they had, where they got it from and on what legal basis they held it.
The right to request personal data that an organisation holds about you is a cornerstone right in data protection law and it is important that Professor Carroll, and other members of the public, understand what personal data Cambridge Analytica held and how they analysed it.
We are aware of recent media reports concerning Cambridge Analytica’s future but whether or not the people behind the company decide to fold their operation, a continued refusal to engage with the ICO will potentially breach an Enforcement Notice and that then becomes a criminal matter.
Since mid-March this year, Cambridge Analytica’s name (along with the names of various affiliates) has been all over headlines relating to a major Facebook data misuse scandal, after press reports revealed in granular detail how an app developer had used the social media’s platform’s 2014 API structure to extract and process large amounts of users’ personal data, passing psychometrically modeled scores on US voters to Cambridge Analytica for political targeting.
But Carroll’s curiosity about what data Cambridge Analytica might hold about him predates the scandal blowing up last month. Although journalists had actually raised questions about the company as far back as December 2015 — when the Guardian reported that the company was working for the Ted Cruz campaign, using detailed psychological profiles of voters derived from tens of millions of Facebook users’ data.
Though it was not until last month that Facebook confirmed as many as 87 million users could have had personal data misappropriated.
Carroll, who has studied the Internet ad tech industry as part of his academic work, reckons Facebook is not the sole source of the data in this case, telling the Guardian he expects to find a whole host of other companies are also implicated in this murky data economy where people’s personal information is quietly traded and passed around for highly charged political purposes — bankrolled by billionaires.
“I think we’re going to find that this goes way beyond Facebook and that all sorts of things are being inferred about us and then used for political purposes,” he told the newspaper.
Under mounting political, legal and public pressure, Cambridge Analytica claimed to be shutting down this week — but the move appears more like a rebranding exercise, as parent entity, SCL Group, maintains a sprawling network of companies and linked entities. (Such as one called Emerdata, which was founded in mid-2017 and is listed at the same address as SCL Elections, and has many of the same investors and management as Cambridge Analytica… But presumably hasn’t yet been barred from social media giants’ ad platforms, as its predecessor has.)
Closing one of the entities embroiled in the scandal could also be a tactic to impede ongoing investigations, such as the one by the ICO — as Denham’s statement alludes, by warning that any breach of the enforcement notice could lead to criminal proceedings being brought against the owners and operators of Cambridge Analytica’s parent entity.
In March ICO officials obtained a warrant to enter and search Cambridge Analytica’s London offices, removing documents and computers for examination as part of a wider, year-long investigation into the use of personal data and analytics by political campaigns, parties, social media companies and other commercial actors. And last month the watchdog said 30 organizations — including Facebook — were now part of that investigation.
The Guardian also reports that the ICO has suggested to Cambridge Analytica that if it has difficulties complying with the enforcement notice it should hand over passwords for the servers seized during the March raid on its London office – raising questions about how much data the watchdog has been able to retrieve from the seized servers.
SCL Group’s website contains no obvious contact details beyond a company LinkedIn profile — a link which appears to be defunct. But we reached out to SCL Group’s CEO Nigel Oakes, who has maintained a public LinkedIn presence, to ask if he has any response to the ICO enforcement notice.
Meanwhile Cambridge Analytica continues to use its public Twitter account to distribute a stream of rebuttals and alternative ‘facts’.
0 notes