I wanted to share some thoughts I’ve had over the past 3 years, but have crystallized and lodged themselves in the front of my brain over the past week. We are at the beginning of what may be a highly accelerated platform collapse, particularly for Facebook. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube…

One year after the election of Donald Trump, polarizing and partisan content continues to outperform mainstream media on the world’s largest social network. — Spend any measurable time talking with journalists and you’ll be bombared with critiques of Facebook. Some theories are farcical, such as Facebook purposefully crushing organic page reach of publishers so they are forced to Facebook ads to reach their fans (I honestly doubt Zuckerberg, or anyone else at Facebook, thinks…

As part of my Nieman fellowship at Harvard, I participated in Professor James Waldo’s Technology and Privacy class. For the final project in this class, I’ve examined how much non-public information Facebook will inadvertently leak if actively manipulated to do so. Exploiting Custom Audiences Facebook’s Custom Audience feature is a powerful tool that…

Local TV network affiliates always seem to be killing it on Facebook. They are dripping with video content and inevitably hit it big every week with a story that outrages, shocks or inspires driving a boatload of clicks. I decided to take a closer look at the composition of the…

For the past month the Audience Engagement team at The Boston Globe has been experimenting with sending news alerts via Facebook Messenger. Delivering alerts via Messenger allows us to push messages directly to the lock screen of a notification subscriber. When the user opens the message, they are prompted to…

Facebook’s ad tools are incredibly powerful; they were built to allow brands to pinpoint advertisements to highly precise audiences. For brands, this is great, it allows them to show off their wares to people primed to buy. …

Not long ago, Instagram introduced the ability for verified accounts to include actionable links in their stories. This change has the potential to dramatically change Instagram’s value for publishers. Over the past 8 days, we’ve published a number of stories to both the Boston.com and Globe.com …

Years ago, Facebook launched a surveying tool that helped them identify the anatomy of posts that were essentially advertisements instead of “engaging content”, the tool looks like this… If too many people felt that the post you were making from your brand page was an ad, your organic reach plummeted. This signal from Facebook helped brands improve the quality of their organic Facebook posts, and move advertising-specific content to Facebook’s advertising platform.

As we started to plan the Boston Globe’s social media efforts for election night, we gave ourselves three requirements… Be useful Be interesting Drive traffic to Globe.com We examined the obvious “social” ideas such as a Facebook Live Stream hosted by one of our political reporters, or constantly uploading new…