Seem to be getting more and more frequent, with more links to forum threads and more content. Is it just me or is it getting a bit too much? Anyone else tempted to unfollow or is it just me?

Completely and utterly over the top imo.
Un follow is imminent I feel.
Like to support STW but I can barely see anything else.

Aye, too much. I check out the website most days, so will likely unfollow. I guess they’re just trying to generate new traffic.

I made a comment to that effect on the FB page and basically got told to fekkoff by who ever runs it…..which was nice.

Unfollowed ages ago. But to be honest that’s partly because I’m on here enough that by the time it reaches my FB feed it’s old news. 😳

I’m getting annoyed by those too. Perhaps they’ll listen to this post… Or post it on Facebook.

They didn’t even bother to read a thread of mine before stating my opinion (wrongly)…

Not on Facebook so what’s happening? They post links to threads, or the whole thread’s content?

I agree – the links to forum articles are unnecessary noise. Will probably unfollow soon if they continue.
Other content is great.

eh? I’ve got one post on mine, perhaps you need more friends?

Perfectly fine with me, supportive of greater social media profile and have watched a few facebook live events too. More traffic to the forum / website is only good for the magazine

We have posted on FB on the hour through the day for well over two years now. It’s exceptionally good for traffic generation to the site and also for revenue earned directly from FB via Instant Articles. It’s the FB algorithm that dictates what you se in your feed. That is based on what your interests are. FB clearly thinks you should see lots of our content in your feed. However, if you click the link at the top right of any FB post you get the option to block or see less of ‘this type of post’.

The links to forum posts is a recent strategy. Our FB audience is very much different to the regular crowd on here and we highlight threads we think deserve a wider viewing and push them on FB.

Mark – could we have some sort of opt out from STW adverts on Twitter promoting the same few products over and over again? It’s a bit ironic for Premium members to be able to opt out of adverts on the forum but still be spammed with them on other social media 🙂

could we have some sort of opt out from STW adverts on Twitter

Unfollow?

I guess most of the STW posts are during the day so I don’t see them but it’s just background noise really.

I get the odd one pop-up but it’s not really intrusive….in amongst all the other guff that I scroll past.

As above, most of the time I’ve already seen it so don’t tend to click through, but I can see how they might grab your interest if you are not a regular forum visitor…

scotroutes – Member
Mark – could we have some sort of opt out from STW adverts on Twitter

Agree with this – it’s quite annoying.

More traffic to the forum / website is only good for the magazine

There is a magazine !?!!?

But yeah, dont know why I would follow STW on any social platform. I come here to pick my own interesting threads to read, and STW are always last and less detailed with new-product news behind Road.cc, Bikerumour, Pinkbike etc. Yet to notice a big difference of premier content.

Was going to say I hadn’t noticed any FB posts, but then in hindsight, I think I unfollowed practically everything on FB that is not a person I know personally.
Twitter is a different issue. STW is not so bad from my casual observation. The problem there was more having STW, road.cc, bikeradar, bikerumour and a load of others, so you get “spammed” every story several times. And of those, most post every story/link at least 3 times. And of those that do, when I complained at them for doing so, one categorically stated that they never repost the same story (which is BS) and said it must be my twitter client (erm the official twitter webpage!), and the other stated they do because different people see it at different times of the day (glad they admitted it). One was road.cc, the other was future publishing, but I forget which way around it was.

STW is one of the few that survived the consolidation purge across my array of social media.

Of all the shit that appears on Facebook, you find the STW ones are the ones worth complaining about?? Lordy.

I’m guessing they are only linking to the threads on the Forum to generate ad revenue from all the ads that are on the page as the average facebook post will be shared across a larger platform than just those who follow them and it will generate click through revenue.

I follow them on FB and can’t say they are that intrusive amongst all the other chatter.

Do you guys realise if you click that little down arrow on the top right of the posts you can click
“Hide Post – see fewer posts like this”. 🙄

That doesn’t work on all things that FB decide to show you.
Certainly doesn’t work on the latest ad-block proof ads* that masquerade as a post. Well the option is there, but it will immediately forget.
And for normal posts it basically hides everything, so like unfollow but still following them.

*that can now be blocked again 😉

I feel like stw is loosing its edge tbh. the FB posts make it feel less of a premium product and more of a desperate attempt.

Let me shed some insight on how we (and every other publisher that wants to survive) exploits social media.

Facebook – Has it’s own algorithm that decides what you see. If you like our page or engage with our posts then FB deems you a receptive audience and will present you with more posts from us. We have over half a million page likes on FB and our monthly timeline reach is currently over 4 million. You don’t have to like our page to see our posts. If you are interested in the topics we cover then FB itself will put our posts in your feed as it deems you may well like it (Suggested posts). A typical post will reach 30k timelines. What this means is that it’s extremely unlikely that you will see all our FB posts. The ultimate control over what you see on FB is down to FB and how you set up your profile and use it. If you see too much of one type of post then the fact you likely won’t engage (like, share comment) will indicate to the FB system that you aren’t interested in it and over time you will see less from that source.

Twitter: This is like a river. There’s tweets constantly being posted but each user only steps in to look at the posts occasionally through the day (some much more than others). With each visit the typical user will only view a limited number of the available posts (Typically – ie you may be an outlier that examines every single post between twitter visits). This means that the chances of you seeing a particular tweet at a particular time are limited. So, publishers like us will post the same link to a story several times a day.

Back to that river/stream analogue. It’s a bit like someone throwing footballs in the river up stream. You, further down stream, will pop over to the river bank several times a day but you won’t see every football float by.

