Stories Marketers Are Talking About Today

Facebook Fall-Out Continues as the #DeleteFacebook Movement Grows

The Facebook fall-out continues as Mark Zuckerberg addressed questions about the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica Scandal in a joint-Senate hearing Monday.

The media has questioned how effective the hearing may have been. CNN suggested that the hearing was simply a “light roasting” because many Senators did not have a good understanding of what exactly Facebook does. The Verge also questioned the validity of the two-day-hearing by pointing out exactly how much money Facebook has donated to the lawmakers who were questioning him—it’s $641,685, by the way.

Despite the company’s attempts to recover from the scandal, many prominent entrepreneurs are joining the #deletefacebook movement including Tesla’s Elon Musk and WhatsApp Co-Founder Brian Acton.

The fact remains, Facebook is still a valuable social media network for now—but every company must evaluate the pros vs. the cons to their business of being associated with the platform. A joint Survey-Monkey and Recode survey taken just last week shows that 56% of Americans trust Facebook the least out of all major tech companies.

Mark Zuckerberg has made it through the Senate hearing in-tact, but may face bigger challenges ahead as the FTC has opened an investigation into the matter. No matter what happens, lawmakers are talking about setting up future laws to more closely monitor internet security.

Headlines Loom but the Show-Must-Go-On

Despite the prominent headlines, behind the scenes, some aspects of the company are business-as-usual. Facebook Stories added two new features this week—AR doodling (the company calls this 3D drawing) and Boomerangs, which play a clip front to back and to front again instead of just repeating it. The new features are an attempt to make the stories feature more popular.

In addition—Facebook will be releasing new business tools terms that marketers need to know about. Individual companies—not Facebook—will be responsible for obtaining user consent to access, gather and store their data. The changes will take effect on May 25, 2018, the exact day the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation’s (GDPR) global set of rules go into effect. Read the complete rules and how they will affect American companies here.

More Social Media News--Bots, Snapstore and Privacy-is-Not-Dead

The Pew Research Center released a study on “Bots in Twittersphere”, finding that nearly 2/3 of all tweeted links to popular websites are posted by automated accounts rather than human beings. However, the highest incidence of bot shares did not occur on political or news sites, but rather on adult content, sports and commercial products.

Snapchat is testing a new e-commerce option on its Snapchat Discover channels.The feature will allow users to swipe on a product and purchase it in the SnapStore. Nearly 400 brands advertised on SnapChat Discover from November 2017-January 2018, which may seem small. But the company is targeting larger brands and offering bigger buys—think more TV ad value than social media value.

Firefox 11.0 is here and its new features are very relevant to the headlines. The new update turns on tracking protection by default, turning off ads, analytics and social share buttons—which means you can browse the internet with a bit more privacy than some other browsers. Users will also be able to reorder their tabs and gain a few iOS specific features. The tracking protection can also be turned off by website depending on the user’s preferences.

Even more interested in how to safely use social media without giving up privacy? TechCrunch put together a handy guide that anyone can use to safeguard their information.

Well, that’s our round-up of need-to-know marketing news from the past two weeks. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss out! 

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