Reddit is yet again making some changes and adding features to make it more modern and competitive with other social websites and apps.
For ages, comment and vote counts on Reddit posts would only update when you refreshed the page or you were the person upvoting or downvoting something. Now, a small animation will play each time someone upvotes or downvotes a post, and the number will update in real time even if you don’t refresh the page.
Similarly, a new comment dropdown pill will tell you how many new comments have been added as you view the post. “When a redditor clicks on the new comment indicator, the comments will sort by new and highlight live comments in real-time,” Reddit said in a blog post.
There will also be anonymous indicators noting how many people are currently reading a post and how many are currently typing a response to any existing comment you’re about to reply to.
This is the sort of thing we’ve seen in many other social apps already. For example, Facebook has long had a typing indicator to tell you when your friends are preparing a message or comment for you.
The new features all serve more or less the same purpose: making Reddit posts more active, with live updates that both keep users posted on what is changing in a conversation as they view it and that encourage users to engage more. (On-page engagement is a key metric that apps and websites track to judge the success of the content or platform.)
It’s hard to overstate the influence Reddit has on the Internet at large, but the social network has struggled to monetize its users to the same degree as its competitors, and it lags behind competitors in some performance indicators, like engagement.
These changes make its increasing focus on live engagement clear, and they likely aren’t the last we’ll see pushing the platform in this particular direction.
The changes began rolling out to all iOS, Android, and web users today. The new features are only available to users who are using the new Reddit design. While you can still access old Reddit, it won’t be getting any updates—hence, “old” Reddit.
Disclosure: Advance Publications owns a majority stake in Reddit. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1817275
Stop Chasing Trends
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What is trending on social media today is old news tomorrow. I am reminded of this truth at the dinner table with my two teenage daughters. The conversation usually goes something like, “Hey girls, have you seen this funny video that has gone viral?” To which my girls reply, “Dad, that was so two weeks ago.”
I don’t pretend to be on top of the latest trends, and if you own a small business, you need to stop focusing on social media trends and instead plan out a social media strategy. Too many entrepreneurs try to get cute with their posts and jump in on the fun. Newsflash: it does not help you close more business.
If this describes you, think back to some of the hashtags or TikTok videos you created and ask yourself, “Did my sales increase because of this trending post?” I am willing to bet the answer is no. Not a single person became your customer because your business weighed in on the color of a dress or posted a Bernie Sanders mittens meme.
The only time it makes sense to use a popular trending topic is when that topic fits your brand. If you own a clothing store, then talking about the dress color makes sense.
What is your brand?
What are you trying to communicate online? What does your marketing calendar look like for next year? Those are the questions you need to be asking yourself.
Always start with understanding your brand. Social media should be an extension of who you are as a company. Before you start pushing content out, know the answer to this question. Your brand might be defined as the product you offer or your stellar customer service. It’s not enough to say what your brand is; you must eat, sleep and breathe your brand.
I am reminded of the funny scene in the movie Elf when Will Ferrell’s character gets excited about the sign in the local diner window that reads “World’s Best Coffee.” Know your brand and push your brand on social media.
However, what you communicate online needs to have a purpose. Let me caution you to not just use your social media for promotion. You need to follow the 90-10 rule when it comes to social media. That means that 90 percent of your content needs to be of value to your current and potential followers and only 10 percent promotional content. This is where a lot of small businesses fail at social media. Too much self-promotion and not enough value.
First, ask yourself who the target demographic is for your business. How can you relate what your target demographic is interested in with the products you are selling without it coming across as a promotion?
Let’s say you own a bait and tackle store. You sell supplies for people who like to go fishing. In that case, most of your content online needs to be centered around articles and videos that give your prospects tips on catching their next big fish. When you start to build followers interested in the content, you then use the 10 percent to promote your products.
When you look at next year, what do you want to promote throughout the year? Create a strategy that compliments your overall marketing plan. Look at the sales from the previous year. What products were popular in the winter months versus the summer months? Or what products do you want to promote more in certain seasons to drive more sales?
These are all ideas the big companies follow every year. Learn from the large corporations that have huge budgets. That promotional offer you took advantage of in August as a consumer, chances are it was well thought out and planned the previous year. The social media team was a part of that marketing strategy.
New to social media and looking for more inspiration? Try pulling up a national holiday calendar and seeing if you can create content or promote certain products or services around dates on the calendar. Try to ask yourself what your prospects are thinking about throughout the year and how you can connect with them on social media.
Bottom line, it’s time you stop being reactive with your social media and be proactive in the new year.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
You’re reading Entrepreneur United States, an international franchise of Entrepreneur Media.
