#they’re discussing the best way to prepare human eyeballs

[faelapis]

white diamond’s morality

i think one of the reasons i like SU so much is, i feel its approach to morality is more structural than individual.

cartoons tend to be a bit... “great man history” about its conflict resolution. that is to say, entire systems hinge on their leaders, and the masses are easily led in a new direction if the old leader is dispatched. this is seen as unproblematic, and no one clings to everything they were taught under the old system. unless, of course, they’re one of the “bad seeds” (note again the individualism) and must also be dispatched, rather than understood as part of a context.

su definitely has a bit of that, namely the gems who were inspired by rose and chose to fight with her, but it’s more deconstructive about it. they all have personal reasons for joining, rather than the rejection of their old lives being the “default”. they still cling to fears of failing to be what they’re supposed to (especially pearl), and their leader doesn’t have a solution to the gem hierarchy. 

rose is against it, but she doesn’t know how to dismantle it. she carries seeds of disrespect towards those she protects. she may not even think they can truly break free, judging by her dialogue. she plays the perfect leader, because she’s become depressed enough to think that’s what they want her to be. it’s certainly what she was encouraged to think.

moreover, many on the cg side, including rose, thought that “shattering“ pink would be the end of it. that the dear leader was necessary to keep the system alive. but that thought is subverted - not just by the other diamonds, whose ties to pink are close, but by her followers. the ones whose role became their solace, rather than the thing they wanted to escape from. they don’t all become crystal gems, because that’s not what makes sense to them. what makes sense is to... keep going, as before. that’s what made sense to jasper, eyeball, nephrite.

and yes, they all suffer for it, but the worldbuilding of the show is strong enough that there’s inherent understanding that their responses make sense within their world, and that expecting them to celebrate and change sides overnight is... kind of unfair. it was certainly immature of rose, if she ever had that hope.

which brings me to white diamond.

i love the setup of the current arc. the question is never “can white be redeemed or will we just have to kill her”, because there are actual reasons they’re talking to her in the first place that aren’t merely ideological. like, ok, you defeat white, then what? the corrupted gems are still corrupted. her gems will hate you, maybe even seek revenge. i hope your individual moral purity was worth it, because that’s all you get for refusing to talk to her. by treating her as an individual evil, you’re inherently choosing to ignore structural problems at hand.

so the real questions are as following: 1. what would steven need to do to convince white to help him? 2. why does white perpetuate the system, and what does she think would happen without it?

i’m not the oracle who can tell you the former, but the latter is worth discussing. most of the reaction i’ve seen to the idea of white having genuine character motivation is very... well, as the saying goes, “cool motive, still murder”.

but people basically say that about every character before they know that motivation. they said it about jasper. they said it about blue and yellow (some still do, but others substitute that for blaming everything on white). it’s a very easy thing to say, when you assume all it could be is just “maybe they’re sad and lonely :(“... but that’s not what i imagine for white.

to be clear - i do think she’s lonely. isolating yourself in your head (figuratively and literally) for thousands of years will do that to you... and playing puppet with her pearl is kind of a brilliant commentary on what it’s like to be avoidant - you’re there, you can see and hear others, but you’re shielding yourself in such a way that they can’t really reach you. you’re not present enough to open yourself up, or ever tell anyone how you feel. “white never leaves her own head anymore”.

but this isn’t a motivation in and of itself. avoidance is tied to anxiety, so what is white so scared of happening if she lets go of her control?

honestly, i think what she fears is nothing less than the end of gemkind.

becoming a childless god.

the crystal gems are basically ok with that. they have to be, because gem production requires feeding off of planets, and fertile ones tend to be populated - hence the injectors look like irl viruses. they’re a parasitic species. they reproduce by killing their host.

moreover, gem production is highly specialized. you need kindergarteners, and then you need lapis lazulis to terraform in preparation of the injectors, then of course you need armies to conquer the next planet, and then Of Course you need agates to keep those gems in line, and then Naturally you need a court system with zircons to make sure everyone does their jobs, and Obviously guards to keep the peace, and managers, and pilots, and domestic servants, and if everyone doesn’t do these things then nothing will ever get done! there will be chaos and we’ll be defeated and we’ll all die next time we try to reproduce. what’s that, the youngest diamond thinks we should prioritize humankind over our own species? don’t be absurd!

that’s the rabbit hole of anxiety white has fallen down. and those anxieties aren’t merely hers, but everyone who follows the system - and gems seemingly burst out of the ground “already knowing what they’re supposed to be”, which is very much in line with that system. 

