My personal Facebook account is technically a “professional” account, and therefore has Meta’s silly weekly contests. I have the content part down, but I’m NOT creating a Meta personal AI bot. (The Bredemarket Instagram account has two.)
Remember last month when I created the Meta AI character N. P. E. Bredemarket? “He” identifies as “wisdom in technology, at your service.” Although I need to train him more, he is fairly good at illuminating technology topics.
N. P. E. Bredemarket.
But he doesn’t make me money.
To make money, I need an influencer to promote Bredemarket.
But not a macro-influencer like a Kardashian or Jenner.
“She” is still in anti-hallucination training; at one point she said that I was the past president of the International Biometric Association (whatever that is). But she’s getting better.
Will she drum up business for Bredemarket? Probably not, since my Instagram influence pales in comparison to my Facebook and LinkedIn influence. But I’m curious to try it.
I even scheduled a Facebook event. Because Meta wants me to turn every Facebook post into an event, I set one up for Monday at 8 am (Pacific Daylight Time).
Nothing special at the event; I’m not even planning to go live. Just a time to check to see if the video is posted, and to spend 32 seconds watching it.
Last Friday I shared my beef with the so-called LinkedIn “experts” and their championing of generic pablum.
“The ideal personal communication is this: ‘I am thrilled and excited to announce my CJIS certification!’”
This drivel is rooted in the idea that LinkedIn is a business network…and anything else is just “Facebook.”
Oddly enough, my Bredemarket consulting blog gets much more traffic from Facebook than it does from LinkedIn.
Despite me emphasizing LinkedIn more than Facebook for Bredemarket social media.
And despite the fact that Bredemarket’s LinkedIn pages have many more followers than Bredemarket’s Facebook page and groups.
It appears that Facebook users are more willing to click on links (and leave the walled garden).
Perhaps that’s not “businesslike” on LinkedIn.
Therefore, despite my issues with the Metabot at times, I’m paying more attention to Facebook these days.
And if Facebook users pay more attention to Bredemarket than LinkedIn users…well, I won’t impede on the LinkedIn users as they perform thrilling and exciting things.
In the distance.
By the way, I probably won’t post an anti-LinkedIn “experts” diatribe on the Bredemarket blog next Friday…
I’m experimenting with more detailed prompts for generative AI.
If you haven’t noticed, I use a ton of AI-generated images in Bredemarket blog posts and social media posts. They primarily feature wildebeests, wombats, and iguanas, although sometimes they feature other things.
My prompts for these images are usually fairly short, no more than two sentences.
By the way, here is my prompt, which Google Gemini (Imagen 4) stored as “Eerie Scene: Sara’s Fake Bills.”
“Draw a realistic picture of a ghost-like woman wearing a t-shirt with the name “Sara.” She is holding out a large stack of dollar bills that is obviously fake because the picture on the bill is a picture of a clown with orange face makeup wearing a blue suit and a red tie. Next to Sara is a dead tree with a beehive hanging from it. Bees buzz around the beehive. A laptop with the word “HiveLLM” on the screen sits on the rocky ground beneath the tree. It is night time, and the full moon casts an eerie glow over the landscape.”
I didn’t get exactly what I wanted—the bills are two-faced—but close enough. And the accident of two-faced bills is a GOOD thing.
I’m moving in a different direction on social media. Well, personal social media anyway.
There are multiple schools of thought about whether small companies with well-known leaders should share content on their company platforms or their personal social media platforms.
On one extreme, companies only share content on company channels, to better establish the brand of WidgetCorp or whatever.
On the other extreme, company heads only share content on their personal channels because their personal connections are so important to the company’s success. In fact, these company heads may not even bother to create separate company pages.
Obviously, most companies and company heads adopt a “do both” tactic. Maybe the company head reshares company posts. Or maybe the company reshares company head posts.
Or they do something that John Bredehoft and Bredemarket have done in the past: share the same content on both the company and the personal channels.
I might not do that any more.