Content creators are becoming the backbone and main attraction of many social media platforms.
The phrase started from YouTube as a more elegant description for people who uploaded videos but has spread to Instagram, TikTok and now LinkedIn. But unlike the other three platforms, LinkedIn does not have a notable video or visual element, and the features they have taken from other social media sites like their “stories” feature have been discontinued.
So what makes a Linkedin content creator? What do they contribute that’s unique to the platform and attracts other users to follow and engage with them? According to LinkedIn itself, a creator is someone who empowers and educates their professional community with the use of LinkedIn’s tools for optimizing their profile, targeting their audience and abiding by the best practices of content that LinkedIn outlines.
If we dive deeper into the best practices, we can get a better sense of how LinkedIn defines “creators”:
Each post should be treated as an opportunity to start a conversation — not an opportunity for self or brand promotion.
They should have a diverse content mix of articles, videos, polls, and more — and post frequently, as much as 4 times a week.
They should be a source of ideas and thought leadership. A LinkedIn creator doesn’t segregate news, they give their unique perspective on it.
Finally, they should treat LinkedIn as a bridge to their brand by ending each post with a pathway to more content like blogs or longer videos.
Looking at these four guidelines that LinkedIn lays out, this tracks what both platforms and platform users are expecting from content creators. Sales-centric content and shameless self-promotion are unattractive to both social media users and the sites themselves, which is why platforms like TikTok have accounts specifically for creators that don’t get as heavily promoted by their algorithm.
Consumers have grown hyper-attuned and weary of sales tactics — they can spot them from a distance and will go out of their way to avoid interacting with social media salespeople and brand promoters. In exchange for following a personality online, they want something in return — the product that content creators on LinkedIn can give is their expertise. And the truth is, if you’re an expert, you don’t need to be a salesperson, because your expertise will do the selling for you.
One thing that LinkedIn has the capability of that other heavily creator-dependent sites don’t is the ability to post diverse content. Video might be the future, but some content creators could feel boxed in by the limits of Instagram and TikTok’s format. On LinkedIn, words matter and the ability to start a conversation in the span of a single post is what defines a successful content creator.
But now, to the more important question: Does being a LinkedIn creator actually mean anything?
On TikTok and YouTube, creators have a financial incentive for success — both platforms have started funds to pay out creators who reach a certain follower or subscriber threshold. LinkedIn has no equivalent of this — perhaps because the concept of a LinkedIn content creator is so new that the platform doesn’t have enough data to invest.
Linkedin is in a state of flux but they’re handling it better than most adapting platforms. They’ve shown a willingness to try anything but never feel stuck to committing to an idea that isn’t working (ex. Linkedin Stories.) However, when they do have a good idea on their hands (ex. their ticketed virtual events feature), they’ve been shown to put resources into it so the feature can scale and evolve.
As of now, though, being labeled as a LinkedIn content creator is more of a status symbol for LinkedIn than it is for the users. LinkedIn gets to boast about having you on its platform — before you dive fully into carving out your space there, it might suit you to wonder “What exactly am I getting from this?”
If you’re a thought leader on LinkedIn, chances are you have both a stable career and are a thought leader in other elements of your life, whether that’s through a website, blog, podcast or another avenue of content. If this is the case, it begs the question: Who is the content creator status on LinkedIn really for?
Facebook is battling its gravest crisis since the Cambridge Analytica scandal after a whistleblower accusing the company of placing “profit over safety” shed light on its inner workings through thousands of pages of leaked memos.
The documents were disclosed to US regulators and provided to Congress in redacted form by Frances Haugen’s legal counsel. A consortium of news organisations, including the Financial Times, has obtained the redacted versions received by Congress.
Earlier this month, Haugen testified in Congress that the social media company does not do enough to ensure the safety of its 2.9 billion users, plays down the harm it can cause to society and has repeatedly misled investors and the public. The Wall Street Journal also ran a series of articles called the Facebook Files.
Here are four surprising revelations the documents contain:
Facebook has a huge language problem
Facebook is often accused of failing to moderate hate-speech on its English-language sites but the problem is much worse in countries that speak other languages, even after it promised to invest more after being blamed for its role in facilitating genocide in Myanmar in 2017.
One 2021 document warned on its very low number of content moderators in Arabic dialects spoken in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Libya. Another study of Afghanistan, where Facebook has 5 million users, found even the pages that explained how to report hate speech were incorrectly translated.