we tend to prescribe individuality to the diamonds, that they do things merely because they want to, but i think white is as much part of her court as her court depends on her. she doesn’t just think she’s the leader, she thinks she has to be in order to serve her society. she’s another gear in the clockwork, just like everyone else. why shouldn’t she stay in her room as a perfect queen, shining down on her court without desires of her own? why should she open up about what she wants? such irrational thoughts...

i think how pink creates life (the pebbles, lion, steven’s watermelons) terrifies white, because it’s use of resources without that structure. putting your own desires above your duty, allowing atomic chaos controlled only by each individual, knowing that those individuals could be destroyed and nothing new could be made without a diamond’s essence... feels selfish to her. like. ok, you want individuality and choice, cool, i’m kinda trying to keep everything in its place so we can live on as a species. but go off i guess.

and this is the part where i say what’s obvious but still needs to be said - white’s perspective is flawed. pink may be reckless, selfish, and naive, but white’s system is so deeply collectivist that she fails to see the clockwork as made up of individuals. why shouldn’t she harvest and replace a faulty part, if someone in the beehive isn’t doing their job perfectly? we’re all just machine parts, and we’re all replaceable. naturally. for the greater good. 

it’s fitting that what made her smile in the first place was a synchronized dance of literal machine parts. the end of that order terrifies her.

this is why her design (and homeworld’s) is so heavily inspired by the movie “metropolis” - which was in and of itself a critique of the dehumanization of workers under industrialism. white is the end point of that. that’s also where we got the quote for the configuration of the diamond ship - “the mediator between the head (white) and the hands (blue & yellow) must be the heart (steven)”. 

but it’s not just her. peridot and jasper both think this is perfectly rational, and write the crystal gems off as emotional and selfish (at first). and.. everything taken into account, it’s clear that neither the crystal gems as a collective or rose as an individual have been able to fully cast these ideas aside. rose’s answer wasn’t for gems - it was to put her faith in humanity, who “can choose”. who can reinvent themselves. and she thought right up until her last years that gems are somewhat tied to their purpose. that’s why she wanted to be human, after all.

and that’s why steven makes such a great bridge between these worlds. he’s blunt about how wrong it is, what rose and the crystal gems thought - that gems couldn’t change. of course they can, look at how far garnet, amethyst, and pearl have come! look at how they’ve blossomed, look at how they’ve worked to become their best selves! look at what gems and humans have in common! 

and what’s sometimes a flaw of his - inserting himself into other people’s lives and believing he understands what’s best for them, even before he knows them as individuals, to the point that it occasionally drives people (like lapis and lars) away... who does he have that in common with, if not the diamonds? if not the “impeccable judgement” of white herself?

i think that’s why, ultimately... flawed, biased and shortsighted as he can be (just like his mother), steven can get through to white. maybe not now, but someday. because he understands how these things fit together, how the problems of individuals have structural causes. most importantly, he knows that it’s going to take more than just him to fix things - and maybe he can help white realize that, too. there’s a secret fusion or love affair everywhere you look on homeworld, and so she could never really control a clockwork order... but that’s ok, because she can let go. everything in the world isn’t up to her.

[emeatocannoliii]

Vectazar Fanfic Ch. 3

*THE SAGA CONTINUES*

   The walk to the car wasn’t terribly long. The two men stopped once they got to small, orange, rather cute Slug Bug-looking vehicle. It didn’t look like much, but if it survived the trip to the convention, then it’s good enough for anywhere.

“Here we are! Say hello to the Vector Mobile!” Vector told Bratt, staring at the car with pride and joy.

   Balthazar observed the vehicle a little bit, noting some of the damage he could see on the outside (specifically with the hood having some faded paint that didn’t belong). He also noted the fact that there were some stuffed sea animals on the dash, much like how some people would have a bobble head or something like that. Bratt chuckled a bit and caught the nerd’s attention.

“What’s so funny?” Vector asked, feeling a bit embarrassed by his new companion’s sudden laughter.

“Oh nothing,” Bratt admitted, pointing to the dash “I just think it’s cute how you have some stuffed animals in there.”

“Oh. I love animals, especially sea animals, as you can tell.”

“You do you, I guess. So, we gonna admire the car all day or get some burgs?”

“Oh yeah!” Vector exclaimed, “Burgers it is! I’ll be driving.”

