Mello Jr. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal , the Boston Phoenix , Megapixel.
Net and GovernmentSecurity News. Email John. Stop using so called social media, its not social and its there as a big brother tool. The same as the cloud, another big brother tool. Stop feeding them. Please sign in to post or reply to a comment. New users create a free account. Canonical Launches Ubuntu Google vs. The Challenge and Promise of Quantum Computing. Imagining the Future Smart City.
Will Mistrust Jeopardize the Survival of Facebook? The Metaverse Comes to Life. Computing See all Computing. Internet See all Internet. IT See all IT. Mobile Tech See all Mobile Tech. Security See all Security. Four of these seven platforms are owned by Facebook. However, you can find in-depth data for LinkedIn use around the world here.
Indeed, if reach is your primary objective, you can focus on just one or two of the larger platforms, safe in the knowledge that you have the potential to reach 99 percent of social media users. The chart below offers some great insight into the reasons why people use social media today, but remember that these motivations will differ by country, by age group, and by platform, so be sure to dig into our local market data too.
Once again, data from GWI can help us make sense of which platforms people have the greatest affinity for, with the chart below showing overall social media platform preferences at a global level. As you might expect though, these preferences vary considerably by age and by gender. However, there are important differences in these preferences at a country level, and those local nuances are particularly important for marketers who are hoping to reach the right audience in the right place at just the right time.
Facebook: click here. Instagram: click here. Such data is often public — many users put their content online for all to see. This means that not only other private users but also secret services and law enforcement agencies can directly exploit this data — either by observing individual users online or, collectively, by analyzing large data volumes through text mining. Seemingly private data is also exploited, however — not just by governments and government bodies but equally and, above all, by companies.
Not to forget that so-called social sharing buttons embedded in numerous websites below the articles posted there — allowing me to like or share them instantly — are used by Facebook and other providers to track what websites I visit.
Because unique advertising IDs can identify user movements and assign them to a specific profile. The use of data by companies is, firstly, far more sweeping and, secondly, less easy to regulate and especially to control. Countless companies run user tracking. The major players among them are Facebook and Google, with the latter relatively late to adopt web tracking. But why do all this?
To do this, advertising networks are increasingly employing finely tuned segmentation processes. These are capable, for example, of targeting women aged between 35 and 45, earning a monthly income of between 2, and 3, euros, living in a major city and with no children.
This can even be narrowed down to levels of education and areas of interest. Of greater interest to companies is information on purchase decisions made by consumers. As far back as , the New York Times reported on a practice applied by US supermarket chain Target , which linked customer data from multiple platforms to create profiles and target them more specifically.
The practice involves companies combining both online and offline behavior to generate predictive analytics — how a customer will most likely behave — based on the behavior of other customers displaying a similar profile. Facebook is also said to be acquiring offline purchase data, in addition to data that accrues in the course of using the platform online and mobile , in order to refine their profiles.
In Germany — and the European Union — the collection of personal data is subject to rules and regulations. Exactly how meaningful these rules are in terms of profiling and personalized advertising is a source of contention.
0コメント