Should your offline activities affect your Twitter account?

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I’ve seen a lot of posts from conservative friends that suggest that Russia and other adversaries shouldn’t be allowed to have Twitter accounts. After all, if Twitter banned Donald Trump, they should ban others too, right?

Twitter’s response has generally been that accounts are only removed for actions taken by a user on Twitter, not by digging into their background. While some backgrounds would be easy to find offensive and worth banning (Russia, for example), it’s a slippery slope.

I’ve found that a lot of the people who are upset that adversaries are still on Twitter also share memes like this:

You can’t have it both ways

With the first meme, they’re asking Twitter to take down accounts based on actions made offline.

With the second meme, they’re suggesting the exact opposite: that Twitter might dig into all of our accounts and make decisions that affect our offline activities.

Personally, I tend to agree with Twitter’s current approach. If you do something on Twitter that violates their terms of service, you should be kicked off. If you do things offline that people are against, that should not affect the status of your account.

While I’d ideally love to see Russia and people like Zabihullah Mujahid removed from Twitter, I don’t like the ways that it would need to happen.

Social media moderation is already a shockingly difficult thing to control, and adding more nuance seems like a recipe for disaster.

The best people ask the toughest questions

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I’ve talked a good bit over the last few weeks about learning to ask better questions, and I’ve seen two people in particular that consistently do a fantastic job of it.

Todd

I was on a “book club” call with Todd Stanton a few weeks ago, and we were very fortunate to have the author of the book on the call with us. As the author was explaining an idea from the book, Todd said “I agree with your previous point, but not this one. Why do you believe that angle to be true?“.

He wasn’t being rude or pedantic — it was a fantastic question that caused all of us to stop and think and it led to some great conversation.

Evan

The other that comes to mind is Evan Chasteen, who replies to many of my LinkedIn posts (and many other posts too) with questions that cause me to re-think my premise. It’s fantastic.

With many people on LinkedIn, when I view their activity I quickly filter to just “posts”, because their comments are generally just short praises (“Congratulations!” or “Great post!”). Those aren’t bad, as giving praise is a great thing, but as a third-party to the conversation it doesn’t do much for me.

Evan doesn’t comment like that, so I often just search to see what he’s saying on other random posts. In one recent comment he left on a post of mine, he essentially said “I’m not sure I agree with that, and here’s why…“, which led to some great discussion.

Like Todd, I am 100% convinced that Evan does this for the purpose of pushing the conversation forward to help us all learn, and not just to be contrarian.

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By asking questions that are both tough and fair, these guys make every conversation that they’re a part of better for everyone involved.

Collective sharing versus collective building

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The internet is at an interesting place right now, where sharing is becoming easier than ever, but building is becoming more elusive. As people continue to run to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and other platforms, they’re finding it increasingly easy to share content.

That’s a not a bad thing, for sure. While I work to obtain a lot of content directly from the source that created it (using tools such as Feedly), most great content still comes my way because someone shared it with me, either via social media or by contacting me directly.

However, while sharing can be a great thing, the slow fade of true content creation on the internet is troubling. Thomas Friedman said it well in his book “Thank You For Being Late“:

“Social media is great for collective sharing, but not always so great for collective building. Good for collective destruction, but maybe not so good for collective construction.”

Collective building can be amazing, but it’s rare. Wikipedia is likely the best example of that, but so are most news organizations. Anything where people can come together and create is a great place to be, and I hope we find a way to develop more of those in the coming years.

Authenticity > Automation

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A few days ago, I received an email from a company that could “help us out”. Among other things, they promised to show us great ways to do telemarketing, email blasts, and ways to automate our connections and messages on LinkedIn.

If you’ve followed this blog much at all, you know that I detest automated LinkedIn messages, and if you consider your email marketing to be “blasts”, then you’re doing it wrong. It was such an awful email that it almost felt like I was being pranked. It reminded me of the episode of the office where Jim intentionally gave Andy awful advice to try to win over Pam:

Of course, this post isn’t really about poorly targeted messages — it’s about finding ways to actually connect with people instead of just automating our days away.

I’m with my current bank and my current insurance company because I’m a real person to them. I bought a car a few years ago because I was able to talk over email with an actual person instead of a bot. This isn’t difficult.

