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The t-shirt and jeans are meant to give you that "he's not really
a manipulative, greedy billionaire" feeling. (Mark Zuckerberg, a
co-founder of Facebook: Photo by TechCrunch) |
Social media sites like Facebook are deliberately "crippled" by their programmers to keep you from your friends, serve you up to advertisers and rob your money. Did you know that only 7-8% of your Facebook friends can see your posts and that you have to pay Facebook a "promotion" fee so that 92 - 93% of your Facebook friends can actually see what you posts? In addition, only 3% of those who "like" your business or non-profit page are kept up to date with your posts, the rest are kept in the dark: unless you pay Facebook a fee, of course. Happen to know a friend or family member is on Facebook and you would like to find them? Try searching for them using the "search" engine inside of Facebook. Unless they are already "friends of a friend" your chances of ever finding them through Facebook is virtually nil.—Ronald David Jackson
By Bruce A. Dixon,
BlackAgendaReport
For a long time now, we've all been told, and have told each other, that corporate social media is the way to build businesses, audiences and brands. What if this is about as true as the old saw about real estate prices only going up? What is “dark social media” and how is it different from Twitter, Facebook and the rest.
It's new, it's now, it's cool, learn how... everybody's on it,
everybody's doing it. For some time now, we've been told you cannot
build a business, find old friends or organize much of anything without
the indispensable aid of corporate social media, especially Facebook and
Twitter. But what if this is about as true as other stuff the
supposedly wise and informed told us in recent years, like that real
estate prices could be counted on to always go up?
Human societies are based on lots of horizontal communication. What
if corporate social media is little more than a gigantic scam to extract
revenue from the otherwise ordinary communication the internet permits
between groups and individuals, between people and businesses, and among
communities of interest. What if corporate social media ultimately aims
not to open up but to throttle and restrict those conversations to make
them artificially scarce and valuable commodities. What if corporate
social media's business model is to thrive on content its proprietors
don't create, and to place itself between that content and prospective
audiences, even to substitute itself for the web sites, email lists and
media offerings of content creators?
With a billion users, Facebook is far and away the largest player in
the world of corporate social media, so all these criticisms apply to
Facebook. But many also apply to Twitter, Pinterest and their little
brothers as well.
Here are the top ten reasons why corporate social media is NOT your friend, and dark social media is.
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Facebook currently limits the number of your “friends” who
can see your posts to about 7 or 8%. What? You thought that “friends”
list was yours? It's not. It's theirs. And think about it, if
you had a thousand friends, and 25 of them, that's 2.5% posted 3 or 4
times a day, another 25 posted once a day, and a hundred posted once a
week, that would be at least 150 daily posts for you to comb through,
leaving little room for Facebook to insert ads and promoted content
which customers have paid for into your news feed.
-
Facebook will let you talk to the other 92 or 93% of your
friends, but you have to pay for that privilege. You buy an ad, or you
“promote” the post by paying Facebook. Essentially Facebook is “broken on purpose” so
it can extract payment from you to do what you imagined it would do
anyway, keep you in touch with your friends. You can get around this to a
very limited extent by “tagging” each post with the names of
individuals, or joining dozens of Facebook groups and individually
sharing posts in the groups. But this is a time consuming process which
has to be repeated with each post. If Black Agenda Report, with only a
dozen or so new articles each week, we'd be on Facebook three or four
hours each publication day.
-
Facebook, along with Twitter and other corporate social
media platforms provide you no way whatsoever to contact or individually
identify your Facebook “friends” outside its own walled garden. Again, those lists of Twitter followers, and Facebook friends aren't really yours at all.
-
Facebook limits the “organic reach” of your business or
nonprofit organization page to about 3% of those who say they “like”
you. Presumably those people “liking” your page imagined this
would keep them up to date with what you're doing. Not so. Neither
Facebook nor Twitter provides you any way to identify those “likes”, and
Facebook won't allow you even to send a message to them. Let's do a
thought experiment. Suppose you've got a business or a worthy cause, and
a list of thousands of customers, prospects, clients, or past and
potential volunteers and like minded donors. If I offer to take care of
deliveries to that list, but won't let you see their names, their email
addresses, or how many and which of them I actually deliver to, would
that be OK with you? No? Now please tell me again why corporate social
media which pretty much does that is essential to building your
business, your brand, your cause.