Enlarge/ Facebook allocated only 13 percent of its budget for developing misinformation detection algorithms to the world outside the US
Washington Post | Getty Images
The failings occurred even though Facebook’s own research marked some of the countries as “high risk” because of their fragile political landscape and frequency of hate speech.
According to one document, the company allocated 87 percent of its budget for developing its misinformation detection algorithms to the US in 2020, versus 13 percent to the rest of the world.
Haugen said Facebook should be transparent on the resources it has by country and language.
Facebook often does not understand how its algorithms work
Several documents show Facebook stumped by its own algorithms.
One September 2019 memo found that men were being served up 64 percent more political posts than women in “nearly every country,” with the issue being particularly large in African and Asian countries.
While men were more likely to follow accounts producing political content, the memo said Facebook’s feed ranking algorithms had also played a significant role.
Enlarge/ Facebook found that men were being served up 64 percent more political posts than women in “nearly every country.”
Ben Stansall | Getty Images
A memo from June 2020 found it was “virtually guaranteed” that Facebook’s “major systems do show systemic biases based on the race of the affected user.”
The author suggested that perhaps the news feed ranking is more influenced by people who share frequently than those who share and engage less often, which may correlate with race. That results in content from certain races being prioritised over others.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1807384
How I Got Verified on Instagram Without Being Famous
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According to Instagram’s official website, verification “is a tool to help people find the real accounts of public figures and brands, and it means we verified this is a notable and authentic Instagram account.” It was never intended to become a status symbol in society, but the fact that the culture views it as such means that it carries much more weight than letting people know a particular account is authentic.
Not long ago, I asked a friend a question. “When you see a blue check on somebody’s profile, even if you have never heard of them before, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?” Without hesitation, my friend answered that the person “must be famous” or “at least the real deal at whatever they do.” And in this simple response lies the answer to why getting verified on Instagram matters.
If you have a brand or business, people buy from you and want to work with you when they know you, like you or trust you. A blue verification badge gives you instant credibility with absolute strangers even when they don’t know exactly what you do. You become looked at as an authority in whatever space you’re in and gain power that needs to be handled responsibly because people tend to take you at your word.
I spent most of the last few years building businesses, traveling as a speaker and making content on social media. Every once in a while, small publications would reach out and write a story about me. Whenever I applied for verification, however, I always got rejected. It was around this time that I started my PR agency and in the process of helping others land major news articles, I started doing the same for myself.
I spent a great amount of time building relationships with journalists and today have the contacts of thousands of writers at the world’s biggest publications like Forbes, The New York Times, Success Magazine and more. Throughout the early months of 2021, I focused heavily on getting myself featured in top publications instead of just focusing on clients. After countless emails, pitch rejections and pitch acceptances, I built a strong line up of news articles for myself to add to my Instagram verification application.
Before submitting, however, I made the decision to do something I don’t see many people talk about when it comes to getting verified on Instagram: I pursued getting verified on other platforms first so that I could show Instagram that I’ve already been recognized as a noteworthy person. After getting verified on Facebook and TikTok, I applied for Instagram verification by submitting these social-media links along with three news articles. When I checked my phone at dinner that night, I saw that little blue check on my profile, and the rest was history.
The biggest benefit that I noticed was that my Instagram DMs became full of people wanting to collaborate or do business together. I don’t even think all of these people really knew what I did for work, but they knew they wanted to work with me in some capacity. I also noticed that my prospective clients in my various businesses tended to have fewer questions before making a purchase because the blue tick added an increased level of trust.
In an interview on The Breakfast Club, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri was asked about verification and explained quite simply that the company determines if a person should be verified based on the amount of press he or she has. In other words, when a person Googles you, are a number of credible sources writing about you?
When you apply for verification, you’re given the opportunity to provide up to five links to news articles and other social-media profiles that show you’re credible. If you applied for verification and got denied, one of a few things probably happened.
First, you might have not waited the full 30 days you’re required to wait before applying again after being denied. Rumor has it that not waiting 30 days to apply will have your application rejected automatically.
Second, you might not have added any links to news articles you’ve been featured in. If you apply for verification without any news articles, you’re pretty much wasting your time. Press is the biggest deciding factor in your account getting verified, and you need to have it before you apply.
Lastly, you might have submitted news articles in your application that simply aren’t strong enough. Getting featured in Forbes carries more weight than getting featured in your high school’s online newspaper. That’s not to say your small articles are not worth submitting. It’s only to say that the bigger the press, the bigger the chances of you getting verified.
It’s also important that the article is about you. If your name appears only once in a small sentence, you may want to consider using a different article in your application. Having your name in the headline is the most ideal situation.