We have 48k twitter followers. the average tweet is viewed 4000 times. That means statistically we should repost that same tweet 12 times a day to maximise the chances of every follower seeing it.

We don’t do that of course, but 2/3 times a day for a story link is typical. The chances of you seeing that same link twice are small, but with big audiences and a great range of usage profiles among users some of you will. But you are a small fraction of the overall audience.

We use these two SM channels to promote our content (including occasional forum posts) as that’s how we make money. There’s advertising around the content.

We also make money from posting stories to FB as Instant Articles, which also have ads in them. An Instant Article is one where the entire article is displayed on Facebook itself. Facebook is the distribution platform. You get to read that article within the FB app without having to leave the app and come over to our website to read the article. Instant Articles are only available on mobile to users of the FB app, but that’s 80% of all FB users currently and as I said earlier we are currently reaching 4 million timelines every month on FB.

Interesting stat: 80% of FB users who click on an external link give up before the destination website has rendered in their mobile browser. That’s an 80% dropout rate for every external link click for every publisher. So by clicking in the first place the user has indicated they want to read the content but the average delay of 8 seconds between click and the content loading is enough of a delay to make 80% of those users give up and click back to continue browsing their timeline for something else to read. and that incredible stat is why FB came up with Instant Articles, which load, well, instantly. Instead of a 20% hit rate they provide publishers with a 100% hit rate.

This website currently reaches about 1.5 million people every month. You can see from that the power that Facebook has over Publishers as a distribution platform. Websites are fast becoming central distribution hubs for publishers content and not the principal place where the publishers content is read or watched. One Facebook live broadcast can reach more individuals than a week of content on our website. Our Facebook live broadcasts from Mountain Mayhem reached a totals of 1.2 million Facebook timelines and were watched by over 150,000 people.

In short – publishers not using social media channels to promote and distribute their content will rapidly see their traffic and reach dry up.

If anyone is interested, then watch the story reads of one of our front page stories after it’s published. You should be able to spot the time when that story is promoted on FB – that will be when the reads suddenly leap from a few hundred to thousands in the space of a few hours.

Our new Social/Content Marketing manager is due to start in a week or so. That job is entirely about adapting, managing, growing all our SM channels in order to distribute our content to as wide an audience as possible.

*unfollows*

Thanks Mark. It was more the frequently repeating Twitter ads to which I was referring (sunglasses, saddlebags being examples). I have no issues about promoting magazine or forum content.

Good read, thanks Mark.

Does ‘Search Forum…’ work better on Facebook? 🙂

Those tweets are retweets of our premier dealer network posts. In exchange for being a Premier dealer/partner and offering our subscribers an exclusive offer/deal we help promote their business. There’s a range of things we offer there from listing in our apps, mag and site to displaying their ad in the right hand column. But we also provide a social media service. We will share a post on FB from a premier dealer/partner once a week at their request. On twitter we will retweet a post from premier dealers a maximum of once a day. They have to use the hashtag #stpremier in their post. We pick that up, check they are a current dealer, and retweet.

Our premier dealers are an important part of our distribution network and our job is to give them access to you, the potential customers, as much as it is to produce stuff that you guys want to read. It’s a constant balancing act to make sure that both sides of that equation are happy. As our dealer network grows and demand for access to our SM channels increases then the current 1 tweet/day 1/share/week ratio will get reviewed.

Interesting stat: 80% of FB users who click on an external link give up before the destination website has rendered in their mobile browser. That’s an 80% dropout rate for every external link click for every publisher. So by clicking in the first place the user has indicated they want to read the content but the average delay of 8 seconds between click and the content loading is enough of a delay to make 80% of those users give up and click back to continue browsing their timeline for something else to read.

I’m not sure about this reasoning – In my experience, the 80% dropout rate is much more to do with not intending to open the link in the first place.

Probably most of the times I open a link I was actually trying to either open the comments, or just scroll past. So obviously I close it down before it renders. The joys of fat fingers and small touchscreens!

I can understand you might think that is the case but FB are pretty confident of the reasons for the dropout being down to the delay and not rogue misclicks. The data backs this up too as one metric that is tracked is how long does a user spend in the content once it loads and if fat thumbs were a significant issue here we’d see a significant spike in bounce rates from Instant Articles, which we don’t.

In fact FB uses that bounce speed metric to gauge if a post is click bait or not. The reasoning is that click bait stories result in a very fast exit from the story once it has loaded. FB have also just introduced further anti-click bait measures by tracking key phrases in headline associated with clickbait stories. Any posts that get caught by the new FB clickbait filters will result in that publisher having their reach reduced.

bounce speed metric

What a time to be alive in the world of publishing!

If you are a data geek, like me, then it’s an amazing time to be in publishing 🙂

The other thing with Instant Articles of course is, you’re staying on Facebook rather than being led to another site. I can see why that would be an attractive proposition for FB.

Definitely true about the 8 seconds thing, although I’m probably gone well before then. No comment on some of the reasons why.
Not sure about bounceback stats – is that an FB app thing, or website? Separate tab, so that’ll be nuked rather than a return. Although I can imagine there are features in a destination site that FB can monitor. But then I’m one of those infinitessimal minority that will often not click a SM link, but will actually cut+paste the native destination URL and edit any referring info from it, and not be using a redirect URL.
Don’t have the app, and definitely don’t have the messenger nonsense. That may also explain why I’m not seeing some of those things mentioned by others in the thread.

So basically it’s our own fault in the first place?

For using FB 😉

what’s facebook?

what’s facebook?

The replacement for the Internet.

what’s facebook?

A series of life-eating tubes.