Leveraging user-generated content

A lot of people getting into using social media for business may not understand how the algorithm works and how they can leverage it. A lot of consumers on social media may not entirely understand how the algorithm markets to them, and may want to become more aware about how the services that they use on their phone serve them content. I want this to be a good explanation for anyone who is interested in the topic to learn and understand, because the algorithm we interact with has become extremely important not only in the way we communicate with others but the way we interact with different companies and platforms and make transactions online.

So when someone makes a post, Meta assigns it a personalized score based on a user’s searching habits based on three factors. Who posted it, the type of content that was posted, and interactions with the post. Who posted it relies on if you interact with the poster, whether it be a friend, influencer, a business, an actor, et cetera. The type of content is also the medium of which the content is delivered to you. Is it a video, a photo? A carousel? Depending on which you interact with more as a user, the Facebook algorithm will align it to you. YouTube’s algorithm can tend to act the same. I tend to watch a lot of long-form video content like video essays or podcasts. My YouTube recommended feed tends to wipe short-form content like reels completely off and provide me exclusively with videos that are 45 minutes or more. And finally, the interactions with the post. The more there are, the more the post will be recommended to you, especially if it is engaged with by users you personally are engaged with.

This can be optimized by users in their settings by selecting feed preferences or favorites, or by using the options next to the post like hiding the ad or saying you are not interested in the post. Otherwise, though, the three factors I mentioned earlier are the ways Meta scores their posts.

This works for ads and reels too, for those of you who are interested in going down those routes of content creation. Though ads are a little more fine tuned, considering that the meta ads manager will serve ads to a certain demographic the advertiser selects, as well as the action the advertiser wants them to take, such as clicking on a link or buying a product.

For businesses that want to play nice with the algorithm, you should probably leverage short-form vertical video content as these seem to be the most applicable to the algorithm. They are easily consumed by users, and tend to have more engagement as the user’s attention is held for the entire duration of the video. This is especially effective for brand advertising. You want the video to be short, snappy, and engaging to the consumer. Not only that, but you have the most possible places for these advertisements to appear. They can not only appear in feeds, but also on reels and stories because they are in the right format.

I’m not too interested right now in explaining what works in the algorithm, though, more along the lines about how it works. If any of you are interested in a more in-depth explanation on how to make viral content that leverages the algorithm, I can do that another week.

Another way the algorithm can be utilized to its maximum potential is by leveraging user-generated content. You want a viral marketing campaign? Let’s talk about McDonald’s. The month of June was huge with their grimace campaign, creating a birthday celebration for one of their iconic characters from Ronald McDonald-land and creating their own personal meal, completed with a purple Grimace shake! Wow! I’m really tired of hearing about it, honestly, and I’m sure you are too. But this was an extremely successful marketing campaign for McDonalds and I don’t think they anticipated the response they got.

I was on a trip with my friends in the Smoky Mountains at the beginning of June, and we saw the T-shirts with “happy birthday grimace” on it. The meal hadn’t rolled out yet, but we were laughing about it to each other. Later on, we discovered that they had let Grimace “take over” their social media pages, similarly to an influencer takeover some companies do where they let someone control their social medias for a short period of time, acting as a sort of spokesperson to the brand.

Then the meal rolls out. It seems to be a pretty decent success. But then? TikTok explodes with these videos of people trying the shake, and then having a cutaway gag of them dying or throwing up or seizing or something because of the purple milkshake. This became bigger than the original campaign itself, even causing CMO Mark Shaver to do the challenge himself, embracing the meme that the combo meal had created. Each one of these videos had someone buy the shake, and even with a sort of “negative” or “ironic” connotation to the shake, people still went out to buy it.

This hits all three parts of the algorithm. Number one: who posted it. McDonald’s, a brand you interact with and know, releases a meal. Your friend just made a grimace shake reel on Instagram. Another friend reposted it. Maybe a popular influencer does it, then gets people duoing with the video. You’re damn well going to see someone writhing on the ground covered in a spilled purple milkshake.

The type of content. Short form vertical videos, the easiest to consume and most promoted by the algorithm. None of these videos were longer than fifteen seconds, probably, none that I had seem at least.

And interactions?

Dude.

Talk about a trend. Everyone is liking, sharing, doing the challenge themselves. The user generated content for the grimace meal brought this marketing campaign to the next level for McDonalds. CNN cites the #grimace or #grimaceshake had gotten around 640 million and 750 million views respectively. Can’t find stats on the total likes or engagements, though.

This is what I’m saying, though. Some businesses refuse to move forward into the digital age and use social media to promote their brand. They might still use billboards, or TV, or even radio. But that’s not what is driving sales anymore. McDonalds just closed out Q2 of 2023 with probably astronomical sales with this grimace marketing campaign. You may not reach as high as McDonalds with your campaign, but you can damn well get close nowadays.

Animoto cites 93% of brands receive new customers from social media marketing. Oberlo cites that positive social media interactions drive new customers by 71%. Bain Capital says interacting online with a business causes customers to spend 20-40% more money. Old world advertising doesn’t get these numbers, and that’s what I’ve been telling businesses when I meet with them for a discovery meeting.

And McDonald's didn’t even have their most successful part of their ad campaigns come from spending money. Sure, they had to buy ingredients and pay for labor to create the meals, but the user-generated content of people on social media pretending to die to drink their shake was totally free, and I’m sure they got more business traffic and hella revenue from people advertising for them.

Now this isn’t successful all the time. I sing the praises of McDonald's now, but they had a little slip-up some time ago when they asked the Internet to create them a new burger. I don’t even have to tell you what happened after that, but McDonald's quickly pulled the advertising campaign and nobody got to try any of the troll-created burgers.

