Facebook | Media Culpa

Fake photo of hurricane Sandy goes viral on Facebook

During breaking news stories like natural disasters, social media can be an invaluable news source. The problem is that with increasing attention the likeliness that someone will take advantage of the situation also increases. Yesterday, it didn’t take long for spam links to appear on Twitter under the hashtag #hitsunami which was used to report about events during the supposed tsunami that would hit Hawaii.

Also, pranksters and people who are just misinformed tend to spread false rumours and fake photos and videos because social media is so fast and few of us actually stop for a moment to check the source of the information. A photo from the hurricane Sandy, aka Frankenstorm, has just gone viral on Facebook with currently more than 177,000 shares. The problem is that it is fake, and definitely not taken today. A quick picture search on Google reveals that the image appeared already two years ago.

The viral image:

A two year old version of the image from Sept 16, 2010 was posted on Urban Legends (link now taken down).

The person who posted the image on Facebook also did some research and concluded that it was fake:

Here is the original photo of the thunderstorm that was used to create the fake image:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/n_supercell_thunderstorm.htm

As always, it if looks to good to be true, it probably isn’t true. Stop for a moment and check before you share.

Hat tip: I found this via Andreas, @Iam_Curtis on Twitter.

Cristiano Ronaldo reaches 50 million fans on Facebook

Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has quite a fan base. On Twitter, he has close to 14 million followers and on the Chinese equivalent Sina Weibo, he has 9 million followers. But it is on Facebook that the largest number of fans are connected to Real Madrid’s forward. He has now reached 50 million fans on Facebook, beating rival Leo Messi of FC Barcelona with more than 11 million.

Impressive as that is, it still doesn’t put Ronaldo in the top ten of most liked Facebook pages. The top ten according to Fanpagelist.com are:

Facebook – 79 million
Texas Holdem Poker – 66 million
YouTube – 64 million
Rihanna – 62 million
Eminem – 62 million
The Simpsons – 55 million
Shakira – 55 million
Lady Gaga – 53 million
Coca-Cola – 53 million
Michael Jackson – 52 million

A Facebook Timeline that’s 1,000 years long

Have you added a lot of historical dates to your Facebook timeline? Well, even if you have added dates all the way back to your birth or the year your company was founded, I doubt many can match the timeline of the Tower of London in England. It’s timeline goes back almost 1,000 years, starting in 1066 when the first fortress was being established after the battle of Hastings. Impressive!

Via Social Media Today.

The impact of images on Facebook engagement

The Swedish candy producer Bubs sells a raspberry licorice candy called Hallonlakritsskalle (Raspberry Licorice Head) that is very popular on Facebook. For a while it has been one of the Swedish brands with most fans on Facebook, currently about 360,000. But getting a lot of followers is one thing, getting them engaged in your content is another. The last four months, Hallonlakritsskalle has only posted about one new update per month. On the other hand, those posts generate a lot of likes and comments.

What I wanted to show was how one single creative image can spark a lot of engagement, but also that the engagement is short lived. The image below was posted on Aug 23 and generated about 5,600 likes and 100+ comments. This equals an engagement rate of 1.9% which is good, but not spectacular.

But note that the engagement after the first few days plummeted and is now considerably lower than it was before the post.

Keeping your fans engaged is difficult and one lucky post doesn’t take you far. Apart from being creative and relevant it also requires frequency and perseverance to keep the page going.

Dole’s Facebook page goes “Bananas”

Earlier this year I wrote a series of posts about how the Facebook page of a brand easily becomes the first property to come under fire in a social media crisis. If you have the time, at least read the last concluding post of the four below.

Another example of a Facebook brand page under attack is currently unfolding before our eyes as I write this. Yesterday, a film called “Big boys gone bananas” aired on Swedish television. It is a follow up to a documentary about a case in which Dole was on trial for using a banned pesticide in Nicaragua. You can see the trailer to the film “Bananas” by Swedish film maker Fredrik Gertten here below. Dole Food Company did everything in their power to stop the film “Bananas” from being distributed and that process is what “Big boys gone bananas” is about.

Not surprisingly, when a film like that is aired, there are reactions and mainly on the Facebook page of Dole which is currently being filled with angry comments from (mostly) Swedes. Whether Dole will remove these comments or answer them remains to be seen, so far there has been no reaction at all from the company. Keep watching.

Footnote: the film “Big boys gone bananas” is mostly in Swedish, but interviews and parts are in English. You can watch the film here (only visible in Sweden, it seems), one month from today. http://www.svtplay.se/video/245806/big-boys-gone-bananas

Update: Dole is apparently deleting the negative comments on the Facebook page. Here are some that I saved from a few hours ago.

Here are some comments that are still up, probably because they are comments to one of Dole’s own status updates and have not yet been discovered:

Of course a company may delete content from its page that is in violation to the community guidelines or the comments policy. The question is if these are. This is what Dole’s policy states:

General community “rules for engagement” include banning or deleting any content or posts that are:

• Abusive, defamatory, or obscene
• Fraudulent, deceptive or misleading
• In violation of any intellectual property right of another
• In violation of any law or regulation
• Solicitation of charitable organization or business
• Advertising for personal business or other
• Otherwise offensive (including spam posts, such as chain letters, videos, photos, and links)