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TBG Digital’s CEO Simon Mansell tells me “this is huge news that show mobile is potentially going to be the big revenue driver that Facebook needs, especially because the usage in there.”

According to a new study by TBG Digital on 278,389,453 Sponsored Story ad impressions across 17 clients, mobile news feed Sponsored Stories (the only ads Facebook shows on mobile) have a stunning click-through rate of 1.14% at a $0.86 CPC. That means Facebook earns $9.86 per 1000 impressions (eCPM), and that could actually rise as more advertisers realize the power of mobile Sponsored Stories and compete for impressions there.

Compare those numbers to the desktop news feed Sponsored Stories that get a 0.588% CTR at $0.63 CPC and earn Facebook an eCPM of $3.72, and Facebook is getting 1.93x the CTR and earning 2.65x as much on mobile sponsored stories compared to what it makes on the web.

Facebook’s algorithm uses a number of factors to establish which posts should be shown to users. Previously called EdgeRank, the algorithm now has more than 1,000 contributing factors, but it still focuses on three main influences: affinity, weight, and Time.

Affinity is defined by a user’s relationship with the person or page that created the specific Facebook object — essentially how much the user interacts with that person or page.

Time, the last major factor, takes into account how recent the action occurred, which, in Facebook vernacular, is called time decay.

women tend to spend more time on social networks, post more photos and have more Facebook friends, while men tend to check them more often).

personality played a much bigger factor in how people use social networks than previously thought. While personality only accounted for a 6% difference in self-reported time spent on Facebook, it accounted for a 14% variance in regret over Facebook posts and interactions, a 16% variance in postings about one’s self and a 41% variance in postings about others.

The study confirmed previous research that showed people with less social stability reported spending more time on Facebook, while more emotionally stable and more introverted users primarily used Facebook to keep up with friends. The study also lent some credibility to the theory that introverts often use Facebook to make up for a lack of interpersonal communication.

Facebook has been losing traffic and sales since the 2012 holidays, while Pinterest has been steadily trending upward.

Facebook’s share of traffic hit 92 percent in mid-December, then plummeted to 69 percent in the week leading up to Easter. Pinterest has grown from 6 percent to 25 percent in that time. Also in mid-December, at the peak of the holiday shopping season, Facebook’s market share of sales hit 89 percent, then fell to 78 percent by Easter. Pinterest grew from 10 percent to 21 percent in that same period.

the fundamental differences in how people use Facebook and Pinterest make the latter a better option for commerce. She likened Facebook ads to a marketer pitching wares while users are having conversations with friends, while Pinterest is more like window shopping at a store that the user chooses.

Facebook users will sit still for ads that, per current reports, will take over your desktop screen and run for 15 seconds, up to three times a day per user. What are the odds of that? 

Initially, the 15-second autoplay ads will appear on Facebook's desktop site; the social network is still working to bring them to its mobile app as well.

Facebook is expected to offer four daily "slots" for its video ads, each targeting a very large demographic: Women over 30 Women under 30 Men over 30 Men under 30

Facebook announced the purchase of the mobile messaging service WhatsApp on Wednesday, in a $19bn deal that represents the social media company’s biggest acquisition yet.

The deal is a big bet for Facebook, which has until recently struggled to convince investors of its strategy for mobile.

Facebook’s successful bid comes after Google reportedly made a $1bn offer for the company last year.

Kentico found that 68 percent of respondents “never” or “hardly ever” pay attention to brands’ posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, yet only 5 percent of that group unliked or unfollowed brands on those social networks.

Of those who like brands on Facebook, 39 percent did so in order to receive special offers, while 12 percent did so due to recommendations from friends, and just 8 percent were seeking more information. The most common reasons for unliking or unfollowing brands were uninteresting posts (32 percent) and too many posts (28 percent).

While our latest Digital Experience Survey may be bad news to some, it only reinforces our notion that the social media efforts of a company need to be measured by community engagement, rather than likes or follows. Equally critical is content that is compelling and personalized whenever possible to maintain the interest of people who may have become somewhat impervious to the constant bombardment of various marketing messages today.

Facebook has created a new way for businesses and developers to target ads to users who have taken an action on Facebook or in an app within a more specific time range. Using the “action spec” targeting capability, which allows advertisers to reach users by the actions they take in Open Graph apps and on Facebook directly, an advertiser could designate a time range shorter than 14 days

a local business might want to reach users who checked into their store within the past week. A developer might want to target users who installed their app in the past three days. A page owner might want to retarget users who viewed one of their page tabs the day before.

Action spec targeting is still a beta feature limited to advertisers working with Preferred Marketing Developers

Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled a new metric for evaluating advertising campaigns on Facebook, called "cost per action" (CPA). Now, advertisers can pay not just for impressions or click-throughs, but for specific actions they want consumers to perform once they've seen an ad — including becoming a fan of a Page. For example, an advertiser could specify it is willing to pay $2.00 for a "Like" — that is, for a new fan on its company or product Page — and only pay when the Page gets a new fan. Other actions include Offer claims and clicks on links to third-party sites.

a fan is worth an average of $174 to a company. But as the chart below shows, the value of a fan can differ widely across companies:

"Marketers should define the value of a fan based on how it impacts the key criteria that determines the success or failure of their business," says Kalehoff. Specifically, marketers should measure the spending habits of fans versus non-fans, to see if fans are more likely to make a purchase, make purchases at great amounts and/or purchase repeatedly. Advocacy — the probability of a customer recommending a product to others, and the probability of that recommendation to affect sales — is another key metric. Another area that is more difficult to measure is brand affinity — that is, the emotional draw that a customer feels towards a brand because of the relationship that develops between brands and fans over Facebook. If positive brand affinity tends to be a powerful sales indicator on other channels, it may be worth cultivating on Facebook, too.

