Long time no post? Yeah… I was off building content on other sites instead of pushing content to my own. I spent some time with twitter and facebook. I did some advertising. I did some experiments, and I’m back to where I am the decider!
Monetization; Nothing is ever really free, and recently the squeeze of the all mighty dollar has been put on social media. Twitter was used to directly push eyeballs to NBC for the Olympics this year and Facebook has been slowly filtering out your feed. Now with fresh API’s and IPO’s respectively, social media is using every trick in the bag to get advertisers and it’s audience together.
Both sites control media, content, and make filtered decisions on your behalf. Remember when you saw EVERY post from your friends on facebook? They started to slowly show more of the people you interacted with. A year ago they implemented a subscribe feature that no one can figure out and opts everyone out of your feed. Soon you were asking your friends: “When did you post that?!” because FB decided that it wasn’t important. Facebook Pages are in even worse shape. Only 30% of the people that like your page will be shown any particular update from that page. “Will be shown” as in – 70% just won’t ever see it on their feed unless they directly go to your page, or you pay for that update to be promoted. Twitter has a similar model that suggests people follow you and pushes your tweets to their page.
One of my close friends liked Verizon on facebook. Or at least facebook told me that they did. Are you kidding me? Verizon has a pretty good network, but no one actually likes them. This made me suspicious and it turns out this is just another advertisement option trick.
Third party apps suffer: What I want is an app that will broadcast my words across multiple channels and outlets. I want an app that reads and parses everything from all outlets under my control. Post to facebook, twitter, wordpress, google+, etc. Show your entire timeline, all tweets, all posts. The reality is that those apps are being crushed or filtered so badly that no one will see the content when it gets there. Nothing is ranked higher then you typing an update directly into facebook.com. Hootsuite, Seesmic, Twitter, SMS, etc. will all be ranked lower (show up on less feeds) then your eyeballs on their site and their apps – looking at their ads. Google+ doesn’t even play the game. You just can’t post on G+ if you’re not on the page or using their app.
Why are we playing this game? It’s only going to get worse. We are social creatures, but at what (Buy Coke) point is the (Doritos) interaction going to be (Target) spoiled? Twitter just feels like a bunch of people yelling on mountaintops with no engagement happening. I have evidence to suggest that facebook just makes up demographic data. For example I ran an ad targeting anyone in the US that likes “rallying” OR “WRC”. It was over 250,000 people?! I can tell you that this demographic is more like 10k to 15k people on it’s best day – and that’s if I count the 25% of the population that is NOT on facebook!
Push them to the website: I’m retreating to safe waters. I pay for the server, I have a pro flickr account, my rally blog runs some ads to cover the $90 a year, and I get to post and promote whatever I want. I’ll still be on the social networks, but my goals have changed. I just want people to visit my sites and enjoy my work. If they’re interested they can sign up for updates via email or RSS. Google search loves unique content and is more likely to find viewers then a lousy facebook ad. I’m experimenting with IFTTT.com and a microblog with microposts on rallynotes.com. Instead of content ending up there, content STARTS there, where it remains king.