   With that, the men got in the vehicle. Vector started the car and started to drive off while Bratt was in the passenger seat, eyeballing everything in and out of the orange piece of metal. He reached over to the dash and grabbed a seal plush Vec had, it was spotted. His mustache formed a smile at the sight of the toy; Vector noticed this as they stopped at the stoplight.

“You like seals do you?” He asked the man in purple.

Balthazar quickly looked over with a surprised expression on his face, “Oh yeah, yeah I love seals. Especially leopard seals; I wanted one since I was around 10. The people who worked with me on Evil Bratt refused to get me one, probably for the best. I heard they are extremely dangerous, I still think they’re cool though.”

“Really?” Vector was interested in the fact that Bratt wanted a seal. “Well, I have an actual shark at my place.”

“You do?!” Balthazar was stunned by this piece of info. He heard of other villains having some of the most bizarre pets out there. But a shark … he wondered what it was like to live with one.

“Yeah, I know. Very impressive I say. Anyways, we’re here.”

   Vector pulled into the parking lot of small burger place, something like a Burger King in terms of shop size. It was called Little Leo’s Burgers, Bratt started to feel a bit iffy on the place by its appearance and name alone. It all seemed like it would be somewhat childish to the two men, but it didn’t seem to be a big deal to Vector who was looking at the ex-actor.

“Is something wrong, Bratt?” Vector asked.

“Are you sure this place is even good? I mean, I don’t want to be rude and all to a fan but … it seems to have a Chuck E. Cheese’s kinda feel to me and I don’t like it,” He explained.

“Don’t worry,” Vector replied, “This is nothing like Chuck E. Cheese. Think of it as more of a McDonald’s or Burger King.”

“You sure?”

“Positive.”

   The two quickly got out and headed inside. For the most part, Vector did keep his word to Balthazar; the place wasn’t filled with wound up kids nor did it have much kid-targeting mascots, games, or anything like that. There weren’t even that many people in the restaurant at all; it was just Bratt, Vector, a few folks at a table here and there, and some employees. With the 80s man’s mind at ease, he began looking through the menu and deciding what he wanted. Vector took the time to do the same and within a few minutes, they were ready to order. Both of them decided to get the same meal idea; a burger for each, a thing of fries for each, and two drinks. Once the order was said and done, Bratt attempted to pay for the food, only to be stopped by Vector.

“No,” the man in orange told him, “This is my treat.” Vector then gave the cashier the money that was needed.

“Well, um, thank you then, Vector,” Bratt said, he was a bit flustered by this.

This guy’s actually really nice. Bratt thought, I haven’t had a treatment like this in a LONG while.

They quickly got to a table near the front window (not like it was necessary, noting how few people were in the place) and began talking with each other once they were seated. They discussed various things about each other; Bratt talked a bit about his life during his Hollywood career and about what he was currently up to. Vector talked some of his own personal interests like video games and the many different sea animals he can name off the top of his head.

“I didn’t know humans know more about the moon than the oceans,” Bratt said in amazement, “I always thought it would be the opposite.”

“Tell me about it,” Vector replied, taking complete interest in every piece of information being exchanged.

   Their order was called out and Bratt hurried over to grab it and return to his seat. Bratt took out his gum before starting to wolf down his meal. The men still continued to talk a bit, but was limited by how much they were eating.

“So tell me,” Vector said through a bite of his burger, “Why did your show get cancelled, anyways? I was wondering what happened to it once season three was halfway completed.”

Balthazar stood there for a minute, frozen in place like a dog that knew it was in trouble. A moment passed before he drank some of his soda and replied, “Well, *sigh* during season three I started puberty and that just caused a whole mess of problems. I honestly don’t like to talk about it, but by God I looked horrible.” Bratt placed his hands over his face as he leaned back into the chair.

“I bet you didn’t look THAT bad,” Vector said, being very sincere to his friend.

Bratt quickly took his gloved hands away from his face, revealing a somewhat offended-looking face. His mustache hid his mouth but was shaped to match the rest of his expression. He let out an angered sigh and quickly pulled out his phone. He typed some stuff in and handed it to Vector before putting his hand over his eyes. Vector looked at the phone to realize it was a photo of Balthazar in his teens. Bratt seemed to have all the curses of puberty: acne, some stubble where his mustache would later be, and he even noted braces on his teeth. Vector didn’t know what to say; Bratt definitely wasn’t the most handsome boy then, but at the same time, he knew there were far worse cases of acne and body hair than what Bratt had.