These are the most common mistakes I see people make when trying to get verified on social media. If you haven’t gotten verified yet, don’t get discouraged. Keep getting more press, submit for verification every 30 days, and I’m confident it will come in time.
Algorithms shouldn’t be protected by Section 230, Facebook whistleblower tells Senate
Enlarge/ Former Facebook employee Frances Haugen testifies during a Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation hearing on October 5, 2021. Haugen left Facebook in May and provided internal company documents about Facebook to journalists and others, alleging that Facebook consistently chooses profit over safety.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testified before a Senate panel yesterday, recommending a slate of changes to rein in the company, including a Section 230 overhaul that would hold the social media giant responsible for its algorithms that promote content based on the engagement it receives in users’ news feeds.
“If we had appropriate oversight, or if we reformed [Section] 230 to make Facebook responsible for the consequences of their intentional ranking decisions, I think they would get rid of engagement-based ranking,” Haugen said. “Because it is causing teenagers to be exposed to more anorexia content, it is pulling families apart, and in places like Ethiopia, it’s literally fanning ethnic violence.”
Haugen made sure to distinguish between user-generated content and Facebook’s algorithms, which prioritize the content in news feeds and drive engagement. She suggested that Facebook should not be responsible for content that users post on its platforms but that it should be held liable once its algorithms begin making decisions about which content people see.
Yet despite the call for Section 230 reform, Haugen also cautioned that reform alone would not be enough to adequately oversee the company’s broad reach. “The severity of this crisis demands that we break out of previous regulatory frames,” she said. “Tweaks to outdated privacy protections or changes to Section 230 will not be sufficient.”
“False choices”
The sweeping hearing was called to address tens of thousands of documents Haugen obtained from Facebook before she left the company in May. The former product manager handed over the files to Congress and the SEC and is seeking whistleblower protection. She has filed eight lawsuits with the SEC, including allegations that Facebook overcharged advertisers and misled investors about the size of its user base. The company, she said, is not being upfront about the nature of the problems it’s facing. “Facebook wants you to believe that the problems we’re talking about are unsolvable. They want you to believe in false choices,” Haugen said.
“They want you to believe that you must choose between a Facebook full of divisive and extreme content or losing one of the most important values our country was founded upon: free speech,” she added. “That you must choose between public oversight of Facebook’s choices and your personal privacy. That to be able to share fun photos of your kids with old friends, you must also be inundated with anger-driven virality. They want you to believe that this is just part of the deal.
“I am here today to tell you that’s not true. These problems are solvable. A safer, free-speech-respecting, more enjoyable social media is possible.”
Haugen was similarly optimistic about Facebook’s mission, despite its myriad problems. “I believe in the potential of Facebook,” she said. “We can have social media we enjoy, that connects us without tearing apart our democracy, putting our children in danger, and sowing ethnic violence around the world. We can do better.”
Algorithmic choices
Time and again, the hearing came back to the problems posed by the prevalence of algorithms and artificial intelligence in Facebook’s operations.
Documents that Haugen collected from Facebook show that engagement-based ranking algorithms prioritize divisive and extreme content on the platform. To solve that problem, she said, Facebook uses artificial intelligence to find dangerous content before it spreads. The problem is that “Facebook’s own research says they cannot adequately identify dangerous content. And as a result, those dangerous algorithms that they admit are picking up the extreme sentiments, the division, they can’t protect us from the harms that they know exist in their own system,” Haugen said.
One solution, floated by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) during the hearing, proposes that users be offered a choice between an algorithmic news feed and a chronological one. Haugen did not think that would be sufficient. “I worry that if Facebook is allowed to give users the choice: do you want an engagement-based news feed or a chronological news feed… that people will choose the more addictive option, that engagement-based ranking, even if it is leading their daughters to eating disorders.”
Facebook’s research
In an internal message later posted publicly, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg alluded to research the company has done on its platform. “If we’re going to have an informed conversation about the effects of social media on young people, it’s important to start with a full picture. We’re committed to doing more research ourselves and making more research publicly available.”
Despite promising a “full picture,” Zuckerberg did not commit to releasing all of Facebook’s research or opening its platforms to study by researchers not employed or funded by the company. Haugen’s documents show that, as recently as last week, the company has released research selectively to paint a rosier picture of what is happening on its platforms.
The company’s lack of transparency has tied regulators’ hands, Haugen said. “This inability to see in Facebook’s actual systems and confirm that they work as communicated is like the Department of Transportation regulating cars by only watching them drive down the highway,” she said. Haugen urged the senators to consider a government agency that would audit social media platforms, giving regulators greater insight into the companies’ inner workings.
