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Tag: Likes

  • New Data Shows Importance Of Facebook Shares Over Likes And Comments

    New Data Shows Importance Of Facebook Shares Over Likes And Comments

    When it comes to your Facebook posts, shares appear to be significantly more important than either likes or comments when it comes to increasing your reach and audience.

    Have you found shares to be more effective at increasing your posts’ reach than likes? Let us know in the comments.

    That is the key finding from some recently released research by Socialbakers, which says it is now able to demonstrate that shares directly correlate with viral reach more than any other kind of interaction.

    Here are a couple of graphs that do just that, looking at both media and brand posts:

    Optimized-Screen Shot 2015-11-20 at 10.53.31 AM

    Viral reach, by the way, refers to those who saw a story in their News Feed or Ticker only because of one or more of their friends interacted with it.

    According to the findings, there’s a 72% chance that if a Facebook user sees a Media post referred from a Facebook friend interacting with it, the interaction was a comment, but if that person shared it, the percentage goes up to 99.8%. The numbers for brand pages are 28% for comments and 94% for shares.

    “Another major finding from our research is that most unique Media impressions come from viral reach – and from their posts being shared,” says Socialbakers social media analyst Phillip Ross. “This fits the general pattern we see in our Promoted Post Detection tool (an exclusive component of our social media analytics tool), that almost all Media engagement is organic. Now, we know that this organic engagement almost certainly comes from content being shared. But for Brands, it’s not the same story. Shares only correlate 55% with unique impressions for Brand posts.”

    “Strangely enough, Likes correlate most strongly with overall Brand post impressions,” he adds. “This phenomenon happens for a more obvious reason than it may seem: there are simply more Likes happening to the average Brand post than there are Shares. Keep in mind there’s still a very high correlation between Shares and unique viral impressions – but because viral impressions only make up 6% of all Brand impressions, most Brand post impressions that come from social referrals will come from Likes. The lesson here is clear: To get friends of your target audience to see your branded content – and to get the broadest reach possible on Facebook – your content must be shareable.”

    Socialbakers also shared this video of its executive chairman talking about engagement data of publishers, which the firm says brands should be looking to for inspiration when it comes to shareable content.

    The advice here essentially amounts to following BuzzFeed and Business Insider to see how to do content for social media.

    A Facebook spokesperson was recently quoted as saying, “Over the past two years, we’ve seen referral traffic to publishers from Facebook grow significantly, nearly across the board. As the number of posts to Facebook has increased substantially over the past few months, there has been a corresponding increase in the amount of potential posts to show any one person, which impacts reach. In this newly competitive landscape, we’re seeing results vary by publisher: some are experiencing continued growth in referral traffic while others have seen declines. On the whole, referrals to the top 1,000 publishers are at the same level today as they were in January.”

    Clearly, businesses need to be creating content that people want to share with others, and should be going out of their way to encourage people to do just that. Does your content only display Facebook’s like button and not the share button? That’s a good place to start.

    We recently looked at some findings indicating that short and sweet Facebook posts tend to drive more traffic to websites. More on that here.

    Do you focus on getting shares over likes? Do you post content that emulates that of the media? Discuss.

    Images via Facebook, Socialbakers

  • Twitter Favorites Are Dead, Now You Must “Like” Tweets with a Heart

    Twitter Favorites Are Dead, Now You Must “Like” Tweets with a Heart

    The Twitter favorite, the star, is dead.

    Twitter has decided to swap favorites for “likes” and stars for hearts on both its main platform and on Vine. Now, Twitter’s three main properties – Twitter proper, Vine, and Periscope – will all use hearts to signal agreement, interest, solidarity, etc with a post.

    “We are changing our star icon for favorites to a heart and we’ll be calling them likes. We want to make Twitter easier and more rewarding to use, and we know that at times the star could be confusing, especially to newcomers. You might like a lot of things, but not everything can be your favorite,” says Twitter

    “The heart, in contrast, is a universal symbol that resonates across languages, cultures, and time zones. The heart is more expressive, enabling you to convey a range of emotions and easily connect with people. And in our tests, we found that people loved it.”

    Users are very familiar with he concept of a heart, from both Tumblr and Instagram. And as for “likes”, well we’re all pretty used to giving out those.

    The one thing about favoriting tweets with a star is that people used the feature to bookmark, or save tweets. You might not “like” the tweet – in fact you may hate it and disagree vehemently – but you might still fav it in order to preserve it, in a way.

    But Twitter’s right in saying the heart icon and “liking” is more universal. And if we know anything about Twitter’s latest strategy to get more people using Twitter, it’s a desire to be more universal.

  • Microsoft Is Trying to Make Email More Social

    If you’ve ever had to desire to “like” an email, Microsoft has you covered.

    The company is bringing both “likes” and “mentions” to Outlook email. A thumbs-up button will now grace emails in your inbox, and clicking it will send a notification to the email’s author.

    These likes, which Microsoft says can be an “easy way to endorse an email,” will show up as a counter at the top of said email.

    That’s taking a page from Facebook, but Microsoft’s also taken @mentions from Twitter.

    “To use Mentions, simply add the @ symbol in the body of an email. This will bring up your frequent contacts as well as access to your directory. Select the person you want to highlight, and they will automatically be added to the To: line if they were not already included. In addition, their name will be highlighted in the message in blue and they will receive an @ flag in their inbox view next to the message. Furthermore, they can sort by their @ messages to ensure they respond to all messages in which they were mentioned,” says Microsoft.

    In terms of availability, you might not have access right away:

    “The Like feature in Outlook on the web will begin to roll out today to Office 365 First Release customers whose Office 365 plan includes Exchange Online. We expect the feature to roll out broadly to eligible Office 365 commercial customers starting in late October. The Mention feature will begin rolling out to First Release customers in mid-October and broadly to all eligible Office 365 commercial customers in mid-November. In addition, our Outlook.com users who have been migrated to the new version of the service will start seeing Mentions in the December time frame as well.”