So, anyone interested in growing their platform online, optimize this user generated content. At least let your consumer base interact with you. Create polls, make a challenge, get influencers involved. And don’t be afraid to let them be creative and run with it. Nothing is worse than someone who can have no fun, why make your business the same way? People love to see the  more human side of a business they know. It’ll create sympathy, and loyalty.

For users and consumers, however, I would like to discuss something that the algorithm can have an effect on, which is confirmation bias. When we have an algorithm specifically select things that we are more likely to resonate and engage with, it can, in turn, cause us to be served things that are specifically catered to our own bias and opinions. Say, I really hate Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. I think it sucks. I think JJ Abrams totally fumbled the bag with that movie, and Disney completely trashed the entire sequel trilogy without having a plan for their movies. Now what would a site like YouTube or Facebook recommend me, knowing that I do not like the sequel trilogy? I would wager they would show me YouTubers endlessly dunking on the Disney star wars movies, such as RedLetterMedia or MauLer, and less people who are really enjoying Disney Star Wars and promoting it.

This can be for anything. Specific brands you enjoy. Music genres, and recommendations via Spotify or apple music. Political affiliations and the news you consume. A country listener wouldn’t want to listen to French house music, and a Democrat wouldn’t want to hear the rhetoric of a deep south pro-life congressman. And the algorithm supports this notion by serving content to these people that these people will most likely enjoy.

I think that this can cause some serious detriment to people. I know some friends who specifically say that there is a rabbit hole that the algorithm can send you on YouTube where it makes you more and more radicalized towards one side of the political spectrum, and they’ve been through it too. Or how Andrew Tate rose meteorically influencing the algorithm and the manosphere and using user-generated content of people reacting to his clips or posting them altogether, sort of like how McDonald's leveraged the Grimace Shake to their advantage for more revenue.

Not trying to say that the algorithm is evil and out to get us, but I think it is a tool that we should be aware of, whether it be content creators or consumers, that the algorithm is there and we should be mindful of it. Just keep your eyes open.

Okay, cool. Part one done. Let’s revisit some topics that I covered in the last few episodes and see what’s going on there.

Back on generative AI. I told you I’d be back to this last week. I’m sure I’m going to be talking about this forever at this rate.

Couple of things, all from TechCrunch. Google is testing an AI tool to write the news. Now before you get all up in arms that journalists are about to be replaced, let me get you a quote from the article. “Google reportedly believes that the tool can serve as a personal assistant to journalists by automating some tasks in order to free up time for others…” Further down they quote “these tools are not intended to, and cannot, replace the essential role journalists have in reporting, creating, and fact-checking their articles.” They also use the term “responsible technology” to describe the tool codenamed Genesis.

This tool can be used to generate headlines or use different writing styles per different story. Which I think sounds kind of cool. Perhaps a journalist moves to the Onion and needs help writing in a more satirical fashion. Honestly that sounds a little silly but I’m just trying to think of application here. But headlines is a serious plus. I cannot write titles for the life of me.

Also kind of bad-ass is the fact that a startup company called Nous launched an assistant to help with and manage household bills. Users connect their email inboxes and upload their bills and their assistant tells them what to do, and if they can save money. Again, as I mentioned last time, people are wanting to have something that takes away from the menial tasks of life and automates them. And it looks like that’s what Nous is going to do here. They’ve raised ten million dollars so far from venture capital seed funding, and I’m sure their series A is on the way. Not bad for a company based off of Open-AI’s framework.

Speaking of Open-AI they’ve now input prompts for Chat-GPT so you don’t have to type the same thing over and over again. Prompt wizards, guys. I said this last time! Once you’ve got something that works, you’re going to use it over and over and keep those keywords close to your chest.

It sounded more interesting to retread ground on AI but honestly, it’s all going to be the same story if I keep going. Let’s embrace AI to be our helpers, and everything is going to be fine.

Finally, I wanted to touch back in with the topic of our first episode, which was Threads and Twitter. We’ve had some time to step back and look at the aftermath of the launch of Threads, and we can see from some studies that the average usage per user has more than halved, dropping to six minutes of usage over the peak of 21 minutes from two weeks ago. Well that doesn’t sound that great, does it?

And even when I open threads, after a few minutes I head right back down to posts I had seen a day before. It’s not as active as I personally thought it would be, and I think here’s why:

First off, Twitter got another leg up by removing those rate limit changes that caused people to be locked out of their app after like five minutes. Not only that but I think the choice of sharing ad revenue to creators was a huge bonus for people to use their app. I think that really helps out people who use twitter as an avenue for monetization, like artists who take commissions. This can help ease the blow of exclusively working on commission only and they can monetize just their presence online. Or just simply for influencers, too.

I think the issue with threads is two things: they don’t have an adequate explore page with hashtag optimization, or at least keywords to search by, and they haven’t connected with ads manager yet. Like I mentioned before, people need to advertise via keywords, especially people like artists or online models. You lose a majority of these people working for themselves, creating their own following, and they will stay on Twitter.

And having no ads manager means businesses aren’t incentivized to run ads on the platform. They can only really connect with their audience, which is great, but getting them to convert has a ton of extra steps without ads manager. You can’t really link anything, so you’ve got to go to the bio, and even then it can only really be one landing page. There’s so many steps that the click-through rate to get anyone to convert through Threads has to be stupid low.

That doesn’t mean Threads is dead, though. Businesses and influencers continue to use the app in conjunction with Twitter, like I thought they would before. But it can’t level up until these changes are made. I really think Meta needs to nail this before the holiday shopping season, because having businesses advertise through threads as another platform through ads manager could really help drive more sales for businesses.