Tag: Facebook

Flywheel: A Tale of 3 Socials

With the ever-rising status and importance of social media, content marketing is a strategy made both more accessible and more necessary for communications strategists across all kinds of industries. Local startup Flywheel is an excellent example of valuable content marketing on social media platforms. I examined their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts and while there is some room for improvement, overall I find Flywheel’s content marketing to be some of the best I’ve seen.

An effective content marketer is able to post very similar content to Facebook and Twitter but effectively scale that content to better fit each platform individually, and Flywheel does this very well. There is a variety of this between posts, some being the exact same, some posts having the same message with different delivery and some content exclusive to either platform. For their anniversary, the posts had the same captions and photos, but on Twitter the account tweets articles several times a day that often don’t make it to Facebook at all. On Twitter, they announced their new search and filter feature with a GIF, but on Facebook the short video was presented differently in a format called Watch Party. This is a prime example of how Twitter is often a better platform for presenting quick videos and GIFs.

Flywheel’s Instagram is more individualized than Twitter and Facebook, which is necessary given just how different the platform is overall. However, it is not individualized enough. It essentially rehashes everything said on Twitter and Instagram, and occasionally there is a different post with a fun graphic that is not on the other two. Really, there is not much to be gained from following their Instagram account if one already follows Twitter and/or Instagram. With how hard Flywheel sells their culture, I see an opportunity to use Instagram to give more insight into the office itself without needing to redirect to other links. Instagram posts should be able to showcase the Flywheel atmosphere and culture without needing to say “check the link in our bio to find out!” This account should greater focus on just the images themselves, and not let a call to the link in bio take away from the post, as it often does on Instagram.

The biggest issue I took with all of Flywheel’s social media accounts was the over-saturation of links within their posts. On Twitter and Instagram, great content was being posted, but it was almost exclusively in the form of links to articles. Internally made articles are extremely important to content marketing, but their effect is lost when every tweet or post contains one. While these articles are not necessarily direct sells for Flywheel, they dilute the 80-20 mix of social media. On Twitter and Facebook especially, there should be more variety in posts. Even something simple as a “Happy Friday!” tweet or a picture of one of the many dogs throughout the office would help break up the endless stream of articles.

Flywheel’s social media presence and content marketing is overall very effective. They have high visibility throughout Omaha, Nebraska and beyond, and their positions and internships are among the most sought after in the area. They have laid a standard voice for their brand that is echoed perfectly across their channels, ensuring consistent content. While Flywheel has some work to do in its content marketing, mainly the proper use of the 80-20 mix, they use social media to effectively market their brand and services in unique ways.

Photo by Shridhar Gupta (@shridhar) on unsplash.com. URL- https://unsplash.com/photos/dZxQn4VEv2M

Why do we see what we see?

Today, more than half of America’s adults get their news from social media. Which means for millions upon millions of people, the majority of what we see, read, share and think is determined by a few lines of code carefully hidden within Facebook or another company’s walls. Will Oremus’s insightful article into Facebook’s newsfeed algorithms challenged me to ponder the increasingly important role algorithms play in our digitally evolving world.

What struck me most was how human algorithms really are. No matter how robotic and sci-fi the whole concept of algorithms may sound, they are still ultimately determined by human beings (at least until AI becomes more prominent). In short, humans determine how machines determine what humans see, at least for now. This means that the algorithms are constantly being tweaked and improved to both account for the human errors made in producing the algorithm and the change in behaviors and preferences of Facebook’s human users.

What really intrigued and surprised me was the necessity of not just quantitative, but qualitative factors used in building newsfeed algorithms. It was interesting to see the different ways Facebook grapples with building its one billion plus newsfeeds. In their attempt to make feeds personal and more human, they have to consider likes and time spent on articles, as well as non-empirical factors such as how much and why a user liked or disliked a post. The work of Adam Mosseri, described as “the news feed’s resident philosopher,” showed me that Facebook’s algorithms somehow have to account for things that cannot be statistically quantified. Facebook also faces the challenge of competition from other digital platforms like Twitter and Snapchat, who disseminate information in very different ways. The article mentioned that while Facebook’s algorithms have grown more precise in optimizing the user experience, people are enjoying Facebook less than the early days when crude algorithms or just human intuition were determining the content uses interacted with.

I am noticing Facebook’s struggles first-hand all around me. Less and less of my peers are using Facebook, preferring platforms such as Twitter and Facebook-owned Instagram. While I cannot exactly explain why, Facebook’s audience is increasingly made of older adults, while more and more young adults and teenagers are leaving their accounts inactive, and new entries into social media are less likely to join Facebook than ever. Meanwhile, it seems every other week Mark Zuckerberg is testifying to Congress that Facebook compromised the information of a concerning number of users. While this article gave me a better look at how humans are trying to make Facebook better, I still have yet to be convinced that it is a platform I should spend more of my time on. I find other networks, especially Twitter, more enjoyable and relevant, and Facebook has yet to earn back much of my time.

Photo by Jacob Miller (@kineticbear) on unsplash.com. URL: https://unsplash.com/photos/ot5kWZkH97s