The experiment
The rationale behind sharing company posts on your personal channels is that your personal friends like you and will engage with your company posts.
But this rationale ignores one very pertinent fact: most of my friends have NO interest in identity, biometrics, cybersecurity, or related technologies.
Why would they engage with such content if it doesn’t interest them?
I’d share Bredemarket Facebook content to my personal Facebook feed…and with very few exceptions I’d end up with crickets.
Or I’d share some Bredemarket LinkedIn content to my personal LinkedIn account. Often…crickets.
But most painful of all was when I would share Bredemarket Instagram posts to my Instagram stories. Higher impressions then the same stories on the Bredemarket account…but absolutely no engagement. Crickets again.
So on Monday afternoon I intentionally conducted an experiment on my personal Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts, where together I have a combined 3,396 connections. My Monday afternoon identity/biometric and product marketing-related content received a total of 9 engagements…and that’s counting the Instagram user who requested “Can u share it @canadian.icon”).
Even acccounting for the three algorithms involved…that’s low.
And it…um, prompted me to ask myself a “why” question.
Why share corporate content on personal feeds?
Good question.
So for now I’m “moving in a different direction” (a few of you know where THAT phrase originated) and not bothering to share Bredemarket content on my personal feeds. At least for now.
Those who are dying to see Bredemarket content will subscribe to the appropriate Bredemarket Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn feeds.
But frankly, my friends have no need or desire to see Bredemarket content, so they won’t.
In my case, my high school friends, church friends, and even some of my former coworkers (who left the identity/biometric industry years ago) are NOT Bredemarket’s hungry people. So I’ll spare them the parade of wildebeests, wombats, and iguanas.
There are some things that I don’t bother to share in the Bredemarket blog, but instead just share to my socials.
This morning, I shared a story about the third-party risk management firm Whistic to LinkedIn’s Bredemarket Technology Firm Services page.
From LinkedIn.
You can see an oft-used Bredemarket technique: rather than sharing everything from a third party (geddit?) article, I only share a bit of it, then encourage the reader to click on the link to see the rest of the content. Makes everybody happy. What could go wrong?
Then I shared the same story to Facebook’s Bredemarket Technology Firm Services page.
Or tried to.
First attempt to share to Facebook
Facebook removed the post, accusing me of using “misleading links or content to trick people.”
I’m so devious that even I couldn’t figure out what I did.
Until I re-read the post and noticed this parenthetical comment.
(And one more key finding. Read the article.)
Doesn’t seem like a trick to me, but I explicitly urged people to leave Facebook’s walled garden and read something.
I do this all the time—Facebook is the second most popular traffic source for Bredemarket, after Google—but apparently the way I did it in the Whistic post was a trick to Facebook’s readers.
Second attempt to share to Facebook
The solution was simple: repost the article WITHOUT the offensive parenthetical comment.
So I did.
And Facebook removed the post again.
This isn’t the first time Facebook has rejected content that other platforms accepted without question…including other Meta platforms such as Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.
I was this close to ceasing content sharing on Facebook altogether.
But then I had an idea.
Now I’m engaging in real trickery
If I am offending Zuck by using text to supposedly trick people into clicking on a link…
…what would happen if I ONLY posted a link with no text at all?
And rather than posting the text of interest in Facebook’s walled garden…
…I put the text of interest in the Bredemarket blog, along with the Whistic link that offended Facebook so much?
Then I could share it on character-limited platforms such as Threads and Bluesky.
You see the irony here. For a while I’ve strived to place social content natively on each platform. Now the platforms are forcing me to place the real content on a platform I control.
And the text would look something like this:
What I tried to say this morning
Every year, Whistic surveys hundreds of Risk-Management and Information Security leaders to understand the trends, challenges, and opportunities that are actively shaping the third-party risk management (TPRM) industry.
In 2025, the average company in our survey works with 286 vendors—up by 21% versus last year….That increased demand comes with increased risk.
[C]ompanies are spending more time, more money, and more resources on TPRM, but still not meeting their own risk standards or reducing security events.