Archive for the ‘Social Networking’ Category

Social media growth without spending is no more a challenge – Times of India

We are in the social networking age and social media platforms are all around us. They are playing an important role in human life from both personal and professional perspectives. Some businesses or influencers are nailing it with social media marketing without paying a penny, but for some social media marketing is digging a hole in their pockets.

If you are tired of shelling out your hard-earned cash for paid social media strategies, then It may seem like a challenge, but in this era of social media freedom, its not a challenge. Some proven organic social media strategies are better than the paid ones and wont cost you a dime.

India, in particular, has seen some great examples of brands that have successfully leveraged organic marketing to increase their reach and impact on social media. For instance, the Mumbai-based food brand, Swiggy, became a household name by using social media to engage with its customers and create viral content that resonated with its audience.

Almost five years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk, a serial entrepreneur said that brands will eventually wake up and realize that they shouldve invested more in social media. In an interview with Inc. magazine in 2018, Vaynerchuk was discussing the importance of social media for brands.

Now, If you look around, all of the brands are digging deeper to win on the social media battleground. However, not every brand is doing awesome.

Personify The Brand

If your brand is still looking like a company online that is trying to sell its products via different channels, then you need to work on social media strategies. Personify your brand, and develop a character for it as it has feelings, emotions, and stories like a real human being. The more it is human, the more people will find it relevant.

Taking the example of Red Bull here. Red Bull has a Daredevil personality that showcases the outrageous personality and makes its customers feel more adventurous and energetic.

Engage Yourself

The biggest lie of digital marketing is that you need to engage your customers. However, things have changed now. These days there is information overload on the internet. Customers or prospects will not engage with the content if you are not engaging yourself. By your engagement, we mean that you need to speak the customers language. Let the customers feel that a brand is talking about its style. So the more you engage yourself in social media posts, the more customers will respond, resulting in higher reach and retention.

Make Mistakes

There is only one way to achieve rapid organic social media growth other than to make mistakes. A lot of brands have leveraged this organic social media marketing strategy. In this case, as a brand, you have to make a mistake online in your content, and you will get a huge response.

The most important thing in this strategy is to make sure that brand posting mistakes dont harm anyone through any means. Trying this social media marketing hack is risky because it can also get you some negative responses from netizens. Always be conscious of the deliberate mistake you will make to win peoples hearts.

Use Humor

Does your brands social media handle sound boring? Keep in mind people dont like boredom. Humor is a tool you should always have in your hand when posting anything on the internet.

Create and share posts about topics that have yet to be discussed online. Try to share hidden stories of the brand, employees, and even the failures the brand management team faces.

Deal With Crisis Communication

Many brands have run away when their followers throw stigma on them through their bad comments or posts. This situation is very crucial to deal with in social media marketing. Most brands dont have a crisis communication strategy and delete the negative comments or remove the associated persons/accounts from their follower list. However, some brands have crisis communication strategies and enough wisdom to deal with them positively.

Brands like KFC have the potential to turn such situations of crisis communications into an opportunity for organic social media growth.

Bottom Line

We all know that posting regularly on social media, relevant content, posting during peak hours, and resharing bring organic social media growth. Following all these social media practices is good, but to be ahead of the competition, you need something beyond the ordinary. The tips mentioned above are less-discussed but very effective. Most of the top brands are using these strategies and gaining followers and sales through their social media handles.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Social media growth without spending is no more a challenge - Times of India

Government poised to fine social media platforms if they do not deal with misogynistic abuse – Daily Mail

Social media platforms are set to be fined if they do not deal with misogynistic abuse and bosses could face jail - as the government draws up new measures.

A cross-party group of lords led by former culture secretary, Baroness Morgan, is proposing a new amendment to the Online Safety Bill which would legally require social media firms to prevent the online abuse and violence against women and girls.

The amendment to the bill, which is due to be debated on Tuesday, is backed by Tory and crossbench peers, Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

It also means that companies who failed to remove misogynistic content would face fines worth up to 10 per cent their global turnover.