According to Joyus founder and ex-Googler Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, people are five times as likely to buy something from a video ad than from a picture on an e-commerce site, and buy five times as often.

The Facebook videos will run silently until the user chooses to activate the sound, which will relaunch the ad from the beginning. How long before Facebook offers an ad-free newsfeed to users--at a price?

the typical page had reach of 26%  prior to the Sept. 20, meaning that, on average, 26% of a page's subscribers would see messages posted on the page. That reach has dropped to 19.5% since Sept. 20.

In short, according to the Facebook source, if brands are seeing less engagement and reach on their Facebook pages, it’s because they’re not creating engaging content. “If a brand is continually putting up low-quality content that no one is engaging with, that content is going to be optimized out of the Newsfeed,” the source said. 

Facebook measures the quality of content through engagement: number of likes, clicks, shares and comments. Typically, a post’s reach is between 15% and 20%.

an example a search for a spicy meal in San Francisco. A search for "restaurants liked by my friends from India" revealed a long list. Narrowing that to "Indian restaurants liked by my friends from India" yielded another list. Then he searched for restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.

In cases where Graph Search comes up blank – which is likely to be a frequent occurrence in its infancy – the service defaults to the web search engine Bing, which is run by Google's rival Microsoft.

"I want to invite friends over for Game of Thrones," he said, "but who among my friends likes Games of Thrones? Graph Search tells me."

In terms of specific days and times to post on Facebook, here are some of the stats I found: Engagement rates are 18% higher on Thursdays and Fridays. I love the way this was explained in Buddy Media’s study: as they put it, “the less people want to be at work, the more they are on Facebook!”

Another study found that engagement was 32% higher on weekends, so the end of the week is definitely a good rough guide to start experimenting with.

The best time of day to post on Facebook is debatable, with stats ranging from 1pm to get the most shares, to 3pm to get more clicks, to the broader suggestion of anytime between 9am and 7pm. It seems that this generally points to early afternoon being a solid time to post, and anytime after dinner and before work being a long shot.

according to a study of more than 100 million anonymous U.S. Facebook users and more than 1 billion of their posts — conducted by Facebook and researchers at the University of California San Diego and Yale University — your happiness might spread to your Facebook friends. The Wall Street Journal reported that the study found that emotions expressed in status updates tended to be contagious, but upbeat emotions were more likely to affect friends’ moods than negative emotions were.

Back in April, the fast feeder was re-launching its Facebook page and in an effort to get a fresh start, offered all of the followers of its previous page a free Big Mac to not join the new page (giving away up to 1,000 Big Macs). The rationale: the brand had low engagement and a lot of fans whose activity consisted of making negative cracks and asking for discounts. In the wake of the stunt, about two-thirds, or 28,000, of its Facebook fans took up the offer, leaving just 8,000 fans on the new page.

Burger King Scandinavia marketing director Sven Hars stands by the decision to prioritize quality over quantity. "This campaign gave us the opportunity to get rid of all the fans that just liked us because of freebies," says Hars. "We stopped focusing on how many likes we had, and put time and resources into finding out what to talk about and how to engage our fans."

thousands of so-called virtual assistants - essentially freelance social marketers - who typically offer clients 1,000 likes for about $25. 

"One thing all of these virtual assistants have in common is a large number of fake profiles that they use,” he said. “The average virtual assistant I've seen who does Facebook marketing has at least five Facebook accounts.”

Such deals have proven irresistible to marketers. “Business owners jump on the chance" to get hundreds of likes, said Jayme Pretzloff, online marketing director for Minneapolis-based Wixon Jewelers, "but they don't realize the repercussions of doing this. Facebook has already cracked down on this by changing its Newsfeed rankings based on engagement." Companies' strong engagement with their fans will appear more often in their fans' feeds, he adds.

52 percent of boomers will like brands in exchange for offers, compared with 42 percent of millennials. Both groups had trouble remembering all of the brands they had liked — 63 percent of millennials and 60 percent of boomers. Like doesn’t necessarily lead to love, as just 16 percent of millennials and 36 percent of boomers said they truly “liked” brands they have liked on the social network. The opinions of friends remain important, as 68 percent of millennials and 52 percent of boomers said they turn to information about brands from friends.

While there’s no disputing the fact that Facebook provides a valuable channel for brands to engage with their fans, the value of a like is diluted if the people liking them won’t remember who they are tomorrow. That’s why it’s vital for marketers to understand the driving factors behind online behaviors so that they can convert fans into loyal, interested, and paying customers.

To which social media brands do consumers feel the most attachment? Facebook ranked number one in a Brand Dependence Social Media Survey conducted by UTA Brand Studio

And we're not talking about "liking," apparently. To clarify, attachment, which is at the core of Brand Dependence research methodology, refers to the degree to which consumers believe a brand is like themselves and the degree to which thoughts and feelings about a brand come to mind,

Facebook was followed by Instagram, then YouTube, Pinterest and Reddit in the February 2014 survey of 2,006 U.S. adults aged 18 and up.

According to a new poll of U.S. marketers conducted by Gartner, corporate websites are ranked as the top digital activity for marketing “success” — beating marketing on social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Social media marketing, however, ranked as the next most important activity, equal in importance to online advertising.

The survey, conducted in November and December of 2012, polled a relatively small sample of 250+ marketers from U.S.-based companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue

Design, development and maintenance of the corporate website was cited by 45% of survey respondents as contributing to marketing success, with marketing on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter cited by 43%. Digital/online advertising was also cited by 43%