Misconceptions about Social Media - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep. 40) | Mental Floss

Hi, I'm Elliot, and this is Mental Floss on YouTube

Today, I'm going to talk about some misconceptions about social media. Misconception number one, social media means the same thing as social network

Experts actually distinguish between the two. Social media is what you upload, and a social network is the platform where you upload it

So, a photo or status that you put on Facebook is an example of social media

and Facebook itself is the social network. David Fincher, movie pun not intended

Or is it? Who knows? Speaking of which, misconception number two. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook by stealing people's money and ideas

The film makes this seem like a very plausible story, but it's actually not that simple. The film was based on the semi-fictional accidental billionaires

The author of the less fictional, The Facebook Effect, the inside story of the company that is connecting the world, David Kirkpatrick

pointed out that much of what happened in the movie was exaggerated for dramatic effect, or just never happened

For instance, it's true that Zuckerberg's friend Eduardo Saverin invested $1,000 in Facebook

But what the film doesn't show is that Zuckerberg put a lot of his own money into the project too

And Zuckerberg did meet the Winklevoss brothers and hear their idea for a Harvard exclusive website

But Kirkpatrick notes that this wasn't as original idea as the social network would have you believe

Both Friendster and Myspace were very popular by this time. Plus there were Facebook networks popping up at schools like Stanford Columbia Yale and Baylor at the time Misconception at number three Hashtags on Twitter mean that more people will find the tweet and retweet it So this is true to an extent

In 2012, Twitter announced that tweets with hashtags increase engagement 100% or two times for individuals and 50% or 1.5 times for brands

Tweets containing hashtags are seen more because people who aren't following that account may find the tweet by searching the hashtag

But, this has its limitations. Research has shown that tweets containing one or two hashtags

has 21% higher engagement than tweets with three or more hashtags. And in fact, there's a 17% drop in engagement

when there are over two hashtags in a tweet. Hashtag, hashtag. Misconception number four, Facebook can sell your photos to advertisers

There's a popular rumor that once you upload a photo to Facebook, then Facebook owns it and can sell it to whoever they want

What they can do is put your profile picture on Facebook next to a person or business that you've already publicly become a fan of

According to Facebook, We've run advertisements from our own advertising system for more than a year that let your friends know if you have a direct connection with the product or service in the same way that your friends learn through your newsfeed if you're connected with another friend or an organization's Facebook page

For example, if one of your friends becomes a fan of a page, you may see an ad with your friend's profile photo that indicates the action that friend has taken

But they're not selling your photos to advertisers. Similarly, misconception number five, Instagram owns the rights to your photos

According to Instagram co Kevin Systrom Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos They don own your pictures and like Facebook they not selling them to advertisers So just post away guys It great Misconception number six Foursquare was very popular in its day

Despite often being labeled as the next big thing, Foursquare never made it big. According to a 2011 survey, only 3% of Americans checked in on a mobile device

and a shocking 74% of Americans have never even heard of checking in

And that brings me to misconception number seven. LinkedIn is growing very fast

Well, technically it is. As of 2013, two members were joining LinkedIn every second

It can consistently be found on the list of top five social networks. The problem is 51% of its users aren't active

That's less than Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest. Plus, it's way less than Facebook, which has 82% active users

The other 18% have died. Misconception number eight, short tweets are the most popular

Believe it or not, the length of a tweet actually does affect how much people pay attention to it

Dan Zarella, author of The Social Media Marketing Book, yzed the click-through rate of 200,000 links that were tweeted

He found that people were most likely to click on links when they were found in tweets that

were between 120 and 130 characters. Two other social media researchers, Buddy Media and Tracks Social, found that tweets

with the highest engagement rates were around 100 characters. Misconception at number 9, social media is free advertising for companies

Companies throw more money into their social media than you might expect. You might remember in 2014 a tweet from President Cheese made news as The tweet that took two months It was a simple photo of Camembert Cheese with the caption President Camembert The tweet read Sharing a Camembert with friends How generous

Get the best flavor by serving at room temperature. Hashtag Art of Cheese. The company had hired digital design and advertising firm Huge to work on their social media

In early March, tweets were mapped out. Then they had to be sent to copywriters and graphic designers

Once the image was created, it had to be pitched for a team. Eventually, it was approved, then posted in late April

My point is, companies take this stuff very seriously. It might be free to make a Twitter account, but they spend a lot to make their accounts good

In fact, according to Bloomberg Business, the budget for an effective social media marketing campaign begins at $50,000 for two to three months

Misconception number 10. Due to a bug, old Facebook messages went public. In 2012, there was chaos on the internet when people believed that their private Facebook messages from 2007 to 2009 had suddenly appeared on their public walls

This turned out to be a hoax. Facebook even had to put out a statement claiming, our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts

that had always been visible on the user's profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy

Thank you for watching Misconceptions on Mental Floss on YouTube. If you have a topic for an upcoming Misconceptions episode that you would like to see

please leave it in the comments, and I'll see you next week. Bye