“Well, I still think you looked fine to me,” Vector confessed. The man in purple lifted his hand a little bit at his comment. His face changed from embarrassment to surprise.

“You … You do?” Bratt asked.

“Absolutely. I’ve heard and seen far worse.”

“But I was rejected by Hollywood! They stopped caring after that! What would say to that!?” Bratt replied, getting slightly infuriated.

“Well, that was their fault then. They didn’t want you for what you were capable of. I think you’re still the ‘baaaad boy’ you were on TV.”

   Bratt started to smile, he hasn’t heard anything that sweet being said to him by anybody other than Clive for the longest time. With that, what the nerd was saying really meant a lot to him. Bratt’s eyes attempted to form tears at this.

“Thank you,” Bratt said, sounding very joyous to what Vector was saying,” Y-you have no idea h-how much that means t-to me.”

“I know it does.”

   The two then finished their food before heading outside. Once outside, Vector showed off his Squid Launcher to Bratt who in turn showed him his Rubik’s Cube and Keytar. Both were impressed with each other’s weapons and styles. Suddenly, Bratt got a call; Vector let him take the call.

“Oh hey Clive!””Oh, yeah, sorry about that. I met this guy at the convention and he offered me food and I guess I just forgot to tell you about it.””Okay, okay, I’ll text the address I’m at for you. Alright see you then. Bye.”

“Sorry about that,” Bratt told Vector,” My ride’s coming in a bit.”

“That’s fine,” Vector said, “I had fun either way.”

“Yeah, me too,” Bratt agreed, rubbing the back of his neck.

   Vector was about to get in his car before pausing. He wanted to do something real quick; he grabbed the stuffed seal from Bratt’s seat as well as the pen and notebook in his bag. Balthazar crept closer to the man as he dug through his car, only to be greeted by Vector being in his face. Their noses nearly touching.

“Son of a Betamax!” Bratt yelled,”Don’t do that!”

“Sorry,” Vector said, “I just thought I’d give you something and have us exchange phone numbers.”

“Oh, alright then. Do you have anything to write with or do you want me to say it out loud?”

“No, no, I got pen and paper.”

“You’re even prepared. You know Vec, you never seem to stop impressing me.”

   Bratt then grabbed the book and wrote his name and phone number on the first page. He gave the book back to Vector who wrote his name and phone number and the next page. Vec then ripped out and gave it to Bratt along with the plush.

“Are you really giving me the seal toy?” Bratt asked.

“Yeah,” Vector said, “You seem to like seals more than me. But don’t worry, you can keep that little guy. I prefer sharks anyways.”

“Well, thank you. I think I’ll call him Bowie. Like David Bowie.”

“Okie dokie!” Vector smiled at him, “Well you and Bowie get home safe. I’ll text you tonight.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Bratt replied, “Okay, my ride’s pulling in. I’ll see you later!”

“See ya!”

The two waved goodbye before they drove off in different ways.

Boy, oh boy. Vector thought, What a day.

[lucids]

11 Organic Social Media Marketing Tactics to Increase Your Reach Online

There’s a world of difference (and difficulty) between using social media as a consumer versus harnessing it for your business.

Some people can post a picture of their kids to Facebook and see 100 Likes overnight. But small businesses with growing audiences might have a harder time trying to get the same results organically.

If you want to realize the long-term potential of social media, you can't just focus only on promoting your products. You also need to incorporate tactics and types of content that create organic (unpaid) engagement.

Focusing on organic engagement as a pillar of your social media marketing:

Extends your organic reach, which you can then pay to amplify. Lowers the costs if you choose to pay to promote your posts. Establishes social proof by the numbers (total follower count and likes/shares on individual posts) Potentially turns your fans' friends into followers if they see that someone they trust has engaged with your post. Social Media Marketing today might be 'pay to play', but organic engagement still matters. A lot.

Achieving this kind of real engagement, however, involves a mix of strategy and creativity. So, here are some tactics you should consider trying.

1. Unleash a Thunderclap

What if, instead of a generating a consistent stream of likes and shares, you saved them all to go out at the same time—a strategic BOOM that could be heard all around the internet, all at once?

That’s the thinking behind Thunderclap, a platform that lets you collect Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr shares—the “digital voices” of your supporters—so that you can strategically let them loose at a time of your choosing in the future.

Thunderclaps are great for social causes and product launches, and are best when used in tandem with other crowdfunding sites, such as Kickstarter or Patreon, to leverage the support you have there.