    So, probably December for most of you.

    Thumbs up? Thumbs down? Do you see yourself liking many emails?

  • Man Violates Restraining Order by Liking Facebook Photos

    Man Violates Restraining Order by Liking Facebook Photos

    If you’ve recently been hit with a restraining order, it’s probably best for you to stay off Facebook.

    In today’s reminder that social media contact is still contact, a Pennsylvania man has been arrested and charged with contempt of court after he liked approximately 22 photos and videos on Facebook.

    According to the Times Leader, 26-year-old Justin Bellanco violated a no-contact restraining order when he showed his approval of nearly two dozen posts by 24-year-old April Holland.

    From the Leader:

    Holland, 24, of Pittston, obtained a protection from abuse order against Bellanco on July 28, claiming Bellanco has been stalking and harassing her and her friends, and threatened to shoot her knee cap to watch her suffer, according to her PFA application.

     

    Luzerne County Judge Lesa Gelb on Aug. 4 granted a restraining order against Bellanco, prohibiting him from having any contact with Holland for one year.

     

    Pittston police arrested Bellanco on Monday after Holland alleged he has been “liking” photos and videos she posted to her Facebook page, according to the criminal complaint.

    This is not exactly new ground. Last year, a man was arrested for violating a restraining order after he allegedly sent a Google+ invite to his former girlfriend.

    Image via Facebook

  • Facebook: We’re Getting Better at Axing Fake Likes

    Fraudulent likes have always been a problem for Facebook. The company says that fraudulent activity only accounts for a tiny fraction of all the activity on Facebook – but it’s an issue nonetheless. Facebook’s been amping up its efforts to combat like farming for years, but it’s now touting that fact that it’s “breaking new ground” in the battle.

    According to Facebook, its automated efforts have led to triple to rate of fake like detection.

    “New advances in our pattern recognition technologies helped us halt many of the major exchanges that promote fake like activity on Facebook originating from click farms, fake accounts and malware. When we see suspicious patterns of likes coming from or to a specific account, we throughly investigate the situation in order to determine whether there is fraudulent activity taking place,” says Facebook software engineer Huseyin Kerem Cevahir.

    “This work has made it extremely difficult for the people selling fraudulent likes to actually deliver their promised likes to paying customers. In fact, over the the last six months, we’ve tripled the number of likes we’ve detected and blocked before they ever reached a Page. Because of this effort, a large number of the vendors that were attempting to sell inauthentic likes to Facebook Page administrators have closed their businesses.”

    Of course, Facebook cannot prevent all of this sort of fraudulent activity – as the landscape is “constantly evolving”:

    “Fraudulent activity has always been a tiny fraction of overall activity on Facebook—we’ve worked hard so that most people on Facebook don’t encounter this sort of thing at all. Even so, we continue to adapt and improve the methods we use to prevent fake likes because scammers are constantly evolving and testing new methods to try to get around our spam prevention systems,” says Cevahir.

    On the side of the page admins, this is good news. Inflated like counts help nobody, as Facebook explains:

    “While many legitimate Page admins think that packages of fraudulent likes are a useful tool to increase the perception of how popular their Page is, the likes end up being detrimental to the Pages and admins that purchase them. Fraudulent likers are extremely unlikely to engage with a Page after liking it. Facebook takes into account Page engagement rates when deciding when and where to deliver a Page’s legitimate ads and content, so Pages with artificially inflated like counts are harming themselves, making it harder and more expensive to reach the people they care about most.”

    In other words, it’s more than a waste of time to get involved in the “10,000 likes for $$$” schemes – it’s actively harmful.

    If you’re a page admin, you might have noticed your like count take a hit as of late. Facebook recently made changes to the way page likes are counted, removing memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from pages’ like totals.

  • Etsy Just Lost Most Of Its Facebook Page Likes [Update: They’re Back]

    Etsy Just Lost Most Of Its Facebook Page Likes [Update: They’re Back]

    Update: Etsy’s Page appears to be back in order. As of the time of this writing, it has 1,919,663 likes.

    Original article (03/13): Last week, Facebook announced that it would make some changes to the way Page likes are counted, removing memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from Pages’ like counts. This was a warning that Pages (some more than others) would soon see their like counts decrease.

    According to the company, this will make audience data more meaningful for businesses, and ensure the data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date.

    It appears that something must have gone wrong somewhere.

    DigiDay is sharing data from CrowdTange, which has been monitoring Facebook’s biggest page losers. The biggest loser is Etsy by far, though this may just be a temporary setback. The report says:

    Etsy, the platform for buying and selling homemade goods, lost nearly all of its Facebook likes overnight, according to social media analytics company CrowdTangle. The number of likes on Etsy’s page dropped 99.99 percent, per CrowdTangle, from more than 1.9 million yesterday to a dismal 290 as of earlier this afternoon.

    As of the time of this writing, Etsy’s page has over 277,000 likes. This is significantly more than 290, but obviously still pretty far off from the nearly 2 million it had before.

    According to DigiDay, Etsy thinks the drop in likes is probably due to it “working with Facebook to provide ‘localized experiences under one global brand umbrella,’ and that ‘correct fan count should be back in a few days.’”

    Facebook doesn’t appear to be commenting.

    Everyone knows Etsy is extremely popular, so there’s no way it only has 277,000 legitimate likes. It will, however, be interesting to see the final tally in light of Facebook’s news. It also makes you wonder what kinds of errors other Page may have experienced.

