Social Media Roundup: February 23, 2016

Can Your Brand Profit from #TBT (Throwback Thursday) Nostalgia?

Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook are awash in old baby pictures, family photos, and all kinds of nostalgic snapshots. Welcome to Throwback Thursday (#TBT). Brand marketers as well as individual consumers can take advantage of #TBT to post excellent, compelling content that has proven to attract attention. Here are the rules, courtesy of Kendall Walters, writing on Hootsuite:

1. share photos on Thursday
2. include the hashtags #TBT or #throwbackthursday (or both)
3. only old pictures should be used--no cheating
4. only one per week, please.

The article has some terrific examples of successful marketing-oriented #TBT posts from brands: for example, Conrad Hilton riding a camel in the late 1950s at the opening of The Nile Hilton. Clicking on the photo takes the viewer to Hilton's Twitter page.

New Social Network Peach Provides a Cautionary Lesson for Marketers

Peach, the new social network from Vine founder Dom Hoffman was the Next Big Thing at this year's CES in early January. Well-established brands including J. Crew and Merriam-Webster quickly embraced it. Within weeks - no, days! - the same tech community that had gushed so effusively at Peach's debut were declaring it dead. Peach, a chat or messaging app described as a cross between Twitter, Snapchat, and popular team communications platform Slack, quickly soared into the top 10 social networking apps in the iOS app store, then almost as quickly plummeted in the rankings. So what's the lesson here for marketers? "I understand the temptation to jump on the hot new thing. But c'mon, my marketing brethren: Let's give these social networks some room to grow first. There's no need to plunge resources into an infant social network before it's even two weeks old," writes Joe Lazauskas on Contently. He also includes a fabulous (and funny) video from Adobe Marketing Cloud about a fictional social network to illustrate his point. Peach is not "dead" yet, still has its supporters, and released an Android version last week.

Taking a Deep, Human Dive into Facebook's News Feed

Google's ranking of web pages and websites through its ever-changing, secret sauce of an algorithm has led to the creation of countless SEO companies (and spending by brands to be on the first search page returned). Today, Facebook's News Feed algorithm has become a very important player in the online world. Facebook's News Feed algorithm, which evaluates several hundred factors to make a guess about whether viewers will like an item (and whether they'll comment on it, share it, hide it, or mark it as spam), has been getting some human help from a panel of several hundred real live "experts" who constantly re-evaluate and tweak the (human-designed) software to more closely mirror what Facebook users actually want to see. Will Oremus, Slate's senior technology writer, visited Facebook's Menlo Park headquarters to get a closer look at how it all works.

Handy Guide to Online Image Sizes for Popular Social Media Sites

Images are a popular and powerful form of social media content. "Images can make a big impact on getting noticed in a customer's social media feed. Research has found that 90% of the information that the brain processes is visual, and the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than anything that's read," writes Joel Carlson on TopRank Marketing. But many smaller businesses doing their own social media marketing may not know the best sizes for the different platforms and struggle with tools for resizing and editing their visual content. Carlson provides a handy, useful guide to the optimum image sizes for most commonly used social media sites. He also lists some tools that can help get your images sized right for your chosen online destinations.

Daniel Lieberman is the founder of Daniel Lieberman Digital ("I speak Geek - You don't need to"). Based in Shelburne Falls, Mass., he helps companies, organizations, and individuals learn to use the Internet to communicate, market, and brand themselves using the most up-to-date tools and techniques. Contact him at 413-489-1818 or daniel@daniellieberman.org.