Keep in mind though, if you're on the free plan, you'll need to reach your supporter goal (a minimum of 100 supporters) or your Thunderclap won't get shared.

2. Use Emojis in Your Social Copy to Boost Engagement

Emojis have become an accepted part of our online vocabulary, and are a good way to spice up your social copy.

Larry Kim, Founder of Wordstream suggests using emojis in your social media posts to reliably boost organic engagement and lower the costs if you choose to pay to amplify them.

Used appropriately, emojis don’t just humanize your brand but also help you capture more attention by conveying the general emotion and ideas around a post even before a person has had a chance to read it.

In simpler terms, sprinkling an emoji into your social copy can earn you more eyeballs, attention, and reach.

3. Pin Your Best Performing Posts to the Top of Your Profile

Any time you engage with others through a social profile, you're not just building your online presence. There's also a chance that those people you engage with might quickly check out your social profile feed and click through to your site or content.

Be sure you’re using all the features at your disposal so your profile communicates what you want and funnels clicks where you want:

Update your cover photo to something eye-catching like a product image or a banner to promote a sale. Include links back to your site in your bio or profile. Strategically feature or "pin" a post at the top of your feed. While you might be inclined to pin a post about one of your products or promote a sale, also consider pinning posts that did particularly well so they can continue to show off your engaged audience plus generate retweets, likes and shares for you instead of simply getting buried.

4. Be Active on the Right #Hashtags

The hashtag has organized a big part of the social web according to conversations, making it easy to join in on discussions and events by posting under the ones that are relevant to your brand.

A social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite can help you find, like, retweet and reply to posts under several hashtags. Use Hashtagify to find other hashtags related to the one you're trying to target.

Be careful not to treat hashtags the same on every channel. According to data from Buffer, hashtags affect engagement differently depending on the social network:

Twitter posts with one hashtag generate 21% more engagements than tweets with three or more. Instagram posts, on the other hand, see the most engagement when using 11+ hashtags. Facebook posts do better without hashtags. If you know of a high-profile event coming up, you can prepare in advance to make sure you're ready to get in on the action. The more targeted, the better. If you’re a fashion brand, for example, consider live-tweeting or covering high profile events and commenting on what celebrities are wearing.

Most events are accompanied by hashtags that you can hop on. But the key to hijacking a hashtag is not to hijack it at all. Instead, you should aim to contribute to the conversation in a meaningful, natural way.

5. Align Your Social Media Post With a Trending Topic

You can also reach new people with your social content by aligning your posts with trends that are relevant right now. If you pay attention to hashtags and news cycles, you can likely find an opportunity to add your voice to a conversation or parody what's happening in the world.

6. Tap into the Virality of Memes

Memes have taken over social media.

While there are some of the most common examples of memes, memes are a much larger phenomenon.

Memes are cultural behaviors that spread from person to person through imitation. That gives them an innate virality that businesses can use. They don't necessarily need to make sense at first—after all, they catch on through repetition. However, memes are only as effective as they are culturally relevant, easy to replicate and properly timed.

Look out for memes that are trending right now and find ways to adopt them into your social strategy that relate to your brand.

You can find and make basic image memes using Meme Generator. Just be sure they're memes your audience is familiar with, as memes function kind of like inside jokes where the uninitiated won't get as much value from them.

7. Post Quotes as Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. But what if you layer words on top of your pictures?

You don’t need to do the math to know you’re doubling down on engagement by communicating with your audience through both language and imagery.

That's where adding quotes on top of social images can be part of an effective strategy.

When you quote well-known words, you also borrow some of their speaker's credibility by associating yourself with them. So look for quotes that come from the people your audience adores and loves, and use Pablo by Buffer or Canva to bring them to life easily through drag-and-drop design.

Some good places to look for quotes include:

Good Reads Brainy Quote Pinterest Shopify's Daily Motivation

8. “Tag a friend who...”

Have you ever seen a post  on Facebook and engaged with it after thinking “This is just like me” or “I know someone like that”?

That's because it speaks to you as an individual while at the same time being relatable to many.

If your audience can see themselves in the things you post, it's only natural they'll be more inclined to consume and engage with them.

"Tag a friend who..." is a type of social media post you might’ve seen on Facebook or Instagram. Done right, these posts provoke others to tag their friends.

