Who put the algorithms in charge?
While there is a lot we don’t know about the 2016 United States election, we do know one thing — Russia used Facebook’s ad platform, and incredible algorithmic powers, to distribute misinformation.
It’s the algorithmic power piece that I’d like to focus on here.
Pay-per-click advertising has traditionally been a direct marketing channel, meaning ROI was easily measurable:
- How many people clicked?
- How much money did they spend?
- What is your return on investment of the average click?
But Facebook has changed this model in a way that’s subtle and powerful — by combining PPC with recommendation algorithms, it has upended the value chain of digital advertising, disproportionately rewarding content creators who earn the “like”.
And what gets the “like”? Highly emotional content. This means that if you want to promote a product, Facebook will get pricey as your product is unlikely to trigger an emotional reaction. Product ads won’t tip Facebook’s organic recommendation algorithm and you’ll pay for every single click. BUT, when you promote emotional content, it’s a different game. You pay for a good chunk of clicks, but as people like and comment, Facebook will begin to reward your engaging content by sending you free attention.
I’ll show you exactly how this played out in real life for HubSpot’s social team.
The algorithm gives and the algorithm takes away: a HubSpot case study
Over the past decade HubSpot executed (and kind of invented) the classic B2B social strategy — create great content that educates prospects about our product, gate that content, use channels like SEO and social media to drive traffic back to that content where you can turn them into leads.
Sometime during 2015, consumer behavior started to shift — people stopped clicking on links in social media. Buffer was one of the first companies to talk openly about this, but today, it’s a known reality for every social media marketer.
If you want to get high engagement on social platforms today, you have to create content for that platform because very few people are clicking off the site.
At the start of 2016 our team began to create more video content for Facebook — a format that consumers love delivered on a video-friendly platform. But we stayed close to the classic HubSpot formula of education. We were no longer asking people to click out of Facebook, but our strategy was still aimed at being educational. Snapshot of the results below but the tl;dr is: paid was an amazing tool to get clicks.
But as you can see, our PPC budget was doing very little to influence organic traffic. People were watching the videos, but it wasn’t emotionally engaging enough to earn viewers’ recommendations in the kind of big way that tipped Facebook’s recommendation algorithm.
Earlier this year we started testing some new things. You can read a little more about this strategy shift here, and its worth reading in its entirety, but the summary is: We started creating content that was less education, more entertainment, more feeling, more fun.
Our social team created content like What if Rick Grimes was your boss? and Kim Kardashian Knows How To Sell. A bit of business, a lot of emotion (seriously, that Kardashian video has over 700k views and almost 300 comments…people have feelings about the Kardashians). With this shift in strategy, the numbers started marching up and to the right.
Hubspot’s social team is still paying to promote videos on Facebook, but paid budget is now resulting in 3x the number of organic views.
What this means for content creators
Yes, publishers have always struggled with balancing what readers should know vs. what readers want to read about, but this time, the stakes are higher. Because algorithms, more than any human editor ever, cares about one thing only — owning your attention — and it has the massive data sets needed to achieve that goal.
Should a B2B software company be creating videos about The Walking Dead? It’s a fair question and one that HubSpot’s social team is deep in the process of teasing out, but this article isn’t meant to be a critique or recommendation of that strategy. The reason I share the above data is to make it clear that playing to the algorithmic gods has enormous rewards, and any other strategy is pay-to-play.
Facebook has put the algorithm in charge and told it to care about one thing: keep users on the platform. If you create content that helps Facebook achieve this goal, the algorithm rewards you with organic attention. This makes it lucrative for content creators to create click-bait, and prohibitively expensive to create content that doesn’t appeal to our lazy-brain.
And we know what our lazy brain wants — feelings. Our lazy brain latches on to things that make us laugh, cry, feel anger, or shout “I knew it!!!” And that is exactly what Russia used to such powerful effect. But this is also bigger than Russia, because now that it has been done, everyone knows it can be done.
The formula is quite simple: create emotionally charged content, invest a bit of money into promoting that content on Facebook, watch the algorithm spread it regardless of value — or even more frighteningly, truth.
What this means for readers
HubSpot Research ran a quick survey recently to get a consumer hot-take on this topic. The answer is clear — consumers aren’t that thrilled with Facebook’s response to Russia using its platform to spread misinformation.
Now whether this negative sentiment actually affects Facebook is a whole other story. 25% of people say they plan to use Facebook less as a result, but as we all know when it comes to habits (and Facebook most certainly is a habit, people spend 50 minutes on the platform every day), it’s one thing to make promises and a whole other to make change.
What surprised me (and should unsettle Zuckerberg as he allegedly preps for his run for president) is that consumers are in resounding agreement that it is the responsibility of platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to vet the ads served on their platforms…whether these platforms think it’s on them or not.
But who would enforce that? And how? And what does this mean for the incredible freedom that tech companies have enjoyed over the past 10–15 years? And should the oversight stop at vetting ads?
And even if these companies could protect us from the ill-intent of foreign powers and nefarious interlopers, what about the less insidious crimes of content? Can we ever expect Facebook to care about saving us from our own inability to not click on “You won’t believe #7!” type headlines?
The algorithms are in charge, but should they be?
Late last year a powerful article by James Bridle, Something is wrong on the internet, made its rounds. Bridle digs deep into the creepy results of algorithmically driven content creation on YouTube and the disproportionate affect it’s having on children who adore the platform.
Bridle concludes with this:
“This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways. It is hard to keep faith with the network when it produces horrors such as these.”
It’s that line “systematic and automated” that stuck in my head. Right now, social platforms are doing exactly what we want them to do — delivering emotional content that gives us a jolt of feeling. The question is, do we want them to do this?
What if we got to choose? Would we continue to allow algorithms to optimize for the most easily distracted, petty, and fickle parts of ourselves? or would we insist that our algorithms be used to cultivate the better parts of all of us?
This decision should not be left to government regulations or the PhD’s working at tech companies, it needs to be answered by each of us. How willing are we to let algorithms control the things we watch, consume, and share?How willing are we to let the algorithms influence what gains our precious attention, what we care about, what we believe? And if we’re unwilling…well..what are we going to do about it?