Bosses could even be jailed up to two years if the legal changes take place, which would treat online violence and abuse against women and girls in the same way as illegal child sexual abuse and terrorist content.

Last year, ministers rejected classing misogyny as a hate crime and instead the government compromised by creating a new offence of public sexual harassment.

In April it was feared thatWhatsApp could soon be banned if it refuses to comply with the new Online Safety Bill.

Under the Bill, tech companies will have a duty to find and remove illegal content being distributed through their social networking platforms.

But this could mean doing away with 'end-to-end encryption' - a security feature which scrambles messages to ensure that only the sender and recipient can read them.

Messaging services that use it, including WhatsApp, Signal, Viber and Element, have signed an open letter opposing the Online Safety Bill ahead of its final reading in the House of Lords.

'The UK government is currently considering new legislation that opens the door to trying to force technology companies to break end-to-end encryption on private messaging services,' it reads.

'The law could give an unelected official the power to weaken the privacy of billions of people around the world.

'We don't think any company, government or person should have the power to read your personal messages and we'll continue to defend encryption technology.'

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Government poised to fine social media platforms if they do not deal with misogynistic abuse - Daily Mail

MIT’s Center for Constructive Communication takes aim at the … – MIT Media Lab

The MIT Center for Constructive Communication (CCC) and the closely affiliated nonprofit Corticotoday announced the launch of a broad-based effort that draws on expertise in face-to-face human dialogue, digital networks, and machine learning to develop safe and trusted spaces for meaningful, nonpolarizing human connection and civic impact. This effort has attracted commitments of $21 million from philanthropic individuals and organizations, including a foundational gift from the international nonprofit Project Liberty. Of the total commitments, $8.5 million is directed to research conducted by CCC in collaboration with MITs Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, and the remainder to Cortico.

The goal is to develop and deploy technologies and methods to accelerate more trusted and meaningful communications within and across communities. Initial projects will research and experiment with new forms of social networks grounded in small group dialogue and decentralized social network designs, including the open-sourceDecentralized Social Networking Protocol(DSNP) that was released by Project Liberty in 2021. Other planned projects include the development of AI-powered sensemaking tools for community listening, as well as hardware to integrate real-life conversations with digital networks. These combined efforts focus on providing healthier alternatives to the current social media platforms controlled by dominant tech companies.

With growing evidence that social media is weakening our social fabric and threatening our democracy, its critical that we find new ways forward, says CCC Director Deb Roy, MIT professor of media arts and sciences and co-founder and CEO of Cortico. While we acknowledge that whatever new platform we develop wont be able to compete with social media platforms for entertainment value, they can provide alternative, scalable spaces for trusted and civil public discourse that is so critical for rebuilding a healthy democracy.The work enabled by this gift will advance CCCs research in sensemaking, machine learning, and digital design through a close collaboration with Cortico, which will work with CCC to develop prototypes that can then be translated into scalable solutions. These efforts involve launching pilot programs with a wide network of community organizations to evaluate which tools offer the greatest potential to create more trusted, less divisive communication.Research is based at the Media Lab with growing collaborations with the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

This effort will draw on MITs strong cross-disciplinary research tradition to address the increasingly divisive nature of todays social media culture. I look forward to seeing how this collaborations in-depth research in AI, sensemaking, machine learning, and digital design will come together to help create more trusted social networks that will foster more meaningful and constructive dialogues, says Maria T. Zuber, the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and vice president for research at MIT.

The effort will leverage a longstanding cooperative agreement between researchers at MIT and Cortico that enables collaboration on intellectual property, prototyping, and field pilots. In addition to Project Liberty, the effort is supported by Reid Hoffman, the Quadrivium Foundation, Yat Siu, the Knight Foundation, and Ray Chambers/MCJ Amelior Foundation.

Frank McCourt, founder and executive chairman of Project Liberty, sees support for this new effort as a critical investment to strengthen democracy that will highlight the importance of comprehensive, collaborative action. If we do this right, says McCourt, the dominance of a few Goliathan social media platforms will give way to a thousand Davids that support healthier digital communities and serve society at large.

