Overview: Social Media Strategy

Axel Springer, wary of being overly dependent on third-party platforms for traffic... fighting back by launching its own news aggregator platform... now has around 1,200 publishers on board ... Digiday spoke with Würtenberger, CEO of Upday, about using humans and algorithms for news sourcing, creating a platform for publishers and banning ad block…

Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services... social engagement could solve the conversion challenge ... users enjoy free content that the website provides but are unwilling to contribute to the site monetarily. The bad news is that it’s not enough to just add participatory optio…

Brands have always had a tougher time spreading messages on Facebook than individuals, because they’re playing in a space that’s fundamentally not designed for them... What if our kids find the idea of any brands communicating as if they’re people even more awkward than we do? there are opportunities to re-think the role publishing plays in soci…

ThinkUp analyzes your Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook activity to give you fun and surprising insights, then emails them to you (or tweets at you if it's super interesting).

a big part of Twitter’s current problems stem from choosing to mimic Facebook’s ad-supported, most-eyeballs-possible business model,... forced Twitter to focus on money making strategies that irritate users... becoming more open was also a socially valuable goal, not just an economic one... Instead of becoming more open, however, Twitter turned in…

It is inevitable that Twitter will need to create some scarce, attention-rich inventory it can sell to advertisers

Facebook’s Notes feature is giving The Boston Globe another way to post directly to the Facebook platform... Notes, an early Facebook staple, stagnated for years until last September, when Facebook updated the feature with a cleaner, more customizable design and editing tool reminiscent of Medium. Unlike video posted directly to Facebook, there’s…

But cracks in Twitter’s façade had been showing already... getting noisy isn’t the only problem Twitter has today, though it seems to be one of the more pronounced symptoms of a company that has lost its direction.

Betts ... became the first data head to join the publisher’s board, recognizing data’s importance in growing its subscriptions and audience. Today, he heads up a 30-person team focused on customer analytics and research. Here are lessons from Betts on data maturity and driving audience engagement... While subscriptions are critical ... it’s not t…

For some news organisations, packaging and distributing news on social media falls under the remit of the engagement team. For others, the task is assigned to a distributed news team or to a social content studio within the editorial department.This is the third in a series of articles on how news for social is produced... BuzzFeed Distributed i…

Sure Facebook has 1.59 billion users, but that not my field of view. I have some 900 “friends” on Facebook. To me, it doesn’t matter who the other one billion five hundred eighty-nine million nine hundred ninety-nine thousand one hundred users are. I can’t reach out to them to begin a relationship... Facebook and Twitter are two very different dif…

The new feature will show tweets that are sorted based on relevancy, rather than only chronology, at the top of your timeline... "While you were away," is still reserved to recap tweets when you've gone significant stretches of time between browsing sessions and may not always appear at the very top of your timeline. The new "best tweets first" f…

I don't really see what they send. I tap through so fast. It's rapid fire.Response as message. Virtual eye contact. Like liking or faving. This reminds me of Matt Webb's Glancing project. I'm ok, you're ok. Virtual primate social grooming.

I would watch in awe as she flipped through her snaps, opening and responding to each one in less than a second with a quick selfie face. She answered all 40 of her friends’ snaps in under a minute.

the hallmark of a good branded podcast is that the marketing is subtle... this is something where you want to build a long-term relationship with people. It’s not about short-term conversions, or anything like that, but about having an amazing first experience with a brand.

Publishers are placing big bets on social platforms like Facebook and Snapchat, praying that fishing for audiences outside their owned sites will eventually pay off in new readers and advertising... it’s still a gamble... payoff in audience and ad dollars is uncertain. Plus, fishing expeditions are hardly free. Hiring more staff is just part of t…

... just another fuss that will blow over in time? Perhaps, although users of social services often come to accept many things that might not be good for them. Even the former CTO of Facebook, Adam D’Angelo, acknowledges that there are problems with a filtered feed...It can serve to reinforce the “filter bubble” that human beings naturally form ar…

Twitter will implement an algorithm ... The degree to which this prospect upsets me is plainly absurd... Being so invested in Twitter has helped me, clearly, but it’s also trapped me... The algorithm will, inevitably, push the marginalized voices out of my awareness. It will promote the old and comfortable over the new and challenging. It will st…

the mere suggestion that an algorithm be used instead of pure reverse chronology for displaying the timeline caused people to get their pitchforks out. But I would argue that it’s absolutely necessary for Twitter to make this change — both for the growth of the network with new users, as well as the overall quality of content and connections.

"It tears conversations apart, and it's really confusing when some people have been live-tweeting an event and those things get scattered all across my timeline."

I spent a few minutes viewing the Twitter profiles of some of the people who've followed me recently and I was struck by how much of their TweetStreams were simply RTs of other people here in Brussels. Don't they have anything original to say?

Bots are to modern messaging apps what APIs were to Web 2.0; a way to build on top of other services, experiment, and create a new way of interacting with existing services... what inspiration can we draw from the past that might help us to think about designing Conversational UIs?

At work here is what is called, variously, “social syndication” or “traffic exchange,” a technique increasingly in vogue among publishers looking to get their articles and brands in front of other readers ... help them extend the reach ... fill in the gaps in their own social programming with stories that they didn’t or couldn’t write themselves

I’ve just spent a few days running the Discovery phase of a new project to further develop the communication strategy of an EU Institution, with a particular focus on retooling its online, social media and publications tactics. Apart from focusing on developing a new information architecture, I’m running the overall project. This means not only en…

Reposting your blog on LinkedIn and Medium is a no-brainer. Which is precisely the problem - it takes no brains.

Platforms are eating publishers... The idea that Facebook and its ilk could act as information gatekeepers is also a bleak prospect... Facebook wouldn’t allow The New Republic to create an ad for an innocuous piece on medical marijuana ... If Facebook is squeamish about medical marijuana now, imagine the state of the fourth estate once controversy…

Gawker Media CEO Nick Denton was an extreme skeptic of publishers relying too heavily on Facebook. Now he's ... “all in” on publishing directly to Facebook with its Instant Articles program, a backtracking on Denton’s well-publicized lament that publishers are too reliant on platforms...Facebook, with its deep pool of accurate user data, can help …

what started as a cynical in-joke has become a bad habit, and an excuse for enabling abuse across the web... The fact that we joke about it documents an acceptance of a culture of abuse online. It helps normalize online harassment campaigns and treat the empowerment of abusers as inevitable, rather than solvable... we denigrate a form that use…

The 12-person unit, called the social stories team, includes a variety of roles: writers, animators, graphics professionals, and producers, who create and package content for Instagram, Vine, Tumblr and Snapchat Discover.

This playbook includes tons of ways to jump start your snaps ...If you’re looking for a massive list of ideas to cycle in and out of your Snapchat feed, this is the place