Are you on Ello? Add me as a friend here: https://ello.co/joeyoungblood

EDIT: I missed a very important difference. Currently Ello’s feeds do not update themselves. Unlike Facebook and Twitter you have to refresh your page to see any new feed updates.

Ello is a new social network currently undergoing a boom thanks to some unhappy Faceboook users and their promise to never sell ads. I’m trying to put together a starter guide, but while I work on that I wanted to compare Ello (pronounced: Elle – Oh) to Twitter and Facebook and see how it stacks up and how you the marketer might be able to use Ello for yourself or your clients.

If you don’t want to read there’s a handy dandy graphic down below to help you get the jist of the features available.

Friends and Audience

Let’s start off with audience building. Ello works a lot like Twitter in this aspect with a bit of a twist. You can follow accounts 1 of 2 different ways.

1. You can follow another account as a friend. Unlike Facebook the other person doesn’t have to confirm your friendship
2. You can follow another account as ‘noise’. Think of the Noise as a giant room where business and personalities you want to get updates from shout what they are currently doing. It’s like your own real-time curated list of information that doesn’t rely on an algorithm.

Both the Friend and the Noise groupings appear to update in real-time without using weighting like what Facebook does. This might be appealing to all those Facebook users that complain they never see updates from their friends until it’s too late. Just like the early days (and for some current day) of Twitter and before that MySpace, there’s a lot of people ‘following’ users in hopes for a follow back. When someone follows you though you are not informed of if they added you as a friend or to their Noise section.

Ello also offers a curated list of who to follow. It’s the icon with a plus sign and a small person on the web interface in the upper left-hand side.

So by using this list and following a lot of people by adding them to your Noise area, you could potentially grow your audience really quickly even if you don’t have friends on Ello.

Ello also gives you the ability to invite people to the platform. The moment someone accepts your invitation they are added to your Friends area and you are added to theirs. So use all 25 of your invites to grow your audience of friends.

Finally you can reach out on your other social networks and tell your friends and colleagues on those networks to follow / add you on Ello. I made a graphic for my LinkedIn, just toss it in MS Paint / Photoshop and change out the URL to your own.

Summary: So for Friends / Audiences Ello is much more similar to Twitter. Facebook requires authentication for a friendship and doesn’t have a separate area for non-friend updates. While closer to Twitter this twist makes Ello’s feed system unique and provides an interesting dynamic for engaging with other people and friends. Big downfall here is that you can’t search for friends on Ello currently.

Winner: Really I think Ello’s semi-blind system is pretty good and being able to friend or follow another account is a nice change of pace. With that said, Facebook probably wins here. Some people may not like that people can claim to be their friend without any control. We’ll cover privacy settings later, but the word friend carries a lot of weight in society and I think it’s just a tad odd that there is no confirmation mechanism, maybe people will overcome it or just not care so we’ll see.

Update Feeds

Now that we’ve discussed how audiences are built let’s look at how Ello feeds updates to users. To start off with they have avoided the Facebook approach that uses an algorithm that tries to guess what you want to see and when and have gone with the more straightforward real-time updating like what Twitter uses. Since users can add friends or add accounts to their Noise tab this also creates 2 different feeds to match. Both feeds look and work very differently.

Friend Feed:
The Friend Feed looks very twitter-esque and currently shows

• Updates from Friends
• Who recently followed you
• Who you recently followed
• Who accepted your invitation to join

This can look very sparse on desktop versions, especially on 22″ – 25″ monitors, but displays well on the mobile website version. The fonts are big and images appear in full size (though I haven’t tried to add a super-massive image yet) without using thumbnails. Also, just like Twitter and Facebook, you get to see your own posts here. I kind of hate that.

Noise Feed:
The Noise Feed is an entirely different story taking on a completely different look and feel. Instead of a steady top-down real-time stream of updates from your friends it gives you a lot of updates from everyone in your Noise Feed in a grid-like pattern with images and text being smaller and cut off with a ‘more’ link to open the post up. Honestly, I really like the UX of this part of the website probably better than everything else on the site. This allows someone to get a quick snapshot of their news from non-friends from multiple sources. If it takes off it’ll be interesting to see what filtering or other options they give to people here.

Summary: Ello here again is very Twitter like opting for real-time updates. The difference is they give you the option of seeing friends content and content from others in different formats and that appears to have been well thought out. As a marketer you’ll have to compete with all of the other accounts in the Noise section so getting added as a friend would be more ideal. With their disdain for advertising you’ll also probably never be able to inject your posts into a more sacred spot in either feed meaning reach on this network will be limited to your creativity with updates and popularity outside of the network.

Winner: I have to give it to Twitter’s feed here. Even with ads I just have a much better experience on Twitter than Facebook and Ello. But damn, that Noise Feed has some potential and if more news outlets and businesses join the site it could beat out Twitter in the near future for user experience. Unfortunately it’ll never beat out Twitter of Facebook for business ROI as there’s just too much clutter competing for attention in there which will have an adverse impact on clicks through to the post itself and lead to a lot of ‘skimming for information’ use.

Post / Status Updates

So let’s look at what you can do with your posts on Ello. Right now the site allows you to: post seemingly unlimited amounts of text, links, photos and GIFS, and tag other users. Here Ello has deviated from their Twitter likeness and gone with more of a Facebook strategy. Allowing for large volumes of text in updates and big images allows the users of Ello to express their creativity unencumbered and that’s what the network was originally built for.

The story here is what you cannot do with an Ello update. You can’t see a running list of all of your notifications or mentions, you can’t use hashtags or otherwise categorize your posts, your can’t do anything like a share or retweet, you can’t favorite/like a post, and you can’t post things like YouTube videos that autoplay in the feed. When I first joined Ello I noted that links included in posts were passing link juice, but they have since added the rel=nofollow attribute to all links so there is no longer SEO value to posting on the site.