“Today, no regulator has a menu of solutions for how to fix Facebook because Facebook didn’t want them to know enough about what’s causing the problems,” Haugen said. “Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been a need for a whistleblower.”
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1801618
Facebook’s latest “apology” reveals security and safety disarray
Facebook had it rough last week. Leaked documents—many leaked documents—formed the backbone of a string of reports published in The Wall Street Journal. Together, the stories paint the picture of a company barely in control of its own creation. The revelations run the gamut: Facebook had created special rules for VIPs that largely exempted 5.8 million users from moderation, forced troll farm content on 40 percent of America, created toxic conditions for teen girls, ignored cartels and human traffickers, and even undermined CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s own desire to promote vaccination against COVID.
Now, Facebook wants you to know it’s sorry and that it’s trying to do better.
“In the past, we didn’t address safety and security challenges early enough in the product development process,” the company said in an unsigned press release today. “Instead, we made improvements reactively in response to a specific abuse. But we have fundamentally changed that approach.”
The change, Facebook said, was the integration of safety and security into product development. The press release doesn’t say when the change was made, and a Facebook spokesperson couldn’t confirm for Ars when integrity became more embedded in the product teams. But the press release does say the company’s Facebook Horizon VR efforts benefitted from this process. Those were released to beta only last year.
The release would appear to confirm that, prior to development of Horizon, safety and security were sideshows that were considered after features had been defined and code had been written. Or, maybe problems weren’t addressed until even later, when users encountered them. Regardless of when it happened, it’s a stunning revelation for a multibillion dollar company that counts 2 billion people as users.
Missed the memo
Facebook isn’t the first company to have a cavalier approach to security, and as such, it didn’t have to make the same mistakes. Early in Facebook’s history, all it had to do was look as far as one of its major shareholders, Microsoft, which had bought special stock in the startup in 2007.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Microsoft had its own issues with security, producing versions of Windows and Internet Information Server that were riddled with security holes. The company began to fix things after Bill Gates made security the company’s top priority in his 2002 “Trustworthy computing” memo. One result of that push was the Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle, which implores managers to “make security everyone’s business.” Microsoft began publishing books about its approach in the mid-2000s, and it’s hard to imagine that Facebook’s engineers were unaware of it.
But a security-first development program must have come with costs that Facebook was unwilling to bear—namely, growth. Time and again the company has been confronted with choices about whether to address a safety or security problem or prioritize growth. It has ignored privacy concerns by allowing business partners to access users’ personal data. It killed a project to use artificial intelligence to tackle disinformation on the platform. It’s focus on Groups a few years ago led to “super-inviters” able to recruit hundreds of people to the “Stop the Steal” group that ultimately helped foment the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. In each case, the company had chosen to pursue growth first and deal with the consequences later.
“Many different teams”
That mindset appears to have been baked into the company from the beginning, when Zuckerberg took an investment from Peter Thiel and copied the “blitzscaling” strategy that Thiel and others used at PayPal.
Today, Facebook is fracturing under the internal strife caused by growth at all costs. The leaks to the WSJ, said Alex Stamos, the company’s former chief security officer, are the result of frustrations the safety and security people experience when they’re overruled by growth and policy teams. (Policy teams have their own conflicts—the people who decide what flies on Facebook are the same ones talking with politicians and regulators.)
“The big picture is that several mid-level VPs and Directors invested and built big quantitative social science teams on the belief that knowing what was wrong would lead to positive change. Those teams have run into the power of the Growth and unified Policy teams,” Stamos tweeted this week. “Turns out the knowledge isn’t helpful when the top execs haven’t changed the way products are measured and employees are compensated.”
Even today, there doesn’t appear to be one person who is responsible for safety and security at the company. “Our integrity work is made up of many different teams, so hard to say [if there is] one leader, but Guy Rosen is VP of Integrity,” a Facebook spokesperson told Ars. Perhaps it’s telling that Rosen doesn’t appear on Facebook’s list of top management.
For now, Facebook doesn’t seem to have much incentive to change. Its stock price is up more than 50 percent over the last year, and shareholders don’t have much leverage given the outsize power of Zuckerberg’s voting shares. Growth at all costs will probably continue. Until, of course, the safety and security problems become so large that they start harming growth and retention. Given Facebook’s statement today, it’s not clear whether the company is there yet. If that moment arrives—and if Microsoft’s transition is anything to go by—it will be years before an embrace of safety and security affects users in a meaningful way.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1797126
How to Use Social Media to Get Clients for Your Coaching Business
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
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Social media is no longer solely about keeping in touch with family members and friends. Every online coach and business owner that you know has an online presence. It’s no longer an option; it’s essential for the growth of every online business. According to Statista, there are 420 billion active users on social media, and brands who have a social media presence experience an 88% increase in exposure and 69% increase in leads generated.
