- Twitter’s stock price dipped when it was learned that they have not attracted more users.
- It’s not about the number of people on Twitter it’s about the people who are on Twitter engaging through the platform.
- Facebook’s drop in stock price, however, is alarming because their “lax” policies are finally catching up with them.
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Wall Street is all about growth, but growth doesn’t explain how people are using social media[/inlinetweet]. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””] Advertisers should be measuring engagement rather than the number of eyes on a specific Tweet[/inlinetweet]. Social media is quickly reaching the mature stage of its product lifecycle and growth of new users is going to level off sharply. Facebook however is another story.
According to Forbes “earlier this month it came out that among Facebook’s myriad algorithmically induced advertising categories was an entry for users whom the platform’s data mining systems believed might be interested in treason against their government. The label had been applied to more than 65,000 Russian citizens, placing them at grave risk should their government discover the label. Similarly, the platform’s algorithms silently observe its two billion users’ actions and words, estimating which users it believes may be homosexual and quietly placing a label on their account recording that estimate. What happens when governments begin using these labels to surveil, harass, detain and even execute their citizens based on the labels produced by an American company’s black box algorithms?”
In addition to the big brother mentality of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg seems immune to his own mishandling of controversy. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Facebook refuses to take down fake news pages, even for pages that deny the Holocaust.[/inlinetweet] It’s gotten so bad that some activist investors are calling on Zuckerberg to resign.
Facebook has its own problems an it will survive, but it may be less attractive to advertisers as they see Facebook strictly as a media platform. Twitter on the other hand, seems to be evolving nicely for users and I have seen an engagement, increase for clients over the last six months. Twitter is perfect in the ADHD Internet age and I believe that people are using it to express their anger at the current political climate and other issues like high drug prices.
Wall Street doesn’t get it. To them, it’s a quantitative measurement not a qualitative measurement. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””] As a marketer, however, I would rather use social media that have a higher engagement rate rather than one that has tens of millions of users.[/inlinetweet]