"We at Project Liberty are committed to developing and delivering cutting-edge technology designed for the public good and helping to build an internet that puts people over platforms and enables constructive civic discourse, says Martina Larkin, CEO of Project Liberty. The work under way at MITs CCC and at Cortico, in collaboration with Project Liberty, will be critical to advancing this effort.

Fostering collaborations across the MIT campus and beyond, the MIT Center for Constructive Communication, based at the MIT Media Lab, leverages data-driven analytics to better understand current social and mass media ecosystems and designs new tools and communication networks to foster constructive dialogue, listening, and bridging across divides. To achieve this, CCC brings together researchers in AI, computational social science, digital interactive design, and learning technologies with software engineers, journalists, political scientists, designers, and community organizers. An important aspect of the center is its commitment to designing new models for more trusted and less toxic social networks.

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, Cortico maintains a long-term cooperation agreement with MIT that enables close collaboration with the MIT Center of Constructive Communication on intellectual property, prototyping, and field pilots. It is through Cortico that CCC deploys scalable projects into the field and works closely with experienced, locally based organizations and trusted influencers in underserved, marginalized communities across the country to help facilitate face-to-face conversation and surface diverse voices and nuanced perspectives needed to advance a more constructive and trusted public dialogue. To date, Corticos growing network has involved more than 10,000 participants throughout 38 U.S. states, working with more than 70 local and global organizations.

Project Liberty is an international nonprofit that describes itself as "accelerating the world's transition to an open, inclusive data economy that empowers people over platforms by working to mobilize the foundation of a new internet for the common good. Project Liberty is building a global alliance for responsible technology and bringing together technologists, academics, policymakers, civil society and citizens to build a safer, healthier tech ecosystem."

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MIT's Center for Constructive Communication takes aim at the ... - MIT Media Lab

Allen Mall Shooter May Have Left Messages for Police in Social Media Posts – NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

The search for clues about what motivated a man to open fire on shoppers at a North Texas shopping mall is now focused heavily on social media.

NBC 5 Investigates has learned Allen Police detectives have obtained warrants seeking access to a number of the suspects accounts with major social media platforms. In warrant affidavits, investigators said they believe the accounts may provide a clearer picture of how and when the shooter began planning the assault on a crowd at the Allen Premium Outlets.

In one of the warrants, investigators describe images from a YouTube video entitled "Psychovision Face Reveal," posted on the day of the shooting. Investigators said they believe the video shows the gunman wearing a Scream mask,then removing the mask to reveal his face.

A link to that video was also posted on Russian social networking site OK.ru, where NBC 5 Investigates viewed it along with dozens of other posts on what appears to be the suspect's own page.

That page also contains images that suggest the shooter scouted the Allen outlet mall just weeks before the attack to see when it is busiest. Some of the posts include photos of what appears to be the shooters Nazi tattoos, along with posts containing a litany of grievances and rants about women and various ethnic and religious groups.

NBC 5 has learned police are working to gain access to a number of the Allen mall shooter's social media accounts. Search warrants obtained detail how police believe accessing those accounts may provide a clearer picture of how and when the gunman began planning the deadly attack.

We do know that he had neo-Nazi ideation, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Hank Sibley said at a news conference Tuesday.

Tom Petrowski, a former FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisor told NBC 5 investigates he suspects the shooter may have turned to a foreign social media site to publish some of the content because it would be less likely that people who knew him would see the posts and alert authorities.

Putting this stuff on an obscure Russian platform, he knows that that's just not going to go anywhere, Petrowski said.

In hindsight, Petrowski said it seems easy to connect the dots in the social media posts about what the attacker was planning. But, he said its much more difficult for investigators to find those posts and take action before an event without help from the public, especially given the litany of disturbing posts he says now populate social media sites worldwide.

We look at things he was posting online and they're very troubling. But, the sad truth is the social media platforms around the world are just saturated with material like this, Petrowski said.

After reviewing some of the posts, Petrowski said it seems the shooter hoped investigators would find his Russian social media page after the attack. In one post it even appears he left a coded message for police a little more than two weeks ago. A note above that message seems to taunt authorities challenging them to solve the puzzle.

