Category: social media

What do those temporary Facebook profile pictures really mean?

As so many of us focus our work around online campaigns it’s really useful to know how social media drives norms (or doesn’t….). Here’s a great article from Scientific American  that might help inform some of your future plans!

Also worth reading on the same topic is the Washington Post’s article “More than 26 million people have changed their Facebook picture to a rainbow flag. Here’s why that matters.

From Scientific American

“We know that online peer pressure is powerful. But what we don’t know is whether that pressure is driving real change.

Sharing your opinions and thoughts online is as simple as clicking a button. But you might want to hold off on clicking that button if your opinion or thinking differs from the at-the-moment sentiment sweeping through your social network. To do otherwise, might bring the ire of your connections, and with it ostracism from the group. While it has never been easier to share online, it’s also never been harder to share things that differ from public sentiment or to not offer an opinion in the wake of emotionally charged events. Peer pressure, which was once categorically regarded as a negative driver of drugs and deviant behavior, has morphed to a broader expression of social pressure in online spaces and is more aligned with maintaining group norms.

Why is this an issue? There is a difference between norms that arise as a result of social consideration and norms that are driven by social momentum. The former are designed to improve a group’s cohesiveness by establishing degrees of sameness through agreement; they can be challenged and debated, and there is room for them to change to meet the needs of the widest possible group set. The latter, however, are driven by emotional responses. They become established quickly and decisively, spreading like wildfire, and bear a violence toward those who disagree. This has rightly been described as mob mentality because there is little discussion or debate; and while some people are relieved to have their beliefs finally expressed publicly, others follow because they are swept along by the expressions of the group or because they are afraid to stand apart from the group. In the online world, this has recently been helpful in highlighting cases of harassment but caution is warranted. There is a speed-to-action online that is troubling in that in quickly establishes a stigma tied to behavior or thinking that differs and forces people to act in less than meaningful ways.

In recent years, both of these circumstances have played out on Facebook. In 2012, Facebook allowed users to indicate their organ donor status. Later that year, Facebook asked users to pledge to vote in the presidential election. Both actions were marked by a sharable status that a user could use to broadcast action/intent to his or her network. The organ donor initiative was meant to help reduce the misconceptions that plague the donor community and prevent donor sign-ups. It drew criticism because it highlighted a personal choice as something a person could not be judged on, calling out a status that may differ between people and matter more than if you both liked the television show Friends. Similarly, “I Voted” was meant to mobilize people based on peer pressure. The idea being that if the majority of your friends had voted, you might want to as well. While most people will agree that becoming an organ donor or casting a vote is not a bad thing, the pressure to indicate that you’re in sync with your community might result in a false reporting of your status. There was no means of verifying that you were an organ donor or that you voted. What mattered, however, was the show of solidarity, which was driven by emotional wave of activism and change, respectively.

Behaviors and thoughts spread much in the same way that viruses do: they’re most powerful, and contagious, when passed between people who have close contact with each other. Within social networks–both online and offline–there is evidence to suggest that in groups where there is a great deal of overlap between members in terms of shared connections and interests, there are higher rates of adoption of behaviors and thinking because members are receiving reinforced signals about certain patterns. In these types of clustered networks, behavior and thought exist as complex contagions, requiring multiple points of contact before “infection” is established.

Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler gave us a good example of the power of clustered networks by tracing obesity, smoking cessation, and happiness through the Framingham network. This network was revealed following a medical study that collected information on personal contacts, which allowed the participants’ social networks to be mapped years later, and for researchers to trace the spread of certain behaviors. Christakis and Fowler found that:

  • If a person became obese, the likelihood his friend would also become obese was 171%.
  • When smokers quit, their friends are 36% more likely to also quit. (Although this effect diminishes as the separation between contacts grow, and loses its efficacy at four degrees of separation.)
  • Happy friends increased the likelihood of an individual being happy by 8%.

The Framingham data illustrated a potential impact of the connections within a network. Our networks help us establish a sense of what’s acceptable–right down to expanding waistlines. The more social reinforcement we receive that certain actions are appropriate, the more likely we are to adopt those actions ourselves.

The catch here is that the Framingham data represents an offline dataset. So in the case of the smokers who quit and influenced their friends to follow, this happened without a temporary profile picture or an “I quit smoking” Facebook status. This behavior played out offline where it was vetted and assessed before it was adopted. That kind of critical thinking is often missing from the online pressure to conform. What does it mean if your profile picture was not updated? Maybe you’re not active on Facebook often, in which case, you’d probably get a pass. But if you are active, does it mean you condone the attacks? What do we really accomplish with these kinds of acts of solidarity? Ultimately, it sends a message about who we are as people; it serves to distinguish us from an other–it says we aren’t like them, we aren’t bad people. But does it stop there?