The question is, how do you use social media as a tool to spread brand awareness and get more clients for your coaching business? Here are six ways to attract clients from Instagram and Facebook through organic marketing strategies, completely for free.
1. Share informative content to add value
We need to understand the psychology behind why our target audience uses social media before creating our posts.
These are some questions to think of:
What is my audience looking for when they search for a particular hashtag or keyword?
Why would my audience open up Instagram and Facebook?
What are they looking for and what are they hoping to achieve?
When you start looking at it from your audience’s perspective, you’ll be able to shift your approach. Social media is a place to be social, and it should not be treated like a marketplace. According to Backlinko, 54% of social browsers use social media to research products. This is a huge opportunity for you to use social media as a platform to add value by sharing informative content.
The benefit of sharing informative content is that you’ll naturally be seen as an expert in your niche, making it easier to be seen as a credible resource as compared to being perceived as a salesman. As such, you’ll spend much less effort trying to “convince” your audience to purchase from you when you share your offer.
One of the laws of business is that people do business with those whom they know, like and trust. The simplest way to build a connection with your ideal client is to use storytelling as part of your content marketing strategy.
The aim of storytelling is to evoke an emotional response and inspire action by using a narrative to communicate a message. Storytelling makes your brand more memorable and it helps your audience perceive you as someone relatable. When crafting your brand story, you get to use your brand voice and show them what you stand for and why it matters to them by aligning the beliefs of your brand with theirs.
3. Share your progress to inspire your audience
People take action when they are inspired. Contrary to that, people won’t move forward if they don’t have the motivation to do so. A great way to inspire your ideal clients to take action is by sharing your progress with them.
When your prospects see your backstory and how far you’ve come, they will look up to you as the expert who can guide them. With that being said, where you used to be is where they’re currently at, making it very relatable to them.
4. Showcase results by sharing testimonials
What do the top coaches have in common? Results.
Your prospect wants to make a decision, and they want to know that it’s possible for them too. People need to trust you before handing their money over to you. Showcasing results by sharing your clients’ testimonials gives you a credibility boost as you’re not just talking about yourself. It removes that barrier between your prospect and you. Instead of seeing your accomplishments as insurmountable, it helps them to see from the perspective of, “If others have done it, I can do it too!”
While content is king, social media relies heavily on the algorithm and engagement levels. The more engagement a post receives, the more the algorithm will push your content to more users, giving you a visibility boost as the snowball effect takes place. The algorithm is in complete control when it comes to visibility and going viral, especially when more people like, comment on and share a post.
Once you’ve been uploading content regularly, you’ll start to notice the trend on how each post performs. Digital marketing is all about testing and making improvements through data-driven results. Constantly monitoring and tracking your analytics will give you better insights on what types of posts you should continue creating and which ones to tweak to improve your overall performance. To make it simpler, post more of what your audience enjoys engaging with and stop posting content that doesn’t gain much traction.
6. Include calls to action to direct users to the next action step
Last but not least, your content strategy needs to have purpose and intent. Every piece of content that you’re creating needs to be contributing towards your goals and objectives on social media.
What is the next action step that you want your prospect to take?
How will it benefit them and why should they care about it?
Are you trying to grow your email list or get more sign-ups for your masterclass?
Ensure that your call to action is clear in every post so that your ideal clients have a direction to take. They need to know what you’re here for, how you can help them, and why they should take the next step by acting right away. Having clarity will make it easier for them to move down the sales funnel as they don’t need to guess what’s the next step for them, while giving them a reason not to scroll past your post.
Proven ways to attract coaching clients
There are several proven ways to attract coaching clients, and you’ll find that every coach has a unique approach, just like every other business owner. It’s important to realize that not every coaching business is the same and you need to focus on what works best for you.
The most important thing to do is to establish your authority as the expert and ensure that you are focusing on lead-generating activities that will fill up your sales funnel. The biggest mistake is to fall for the shiny object syndrome and try everything as that’s the fastest route to losing your time, money and energy. Master one thing, be known for it and position yourself as an expert to attract clients consistently.
Facebook forced troll farm content on over 40% of all Americans each month
In the wake of the 2016 election, Facebook knew it had a problem. Pages and fake accounts created by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency had spread through the social network and drawn massive engagement from real users. Facebook knew it had to get things under control.