To me, it looks like he targeted the location rather than a specific group of people. He was very random. And the people he killed, it didn't matter the age, race or sex. He just shot people.

Authorities said Tuesday that they are continuing to review digital evidence to gather more information about the shooters ideology and motivations, but said the gunman appeared to fire randomly on the crowd.

To me, it looks like he targeted the location rather than a specific group of people. He was very random. And the people he killed, it didn't matter the age, race or sex. He just shot people, Sibley said.

Meanwhile, the search warrants obtained by NBC 5 Investigates also reveal more details about the weapons involved in the attack.

The warrant affidavits said the gunman was equipped with a tactical vest, 10 rifle magazines, an AR-15-style rifle, a handgun and six pistol magazines.

Authorities confirmed Tuesday that the shooter once had a Texas security guard's license but said the license had lapsed in recent years.

They also said they are trying to learn more details about the mans sudden departure from the U.S. Army and questions surrounding his fitness for duty.

The Army has said the suspect was discharged in 2008 before even completing basic training.

Questions about the shooters military background, and the social media posts, leave Petrowski wondering if a tragedy could have been avoided if only someone had seen the posts and spoken up.

We keep repeating the, you know, 'see something, say something' mantra, but that's really what it comes down to, he said.

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Allen Mall Shooter May Have Left Messages for Police in Social Media Posts - NBC 5 Dallas-Fort Worth

LinkedIn Adds New Topic Prompts to Help Creators Build Their … – Social Media Today

As part of its broader roll out of a central location for creator analytics and tools, which is designed to make it easier to manage all aspects of your content in the app, LinkedIn has also now added some new topic and post prompts to help guide creators in building their in-app presence.

LinkedIn has been rolling out its new Analytics and tools dashboard to users that have had Creator Mode switched on over the last few months. Creator Mode provides a full overview of content performance, as well as the creator-specific tools available to you.

As you can see in these screenshots, Analytics and Tools, available on the left side panel of the app (to those with Creator More active), will show you content performance over time, and topics associated with your profile (which you can add to), as well as a full listing of the creator elements available to you in the app (e.g. LinkedIn Live, Newsletters, CTA links).

As noted, LinkedIns been rolling this out to selected users since February. But just recently, it added another element to the Creator Mode dashboard Conversations Happening Now, which includes a new Post Ideas listing.

As per LinkedIn:

In the Conversations happening nowsection, youll see a sample of posts that might be relevant to you and your audience. The posts that appear in this section are based on the content you have previously posted and topics your audience might be interested in. You can click on the post to review in more detail and consider reposting them with your own commentary to join the conversation.

The initiative is part of LinkedIns broader effort to prompt more users to post more often, with LinkedIn also experimenting with AI-generated post prompts to help get you thinking about what you might want to post to maximize engagement with your in-app audience.

Which, in some ways, feels a little inauthentic. The idea is that Creator Mode gives you a means to highlight your expertise and knowledge within your niche. But if LinkedIns doing all the curating for you, that feels like it could help people gain more notoriety with less oversight and insight, and without really understanding the full scope of the industry.

Which, of course, is even worse if you start using AI to create those opinion posts for you. That could see LinkedIn flooded with a lot of empty opinions based on such, as opposed to facilitating genuine insight, and respective interaction with actual experts.

Then again, your posts likely wont get attention if your opinions are rubbish, so there is some need for original thinking on top of these prompts. But it does seem like this could get misused by some to improve their standing without doing the actual research and having the experience required to make it look like you know what youre talking about.

But either way, it will help LinkedIn to increase engagement, which remains at record high levels, as the platform continues to grow.

Maybe, from LinkedIns perspective, thats enough of a win in itself and when coupled with the need for original insight to truly separate yourself from the crowd, itll be hoping that that will be enough to weed out the fakers in the app.

The new Conversations Happening Now element is available to English language users of Creator Mode if its not available in your tools as yet, its coming soon.

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LinkedIn Adds New Topic Prompts to Help Creators Build Their ... - Social Media Today