Beyond our responses to acts of terrorism, we are establishing new data points upon which we can be judged. In the Framingham study, smokers mingled freely with nonsmokers in 1971 and they were distributed evenly throughout the network. However, by 2001 as groups of smokers quit, those who persisted were socially isolated. What if we required people to list their status as smokers or non-smokers–how would our networks shift as a result of this information? The temporary profile picture is a great way to get people to initially think about what is happening around them. But what does it mean beyond that? How does it drive change in a meaningful way? Right now, it may be a conversation point, but it may also provide an easy way out of having to take action in the real world. There are presently voices online highlighting ways that people can help–but will people feel that need to once they’ve updated their profile picture?”

 

Strategizing social media

“New Tactics in Human Rights” bring together experts over “Online Discussions” on various topics.

In this online conversation, they explored:

  • How to define your social media goals and targets;
  • Strategizing about how to reach your stakeholders with social media;
  • Making decisions about the resources you should devote to building and maintaining a social media presence;
  • How to use social media without putting your staff and your constituents at risk;

This online conversation was an opportunity to exchange experiences, lessons-learned and best practices among practitioners using social media strategically in human rights work.

Tactic examples shared in the conversation:

Engage your audience

With hundreds of millions of people around the world participating in social networks, it’s become passé to try to “be the message”. If your campaign mainly aims at building your sense of community, it’s OK to generate expressions and send them to one another, which is typically what selfie-campaigns do. By if you’re trying to change anybody’s heart and mind, your campaign shouldn’t send a message, it shouldn’t even generate expressions. It should convene a conversation, as only conversations move positions.

One finding that stood out from a survey by the Case Foundation was that 74 percent of non-profits use social media as a megaphone to announce events and share what they’re up to, instead of seeking out conversations.

Online campaigning is to polarize a discussion effectively, and then curate the conversation to make your side more compelling. And to create the conversation, you have to engage your audience.

Here are some tips for achieving this

Find the right tactic to avoid a ghost town.

If there isn’t any engagement with your social media efforts, it generally keeps new visitors from engaging. How do you first encourage engagement? You can recruit a handful of very loyal supporters – staff and volunteers – and get them to commit to participating in your social media efforts.

If you have some clout, you should also recruit leaders. See for example how the “Internet for schools” campaign by Social Driver and The Alliance for Education Excellence started their mobilisation:

“In order to start the campaign off, Social Driver identified 20 key influencers in the education space that they knew could kick-start a conversation. Once they were onboard and excited, Social Driver had them each make a video explaining why internet access and WiFi is important for schools – and post it with a tag to the FCC. From there, the snowball started rolling. Other educators, parents and students started to make similar videos, and even more people started to call on the FCC to expand internet and wifi coverage. All those conversations, impressions, and direct calls on the FCC gave the campaign the voice and weight it needed to be heard.”

Get your people out there to create content !

People don’t want to just participate in a campaign, they want to be the message.

The pinnacle of this is citizen journalism.

For a compelling introduction to what that is, we highly recommend this interesting TedTalk about Storify.com

Ask questions

This gets high interaction rates. Posts on Facebook with a question mark generate twice as much engagement as other posts.

Include photos or graphics with posts

A tweet with visual gets on average 50% more engagement than others.

Every user matters

It’s not just to keep that one user engaged. It shows all users that THEY would matter too, which is the single strongest driver of engagement.

Negative comments are an opportunity ! there is nothing better to start a conversation and wake up sleepy troops than a good troll. Interact, don’t delete.

Make sub-communities

Being/becoming part of a group is one of the fundamental drivers of our engagements. The more this community is made visible, the more people will engage. Look at the #hometovote campaign in Ireland: one of the target groups of the campaigns to get people to support same-sex marriage in Ireland and vote in the referendum were Irish people from the diaspora. To get them to come back, which represents a very strong form of engagement, campaigners created this very specific community, formalised by a hashtag among other expressions, which gave people this additional sense of belonging that propelled them to act

Get out there

We spend most of our time preaching to the choir, when we should really spend at least 70% of our time reaching out to our target audience of the moveable middle: these people whose views, attitudes and actions can be shifted.

Are we all really investing the spaces that our target group is on, instead of talking to one another? We definitely need to assess where we spend our time, and adjust when needed.

The Science of Posting on Social Media

By Shea Bennett Social Times

Full Article

 

The Science of Posting on Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]

Did you know that studies have shown that the optimum number of tweets to send per day is three, and that for maximum engagement you should aim to post between 9am and 3pm Monday through Thursday?

And the worst time to tweet? Every day after 8pm.

When you think about it, it kind of makes sense. Twitter users are just regular people, and people are far more likely to be active online earlier in the day (i.e., goofing around at work) and particularly lunchtime (1pm to 3pm is a great time to tweet) than they are late at night.

On Facebook, aim for two posts per day between 1pm and 4pm, while Instagram content generates maximum ROI between 2pm and 5pm.

Check out the visual below for more insights on a number of social media platforms, including Pinterest, Tumblr and LinkedIn, and comes courtesy of Setupablogtoday.com.

The Science of Posting on Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]