But years later, Facebook’s own internal research teams revealed that troll farms were still reaching massive audiences, even if they didn’t have large direct followings. The company’s own algorithms pushed the troll content onto users who had not expressed interest in the pages, expanding the trolls’ reach exponentially. A report detailing the research was leaked to MIT Technology Review by a former employee.
When the report was published in 2019, troll farms were reaching 100 million Americans and 360 million people worldwide every week. In any given month, Facebook was showing troll farm posts to 140 million Americans. Most of the users never followed any of the pages. Rather, Facebook’s content-recommendation algorithms had forced the content on over 100 million Americans weekly. “A big majority of their ability to reach our users comes from the structure of our platform and our ranking algorithms rather than user choice,” the report said.
The troll farms appeared to single out users in the US. While globally more people saw the content by raw numbers—360 million every week by Facebook’s own accounting—troll farms were reaching over 40 percent of all Americans.
The report, authored by Jeff Allen, a former data scientist at Facebook, reveals that the company’s prioritization of engagement led to the problem. Facebook, he said, knows very little about content producers. Who posted something wasn’t being considered in the News Feed algorithm.
“It’s a lot of extremely fancy collaborative filtering algorithms but all based around engagement,” Allen wrote. “When the content producers that win that system are exploiting communities on our platform rather than building and supporting them, it becomes clear that the ranking system does not reflect our company values. So much so that it is actually working against us.”
Foreign influencers
Many of the pages are run from countries on the Balkan peninsula and target foreign audiences with a primary focus on Americans, the report says.
The popularity and reach of the troll farms led Allen to believe that Russian Internet Research Agency operatives were likely able to exploit the same techniques or use the same pages to reach American users. “If the Troll Farms are reaching 30M US users with content targeted to African Americans, we should not at all be surprised if we discover the IRA also currently has large audiences there,” Allen wrote.
What’s more, the troll farms were able to slip their content into Instant Articles and Ad Breaks, two Facebook programs that give partners a cut from sales of advertisements that run alongside page content. “In Instant Articles, there was a period when perhaps as much as 60% of Instant article reads were taking place on scraped content, which is the Troll Farms article writing method of choice,” Allen said. Facebook had been inadvertently paying the troll farms.
“This post was from a departing employee in 2019,” Facebook spokesperson Joe Osborne told Ars. “Even at the time it was posted, we had already been investigating these topics—and since that time—we have stood up teams, developed new policies and collaborated with industry peers to address these networks. We’ve taken aggressive enforcement actions against these kinds of foreign and domestic inauthentic groups and have shared the results publicly on a quarterly basis.”
Ars has sent Facebook additional questions, and we’ll update this story if we get a response.
Exploited communities
Users who saw troll farm content tended to fall into two groups, Allen wrote. “One camp doesn’t realize the Pages are run by inauthentic actors who are exploiting their communities. They tend to love these Pages. They like how entertaining the posts are and how they reaffirm their already-held beliefs,” he wrote. “The other camp does realize the Pages are run by inauthentic actors. They hate the ever-loving shit out of these Pages. They hate these Pages with a passion that even I find impossible to match.”
The latter group was actively telling Facebook about the problem. “Our users are literally trying to tell us that they feel exploited by these Pages,” Allen said.
By way of example, Allen cited one user who discovered a troll farm page that was targeted toward American Indians. The troll group stole art and sold it reprinted on T-shirts that were frequently never shipped to customers, the user said. “This whole group is a fraud ring,” the user wrote.
The troll farms highlighted in the report primarily targeted four different groups: American Indians, Black Americans, Christian Americans, and American women. At the time it was written in October 2019, the report says that for many of those groups, a majority of the top pages were run by troll farms, including all 15 top pages targeting Christian Americans, 10 of the top 15 targeting Black Americans, and four of the top 15 targeting American Indians. When MIT Technology Review published its story, five of the troll groups were still active. Three targeted Black Americans, one targeted Christian Americans, and one targeted American Indians.
Much of the content these groups posted, while frequently stolen, apparently did not otherwise violate Facebook’s content rules. Still, that didn’t mean it was harmless, Allen said. “The bottom line is, regardless of if there is or is not IP violation taking place, posting strictly unoriginal content violates our policies and exposes our communities to exploitation,” Allen explained.
Simple fixes
Allen believed the problem could be fixed relatively easily by incorporating “Graph Authority,” a way to rank users and pages similar to Google’s PageRank, into the News Feed algorithm. “Adding even just some easy features like Graph Authority and pulling the dial back from pure engagement-based features would likely pay off a ton in both the integrity space and… likely in engagement as well,” he wrote.