-
Facebook will gladly sell you advertising directed at the 97% of
your “likes” who otherwise might never see your stuff. Actually, these
people WILL see what you offer if they go out of their way to your
Facebook page. But with the same amount of effort, they could have
visited your web site independently of Facebook, couldn't they?
-
Third party vendors are eager to sell you all the “Facebook
likes,” “Facebook friends” and Twitter “followers” you're willing to pay
for. They might be located in Egypt, Sri Lanka or Croatia, and
never interact with your product or page again, but you can count them
as “likes.” Twitter and Facebook do not endorse these parasitic vendors,
but the mythology around corporate social media being so important to
your business or organizational “presence” on the web keeps them in
business as well.
-
If someone hostile to your politics, your business or your
person lodges a spurious complaint to Facebook, or Yahoo, Google or
YouTube, say, that you're an anti-Semetic copyright-violating whistle
blowing vegan child molester, what these providers generally do is
simply cut your account off without notice. Their terms of
service often relieve them of the bother of even sharing the exact
nature of the complaint against you let alone investigating it, and
explicitly state that “your” lists are really theirs. I know people
who've lost thousands of business contacts and years of content in Yahoo
and Google email accounts, lists and YouTube contents this way.
-
Facebook, Twitter and other corporate social media platforms
don't just track your every move while you're on Twitter or Pinterest
or Facebook. If you close the browser tab without logging off
or purging cookies, they usually continue to record and transmit all
your internet activity home for data miners to crunch. Such data, both
raw and refined are major revenue sources.
-
While Facebook, Twitter and all the social media platforms
rely on YOU and people like you for their compelling content, they
deliberately aim to place themselves between you and your readers,
customers, and clients, to substitute your Facebook presence for your
own offerings elsewhere on the internet. Do you actually visit
all the articles you pause over in your Twitter feed? Nobody else does
either. We habitually comb through 140 character snippets and hundred
word Facebook brain farts while seldom leaving the corporate social
media plantation, and imagine we've actually visited those web sites,
those sources. There are already folks whose ONLY daily internet
experience is Facebook, and books like “The Shallows”
explain how our internet reading makes us practically unable to read
book length arguments, reluctant to follow any single line of inquiry
for more than a minute or three.
-
Dark social media
is “dark” because it's social media untraceable by Big Data and
corporate marketers. It's direct email sent from your own lists and your
own listserves. Dark social media was around before Facebook,
Pinterest, and Twitter, and remains the proven way for individuals,
causes and businesses to reach, retain and maintain contact with
friends, customers, clients, and like minded souls. Using dark social
media to expand the reach of your business or project, to engage
audiences directly and without an intermediary is often a more fruitful
way to spend scarce resources. Corporate media won't tell you this and
neither will the “social media consultants,” sometimes because they
don't believe fat meat is greasy, and other times because disinformed
customers are more profitable.
Remember all those real estate professionals and “wealth building
experts” who told us home values would never go down? Some of them
actually believed it that swill. Some others knew better, but were
watching their own bottom line, not those of their customers or the
public. This is not so different.
Facebook does some really nice things, and many of us have and
interacted (online at least) with a ton of interesting people. But it
may be time for your business, your social movement or project or you as
an individual to reconsider the effort and resources devoted to
maintaining a presence on Facebook, Twitter and corporate social media
platforms. If you've already got two or three thousand Facebook friends
or tens of thousands of “likes” that aren't fakes a bit of continued
effort on Facebook and Twitter is probably required.
Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report, a
state committee member of the Georgia Green Party and a partner in an
internet technology firm. He lives and works near Marietta GA and can be
reached via emailed at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com.
Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.