Consider using this strategy to encourage your audience to:

Highlight someone in a positive light: "Tag a friend you couldn't live without". Invite someone to take a challenge: "Tag 3 friends to take the ice bucket challenge". Poke fun at a friend: "Tag a friend who snores really loudly". Not only does this contribute comments to your posts, but each comment that includes a tagged friend will all but guarantee that they, too, at least visit your post.

9. Run a Contest/Giveaway

Contests and giveaways tend to produce significant engagement because they ask your audience to do relatively little for the opportunity to reap some reward.

The more compelling your prize, the more hoops people will jump through for the chance to come out on top.

You can run your contest directly on social media, or facilitate it with a tool like Gleam.io (which lets you do quite a bit with just the free version).

Try to establish what's called a "viral loop"—ask every participant to refer a friend or take an action that has the potential to bring in new entrants.  

10. Create Quizzes and Other Interactive Content

In school, the idea of a quiz might’ve gotten groans from all around. But thanks to Buzzfeed, quizzes have made a strong comeback. These pieces of interactive content work really well on social media—that is, if they can provoke quiz-takers to show off their results publicly.   To do that, you need to create a quiz that tells people something about themselves or how much they know, so they're compelled to share it to reflect themselves. If you want to try building your own, I suggest Playbuzz: a free and easy-to-use tool for creating interactive content.

11. Give the Gift of GIFs

A form of media that's somewhere between a picture and a video, GIFs can be found everywhere thanks to their versatility.

Here are the best ways I've found to discover or create GIFs based on your unique needs:

Source existing GIFs or create new ones on GIPHY (you can also customize them with captions) Turn existing videos into GIFs and compress them for sharing. Use Twitter's built-in GIF function to add an animated GIF to your Tweets. Use Boomerang to shoot your own video-GIFs on your phone that will play as a video loop on Instagram (like a Vine video). Use AZ Screen Recorder to record your mobile device's screen and turn the video into a GIF. Incorporate GIFs into your social media strategy and give your audience a reason to smile.

Social Media Marketing Needs a Creative Touch

Effective social media marketing should involve curating content, scheduling product-related posts, and automating what you can.

But bringing out the best in social media marketing is about more than broadcasting your brand—it's about understanding, engaging and reacting to your audience and the world they live in.

Because when so many brands use social media as a soapbox to pitch their products, it pays to be one of the ones building a real connection with their audience and adding a bit of joy to their day-to-day lives.

About the author Braveen Kumar is a Content Crafter at Shopify where he develops resources to empower entrepreneurs to start and succeed in business.

Source: https://www.shopify.com/blog/120051077-social-media-marketing-organic-engagement

[puredatingnet]

Top 5 Netflix Shows to Bond With Your Partner Over

I think we can all agree that the most difficult part about a relationship isn’t the sacrifices, or anxiety, or cohabitating. It’s deciding what to watch on TV, obviously. Picture it, the idyllic night in, involving all the staples: a cozy blanket, your University hoodie, a glass bottle of wine, a bowl of popcorn with melted butter on top (because YO-freakin’-LO), and your partner in comfy town. The only thing this coveted situation is in need of is something to watch. Familiar classics like Friends or The Office will satiate you for a time but before long one of you will be scrolling through Instagram or asleep before Ross even finds out about Monica and Chandler. This is a slippery slope indeed, a choose your own adventure of sorts.

The most ideal way to navigate your Netflix queue with your partner is to consult The Trifecta of Bingeworthiness (patent pending). Preparing to glue your eyeballs to the TV for an undetermined amount of time is like finding the one. In order to avoid making a frivolous decision, the answer to the following three questions must be a resounding YES:

1 – Can you assume that the characters will hold your attention for more than a few episodes?

2 – Does more than one season of the show in question exist?

3 – Does it have the ability to spark interesting conversation between you and your SO post viewing?

Of all the programs, in all of Netflix, let these walk into your List.

Black Mirror

If non-stop captivation and post viewing discussion revolving around human nature are your thing, Black Mirror is the ticket. This nearly unavoidable anthology centres around science fiction, dystopian futures, and moral ethical dilemmas. With four seasons of no more than 6 episodes per season, each averaging 60 minutes in length, it is an excellent recipe for binge-watching.

This is Us

I’m not trying to tell you how to live your life, but if you have not yet let the Pearson family into your living room, what are you even doing? This real, emotional, loveable show requires a box of Kleenex, and someone sweet to watch it with. Get ready to fall in love with every character on This is Us, they are all hashtag goals. (Except teenage Kevin – he’s a brat. You’ll understand once you watch). Fair warning, after seeing the kind of man Jack is, the marriage Randall and Beth have, and the sibling relationship between Kevin and Kate, you’ll be holding your nearest and dearest to a whole new standard.