    Other “big losers” from Facebook’s move – none of which experienced anything like Etsy’s enormous drop-off – include: Shahid Khan Afridi Fans, ESPN UK, Cobra Starship, Testament, Avea, Newegg.com, M Pokora, Enya, and somewhat humorously, Facebook’s own Facebook for Every Phone, which lost 113,087 based on the data provided.

    The biggest grand losers, according to CrowdTangle, were: Etsy, Kenneth Cole, Nestle Pure Life US, BCBGMAXAZRIA, Chrysler, OPI, Herbal Essences, IHOP, Corona Extra USA, and Domino’s Pizza.

    The biggest publisher losers were: LiveScience, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, AlterNet, Bleacher Report, Sports Illustrated, YouTube, Gawker, BBC Three, and The Denver Post.

    While nobody lost counts in the millions like Etsy, which sounds like a glitch anyway, we are talking in the tens of thousands for many of these Pages. According to the data provided, Kenneth Cole lost over 26,000 likes. LiveScience lost over 16,000.

    Has your Page taken a hit?

  • Your Facebook Page May Soon Lose Some Likes

    Facebook announced that it is making changes to the way Page likes are counted, as it removes memorialized and voluntarily deactivated accounts from Pages’ like counts. In other words, you may soon see your Page’s like count drop a bit.

    Will you be glad to see these likes go? Let us know in the comments.

    According to Facebook, this will make audience data more meaningful for businesses, and ensure the data on Facebook is consistent and up-to-date.

    “Removing inactive Facebook accounts from Page audience data gives businesses up-to-date insights on the people who actively follow their Page and makes it easier for businesses to find people like their followers through tools like lookalike audiences,” Facebook says in a blog post. “We already filter out likes and comments generated by deactivated or memorialized accounts from individual Page posts, so this update keeps data consistent.”

    “Everyone benefits from meaningful information on Facebook,” it says. “It’s our hope that this update makes Pages even more valuable for businesses.”

    If your like count is going to drop, you should notice it within the coming weeks. As the company notes, it’s important to keep in mind that these likes represented users that were already inactive on Facebook.

    Also, likes from accounts that were voluntarily reactivated will be reinstated if the account is reactivated.

    The feedback from Page owners appears to be mostly positive. Most are happy to have higher quality data, as inactive users don’t have a lot to contribute to a page other than an artificially inflated like count.

    Well-known Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith, whom we recently interviewed about utilizing some of Facebook’s recently added features, commented, “Excellent – good news!!”

    Demont Daniel, CEO of Comp Bottles, commented, “Attention Facebook Page Managers, be prepared to lose page likes in the coming weeks and explain to your boss/clients the reasons why… #dontpanic.”

    Some think Facebook should go further and remove fake accounts. As a matter of fact, Facebook has gone after fraudulent likes in the past. Back in 2012, Facebook announced increased efforts to remove likes gained by means that violate their terms.

    Facebook went after likes that came from malware, fake accounts, compromised accounts, and bulk purchases. The company said at the time:

    “A Like that doesn’t come from someone truly interested in connecting with a Page benefits no one. Real identity, for both users and brands on Facebook, is important to not only Facebook’s mission of helping the world share, but also the need for people and customers to authentically connect to the Pages they care about. When a Page and fan connect on Facebook, we want to ensure that connection involves a real person interested in hearing from a specific Page and engaging with that brand’s content.”

    Facebook was built on the principle of real identity and we want this same authenticity to extend to Pages.”

    Commenting on the new announcement, one page owner even went so far as to suggest Facebook get rid of likes from accounts that aren’t active “likers”

    The problem with that is that it’s up to Facebook itself whether users even see posts in the News Feed, so just because a person isn’t actively liking a Page’s posts, doesn’t mean they wouldn’t if they were actually seeing posts from that Page more often.

    I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about the whole decline in organic reach thing.

    Are you glad to see Facebook wipe out likes from inactive accounts? Let us know in the comments.

  • Facebook Talks About Its Intolerance For Spam

    Facebook revealed on Friday that it has obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments against spammers, and talked extensively about how it won’t put up with fake likes and other spam on its network.

    The company says it’s honoring Cyber Security Awareness Month by discussing how it is fighting spam, and giving tips to users for “authentic interactions”.

    Facebook’s Matt Jones writes in a blog post, “Most people rarely come into contact with spam or other low quality content on Facebook, but we’re constantly working to make our service even better. It’s important to remember that fraudulent activity is bad for everyone — including Page owners, advertisers, Facebook and people on our platform. We adapt our defenses constantly to stay ahead of spammers’ techniques, and one area we’ve focused on for several years is fake likes. We have a strong incentive to aggressively go after the bad actors behind fake likes because businesses and people who use our platform want real connections and results, not fakes. Businesses won’t achieve results and could end up doing less business on Facebook if the people they’re connected to aren’t real. It’s in our best interest to make sure that interactions are authentic.”

    “The spammers behind fake likes have one goal — to make money off of Page owners without delivering any value in return. They make their profit by promising and generating likes to Facebook Page administrators who typically don’t understand that fake likes won’t help them achieve their business goals,” Jones says. “Fake like peddlers tempt Page admins with offers to ‘buy 10,000 likes!’ or other similar schemes. To deliver those likes, the scammers often try to create fake accounts, or in some cases, even hack into real accounts in order to use them for sending spam and acquiring more likes. Since these fraudulent operations are financially motivated businesses, we focus our energy on making this abuse less profitable for the spammers.”

    Tips for authentic interactions Facebook gives include not buying fraudulent likes, focusing on key business objectives, and being cautious to avoid infecting your computer with malware. Each of these, as well as Facebook’s general approach to “site integrity,” is discussed further in the post if you want to dive in.

