DiGiTure

The ability to distinguish between real or fake content has been diminished due to the deregulated market that has come about from Facebook news feeds or Twitter dashboards. Regular users are unable to tell legitimate content from fake news or between real and fake users. The ease of utilizing the internet and advancements in user scripts increase the amount of fake user being created.

Furthermore, the user pool is so large that companies will gleefully jump at the chance to tap into the 3 billion people on social media. As people look towards measures like follower count to determine legitimacy, the increase in fake accounts unfairly promotes some products by manipulating user trust in such metrics.

This problem has been exacerbated by the rise of a industry built on selling likes and endorsement through social media accounts with widespread influence. Everyone wants to be popular and naturally would follow advice or products promoted by popular accounts. It would then seem natural that if such an industry exists, fake accounts should be purged. However, read on to find out why this is not the case and social media platforms are not very concerned about this.

Decrease Superiority of the Social Media

Firstly, these fake accounts pad the numbers of estimated users of their service. Part of their marketability is due to their widespread outreach of users. Therefore, policing these spam accounts would decrease the number of supposed users on the platform and decrease their supposed superiority.

Cost to Regulate Fake Accounts/Users

These platforms would not only lose revenue, but incur increased costs to catch and regulate fake accounts. Facebook has stated that “it is simply not feasible to review over 1 billion profiles to locate a single user who may be lying about his or her name. No technical program or mechanism exists to prevent an individual from lying about his or her identity and/or age.” However, the creation of fake accounts would be easier to spot than changing one’s age, as a lack of factors such as posts and the date of creation relative to the supposed age. They could also flag out duplicated names and review these through a similar process like their content moderators.

A similar safeguard is in place by Amazon, which double-checks the card number tied to accounts to ensure there is no duplication. Therefore, the reasons above are not good reasons for Facebook and twitter to turn a blind eye to the issue. These platforms have a responsibility for legitimate customers to receive accurate recommendations, and for legitimate content creators to have a fair marketplace to compete in.

How it affect consumers?

Firstly, allowing these fake accounts to remain active creates an environment that allows companies to unfairly exploit users. The users on Facebook and twitter assume that interactions and endorsements on posts are by actual people. If a post gathers 10,000 likes, the first thought by most users is not “how many of these 10,000 likes are fake accounts?”. As system administrators, platform providers like Facebook and twitter have a responsibility to regulate unfair behavior towards consumers.

Secondly, allowing these fake reviews may undermine the inherent trust in a peer-review based system that many online businesses rely on. Fake users may reduce future consumer trust in products and services offered online, as the reviews may not be legitimate. A movement on twitter in 2015 through the hashtag #noreceiptnoreview aimed to filter out fake reviews on TripAdvisors. This campaign aimed to increase the verifiability of reviews on the site, and asked users to verify their review with a scanned receipt of the establishment they are reviewing

FOOD FOR THOUGHTS

1. How much should governments hold these social media companies accountable in regulation of the online market? OR
2. Do you think that Facebook should do more to delete fake accounts?”

We use search engines almost every day, but do we know how it really works?
Let me briefly explain the role of search engines and the purpose of SEO.

Role of Search Engine

Search engines exist to help people find information on the web. When a user inputs keywords into the engine, it brings up relevant results that link to the input. Some examples of search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing and Opera. They all use similar algorithms to trawl the web to find content that relates to the combination of keywords put in by the user.

Purpose of SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process where people make sure their websites are appealing to the search engine’s algorithm. The main idea behind SEO is to make content on your website relevant to keywords inputted by users, so that the search engine’s algorithms will pick it up. If people want to find information about a certain keyword, you can use a variety of tactics which will help your site appear higher on the search results.

The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase a website’s visibility, so that you can bring the right people in from the search engine. When search engine visitors see that your site meets their expectations after they find you on a web search, this means your SEO is working . If visitors are disappointed, this means your SEO efforts aren’t bringing your webpage onto the right searches.

Future of SEO

There are a lot of uncertainties as to what lies ahead for SEO, but field experts have made some predictions about the future of this industry.

Speed is the key. Many think that SEO is just about site speed, when in fact there are a lot more variables at play. With the rapid increases in consumer technology, we’re connected everywhere we go. This allows users to adopt a fast-paced and ‘on-the-go’ mindset. Therefore, if your site and content can’t be quickly accessed, it will be overlooked. This is the harsh reality that faces search providers, that they need to give users exactly what they are looking for, in the shortest time possible.

Voice search has also become popular in recent years, such as Google Home, Amazon Alexa and Siri. Experts predict that SEO companies need to start accounting for this by reworking site content to directly answering questions someone may ask Siri out loud instead of just keywords. Google has already started to take this change into account on the search results page. Google’s Direct Answers pulls Q&A content from sites and displays it higher above the rest of the search results, increasing traffic and awareness. 

However, these days marketers live in fear where their hard work can vanish into thin air within second when Google release a new algorithm update. Business do often see their website drop suddenly in rankings and lose traffic because of a Google update. Therefore, it is important for companies monitor what google as they have a direct effect on your content marketing strategy.

food for thoughts:
Should investor continue investing on SEO even though the returns may not be as significant as before?

I’m going to open by asking you to recall if any of your friends doesn’t own a smartphone. I bet you can’t think of a single person.

In today’s world, it is hard to find someone who doesn’t own a mobile phone. In 2015, there were 4.15 billion mobile phone users worldwide and within 3 years, it grew to 4.68 billion users. Furthermore, data has forecast that it will pass the 5 billion mark by 2019.

With the world’s population at 7.6 billion and close to 5 billion people owning a phone, can you imagine that about 65% of the world population is on a mobile!

This definitely helps to explain why companies are leveraging on technology and promoting their products/services through mobile marketing! There are many different mobile marketing channels, but today I would like to focus on a specific type called Location-Based Services (LBS).

Companies that use mobile marketing as part of their strategy have some knowledge about the consumers: Who they’re dealing with, but more importantly for LBS would be their geographical position at any time. There are different classifications of mobile marketing which is dependent on whether the message takes into account the specific location of the user (location-sensitivity), and if it is processed by the user immediately or with a delay (time-sensitivity).

Location-Based Services (LBS)

In this case, for LBS, what do you think it is?
Too easy to guess isn’t it? The name reveals it all.

LBS is definitely location-sensitive and most of the advertisements that are sent through such channels are time sensitive as well. There are different types of LBS such as location tags, hashtags, keywords, and geotargeting.

An example of a brand who utilizes this strategy efficiently is Whole Foods, a supermarket chain. They partnered with a location-based marketing firm called Thinknear to improve post-click conversion rate for its mobile ads. At the same time, they also targeted ads around competitors stores to attract potential customers away to their stores.

They did so by placing geofences around several Whole Food store locations, then sent mobile users targeted ads and special offers when they walked past. Furthermore, they used the same technique around their competitors stores to incentivize them to get better deals and convert them to Whole Food customers instead. This campaign yielded Whole Foods a 4.69% post-click conversion rate which is 3 times more then the national average.

In case you are unaware of why you are a target of such mobile marketing strategies, you will realize it shortly..

We often don’t know that when we sign up for promotional offers or mailing lists, we give much more information that we expect to marketing companies. Some applications under the Apple and Google store also auto-enable sharing your location even when you’re not using the app, until you turn it off. Therefore, you could be sharing your location with multiple companies and not even know it!

While LBS offers good spontaneous promotions and sometimes can benefit customers, it also shows that our data is being shared to multiple organizations that we may not know about. Will this become more of a positive or negative marketing method in the future?