Keeping a Facebook page would be less work if Facebook were less tolerant of scammers tagging my Facebook page with other Facebook pages impersonating Facebook

Posted on September 24, 2021 by robpegoraro

Living a public work life on social media can be tiresome under many conditions, but my occupational outpost on Facebook–facebook.com/robpegoraro–has been feeling especially tedious lately.

And I can’t even blame random Facebook commenters for that! Instead, it’s the random Facebook scammers that have been nibbling away at my social-media attention span by staking out fake Facebook pages that impersonate Facebook itself, and which then tag my page with grammatically-iffy posts threatening to have my page suspended (for example, “someone has reported you with non-compliance with the terms of service”) if I don’t click/tap to verify my page ownership at a site that is obviously not at Facebook.

(Pro tip: Facebook is an American company and, AFAIK, does not have any substantial presence in Vanuatu that would require it to point users to a .vu domain name for terms-of-service compliance.)

I resent being treated like an idiot and I resent having my time wasted, but I also resent seeing a gigantic social network with country-sized resources fail so badly at stopping its own tenants from impersonating it. Every single time, the scam page has a big blue “f” icon matching Facebook’s and calls itself something like “Pages Identity Policy Issue,” which combined should seem like easy bait for a company with Facebook’s machine-learning capacity to quash or at least quarantine.

Instead, I get to play Whac-a-Mole with these idiotic impostors, and Facebook doesn’t even make that efficient.

Here’s the workflow on my iPad if I want to report the tagging post itself: Tap the ellipsis menu at the top right, select “Find support or report post,” select “False information” from the menu (“impersonation” isn’t an option), select “Social Issue,” (other choices being “Health,” “Politics,” “Something Else”), confirm that the post goes against community standards, then tap “Submit.” That last step doesn’t remove the tag, which takes another tap or two to zap.

If, however, I tap the fake page itself (which, in the most recent incident, had been set up for a construction firm in 2013 and then renamed this week, presumably after a hack), I tap the ellipsis menu at the top right, select “Find Support or Report Page,” select “Scams and Fake Pages,” then choose “Misleading Page Name Change” (had I not seen that switcheroo, I would have picked “Pretending to be Another Business” or “Fake Page”). Then it took another tap to block the page’s tag from my own page.

My gripe here isn’t so much with the number of clicks Facebook required but with the gap between its apathetic enforcement against con artists ripping off its own identity and its aggressive and punitive reaction against the New York University researchers who invited readers to install a browser extension that would track which ads Facebook served them, so that we might learn a little more about how that advertising gets targeted. What’s the priority at Facebook?

It’s yet another reason–on top of of the recurring nags to spend money on Facebook ads–to make me wonder why I keep up that Facebook marketing output when it’s so much more work than my other social-media presences. And yet if I want to see how the advertising machinery works, I feel like I have to stick around, scammers and all.

Should I be on Patreon?

Posted on December 1, 2018 by robpegoraro

I’m not a millennial and I don’t have any tattoos or piercings, so I would appear to be wildly ineligible for Patreon.

Yet I’m still curious about using that crowdfunding site to give people a chance to underwrite my work if they feel so inspired. I can’t tell if that is me being entrepreneurial or vain, so I’m writing this post to try to untangle my thoughts.

I first encountered Patreon when founder Jack Conte gave an exuberant presentation on the site’s backstory at 2013’s XOXO conference. (His talk rambles a bit–which is fine if you enjoy dancing robots–but overall merits 24 minutes of your time.) I decided that letting fans pledge as little as a dollar or two a month to indie creatives was a smart response to declining ad rates and the overall horribleness of the content industry. And then I thought little more about that concept until I started seeing more people and sites I know pop up on Patreon.

You can sum up the Patreon proposition as “Kickstarter over time.” Instead of asking for support for a particular project, creators invite fans to kick in a defined sum each month to support their ongoing efforts–and can also offer extra rewards for contributions above a certain level.

For example, my friend Glenn Fleishman‘s typographic-centric pitch includes exclusive or early access to his articles, science-minded podcaster Rose Eveleth offers a patrons-only newsletter, and the Arlington news site ARLNow.com touts a private Facebook group for more-generous contributors.

After conversations with a few Patreon fans at XOXO this September, I e-mailed Glenn to ask how that was working for him.

His two bits of advice: Find something you can provide to Patreon contributors that they couldn’t get elsewhere, and show what their support lets you do that you couldn’t accomplish otherwise.