    Image via Facebook

  • Facebook Launches Mobile Like Button For All Android, iOS Developers

    Earlier this year at its f8 developer conference, Facebook announced the mobile Like button for apps. At first it was only available in preview for some iOS developers, but on Thursday, the company announced it’s now available to all iOS and Android developers.

    “People using a mobile app can directly Like the app’s Facebook Page, or any Open Graph object within the app, and share on Facebook,” explains Facebook’s Todd Krabach. “The mobile Like Button works seamlessly with the Facebook account the person is logged into on their device, allowing people to Like any piece of content, while in your native app.”

    Developers can add the button with just a simple line of code. As Facebook notes, there are plenty of different places in an app to display it. For example, you can show it after a user reaches a certain level of engagement or as soon as they log into the app.

    “We recommend testing different locations to determine which leads to the best engagement,” says Krabach. “It is also important to select locations on the screen that resonate with your existing app experience and user interface. Some apps also show a pop-up dialog with the Like Button at the right moment in the app when people want to engage or share content.”

    According to Facebook, the Like and Share buttons are viewed across 10 million websites daily.

    iOS documentation is here, and Android is here.

    Image via Facebook

  • Instagram Likes Will No Longer Be (Embarrassingly) Shared to Facebook

    Here’s an example of how a single social networking action can produce drastically different results on two different social networks.

    Imagine you’re scrolling through your Instagram feed and you come across a photo of your friend on the beach. Aw, she deserves a beach vacation, she’s been working so hard lately! So, you double tap and like her photo on Instagram. Your like is lost in a sea of other likes.

    Well, let’s say you had cross-posting to Facebook turned on for all your Instagram activity. Now, all of your Facebook friends and let’s face it, mostly acquaintances and even less, have a fresh, singular story in their news feeds about how you liked a photo of a tanned, buxom woman in a bikini.

    Awkward? No, and yes, depending on the network involved.

    This scenario, while common I’m sure over the past couple of years, will never happen again. Instagram’s new app update kills this link between Instagram activity and automatically sharing to Facebook.

    “Updated Facebook share settings: Continue sharing your Instagram photos and videos on Facebook. But Instagram likes and activity will no longer be shared on Facebook,” say the latest app update notes.

    So, your Facebook friends will no longer get the news that you just followed “CaliHOTbutts69” on Instagram.

    But you’ll still be able to share your Instagram photos directly to Facebook, if you’re so inclined.

    At first glance, it appears that Facebook (who owns Instagram) is doing something odd by removing a layer of seamless sharing, which is basically free (cross) promotion. But let’s face it–nobody really liked their likes and other random Instagram activity being directly ported to Facebook. It’s a dumb feature. Now, Instagram users are free to like as many photos as they please without the fear of looking like a weirdo stalker on Facebook. Sure, you could’ve turned off this feature manually, but judging by my Facebook feed, there were more than a few Instagram users who had no idea that their totally appropriate Instagram likes were popping up on the much less-appropriate Facebook news feed.

    Image via Jen Selter, Instagram

  • Instagram Likes Hard to Come By? Take a Selfie

    Your face drives engagement.

    It’s really that simple. Your Instagram photos (and possibly your Facebook photos too) are going to be much more popular if they prominently feature one crucial element–a human face.

    The Georgia Institute of Technology teamed up with Yahoo Labs and looked at 1.1 million Instagram photos to find that out. Instagram photos that featured a human face were 38% more likely to receive likes than photos without faces. Not only that, but they’re 32% more likely to receive comments as well. No guarantee on what type of comments, however.

    And there’s this:

    The researchers also found that the number of faces in the photo, their age or gender didn’t make a difference. On average, pictures of kids or teens aren’t any more popular than those of adults, even though Instagram is most popular among younger people. The study also noticed that men and women have the same chances of getting likes or comments.

    So, any old face will do. If you’re hard up for likes, it doesn’t matter if you’re an ugly man or a beautiful woman–just take a selfie.

    This study has implications that reach further than just your average person looking for internet gratification. Brands looking to boost engagement on various social media channels should take note–include more faces in your photos.

    “Even as babies, people love to look at faces,” said Bakhshi. “Faces are powerful channels of non-verbal communication. We constantly monitor them for a variety of contexts, including attractiveness, emotions and identity,” said Saeideh Bakhshi, the Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who authored the study.

    Yeah, we like faces. We like them more than food, sunsets, and cats. Actually, I’m not too sure about the cats thing.

    Not mentioned in the study: how your boobs affect social media likes.

    Image via Katy Perry, Instagram

  • Don’t Fire Employees Over Facebook ‘Likes’

    In the United States, Facebook likes are protected by the first amendment. Liking something on Facebook is the same as using your right to free speech to actually say, “I like this.”

    That means that employers should think twice before firing employees over something they “like”. This is what we learned from a federal court ruling on Wednesday.

    Do you agree with the ruling that a Facebook like should be protected as free speech? Tell us what you think in the comments.

    The case has been making its way through the legal system for over a year. It began when Deputy Sheriff Daniel Ray Carter of Hampton, Virginia liked the page of “Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff.” Carter’s boss, Sheriff B.J. Roberts was running against Adams. Roberts saw the like, and eventually won the election against Adams. Carter was then fired. Carter claimed it was the Facebook like that led to his termination. He sued, but the judge ultimately determined that a like is not protected free speech.

    Carter appealed the decision, and Facebook itself even came to his defense. Facebook had this to say in legal documentation last year:

    When a Facebook User Likes a Page on Facebook, she engages in speech protected by the First Amendment…

    The district court’s holding that“‘liking’ a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection” because it does not “involve actual statements,” J.A. 1159, betrays amisunderstanding of the nature of the communication at issue and disregards well-settled Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit precedent. Liking a Facebook Page (or other website) is core speech: it is a statement that will be viewed by a small group of Facebook Friends or by a vast community of online users.

