No, they’re not giving away Range Rovers on Facebook

You’d think by now that people could tell a fake giveaway on Facebook from a real one, but apparently not. There are currently several fake car giveaways on Facebook that have gone more or less viral. These giveaways often claim to hand out luxury cars to lucky winners and this time there are several scams regarding Range Rover 2016.

rangerover2016giveaway

How do I know they are fake? Well it’s incredibly simple to find out, but a lot of people don’t think or don’t care. So they participate and help the scammers build up their pages and spam their Facebook friends in the process.

The post above has been shared more than 60,000 times and the pages has now more than 30,000 followers. But it is all fake of course. No brand would give away three expensive luxury cars in a simple contest that so blatantly brakes Facebook’s rules.

If it’s the very first post on the page: Hoax!

If the URL is not a nice and short vanity URL like you’d expect from a large brand: Hoax!

rangerover2016giveaway2

So if you or your friends ever wonder how you can avoid falling for hoaxes like these, then maybe you should check my blog post about “How to spot a fake giveaway on Facebook”.

One in ten posts on my social networks are ads

LinkedIn sponsored postOver the last few years most major social networks have introduced some form of advertsing as a revenue source. Even Instagram has now started to insert sponsored posts in the feeds for Swedish users. As social media users transfer from desktop use to mobile use, it becomes more and more important to place ads or sponsored posts in the news feeds instead of in a sidebar on the desktop site.

The more ads that the networks can display, the more revenue they can make. However, if ads become too frequent, users will dislike it and eventually stop using the service. So balancing the number of ads is a delicate task. Too few and you aren’t making as much revenue as you could, too many and users will leave, also lowering your profit.

One in ten posts in my feeds were social ads
So the billion dollar question is, how much ads are users prepared to take? The answer, it seems, could be somewhere around 10%.

LinkedIn new mobile app
LinkedIn just released a major update to its mobile app, making it look a lot like Facebook. What first struck me was how many ads there were in the feed and that they appeared early. The second post in the feed was always sponsored. So I decided to study the ad frequency of the big four social networks.

I looked at the percentage of posts in each feed that was sponsored and found that approximately 10% of all posts were ads. Twitter had a slightly lower share of ads at about 8%. On LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, 10% of posts in the feed were ads.

Since I only looked at my own feeds we must not make general conclusions. To do that one would have to look at a much larger statistical sample. However, I find it interesting that all four social networks have about the same share of ads in my feeds and it will be a topic to follow in the coming months to see if the ten percent figure is accurate or not.

Take a look at your own feeds and see if you see the same pattern.

Note: Just to give you an idea of when ads appear in feeds, I looked at 100 posts on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter via their respective mobile (iOS) apps.

Worth noting is that ads stopped appearing on Instagram after 70 posts. Also, ads on LinkedIn appear on the exact same spots in the feed on mobile as on desktop even if I checked several days apart. LinkedIn ads also appear earlier, so after looking at 20 posts you are already exposed to 3 ads. Over 100 posts it still is at 10%.  So to study this topic in more detail you need to know how far back users normally scroll. I think most users don’t ever reach 100.

social ads

Top Swedish Facebook pages in May 2014

facebooklogo

I have received a sneak preview of the latest results from Socialbakers, regarding the results of the top brand Facebook pages in Sweden for May 2014. It also includes statistics for Youtube and Twitter channels. The Swedish beer brand Norrlands Guld has the page with the highest average post engagement rate.

Coop posted two of the three most popular posts in May
I am also happy to see that a campaign I have been working on at my job for Coop has two of the three most popular post on Facebook last month. The campaign called #ekolöftet challenged the 8 parties of the Swedish Parliament to reveal how they intend to support the growth of organic farming in Sweden. More on that in Swedish here: http://ekoloftet.coop.se/

This report will be published later today by Socialbakers.

 

may-2014-social-marketing-report-sweden

Image credit: Flickr mkhmarketing

 

Facebook pulls the plug on frictionless sharing

share-computer-key-260 In 2011, frictionless sharing was hailed by some as the future for social networks. Facebook launched a feature in which apps like Spotify and Netflix and news organizations like The Guardian could post a user’s activity to their wall, without asking for permission every time. While some criticized the move, others saw potential:

“And soon, the idea that apps are sharing a continuous stream of our activity will seem just as commonplace and uncontroversial as the original news feed.”

But with increasing comptetion in the newsfeed, the feature hasn’t paid off and now Facebook has effectively pulled the plug on automatically shared content. Stories shared via seamless sharing will still be posted to Facebook, but have been downgraded to second tier content, thereby making it more or less invisible to users.

Facebook says that “We’ve found that stories people choose to explicitly share from third party apps are typically more interesting and get more engagement in News Feed than stories shared from third party apps without explicit action.”

This means that stories that users share automatically from third party apps will receive a lower ranking in the news feed.

“In the coming months, we will continue to prioritize explicitly shared stories from apps in News Feed over implicitly shared stories. This means people will see fewer implicit stories from third party apps in the future.” 

The average Facebook user has around 1,500 stories per day that potentially could appear in the news feed. Content shared via frictionless sharing isn’t engaging enough and now Facebook is acting to remove a lot of that content, possibly pushing more engaging stories to users.

Via Inside Facebook.

Follow the Eurovision on social media

The first of two semi finals of the Eurovision Song Contest takes place tonight in Copenhagen, Denmark. New this year is the ambition to bring the participants closer to the audience via social media.

The Social Green Room
Social media has become increasingly important as the place to read and share opinions about the contest. So to make it even easier to find live reporting from the participating countries, the Danish public service television channel DR has created a Social Green Room that collects updates from the artists official Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts. You can either follow a stream of updates or select updates from one country.

Official Eurovision social media channels:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EurovisionSongContest

Instagram: http://instagram.com/eurovision

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Eurovision and https://twitter.com/eurovisionpress

Twitter hashtags: #eurovision #esc2014

eurovision-ticktock

Like in recent years, some artists are promoting hashtags of their own, like the Ukraine’s #ticktock. You can also use the country code for each country as a hashtag, like #SWE for Sweden and #DEN for Denmark. A list of country codes can be found here.

What happens when you click like? Ask these 4 million people

It’s easy to trick people to click, like and share the dumbest things on social networks. I have blogged about this topic before, for example regarding how to spot a fake giveaway on Facebook. But I can’t stop being amazed at the number of people who are fooled by these easy hoaxes time and time again. Here’s a fresh example. Whitetail Overload is a Facebook page dedicated to the “pursuit of the Whitetail deer”, and it has half a million followers and a PTA (people talking about) of more than 1.3 million.

4 million likes on one post
How do they get that much engagement? They post often, entertaining and they trick users into interacting with the content in the most deceiving ways. Take this post for example, it uses and old trick, asking users to guess what happens when they click like on the post. Of course, absolutely nothing at all happens. But look at the numbers, 4.1 million people have liked the post and almost 100,000 have shared it. Incredible.

click like on facebook se what happens

Here’s another one, and I must admit that this is as brilliant as it is evil. The last person to comment on the post wins a t-shirt. And of course, the comments never stop coming. As of now, there are 47,000. For a t-shirt!

last person to comment

As long as people are this naive, don’t be surprised when your social networks are filled with spam and scams.