On a normal day I receive around 30 unwanted emails. Google automatically filters 99% of them into my junk folder. It is so efficient that, on most days, my email is spam free. This is in stark contrast to the emerging trends in social media. The providers of these services are the spammers - they have to be. We don’t use social media platforms to buy products; we use them to see what our friends are doing, or to see the latest news. However these companies have twelve figure valuations to back up; somehow they have to sell us stuff.
Social media spam, unlike email spam, is endorsed by the networks themselves. No one thinks that the networks should try to function without adverts, but neither they, nor their users, are happy with the levels of irrelevant marketing content currently being displayed.
Research from Danny Miller at UCL has shown that newsfeed advertising is one of the main reasons young people cite for giving up on ‘uncool’ Facebook. Brands have learnt the hard way that even with great content they can’t get close to the levels of engagement generated by major celebrities. Oreo’s celebrated real time tweet in response to the 2013 Super Bowl power cut, “don’t worry, you can still dunk in the dark”, received a total of 22,000 likes, comments and retweets. Justin Bieber frequently generates six figure levels of engagement with such banalities as “Life is about the Journey :)”.
Social media traffic obeys Pareto’s famous law: 80% of the traffic revolves around 20% of the users. Twenty percent is an enormous number of users however. We have identified a list of around 200,000 social media ‘stars’ who together account for roughly 60% of the interactions across the world’s 12 largest social networks. It is possible to semi-manually catalogue the reasons why most people choose to connect with this number of stars.
There are many reasons to connect with a star like David Beckham, for example: He’s a style icon, a devoted father and husband and a football legend. Someone who also follows the rest of Manchester United’s class of ‘92 is likely to be a passionate Manchester United fan and a candidate for certain football content.
However someone else who, in addition to Beckham, also connects with David Gandy, Orlando Bloom and Adam Levine, probably doesn’t want to see any football content. By merging interaction information across multiple networks it is possible to make up a fairly accurate picture of what people are passionate about and - just as importantly - what they don’t want to see messages about.
The idea of finding passions through the lens of a relatively small number of stars can be extended from individuals to entire communities. People fail to engage with a brand’s social media content because it lacks authenticity, and feels too much like advertising. Some brands are beginning to understand that instead of targeting consumers directly with their messages, it is more effective to find communities that matter to them and to make positive contributions to these communities.
An excellent example of this type of marketing behaviour is Nike’s “Dare to Zlatan” campaign, which featured a series of Tweets from Swedish football star Zlatan Ibrahimović. These were enthusiastically picked up and shared within the football fan community.
Alternatively, companies blindly paying Facebook £10,000 to send a post out to a few million people are likely to find "deal-hunters" who exploit companies lack of sophistication and the prevalence of "like this page for a coupon" ads. Instead, if content is entertaining, relevant to the specific user and ultimately fits with the brand image, social media marketing will begin to see attitudes shift in both brand perception and how advertising on social networks is perceived.
Automatic discovery of passions, communities and influencers are challenging research problems. There are billions of social media accounts and this number is growing rapidly. New Big Data technologies are needed to work at this scale. The most successful social media content to date makes use of current events, and so real-time calculations are needed.
It is to solve problems like these that Starcount and the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 have jointly funded a research fellowship with Imperial College London’s Department of Computing. This fellowship will run for three years, looking at techniques to discover communities, passions, and influential individuals in social media data at scale.
The ultimate goal is to make social media spam a thing of the past, replacing it with useful information and positive contributions to engaged communities.
By Ben Chamberlain, Starcount.
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