    When Carter clicked the Like button on the Facebook Page entitled “Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff,” the words “Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff” and a photo of Adams appeared on Carter’s Facebook Profile in a list of Pages Carter had Liked, J.A. 570, 578 – the 21st-century equivalent of a front-yard campaign sign.

    If Carter had stood on a street corner and announced, “I like Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff,” there would be no dispute that his statement was constitutionally protected speech. Carter made that very statement; the fact that he did it online, with a click of a computer’s mouse, does not deprive Carter’s speech of constitutional protection

    The ACLU also filed a brief saying:

    With “one click of a button,” an Internet user can upload or view a video, donate money to a campaign, forward an email, sign a petition, send a pre-written letter to a politician, or do a myriad of other indisputably expressive activities. The ease of these actions does not negate their expressive nature. Indeed, under the district court’s reasoning, affixing a bumper sticker to your car, pinning a campaign pin to your shirt, or placing a sign on your lawn would be devoid of meaning absent further information, and therefore not entitled to constitutional protection because of the minimal effort these actions require. All of these acts are, of course, constitutionally protected…

    That many people today choose to convey what they like or which political candidates they support by “Liking” a Web page rather than by writing the actual words, “I like this Web page” or “I like this candidate,” is immaterial. Whether someone presses a “Like” button to express those thoughts or presses the buttons on a keyboard to write out those words, the end result is the same: one is telling the world about one’s personal beliefs, interests, and opinions. That is exactly what the First Amendment protects, however that information is conveyed.

    Fast forward to this week, and a federal judge overturned the decision, appearing to agree with the ACLU’s and Facebook’s reasoning. You can see the 81-page legal document here, but basically, what it comes down to is that pressing the like button to show that you like something on Facebook is no different than if you had actually typed the words “I like this.” You know, basic speech.

    Oh, and in case you were wondering, employees using Facebook on company computers is not a federal crime.

    Now, just because employees should be able to expect to be able to freely like whatever they want to on Facebook doesn’t mean that they can do whatever they want on Facebook and get away with it. Ask the Taco Bell employee that posted a photo of himself licking a stack of taco shells to Facebook earlier this year. When the photo went viral, he was fired.

    Taco Bell Employee Licks Tacos, posts photo on facebook

    Image: Facebook (It has since been removed)

    I don’t see a court of law having any problem with that. Posting actual incriminating content on Facebook is obviously a great deal different than voicing your support of something via a Facebook like. You wouldn’t believe how often that happens, by the way.

    There are other times when the lines are a little blurrier, such as when racism or other types of hateful content come into play.

    Even Facebook’s views on freedom of expression are a little blurry at times. Take, for example, its many actions against any breast-related content. They once removed a photo of a woman’s elbow because it looked kind of like a breast.

    Facebook elbow

    Image: Facebook (via Daily Mail)

    Facebook has not discriminated in its anti-boob policies, even enforcing policies against breastfeeding mothers, nude art (even cartoons) and mastectomy photos. Even ads related to the boobie bird fell under the wrath of Facebook (though to be fair, the ad copy was kind of creepy).

    Still, Facebook had taken heat earlier this year for its approach to content depicting, glorifying and trivializing violence against women. Some angry groups got together and make a very public issue out of it, and this led to Facebook making some changes, but some felt this was Facebook walking a fine line between enforcing community standards and stifling free speech.

    One thing is for sure: you can learn a lot about a person from the things they like on Facebook.

    Facebook likes can reveal a lot about a person. Aside from the obvious likes (pages that reflect lifestyle choices, political views, religious views, etc.), other seemingly innocuous likes can reveal more info about a person than one would think. That is according to a study we looked at earlier this year from the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge.

    Facebook is obviously a treasure trove of data about people, and that includes data about employees. Employers can look and find all kinds of things they don’t like about their employees if they look hard enough, but when it comes to using that as grounds for firing, then they’ll do well to remember the federal court ruling.

    What do you think about the ruling? Did they get it right? Let us know what you think.

    Lead Image: Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff (Facebook)

  • People on the Internet Are Made Nicer by Other People’s Niceness

    If a book, TV show, movie, restaurant, etc. is incredibly popular (I mean, everyone is raving about it), there’s a chance that you might assign it a positive rating too – even if you weren’t that impressed. Call it peer pressure, call it the sway of the crowd, or call it “herding,” but the fact remains: people are influenced by the positive opinions of others. People are also influenced by the negative opinions of others – we see this all the time in real life.

    But what about online (I know, that’s real life too don’t yell at me)? Do these same principles apply, let’s say, on a social media site?

    New research from MIT, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and NYU suggest that they do – at least for the positive persuasion.

    Researchers systematically altered the “favorability ratings” for over 100,000 comments on “a major news aggregation website.” They can’t say which one, but it’s one that has similar functionality to reddit (up votes and down votes). What they found was that comments that were inflated to have a positive feedback rating kept getting more and more positive votes, upvotes, likes, thumbs up – whatever you want to call them. It was a “snowball” effect that saw the positively-influenced comments receive a 25% higher average rating from other users on the site.

    Apparently, when internet users see that other people like something, they’re more inclined to like it too.

    But when it comes to negatively-influenced comments (those that have been downvoted into oblivion), the same sort of “herding” didn’t exist.

    From an MIT release:

    “This herding behavior happens systematically on positive signals of quality and ratings,” says Sinan Aral, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and one of three authors of the study. At the same time, Aral notes, the results “were asymmetric between positive and negative herding.” Comments given negative ratings attracted more negative judgments, but that increase was drowned out by what the researchers call a “correction effect” of additional positive responses.