I think I have a good answer for that first item: my time. As most people who have e-mailed me can attest, getting my attention when I’m constantly changing channels between stories and clients is… problematic. If I could offer something like a private Slack group or some other closed forum, I’d like to think that would appeal to people who miss the Web chats I did at the Post. (I miss them too.)

The second thing, though, is harder to answer. I think I do a decent job of selling enough stories from each out-of-town event to cover my travel costs… although conferences like the Online News Association’s annual gathering routinely defy my attempts to monetize them. Would that be enough of a what-you-helped-me-do story?

My other concerns: I wouldn’t have enough time to tend a Patreon page (note that I’m typing this near 10 p.m. on a Saturday); nobody would support it; worst of all, nobody would support it, and outsiders would then point and laugh.

At the same time, I like the idea of generating another stream of income, even if it only underwrites one trip a year. Getting acquainted with the inside of a crowdfunding platform seems like an overdue to-do item for me. And the last few months have made me increasingly uneasy about relying on my Facebook page for occupational banter with readers.

Having spent this much time musing about crowdfunding, I might as well crowdsource part of this decision. Please take the poll below, and if you have suggestions for what you’d want me to do at Patreon or another crowdfunding platform, please share them in the comments.

I tried targeting you all with a Facebook ad. It didn’t work well.

Posted on May 5, 2017 by robpegoraro

Last Sunday, I finally saw something new on Facebook: an invitation to run an ad campaign on the social network and pay for the whole thing with a $30 coupon. Since other people’s money is one of my preferred payment methods–and since I’d been meaning to see what the Facebook ad mechanism looks like from the inside–I accepted the offer.

I couldn’t choose a post to promote, as the coupon was limited to the post I wrote here about money-losing prompts at ATMs and credit-card readers overseas that had become unexpectedly popular when shared automatically to my public page. But I could pick who would see the ad, as identified in a few different ways. In case you’ve wondered just what Facebook advertisers can know about you, here are the options I saw:

• Target people who like your page, people who like your page as well as those people’s friends, or people you choose through targeting. I picked the last, in the interest of science.

• Reach people at a region or at an address. The default was the District. I could have picked an address, but since I’m not promoting a business at a fixed location I didn’t see the point. But with this post’s travel-centric focus, I should have picked Dulles Airport–right?

• Choose interests (as expressed by people on Facebook in things like Likes). For this post, I selected “Air travel,” “Europe,” “credit cards,” and “personal finance.”

• Pick an age range and a gender.

• Pick a duration and a total budget for the ad campaign.

I could have gone deeper into some of these options, but since I was navigating this dialog on my phone during our daughter’s dance class, I didn’t have unlimited time. I submitted the ad, got an e-mail saying it was under review for compliance with Facebook’s ad standards, and got a second e-mail 16 minutes later saying the ad passed.

Three days later, Facebook sent me a summary. Their $30 had brought the Facebook share of my post here to another 2,516 people, of which 56 had clicked on the link and one had left a comment on my page.

This report also informed me that the ad’s audience was 95% male, which is both confusing and unsettling. Maybe I should have targeted only women, considering that my page’s audience already skews so heavily male? Age-wise, the ad found its biggest audience among the 25-34 demographic. I’m not clear about that either.

What I do know is that my WordAds ad revenue here doesn’t support spending $30 to reel in 56 views, so I doubt I’ll be running this experiment with my own money anytime soon.

What posting a Facebook Offer taught me about Facebook’s privacy rules

Posted on July 30, 2015 by robpegoraro

Some months ago, a PR person for Gogo handed me a few freebies I probably couldn’t use: three free passes for that company’s inflight WiFi service. (Ethics aside, almost all of my transcon flights are on planes that don’t employ its connectivity, while on shorter flights Gogo’s unintentional free access to Google apps suffices.) Many weeks later, I finally remembered that I could try giving the passes to readers with the Offers function on my Facebook page.

It seemed simple enough: You create a special post on your page with the image and brief description of your choice, you set an expiration date and limit how many people can claim the deal, and you watch the audience love roll in.

But I didn’t realize, by virtue of not reading the documentation before, that readers would have to take an extra step to collect this freebie. The lucky winners got an e-mail with this instruction: “To use the offer, visit Rob Pegoraro and show this email.”

As the page owner, meanwhile, I only got a notification that the offer had been claimed–without a hint of who had won it. As Facebook’s help explains: “To protect the privacy of the individuals who claimed your offer, you will not be able to see any of their personal information.” They’d have to get back to me somehow.

I wasn’t planning on any face-to-face interaction, but I didn’t get much of the digital sort either. One longtime reader left a comment saying he’d redeemed the offer–I took him at his word and e-mailed one of the three Gogo alphanumeric codes–and nobody else responded, even after I posted comments imploring them to e-mail me.