The Good Place

At the off chance that you aren’t following Kristen Bell on Instagram or the more probable chance that you don’t have cable, prior to being added to Netflix you may not have heard about a gem called The Good Place. Come for the scintillating take on the afterlife, stay for the Eleanor (Kristen Bell) flashbacks – they’re “forkin’” great.

Lovesick

Formerly called Scrotal Recall (I’m not joking), Lovesick is the most underrated show on Netflix. It has everything; awkwardness, multiple and intertwining love stories, and a wicked soundtrack (Alt-J, Metronomy, Django Django…). Following the lives of three best friends – specifically one’s sordid sexual past, Lovesick manages to tackle subject matter in the most refreshingly relatable, down to earth way. This British sitcom is impossible not to love.

The Last Man on Earth

Will Forte is basically the newest version of a Michael Scott-esque (The Office) character and it is excellent. He is the right amount of cringey; you hate him, yet find yourself rooting for him. The Last Man on Earth is a comedy full of holes, nothing about it is realistic and that is what works. It dances on the line of dry and slapstick in a way that will make you literally laugh out loud. On paper, it may not seem that appealing, but I dare you to just watch one episode – spoiler alert: you can’t.

The post Top 5 Netflix Shows to Bond With Your Partner Over appeared first on PlentyOfFish Blog.

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Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[mortlend40507]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[duiatty48170]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[seo19107]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[personalinjurylawyer93555]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[seopt58147]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[bathrem22032]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[vidmrkting75038]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[seo75074]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[constructionsworkr3053]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[duilawyer72210]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6

[ramonlindsay050]

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook Wants You to Trust & Optimize Top of Funnel Ads with Just Two Metrics

Facebook is making a concerted effort to get all advertisers using only two metrics at the top of the funnel: Reach and Brand Awareness. And while this sounds like a simple flight away from the aggressive accountability for end-results that’s become standard in digital, it’s worth looking at the Why and the What of these changes.

Facebook also recently revamped their advertising representative organization, and if you have clients or a total brand ad spend over a certain size, chances are you’ve now got a dedicated representative. Don’t worry if you don’t, we’ll take a look at both ad interface changes observed in the wild, and what we’re hearing from dedicated Facebook ad reps.

What We’re Seeing on the Platform and Hearing from Facebook Reps

Working in the Facebook advertising platform, it feels like we see changes just about every other time we log in right now. On one hand this is great because Facebook’s investment in advertiser tools is paying off really well for control of delivering the right message to the right people at the right time.

On the flip side, this does make it a lot easier if you’ve got a dedicated representative – it’s a whole lot easier to talk to a live human instead of wading through piles of articles published by Facebook to find the answer to a question that may be out of date in two days.

Who knows, maybe this is Facebook’s deliberate effort to force a chatbot on its advertisers. “We are happy to inform you that henceforth all ad platform training will be delivered via Occulus Rift.” (Kidding, mostly.)

Complexity and speed of change notwithstanding, Facebook has done a great job of filling their written knowledge base to the brim with how-to and best practice articles.

A side observation: in addition to getting a dedicated rep, almost every admin on every medium to large ad account has seen an influx of communication from ‘Facebook Marketing Experts’ offering to help prepare your team for the holidays. Beware the snake-oil salesman.

Our team has noticed that we keep hearing a few key pieces of advice from these reps. The most important being this:

“the only objectives within the platform that have been shown to increase purchase intent (top of the funnel) are Brand Awareness and Reach.”

Now, this isn’t an entirely new direction or message from Facebook, as they published a blog post and corresponding white paper about driving impact at scale using Reach in June of 2016.

What that blog post did not discuss is also important: What about the 10+ other advertising objectives that Facebook still offers, and for which they still allow you to dynamically optimize?

Why would these KPIs still be available to optimize against if Facebook’s determined that the way to drive brand awareness, traffic, and ultimately sales revenue exist in just two of the objectives they offer?

Even with the case studies and white papers published directly from the platform about the effectiveness of these KPIs as advertising success criteria, in-house brand teams and independent marketers could probably assume that if the other metrics are still offered, they’re meant to be used.

So Who Sees My Ads on Facebook if I Still Optimize for Engagement?

I’ve always been curious about how Facebook determines who is most likely to engage with an ad that is optimized towards some form of engagement. It turns out that the algorithm simply chooses to serve the ad to the user who is most likely to engage with ANY ad (within the target audience you choose).