Some automation can be amazing if done right, but if you can be more authentic you’ll win every time.

Screenshots versus links

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I’m seeing it more and more on social media, particularly on Facebook — someone will share an article, but rather than sharing a link to it they’ll just share a screenshot of the title and the first few sentences of the article.

The problems

This causes a few problems, with the main one being a lack of information. When people only have the title to base their opinion on, then that’s what you get. Some may search to find the full article and read it, but most will just respond to the headline. Rather than reading the article to get more context, people react to the title alone (which often is slanted with some clickbait) and may miss the point.

Of course, even with a link in place people will often react without reading.

Why?

This practice of sharing screenshots rather than links seems odd to me, so I’ve been trying to figure out what’s causing it. I see three potential reasons.

  1. Ease of sharing. People are used to sharing photos on Facebook, so they just do that here. I’m not convinced this is the reason, as the initial sharing would be easier as a link than as a screenshot –> crop –> share.
  2. Facebook algorithms prefer it. There’s no doubt that this is a piece of it, as Facebook’s algorithm much prefers photos than it does external links.
  3. The third potential reason is so people can hide the content of their “link” from Facebook. I find that this “link hiding” generally happens most when people are sharing content that goes against Facebook standards (anti-vaccine, etc), so burying the content in an image can be one way to get around Facebook’s filters. It’s to the point now that if I see a screenshot of an article instead of a link to a full article, I assume it’s because the user knows that what they’ve posted might not get past Facebook’s filters.

I’m inclined to think that item #2 is the main cause. Suppose maybe 90% of all news stories shared on Facebook are indeed links, but Facebook gives a ton more credit to the 10% that are screenshots so we tend to see those more. That said, item #3 could explain a lot of it as well.

I still wonder why the initial sharer would go to the trouble to create a screenshot of an article headline rather than just sharing a link to the article. If you have thoughts, I’d love to hear them.

Making content that lasts

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The odds are high that you’ll create some kind of content today, with the majority of it likely being on social media. Will it last?

Seth Godin recently shared about the “cultural half-life” of ideas, and how our world is moving increasingly toward vaporous ideas that come and go as the social media algorithms move on to the next click of the day.

There’s really two aspects to what Seth is trying to say: systems and content.

Systems

For systems, I’m talking about sharing your ideas on a platform that you control so that they don’t fade away. With my site, I can easily reference back to posts from years ago (like discovering WordPress in 2004), which is much more difficult with social media. Using Facebook as an example, they weren’t even open to the public until 2006, and it’s likely that people will move on to other platforms over the next 17 years.

Content

The other side is content. I linked back to my old WordPress post, but it’s really not of much value today. It’s neat to point to it, but that’s really about it. The key on the content side is to write content that matters and will be valuable in the future, which is another issue altogether and is something I continue to work on for myself.

An Example

This came up for me recently when a friend published a great post about the future of WordPress. Myself and a few others left comments on his blog post to start some discussion, but most of the discussion happened on Twitter. The ease of discussion there is great, but it’s already essentially gone. Finding old threads on Twitter can be tricky, but finding that post on his blog will be easy to do into the future.

If someone looks back on how this particular WordPress issue was resolved, they’ll find his post (and our few comments there), but almost certainly miss the deeper discussion on Twitter. It’s a tough balance, but it serves all of us well to focus our efforts in areas that will last.

Grace or outrage?

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To paraphrase Tim Kreider in an Op-Ed he wrote for the New York Times, “people love to feel right and wronged“. Particularly when it comes to social media, many people either want to be right or else they want to be offended. It’s easy to hate those you disagree with.

For those that are Christians, though, we’re explicitly told not to do that. Matthew 5:43-45 says:

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You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘Hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Of course, “love” is different than “agreement”. You can show love for someone, and still disagree with what they believe. Loving your enemy doesn’t mean becoming obedient to them.

In his book Jesus Outside the Lines, author Scott Sauls sums it up well:

When the grace of Jesus sinks in, we will be among the least offended and least offensive people in the world.

Whether you’re a Christian or not, you have a choice. You can show grace, patience, and love in the face of those you disagree with, or you can choose to feel wronged and outraged. Social media seems to show most people choose the latter, but I encourage you to take a breath and respond in way you won’t later regret.