Allen left Facebook shortly after writing the document, MIT Technology Review reports, in part because the company “effectively ignored” his research, a source said.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1796217
Leaked documents reveal the special rules Facebook uses for 5.8M VIPs
Facebook had a problem on its hands. People were making posts that got caught in the company’s automated moderation system or were taken down by its human moderators. The problem wasn’t that the moderators, human or otherwise, were wrong to take down the posts. No, the problem was that the people behind the posts were famous or noteworthy, and the company didn’t want a PR mess on its hands.
So Facebook came up with a program called XCheck, or cross check, which in many instances became a de facto whitelist. Over the years, XCheck has allowed celebrities, politicians, athletes, activists, journalists, and even the owners of “animal influencers” like “Doug the Pug” to post whatever they want, with few to no consequences for violating the company’s rules.
“For a select few members of our community, we are not enforcing our policies and standards,” reads an internal Facebook report published as part of a Wall Street Journal investigation. “Unlike the rest of our community, these people can violate our standards without any consequences.”
“Few” must be a relative term at Facebook, as at least 5.8 million people were enrolled in the program as of last year, many of them with significant followings. That means a large number of influential people are allowed to post largely unchecked on Facebook and Instagram.
“PR fires”
The social media giant acknowledged that the program existed for politicians in 2019, but details of XCheck’s extent and mismanagement are new. Facebook is apparently aware of XCheck’s problems, based on excerpts from the report, but the company has struggled to fix the issues. Before making any changes to XCheck, the program’s product manager wrote in a report, “we have to balance that with business risk.”
XCheck was initially designed to keep “PR fires” to a minimum. When typical users post something that’s flagged by moderation algorithms or taken down by human moderators, they can file a report with Facebook. If they don’t win their appeal, there’s not much else they can do.
But when prominent users are moderated, they can air their grievances with their followers, creating a potential public relations headache. If the users are politicians, they might call for increased regulation of the platform. So rather than treat these elite users the same as everyone else, Facebook reportedly allows them to post whatever they like. If a post is flagged by an algorithm, it’s sent to a different set of moderators, which the WSJ says are “better-trained, full-time employees,” for review.
Yet as the list of users has grown, XCheck moderation teams apparently haven’t been able to keep pace. “We currently review less than 10% of XChecked content,” one document stated. It’s gotten so bad that elite users have been reportedly able to publish everything from disinformation to threats of violence, revenge porn, and more, allowing posts that violate Facebook’s policies to nonetheless appear on the feeds of thousands to millions of people.
VIP treatment
Even in cases where the content is ultimately removed, Facebook has treated VIP users differently from others. In the documents reviewed by the WSJ, the case of Neymar, the Brazilian soccer player, stands out. In 2019, he posted a video to his Facebook and Instagram accounts that contained nude photos of a woman who had accused him of rape. He claimed that she was extorting him.
For normal users, posting “nonconsensual intimate imagery” triggers a straightforward response—it is immediately deleted, and the person’s account is deactivated. Instead, Neymar’s video remained up for more than a day. Regular moderators couldn’t touch it, and by the time it was taken down by the XCheck team, 56 million people had seen it. The video was reposted 6,000 times, and many commenters bullied and harassed the woman. Neymar denied the rape allegations, and no charges were filed. But despite posting what Facebook itself called “revenge porn,” Neymar’s account was not deleted.
“After escalating the case to leadership, we decided to leave Neymar’s accounts active, a departure from our usual ‘one strike’ profile disable policy,” a Facebook review said.
“Tradeoffs”
“We know our enforcement is not perfect, and there are tradeoffs between speed and accuracy,” Facebook spokesperson Andy Stone said in a Twitter thread. “We have new teams, new resources, and an overhaul of the process that is an existing work-stream at Facebook.”
Some of the documents reviewed by the WSJ came from a person seeking federal whistleblower protection. The person reportedly turned over the same documents to the Security and Exchange Commission and to Congress.
As recently as March, users were being added to the XCheck lists, expanding a program that had already grown too unwieldy for Facebook to adequately manage. The company has reportedly set a goal to enforce “high severity” rule violations by the first half of this year. In the meantime, Facebook plans to assume “good intent” on the part of high-profile users in the program and take an approach of “innocent until proven guilty,” a product manager on Facebook’s Mistakes Prevention Team wrote.
“We do not have systems built out to do that extra diligence for all integrity actions that can occur for a VIP,” she wrote.
