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Social Media Knight

Fighting our way into the social media realm

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How former teachers are making $100,000 or more, and you can too

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Regan is just one of many educators dubbed “teacherprenuers” who have gained hundreds of thousands of monthly viewers on Pinterest over the years and translated those clicks, views and downloads into cash by funneling their followers to an open marketplace called Teachers Pay Teacherswhere instructors buy, sell, and share original classroom resources.

Leaders of K-12 classrooms were early Pinterest adopters as the platform connected them with other educators, often through collaborative group boards where they could each contribute pins (or posts). Nine-years after the first photo was pinned online, teachers continue to drive some of the platform’s most popular search trends.

Searches for lesson plans on the social networking site are trending up 59% over 2018, according to Pinterest. Those inquiries include searches for Spanish, English, art, library, toddler curriculums and daycare. Lesson plan searches pick up during the late summer months and are at their highest in August as teachers prepare to go back for the school year.

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See Full Story at www.usatoday.com

How Facebook Fought Fake News About Facebook

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These internal efforts, which haven’t been previously reported, also included a program dubbed Night’s Watch, after HBO’s Game of Thrones, that let staff monitor how news coverage of Facebook spread on the social network and apps such as WhatsApp. Messages and content on WhatsApp are encrypted, but Facebook could get a sense of what went viral on that app by looking at how some people mentioned information from WhatsApp when they posted to Facebook.

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See Full Story at www.bloomberg.com

Algorithms Won’t Fix What’s Wrong With YouTube

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YouTube deals in the extraordinary and shuns the ordinary. Whether that’s the everyday life of improbably rich young millionaires like Jake Paul, a high school dropout from Westlake, Ohio, or PewDiePie, a skinny, fast-talking Swede whose real name is Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, YouTube seeks to serve a need.

It does so through “the algorithm” — YouTube’s recommendation engine. It’s a black box that YouTube introduced to keep us watching, but which has become a thorn in its side as the platform grows at an astronomically grand scale.

YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is a set of rules followed by cold, hard computer logic. It was designed by human engineers, but is then programmed into and run automatically by computers, which return recommendations, telling viewers which videos they should watch. Google Brain, an artificial intelligence research team within the company, powers those recommendations, and bases them on user’s prior viewing. The system is highly intelligent, accounting for variations in the way people watch their videos.

By Chris Stokel-Walker

See Full Story at www.nytimes.com

What To Expect When Pinterest Reports Its First-Quarter Earnings

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Pinterest (PINS) will present its first-quarter earnings report Thursday, it’s first since the unicorn startup splashed into the public market last month. The Pinterest earnings report is due to arrive after the market close.

Wall Street expects Pinterest earnings will swing back to a loss after it posted its first profit in the previous quarter.

Analysts see Pinterest reporting an adjusted loss of 11 cents per share, vs. a 10-cent loss in the year-ago period. They expect revenue of $200.6 million, up 53%.

The Pinterest initial public offering on April 17 priced shares at 19. It raised $1.4 billion, with a valuation of $10.6 billion. The Pinterest stock jumped 28% on its first day of trading, hitting a record high of 35.29 on April 30. The Pinterest stock jumped 7.2% to 30.70 during afternoon trading on the stock market today.

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See Full Story at www.investors.com

iTunes Facebook, Instagram pages are wiped clean as end draws near

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One might also think that being a Facebook critic, Apple has decided to withdraw from Facebook and Instagram. But not even Apple can really afford to ignore the weight of social networks. The real reason is, of course, the expected demise of iTunes.

It’s rather odd that Apple would choose to delete all Facebook and Instagram posts and take the time to do that. It could have simply deactivated those accounts but perhaps that would have been too much of a confirmation of its plans. Not that anyone didn’t notice anyway.

It isn’t just social networks either. A few astute netizens have reported that some iTunes links for songs and artists now redirect to music.apple.com. Others have also noted that links to specific classes of digital content will soon redirect to specific links per category, from apps to books to movies.

The iTunes brand may have once made sense when it only contained music and even some videos. Using it for things that have little to do with “tunes” makes as much sense as Google using “Play” for books and magazines (which has also confused some to presume the Google Play Store is all about games). Apple is expected to announce iTunes’ retirement at WWDC this month and in its stead will be separate apps and links to break up what once was a single but messy entity.

By JC Torres

See Full Story www.slashgear.com

Pinterest Influencers Remain an Untapped Resource for Marketers

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Pinterest now boasts more than 290 million monthly users and expects just over $1 billion in revenue this year. Still, the company isn’t profitable, and its first quarterly earnings report as a public company ー revealing losses greater than expected– triggered a 15 percent fall in share prices last week.

Yonchev said Social Chain, which has worked with ASOS, NBC Universal, and Apple Music, doesn’t plan to spend more on media on Pinterest but will be increasing the time it spends on influencers who work on Pinterest’s platform.