    Basically, negative feedback tended to be corrected by positive feedback – a “rescue” of sorts.

    Of course, the implications of such findings could call into question any sort of online system that ranks or prioritizes based on crowdsourced opinions, votes, or reviews.

    “Our message is not that we should do away with crowd-based opinion aggregation,” Aral says. “Our point is that you need solid science under the hood trying to understand exactly how these mechanisms work in a broad population, what that means for the diffusion of opinion, and how can we design the systems to be fair, to have less incentives for manipulation and fraud, and be safe in aggregating opinions.”

  • Do You Really Want Facebook Telling You How Many People Are Ignoring Your Posts?

    What does it actually mean when one of your Facebook friends “likes” one of your posts? In reality, the like is purposefully vague. It can show support, solidarity, agreement, and a wide array of positive emotions. It can show appreciation, awe, or simply come about as a friendly gesture. Do I really like this photo of your baby’s first whatever? Probably not, but I know it’s important to you so I’ll “like” it.

    In the end, the like (and the comment and share) mean one thing – interaction. They indicate that your friends saw your post, and it moved them to participate in one way or another. More likes, comments, and shares mean that more people saw your post – and more importantly, more people cared.

    But what if nobody actually cares what you’re posting on Facebook? What if the amount of friends who are seeing your posts is much higher than you think – and they’re just not interacting. Would you really want to know how many people saw your post and simply allowed it to scroll on by? Do you really want to know the full extent of the situation? That many of your social media posts aren’t going unseen – they’re just being ignored.

    Would you want Facebook to tell you exactly how many of your friends saw each and every one of your posts Let us know in the comments.

    For some time, page admins have known that posting on Facebook is like trying to get the attention of people at a loud party, only they’re all drunk and you don’t have a microphone. They see you and they hear you, but a lot of the time they just don’t care enough to pay attention. Facebook has shown page admins and marketers the actual number of people who see each of their posts for some time now. For instance, a page owner is able to see that though their post only received 8 likes and 2 shares, 1,700 people actually saw it in their news feeds. It’s both a helpful metric for determining audience size and a powerful reality check.

    So, what if that metric could be extended to the average Facebook user? Would you want to see just how many people are seeing your posts but deciding not to interact?

    A recent Buzzfeed article suggested that of course people would want to see this, but Facebook doesn’t want them to. In fact, they suggested that it’s in Facebook’s best interest to keep users in the dark.

    In fact, most of what happens after an update is sent out takes place out of sight – only Facebook knows the truth. And it’s in the company’s best interest to keep that information to itself. The company knows full well that the only thing worse than speaking to an empty room is speaking to a room full of friends and family and having them ignore you.

    The logic here, of course, is that users would probably stop posting status updates, photos, check-ins, etc. if they knew they were simply being ignored by a large percentage of their friends. Discouragement would turn to apathy and Facebook users would stop providing all those juicy data points that the company uses to sell ads and monetize.

    Once users were face to face with the reality of their own ineffectuality and were forced to stop blaming Facebook (they’re not showing my updates to enough of my friends!), the illusion could crumble, leaving a disinterested user base. And as we know, disinterest is the social media killer.

    The most interesting thing about BuzzFeed’s allegation is that it garnered a response from an actual Facebook News Feed engineer. Lars Backstrom posted this to his Facebook page, denying that Facebook was actively trying to hide this info from users. He argues that the average user probably doesn’t care about the “people who saw this” metric:

    As someone who works on News Feed at Facebook every day, I wanted to take a moment to clarify and correct a few aspects of a Buzzfeed story that was posted yesterday: http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-number-facebook-doesnt-want-you-to-see

    The main premise of the article — that everyone wants to know how many friends see each of their posts and Facebook doesn’t want to tell them — is just plain wrong. A few of us did build and test a feature like this internally. Our conclusion after testing it: people are way more interested in seeing *who* liked their posts, rather than just the number of people who saw it. In fact, in all of the thousands of pieces of feedback we receive about News Feed each month, virtually no one has asked to see this information. If we saw enough people asking for this, we would definitely consider building it into the product. But, from what we’ve seen, including the raw numbers isn’t worth the space it would take up on the screen. The Buzzfeed author notes that we do show advertisers how many people see their posts. That’s true, but we also show this information to Group members and Page owners who aren’t advertisers. That’s because these people care about how many people see these posts; everyday users — not so much.

    I don’t know. Do you buy that Facebook users don’t want to see this information?

    Facebook is no stranger to complaints about users’ news feed visibility and allegations of foul play. You may remember that earlier this year, multiple page owners and a few tech writers accused Facebook of pulling a bait and switch when it comes to post visibility in the news feed. The claim was that Facebook was decreasing the visibility of users’ posts in others’ news feeds in order to force them into paying for a Promoted Post.

    Facebook vehemently denied those allegations. They admitted to adjusting the news feed algorithm to show more relevant posts (exact quote: The News Feed changes we made in the fall to focus on higher quality stories may have also decreased the distribution for less engaging stories from public figures) – but they denied decreasing organic post reach in order to force the use of Promoted Posts.

    In his rebuttal, Backstrom took the opportunity to address this as well:

    “I think that this is also a good opportunity to clear up a few other misconceptions about how News Feed works, since there are a lot of rumors and theories floating around. The prime directive of News Feed is to show you the stories that you will find most interesting. If our ranking system thinks that you’ll find a post very interesting, we’ll publish it near the top. If a story seems less likely to be interesting to you, we publish it further down, below other things that seem more important.

    Our ranking certainly isn’t perfect and we are continually refining it, but we’ve run many tests showing that any time we stop ranking and show posts in chronological order, the number of stories people read decreases and the amount of likes and comments people produce decreases. That’s not good for our users or for Facebook. All said, this Buzzfeed article suggests that we have lots of ulterior motives when we make decisions about News Feed. The reality is that we’re just trying to show people as many interesting stories as possible.”