4.5 Billion Facebooks “likes” every day

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I’ve said before that you are “the media”. Certainly big cable news channels and other outlets make an impact in our lives, but that impact is increasingly overstated.

I tried to do some math to see how this works out, comparing the largest social network (Facebook) against one of the largest cable news shows (Tucker Carlson).

Determining Carlson’s audience is pretty easy — he gets around 4.3M viewers per night, so that’s where we’ll count him. For Facebook, though, how do you find a metric to compare to that?

  • Impressions: A bit too soft. An item flowing through a news feed doesn’t begin to compare.
  • Clicks: A bit too deep. While I’d like to use these as the metric, many users are influenced without bothering to read the article and the influence is what we’re looking for.
  • Likes: This is what we’ll use. It’s perhaps a bit soft, but if someone took the time to “like” a post, then it’s presumably something that has influenced them to some degree.

As you saw in the title, Facebook sees roughly 4.5 Billion “likes” every single day — that’s roughly 1000x more people liking content on Facebook than watch Tucker Carlson, and he’s wildly popular. The numbers are just silly.

The challenge is in comparing his influence to just one of us, as he certainly has far more impact than any one of us or any of our individual friends. Collectively, though, what we share online has far more impact than “the media” does. The other angle to consider are sites like CNN.com, which see roughly 13M visitors per day — a big number, but still just a fraction of a percentage of the impact seen from users on Facebook.

If you’re concerned that “the media” is failing to cover something, it doesn’t matter. Share and contribute to what matters to you, and the impact will be many times larger.

Earn the trust first

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The other day, I got a message on LinkedIn from someone that I barely knew (I had met them at a Meetup some years ago, and hadn’t talked to them in at least three years). The message was something like:

We have a new xxxx service with a “xxxx.” business model. It’s great for xxxx. Please share it.

No.

Now, there are probably 200 people that could send me a similar message and I’d be happy to check it out and support them. Clients, friends, even friendly competitors. If you’ve taken the time to grow trust with me, I’m more than happy to reciprocate.

That’s the idea behind books such as Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook, where you take your time establishing a relationship before you ask for more. A better example might be more along the lines of not proposing on the first date, and even better is the classic adage of people wanting to do business with people that they “know, like, and trust”.

Earning trust takes time, but it’s not magic. Put in the work, and the trust will grow. Again, there are literally hundreds of people that I trust enough to take a message like the one above and help them push it forward. In this case, though, I suspect that same message went out to hundreds of random people and likely did more harm than good.

Fuel versus friction

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When it comes to marketing, there are two main directions you want to work to push — adding more fuel, or reducing friction.

This works in many areas of life, as explained wonderfully in a recent episode of the Hidden Brain podcast, but it’s particularly interesting with marketing.

Fuel

When it comes to marketing, fuel is generally the area people focus on. Work to improve your search rankings, buy Google Ads, promote more via social media — these are all great things to do. Getting users into your marketing funnel is essential, and getting more users is generally a great thing.

Friction

The other side is reducing friction, which generally means improving your conversion rate; the percentage of visitors that end up completing one of your goals (buying a product, filling out a contact form, etc). The more friction you can reduce, the higher your conversion rate will be.

This can be simple things like reducing the number of fields on your forms, or may involve a bit more digging through the use of Analytics and heatmaps to see where users are falling off.

Fuel versus friction

With limited time in your day, though, which angle should you pursue? While both are important, I notice that fuel is often over-emphasized and working on reducing friction may yield better results.

For example, suppose your site receives 1,000 visitors per day and your conversion rate is 1% — that means you’re closing 10 customers per day.

If you were to push hard on your fuel and double your traffic to 2,000 visitors/day, you’d then be closing 20 customers. Not bad.

Instead, though, if you put that effort into smoothing out the process and raised your conversion rate from 1% to 3%, you’d go from 10 customers/day to 30! That kind of jump in conversion rate might be tough to accomplish, but if you’ve been ignoring friction for a while, you might find some easy wins to jumpstart things.

For more on this entire concept, though not really from a marketing angle, I recommend you check out this episode of Hidden Brain.