In recent years, Pinterest has made efforts to court influencers and the advertisers that want to hire them. Last fall, the company made available an API that helps markets and brands track insights from influencers’ data. Now advertisers can access valuable data including monthly views, impressions, click-throughs, and the number of times an image is saved. Such information could be vital as one of the biggest challenges for advertising on social media is accessing metrics that can confirm the success of a campaign.

By Rebecca Heilweil

See Full Story at cheddar.com

Facebook says it will restore groups infiltrated by saboteurs

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Facebook is “working to restore” a number of groups that were erroneously removed or affected by “sabotage,” according to the company. A spokesperson told The Verge the social network “removed several groups from Facebook after detecting content that violated our policies.” After investigation, it discovered content had been “posted to sabotage legitimate, non-violating groups.” Facebook is working to restore any groups affected and to “prevent this from happening again.”

The situation allegedly began on May 13th. A popular meme account on Facebook is known as Crossovers Nobody Asked For (CNAF), which boasts more than 500,000 members, was suddenly shut down. The group’s administrators tried to corral its users into a new group, “Crossovers Nobody Asked For ‘Season 2,’” but that got shut down just one day later.

Know Your Meme reported that members of CNAF were able to track down a screenshot of a group known as Indonesian Reporting Commission (IReC) celebrating CNAF’s page being taken down, leading to suspicions among those involved that IReC was behind the attacks. Facebook would not confirm if the Indonesian Reporting Commission, which gets groups and pages suspended through posting questionable content and mass reporting it, was behind the false flags.

By Julia Alexander

See full Story at www.theverge.com

Facebook wants your data: 5 ways to keep it safe

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Facebook has all the photos you took at your girls’ weekend at the beach. That’s no surprise because you posted them to your profile page. But Facebook has ways to get even more information about your getaway.

The company isn’t just a social network. It’s an ad network too, and it follows you around on the internet and in real life to find information that’ll help it tailor the ads it serves up to you. Facebook can track the websites you visited as you planned the trip. It can gather customer information shared by partners, which might include the store where you bought your sunscreen. And Facebook has similar information about all the friends who went on the trip, and it knows you were all together because it has your location data.

Put together, that’s more revealing than any swimsuit photo.

Facebook tracks you so much that it sometimes feels like the company is eavesdropping on your conversations. In fact, many people think the social network is listening to them through the mic on their phone. Facebook has denied it does, but that hasn’t put an end to this persistent conspiracy theory. CNET conducted an informal test and didn’t find evidence suggesting Facebook was listening to our conversations.

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See Full Story at www.cnet.com

 

Facebook stops blocking some blockchain ads

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Facebook still won’t let you advertise for ICOs or binaries, and ads for cryptocurrencies and exchanges need prior approval. But a year after banning all blockchain-related ads, it’s reopening to ones for “blockchain technology, industry news, education or events related to cryptocurrency” without the need for pre-approval.

The change could be a boon to an industry struggling for mainstream attention in the wake of the 2018 cryptocurrency price collapse that soured much of the public on the financial technology. Blockchain events were especially hit hard since Facebook’s local and interest targeting capabilities made it ideal for selling tickets to potential attendees.

Facebook’s goal was to prevent users from getting scammed by Initial Coin Offerings and other cryptocurrency deals where providers had little to no accountability. In January 2018 at the height of the crypto craze, it blocked all blockchain related ads. In June 2018 it began allowing some if they received pre-approval.

By Josh Constine

See Full Story at techcrunch.com

3 Reasons Why Pinterest Stock Can Keep Heading Higher

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The 28% gain makes Pinterest one of this young year’s hottest IPOs, but this doesn’t have to be the end. Let’s go over some of the things that can keep the gains coming for Pinterest’s new investors.

1. Growth always thrills investors

Nearly 300 million people worldwide rely on Pinterest for visual ideas and inspiration, and it’s paying off. Revenue soared nearly 60% to hit $755.9 million last year, and the top-line growth accelerated following a 58% clip in 2017.

A lot of dot-com speedsters are paying up for heady growth, but Pinterest’s bottom line is actually improving. Yes, Pinterest is still losing a lot of money. However, we’ve seen its net loss shrink from $182.1 million in 2016 to $130 million in 2017 to less than $63 million last year.

2. Pinterest is just scratching the surface of monetization

The number of Pinners is growing. Pinterest estimates that it had an average of 291 million monthly active users through the first quarter of this year, up 22% over the prior year. It expects to report a 51% to 54% uptick in revenue when it announces first-quarter results in the coming weeks, and that may be decelerating growth but it’s a lot faster than its user base is climbing.

Advertisers are flocking to Pinterest, and the platform is serving up more ads in the process. Average revenue per user — or ARPU — has risen 24% to 26% over the past year, and we’re just getting started. Pinterest expects ARPU for the first three months of this year to clock in between $0.72 and $0.73.

It may not seem like much. Generating less than a penny per day in revenue per user doesn’t sound very exciting, especially on a free money-losing platform. Thankfully, there’s a high ceiling here. Pinterest is a visual hub across a wide range of interests, and some of those categories can be pretty lucrative for marketers and sponsored brands.

By Rick Munarriz

See Full Story at www.fool.com