K atie c ouric

Why My System Focuses on Facebook
Recently Facebook has been in the news related to concerns about how they
use people’s data. I want to address this topic and explain why I still choose
to use Facebook and believe that it’s a valuable platform. As Alexandra
Samuel points out in her report on Cambridge Analytica in 
The Verge
, the
internet has been designed to capitalize on the free sharing of user data.
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This won’t change until businesses, consumers, and regulators decide to
adopt a different model.
There’s also a difference between using data to help people and using it
to exploit them. Creating fake news (with malicious or manipulative intent)
is irresponsible and not advisable to anyone. On the other hand, gathering
data that allows marketers to know their customers’ needs and better
understand them can serve in providing value to potential customers.
In light of what’s happened, there may be a need to change the way
these systems and companies operate, especially in regard to their level of
transparency. It will be interesting to see if a new agreement or model is
created as a result. In the meantime, I advise you to engage with the data
you use on Facebook responsibly and ethically, as I do in my practice.
As I mentioned, after working with celebrities like Taylor Swift, I learned
that the number one key to success in scaling massive audiences is getting
people to share your message for you. The more people share your content,
the faster and more cost effectively you can scale your audience. I chose to
build one million followers on Facebook because it’s the most democratic
and share-friendly platform, not to mention the easiest and quickest on
which to scale and grow an audience (more on this below). In fact,
Facebook is used to share content more than email or any other online
social platform.
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 From my experience, experiments, and conversations with
the greatest marketing and social media minds in the world, I’ve learned
that if you have a great piece of content, people will rapidly share it on
Facebook, maximizing the potential earned lift of your content.
Facebook lends itself more readily to scaling than other platforms
because it was built around the concept of sharing. On other platforms,
virality is much more based on SEO (search engine optimization) rankings
and algorithms. Yes, there are algorithms at play on Facebook—I’ll discuss
these more in the next section—but if people share your content, you can
overcome the algorithms much more easily than on platforms like YouTube,
Snapchat, and Instagram. For example, filmmaker, speaker, and activist
Prince Ea shares videos that get thirty million views on Facebook within the

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first week, which would be nearly impossible to achieve at this velocity on
other platforms.
Another reason I recommend working with Facebook is that it’s the
largest platform. It gives you access to a community of more than two
billion people (and rising).
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Facebook’s advertising platform (which also
powers Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger) is an incredibly
strong market research tool. You can use it to effectively test all kinds of
content and see how they resonate with people from different backgrounds
and in different parts of the world. When analyzed correctly, this
information gives you a lot of power to enhance your brand and understand
your marketability.