This results in engagement-optimized ads being served to the top 10% of clickiest users within the platform. At 5x the cost, I might add – another statistic you can see in the white paper linked above.

Read: it doesn’t matter if they’re relatively more interested snowmobiles than swim-suits. If they’re interested in clicking, they’re going to see your ad.

Why Does This Matter for Advertisers?

This is incredibly important for advertisers to understand because it means current prospecting campaign strategies which utilize any but two of the objectives are delivering results that are bordering on vanity metrics.

Small business owners that do not have the time or resources to dedicate to reading studies published by Facebook IQ may be wasting their limited budgets on campaigns that are not driving results.

While engagement and page likes may have been the metrics for measuring post success in the past, those objectives are much better suited for organic content – and as we all know organic reach is almost non-existent these days.

In the end, limiting your advertising to an audience of the top 10% of most click-happy users will naturally result in lower overall ad reach.

This simple fact is the strongest argument supporting Facebook’s overall shift toward Brand Awareness and Reach as the two metrics you should care about, and for which you should optimize if you believe that brand and message exposure on Facebook is effective.

That said, Facebook will magnanimously still skim through its audience to find users that will give you the [vanity] metrics that you’re willing to pay for.

Some Observations: Why The Shift in Measurement and Behavior?

TL;DR – Monetization (aka shareholders). Changes in user behavior on the interwebs. Raw number of users on the Facebook.

Facebook is a business, plain and simple. They’re not in this to make friends (hah!). And the data that’s available on each user is incredibly valuable to advertisers. When Facebook first opened the platform to businesses, they gave brands a direct connection to their user base. (YOU get organic reach! And YOU get organic reach!)

Both sides of this relationship really took advantage of this new line of communication, and Facebook remained a true ‘social’ platform. When businesses posted ads on their page, users only saw them when they followed that particular Facebook page. This opt-in format arguably allowed brands to disguise that they were advertising to the user.

Now that Facebook has increased the amount of advertising a user sees each time they log in to the platform to such a significant extent, users see those ads for what they truly are: commercials.

The more commercials a user sees, the more desensitized that person is to those 5,000+ advertising messages we get per day on average.

It seems that the number of posts that a user must currently scroll through has increased so dramatically to get to content about their actual friends, that a user has to prioritize their time within the platform. A user that may have interacted with an advertisement two years ago may simply not take the time to do so anymore.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they won’t remember an advertisement that resonated, it just means that they may not take the time to interact with the post. Combine this with the fact that millennials are shown to be less likely to engage with advertisements anyways, and it’s no surprise the Facebook algorithm has certain flaws when it comes to delivering the most relevant click-through to a website.

What it Means for the Future of Facebook Advertising: Some Wild Guesses

TL;DR. – Users leaving the feed. Heavy participation in closed community groups. Demographic skews. Huge need for creative optimization.

Facebook has a wealth of knowledge when it comes to how user behavior is changing on the platform. For the most part, they typically share this information with advertisers long after it would have been beneficial for them to know.

Based on what we’ve seen, I believe that the above changes will unfold in the following ways unless Facebook makes large-scale changes to how the platform currently operates or manages to shift both consumer behavior and advertiser behavior at scale. (Crazier things have happened.)

Businesses will figure out the “click-happy” paradox

They’ll abandon those vanity metrics, and find a way to validate their digital advertising deeper in the funnel. ‘Likes’ no longer equal a successful post – and haven’t for a while.

Users will continue to flee the main news feed

Facebook has always given users the ability to create groups and communities. And as the amount of interruption-based information pumped into the news feed increases, users will find a way to curate that information in a more manageable way.

Luckily for your marketing program, Facebook recently introduced the opportunity for businesses to do the same. Instead of just the brand posting to the community group, fans of the brand can do this as well. While this decreases the advertiser’s ability to closely control the page, it restores the sense of community that they once shared with their followers.

Advertisers will need to invest more time on their creative

At least they will if they want to see the same return on ad spend that used to come a little more easily, even with {ahem} lesser creative. It’s a simple supply-and-demand equation, and we’re demanding those Facebook eyeballs pretty hard right now.

We love wild projections and guesses about the future of billion-user platforms. Throw ’em in the comments. We’ll all check back in two years to see how accurate we were.

Additional reading on this topic about the Value of a Like from Harvard Business Review

http://ift.tt/2kBs4O6