That’s bad in the sense that I have some readers wondering why they never received the free inflight WiFi they sought. But it’s good in the sense that Facebook seems to have defaulted to privacy at the expense of marketing convenience.

That, in turn, matches up with such Page limits as my not being able to send messages to fans unless they’ve sent me one first. So if you were holding off on Liking my page because you didn’t want your name in lights–go ahead, since even I probably won’t know unless I spend a lot of time scrolling through Graph Search results for “people who like Rob Pegoraro.”

(Whoever can see your profile will, however, see your new Like. If they already mock you for your taste in tech news, you might want to hold off on the appreciation.)

In the meantime, I have two Gogo passes left. Let’s do this instead: E-mail me about how you’ll make great use of them, and the first two people to send a persuasive story will have the codes in their inboxes soon after.

Hello, Twitter followers; hello, Facebook fans

Posted on August 29, 2014 by robpegoraro

On Wednesday, Twitter made itself less opaque and a little more understandable when it invited all its users to log into its analytics dashboard and get a detailed breakdown of who had been following them and reading their tweets.

I’ve had access to that feature for a while–I don’t know why, since my unverified account and unwillingness to buy Twitter ads left me outside of the two groups who were supposed to have access to it–but seeing this in the news got me to take a fresh look at my stats.

(To inspect yours, visit analytics.twitter.com when you’re logged in.)

It also led me to compare this data to the information Facebook provides about users who like my public page there. (People who only have personal profiles get no such report, one of the things I don’t like about Facebook.) Here’s what Twitter’s analytics and Facebook’s Page Insights tell me about my audiences at each social network.

Both are overwhelmingly male. Of my 14,088 Twitter followers, 74 percent are male; for the 2,472 people who like my Facebook page, that figure is 70 percent (while Facebook as a whole is 54 percent male). I don’t know why that is, and I’m not happy about it either. (9/1/14, 12:51 p.m.: If you were wondering how Twitter could determine its users’ gender when it doesn’t ask for that data point, see my friend Glenn Fleishman’s explainer at Boing Boing.)

Facebook seems more globally distributed. The top five cities for Twitter followers are all in the U.S. (Washington, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Philadelphia), while at Facebook Cairo is in second place after D.C. India is the most popular country after the U.S. on both networks, but citizens of the world’s largest democracy constitute a larger share, about 4.5 percent, of my Facebook audience. Among those U.S. readers, Twitter says California is the most popular state for them while Facebook doesn’t show me state-level data.

Twitter followers are not quite as easy to attract than Facebook fans. From Aug. 3, 2012 to the present, my Facebook page went from 1,798 likes to 2,473, a 37.5 percent increase. From Aug. 1, 2012 to today, my Twitter follower count went from 10,376 to 14,088, a 35.8 percent increase. I didn’t expect that; on Twitter, your poor taste in technology columnists doesn’t get broadcast to your friends the way it does on Facebook.

Tweets can go unread just as easily as Facebook posts, maybe even more so. Over the last week, my most-read tweet was an item about Comcast reviving the hyperlocal news site EveryBlock that netted 4,514 impressions, or less than half of my follower count. At Facebook, my share of a Facebook blog post about clickbait headlines topped the list by reaching 1,783 users, almost three fourths of my page’s fan base.

Neither gives me an ethnic or racial breakdown. So I can only hope that those figures aren’t as unbalanced as the gender split of my social-media audience.

Twitter says you’re here for tech news. Twitter’s analytics include a list of the top 10 interests of your followers; “Technology” and “Tech news” top that list, each with a 79 percent share of my audience. (“Comedy [Movies and television]” appeals to 30 percent of my followers, so maybe I should quote from “Dr. Strangelove” more often.) Facebook doesn’t provide me with this category of insight.

Facebook says you’re probably older than 24. The 18-24 demographic is the largest slice of the Facebook population, but not on my page: men in that age bracket make up 17.9 percent of all of Facebook, but 10.2 percent of my page’s likes. For 18-24 women, the numbers are 14.4 percent and 2.27 percent. Instead, I’m doing best among women and men from 25 to 44. Twitter can’t display this kind of detail, since it doesn’t ask for birthdays.

Not all of this data may be true. Unsaid on either site’s analytics pages: Many users of each choose to provide incorrect data for reasons of privacy or creativity. And even if most of this self-reported information is correct, some of the sample sizes of subsets of my audiences are too small for my conclusions to stand up.