Each post also has a permalink and shows the viewcount. At first the viewcounts of some of the posts impressed me, but I quickly realize that they were hyper-inflated. It turns out you can just refresh the webpage to be counted as one more view making your posts appear more popular than they might be.

Summary: Ello updates are pretty vanilla aside from being GIF ready right out of the box there really isn’t much of a difference here from other social networks except that you can do less with them.

Winner: TIE – Twitter and Facebook. I like how posting works on both of those networks but right now Ello’s posting updates are clumsy and hard to figure out, the icons are not straightforward to understand and hard to figure out. Add in the view count bug and Ello is a clear loser here while Facebook and Twitter have nailed down the art of a social media post.

Privacy

Ello’s unique positioning is that they will not sell your private information, so I would expect their privacy to be on-point. Like Twitter you can opt to have a private account (public is on by default) making it so only your friends can see your posts. But of course you can’t control who friends you, so if you decide to make your profile private later on people you didn’t want to be friends with can still see your updates and interact with them. I’m also not sure what limitations having a private profile comes with as the website doesn’t define them nor does setting your profile to private notify you of what changes were just made. There also doesn’t appear to be a blocking or reporting feature on Ello so if someone adds you as a friend that you don’t want to like say a creepy ex or a celebrity stalker, you can’t do anything about it at all except delete your account. So for the privacy oriented start off by setting your account to private.

That’s where the bad news ends. Every website and app in the entire world collects analytics data on their users behavior. Ello actually asks permission to use this anonymous data to improve their site and you can opt out of that at any time. This is a nice change of pace. The site also has promised to never sell advertising on their site effectively “making you the product” like Facebook and Twitter do. Finally Ello doesn’t ask for the invasive levels of data that Facebook does like relationship status, address, phone number, or employer. They also do not require a date of birth to sign up.

Summary: The promise of no ads comes along with sketchy privacy settings that are vague in their actual impact. It’ll be interesting to see how they evolve on this point but I feel like they should have done a lot better here and maybe done a lot more privacy control before asking to use anonymous usage data. In fact they are more perpetuating a lie that seems to get out of control on the internet about anonymous analytics data. Google used that same tactic to take SEO keywords away and others have accused websites of spying on their users, when in reality the data most often helps create better user experiences.

Winner: To me the clear winner is Twitter. Facebook’s privacy settings are not well understood by most of their users and they are just too complex. I enjoy the micro-control of my information on Facebook but the fact is most people who want privacy don’t know how to define it or exactly what they want to be private. Twitter wins due to ease of use of their privacy settings but honestly I’ve never been impressed with the privacy of any social network.

Communication

Communication on Ello revolves around the post updates. It feels like a throwback to early MySpace and FriendFeed days with very limited options. You see a post, you comment, and you can tag people you want to start a conversation with. Ello lacks the ability to send any form of direct message forcing all conversations to be in the public view and doesn’t offer any text based updating or live chat features. There are also no shiny features like GIF keyboards or Snapchat-like video messaging for communication on the site.

Summary: Ello is in the early-00’s of social media communication which just might be a death kiss for them. Social media has evolved beyond just posting an update here and there, especially with the teen and young adult demos.

Winner: Out of the 3 I would say Facebook wins due to their multitude of communication options, but I hate the Messenger app (ok actually I hate being forced to download a second app to do what I’ve been doing since 2005). But in reality it would depend on the reason for sending the message and the message type. Pitting Ello up against Snapchat, Kik, Instagram, Vine, and Whatsapp is just totally an unfair matchup as their site doesn’t appear targeted to the same users, still it’s got the feel of being the modern day equivalent of using a typewritter to send an email. That might actually be their goal, but it’s terrible from a mass user experience perspective.

Other Features

Ello is currently barebones and doesn’t have a lot of the extra bells and whistles the other big social networks have including:

• Photo Albums
• Photo Tagging
• Separate List of Friends
• Mobile App
• Advertising
• Apps Posting to Platform
• App Connection
• Web Login API
• Birthday Notifications
• Event Creation / Management
• Groups
• Markup Code of other websites
• Physical Check-ins
• Report Spam

Some of these will be necessary to have, some won’t. It really depends on who they want to be on their site.

Winner: Facebook has the most extra features, hands down.

Summary

Ello is far behind both of the bigger social networks, but of course that should be expect for a site that is under 1 year old. While I’ve heard and read quite a few people comparing Ello to Facebook, it really functions mostly like Twitter and doesn’t seem to be a big threat to those who enjoy Facebook’s friend, photo, and communication features. There are some definite glaring weaknesses in their social media offering (not to mention some eye bleeding parts of the design) that need immediate attention.

From a marketing perspective we should always be ready to engage our audiences where they are and with large swaths of LGBT and those in the Art community flocking to Ello we should be prepared to talk to them on this platform. I’ve taken the liberty of outlining some steps to get your marketing working on Ello right away and how to approach it.

Getting Started With Ello Marketing
1. Once inside Ello invite a business email and use that account to claim all variations of your brand that you might need later.
2. Once you get your account setup post on your Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (or other networks) to drive new follows on your Ello page.
3. To start repeat your posts from other networks on Ello.
4. Focus on high-quality imagery like Art, Photography, or Print media for your posts.
5. Use the curated list of who to follow and add as many as you can to your Noise section with hopes they follow you back.
6. Invite all of your colleagues that you can to your personal Ello.
7. Invite employees using the leftover invites on your brand Ello.

Here is a chart comparing Facebook, Twitter, and Ello features:

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