    Here’s the reality: more people see your Facebook posts that you think. Just because that photo of your awesome lunch only got 3 likes and 1 comment, it doesn’t mean that only a handful of your friends saw it pop up in their news feeds.

    In fact, think about this: how many people do you think see each one of your Facebook posts? Got a number in your head? Good, now quadruple it.

    Back in March, Facebook contributed data for a Stanford University study that addressed this very issue. What it found was that Facebook users vastly underestimate their audience size.

    “Users underestimate their audience on specific posts by a factor of four, and their audience in general by a factor of three. Half of users want to reach larger audiences, but they are already reaching much larger audiences than they think. Log analysis of updates from 220,000 Facebook users suggests that feedback, friend count, and past audience size are all highly variable predictors of audience size, so it would be difficult for a user to predict their audience size reliably. Put simply, users do not receive enough feedback to be aware of their audience size. However, Facebook users do manage to reach 35% of their friends with each post and 61% of their friends over the course of a month,” concluded the researchers.

    Simply put, the reason your tuna salad photo only received 3 likes has nothing to do with Facebook’s algorithms. It just means that nobody really wanted to “like” it.

    Knowing the reality, would you really want a metric on all of your posts that lets you know exactly how many users saw them? If so, I propose a new metric – the Facebook depression quotient. Just divide the total number of users who saw a post by the combined number of likes, comments, and shares to find your FDQ.

    Do you think Facebook is intentionally hiding this metric because they don’t want you to see the reality? Or do you think that the vast majority of users simply don’t care. Would you want this metric attached to all of your posts? Let us know in the comments.

  • Facebook Including Instagram Likes in Photo Like Totals

    In what appears to be some new integration between Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram, it looks like Facebook is now including Instagram likes in the total like counts on Instagram photos posted to Facebook.

    The like totals look the same on Facebook. For instance, for the photo below, Facebook says that 9 people like the photo (me, three of my friends, and 5 other people)…

    But when I click further to see who likes the photo, 2 of those 9 likes are actually Instagram likes. In reality, only 7 of those likes happened on Facebook. The other two happened on Instagram, and Facebook is including those in the like total. Facebook tells you this, and allows you to click a link to the photo on Instagram.

    What’s interesting is that the photo above was not cross posted from Instagram. It’s an Instagram photo that the user manually posted to Facebook after taking it on Instagram.

    I’ve reached out to Facebook and will let you know when I hear back.

  • State Department Bureau Spent $630,000 Garnering Facebook Likes

    In your “why-the-hell” story of the day, it appears that a federal agency spent $630,000 in a campaign to acquire Facebook likes over the last couple of years.

    The Bureau of International Information Programs, part of the U.S. Department of State, is responsible for foreign public diplomacy and communications. Its job is to “provide and support the places, content, and infrastructure needed for sustained conversations with foreign audiences to build America’s reputation abroad.”

    And apparently, they wanted to spread that goodwill via Facebook.

    From 2011 until March 2013, the expensive campaign increased IIP’s English-language Facebook page likes from 100,000 to 2 million. The foreign language pages also got a boost – from around 68,000 likes to 450,000.

    “Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as ‘buying fans’ who may have once clicked on an ad or ‘liked’ a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further,” says a recently released Inspector General report.

    “With the Department’s use of social media comes strategic questions of the role, purpose, and limitations of the medium. A consensus is emerging that developing numbers of Facebook followers and Twitter fans may not lead automatically to target audience engagement,” says the report.

    The Bureau found out what most businesses on Facebook find out eventually – that likes do not necessarily correlate to engagement.

    “IIP’s four global thematic English-language Facebook pages had garnered more than 2.5 million fans each by mid-March 2013; the number actually engaging with each page was considerably smaller, with just over 2 percent ‘liking,’ sharing, or commenting on any item within the previous week,” says the Inspector General’s report.

    Just…why the hell?

  • Facebook Adds New Tags For Publishers To Increase Likes, Follows

    Facebook announced the launch of two new Open Graph tags for publishers and journalists (OG:Publisher and OG:Author). These allow publishers and story authors to get more organic likes and follows.

    “As mentioned in our documentation, media publishers should include Open Graph tags in their article’s HTML to generate better previews of their content when shared on Facebook,” notes Facebook’s Voja Katich in a blog post.

    That documentation can be found here.

    With the publisher tag, a publisher can link an article to its Facebook page, and when the article is shared in the News Feed, a “Like” button is displayed so people can like the actual Page. The author tag works pretty much the same way, except instead of a “Like” button or the Page, it includes a “Follow” button for the author’s Facebook profile.

    Follow tag

    The buttons only appear for those who haven’t already liked the page or followed the author.

    In the same blog post, Facebook also announced that it is adding new requirements to make it easier for the company to review apps and Open Graph submissions. There are also some updates to using the Facebook Android SDK with ProGuard and the Graph API for events page posts. Read about the updates here.

  • No, Your Facebook Like Won’t Pay for ‘Mermaid Girl’ Surgery

    A new hoax making the rounds on Facebook claims that users must like, comment, and share in order to fund surgery for a little girl born with mermaid syndrome. Although this one is different from many we’ve seen recently because it alleges a partnership between Facebook and CNN, it’s the exact same in the only way that matters – it’s totally fake.

    The hoax claims that Facebook and CNN have teamed up to pay for half of the medical expenses for the child’s surgery, and it’s all dependent on how many likes, comments, and share the image receives. It claims that for every like, $20 will be put toward the cause. For every comment, it’s $50, and for every share, $100.

