The social media business model: Personalisation and Engagement Rate
How they are collected and stored
Introduction
The major aim of the huge data-collection effort of social media operators and other providers of technology platforms is to identify individual users, derive personal information about them and infer their interests, needs and demands. Then, online marketers are able to provide these users with tailor-made – personalised – advertisement. When it comes to personalised marketing the Engagement Rate is of particular importance. It measures how the platform users engage with the platform – read, watch, comment, share, like, or post content. The higher the Engagement Rate the thicker is the data trail of the users, the more accurate is the estimation of their interests and the more appropriate the ads delivered. Hence, not only the ads are personalised; in fact the entire content on a social media site or similar platform is personalised. This module is explaining the basic mechanisms behind personalised marketing and is explaining the term Engagement Rate. It also introduces to the question which tricks platform operators apply in order to maximise the users’ Engagement Rate. According to the #IMMUNE Narrative hyper-personalisation of the entire content on major social media sites is one of the root causes why these platforms are supposed to have damaging qualities for democracies.
Exercise 1
Personal data
In order to depict the students’ handling of their own data and to question existing data disclosures, the publication of various data is discussed (actively entered personal data and data from app access authorizations). The teacher will name various data one after the other (the teacher can freely choose how many data points are discussed), and the students will vote on whether they would disclose this data or not, according to their own attitude. The trick of the exercise is that most of the listed data is collected by social media platforms already at the registration stage.
Exercise 2
Data Linking
In order to depict the students’ handling of their own data and to question existing data disclosures, the publication of various data is discussed (actively entered personal data and data from app access authorizations). The teacher will name various data one after the other (the teacher can freely choose how many data points are discussed), and the students will vote on whether they would disclose this data or not, according to their own attitude. The trick of the exercise is that most of the listed data is collected by social media platforms already at the registration stage.