    Here’s what the hoax post looks like:

    (image)

    The image is actually of Milagros Cerron, a little girl in Peru that’s known as the “mermaid baby” as a result of sirenomelia, or “mermaid syndrome.” She’s had surgeries to separate her legs, and the medical procedures are still ongoing. Although Milagros is now 9 years old, the photo used above to exploit Facebook likes was taken nearly 8 years ago.

    This latest hoax is simply another version of the “Facebook will donate X for each like” hoax that we’ve seen increase in frequency over the past few years. Whether it’s saving starving children in Africa with a like, or making sure kids shot by their father get adequate medical attention, it’s all BS.

    Facebook has not, and will never donate money to causes based on how many likes or shares a post gets. That means that every single one of these types of posts you see is a hoax. Don’t feed the like-whores, please.

  • Is Liking Something On Facebook An Act Of Free Speech?

    Last year, a Virginia judge ruled that a Facebook “like” is not protected by the First Amendment. The story goes like this: Deputy Sheriff Daniel Ray Carter of Hampton, Virginia “liked” the page of “Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff.” Carter’s boss, Sheriff B.J. Roberts, saw this, and then when Roberts won the election against Adams, Carter was fired. Carter claimed it was the Facebook “like” that led to his termination. He sued, but the judge determined that a “like” is not protected free speech.

    Should a Facebook “like” be considered free speech, and protected under the First Amendment? Let us know what you think in the comments.

    Carter appealed the decision, and Facebook stepped in to argue that a like is free speech in the same way that a political bumper sticker is. Facebook filed a brief in Carter’s defense, saying, “When a Facebook User Likes a Page on Facebook, she engages in speech protected by the First Amendment.”

    “The district court’s holding that ”liking’’ a Facebook page is insufficient speech to merit constitutional protection’ because it does not ‘involve actual statements,’ J.A. 1159, betrays amisunderstanding of the nature of the communication at issue and disregards well-settled Supreme Court and Fourth Circuit precedent,” the company continued. “Liking a Facebook Page (or other website) is core speech: it is a statement that will be viewed by a small group of Facebook Friends or by a vast community of online users.”

    “When Carter clicked the Like button on the Facebook Page entitled ‘Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff,’ the words ‘Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff’ and a photo of Adams appeared on Carter’s Facebook Profile in a list of Pages Carter had Liked, J.A. 570, 578 – the 21st-century equivalent of a front-yard campaign sign,” Facebook continued. “If Carter had stood on a street corner and announced, ‘I like Jim Adams for Hampton Sheriff,’ there would be no dispute that his statement was constitutionally protected speech. Carter made that very statement; the fact that he did it online, with a click of a computer’s mouse, does not deprive Carter’s speech of constitutional protection.”

    The debate certainly has large ramifications for not only practices on Facebook, but on the Internet at large, which as we all know, has become very, very social.

    This week, a panel of three judges in Richmond, Virginia heard the case, and Facebook once again stepped up to defend Carter, though really it’s a defense of Facebook users in general. It can’t be good for Facebook if people start becoming afraid of what they can or cannot say on Facebook. Some people have even talked about leaving the social network because they don’t allow pictures of breasts. More censorship can’t be good for user growth.

    According to a report from Bloomberg’s Tom Schoenberg, Facebook lawyer Aaron Panner told the judges, “Any suggestion that such communication has less than full constitutional protection would result in chilling the very valued means for communication the Internet has made possible.”

    The company was reportedly given three minutes of argument time, and the judges refrained from asking Facebook any questions. The report also shares some quotes about Facebook “likes” from Robers’ lawyer:

    “It’s like opening a door into a room,” Rosen, of Pender & Coward PC in Virginia Beach, Virginia, said. “You can’t see what’s in there until you click on the button. That’s not speech.”

    “Facebook has 3 billion ‘like’ clicks a day,” he said. “Is each one of those speech? I don’t think so.”

    As far as Facebook and many others are concerned, yes, each one of those is free speech.

    At the same time, Roberts is claiming that the Facebook activity is not even the reason Carter (along with other employees) was fired, and that performance was the real reason. Still, the subject of the Facebook “like” remains the hot button issue, and has been argued throughout the case.

    What do you think? Should a Facebook “like” be considered free speech, or do you not consider a “like” to be an act of speech at all? Let us know what you think in the comments.

  • Bing Gets More Tightly Integrated With Facebook

    Bing has added a bit more Facebook integration to its social search features. Now, you can comment on and like Facebook content right from Bing.

    “Bing already lets you view Facebook updates and comments from your friends in sidebar, but now you’ll also be able to add your own Likes and comments to your friends’ Facebook posts directly from Bing,” a Bing spokesperson tells WebProNews. “This is yet another step in Bing’s efforts to make it easier for people to leverage all of the incredible information across the web and content within their social networks to help them spend less time searching and more time doing.”

    “Say you’re a huge Beyoncé fan and are searching Bing to see what she’s up to, such as the latest on her trip to Cuba,” the spokesperson says. “While searching, you see a post in Bing’s sidebar from a Facebook friend who has an extra ticket to the sold out Beyoncé concert this week. With Bing, you can now comment on your friend’s Facebook post in one step, directly in sidebar, and claim the extra ticket. You’ve gone from simply browsing for news to attending the concert in one simple step. With Bing’s social search you can connect with your friends and engage with your social world to get things done – all in one spot.”

    Facebook Comments

    Of course none of this applies to the “Bing it On” challenge, which Microsoft just kicked off a new campaign for. The site, which lets you do side-by-side blind comparisons between Google and Bing results, strips out special features from each search engine, including Bing’s Facebook integration and Google’s Knowledge Graph.

    Bing continues to be a major partner of Facebook’s, also providing the web search results to Facebook’s Graph Search.