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While some broadcasters are amalgamating Social TV within their own platforms; there are many, who are integrating Twitter into their Social TV platforms for enhanced custom experience and participation. Industry players such as BBC and CNN, on the other hand have signed deals with social networking players such as Facebook, as social networking companies are aggressively trying to venture into this space,”

“Social is truly emerging as a coalition of television and social media, wherein newer formats are being developed to enhance viewer engagement and encourage paid transactions.

Social media is not a popularity contest. Followers don't equal influence. Don't make this a volume game.

Social marketing is a brand-building tool first and foremost. For decades, traditional advertising media have been let off the hook when it comes to measuring direct financial ROI. You should do the same with your organization's efforts in social media.

Traditional branding focuses on logos. Social media branding must be focused on people. Humanize your brand is the golden rule of social media, because humans connect with humans, not logos. Traditional marketing has always approached branding as a way to control the message.

Controlled messages are distrusted in a world where social media can expose them so quickly. Revealing the people behind your brand builds trust. Trust is the first step to building loyalty.

Of UK internet users with a laptop, 91% multiscreened with such a device at least weekly while watching TV. For those with tablets, this dropped to 89%, and smartphone users came in at 83%. Perhaps the fascination with smart mobile devices ignores the fact that laptops fulfill users’ needs to use social media and the other activities pinpointed by BT at least as well—and some might say better than—tablets or smartphones.

Appinions, a company that analyzes data from five million sources to determine the influence of a brand, topic or person and promises to hook up companies with the most relevant influencers, earlier this month raised an extra $3 million in funding.

the "importance" of someone in a social network isn't simply how active or how many other people they're linked to--it's also a question of how well-connected and active each of these others are too.

Companies of all stripes are becoming aware of the power of high-value social media influencers, which is why they're signing up to campaigns like Klout's Perks. The idea is that via Klout, high-scoring individuals are "rewarded" with a physical gift or perhaps a discount voucher if they're influential in topics connected to the brand in question.

Klout is contentious to say the least, however, and its algorithm (not unlike Google's) is both mysterious and controversial--leading to debates like this extended thread on Google Plus.

The report notes that traditional ‘one-way’ marketing techniques like banner ads are clearly ineffective in a landscape of “perpetually connected consumers”. Web users are tuning out this old school type of marketing or failing to notice it in the first place or forgetting they ever saw it — which may also partially explain why personal recommendations from people they know well are so much more trusted. With so many sources of information to filter, better the devil you know and all that.

The survey also indicates there is still considerable trust in natural search engine results, and also in consumer written reviews, such as Amazon’s user reviews — which were both ranked around 3x more trusted than social marketing.

Consumer surveys reveal that television advertising stands above all others in terms of influencing purchase decisions. 

What Facebook can't yet promise, of course, is whether its billion users will actually sit through — or even tolerate — such intrusive ads, even just once.

Facebook will cap the ads so that no user will see an ad more than three times in a day. It is still unclear if advertising executives will want to cut down the typical 30-second television ad to fit Facebook's 15-second guideline, or if they'd create new ads especially for Facebook.

Even amongst college students, for example, who are likely to be very social media savvy, television advertising is clearly the most influential of all.

55% say they’re connected to 100 or more people through social sites, while 15% are connected to 500+ people.

Gen C is often time-poor and has become incredibly selective when navigating the media landscape, optimizing consumption for maximum returns. They turn to trusted advisors to help them navigate the space, using email lists, social media feeds and content aggregators to map out a media ecosystem that satisfies both their functional and emotional needs.

More than one in three say YouTube is their most important or second most important source of entertainment online, and 46% think of YouTube as an alternative to TV.

Gen C openly welcomes brands into its social circle – for starters 39% say they think of YouTube as a platform to engage with brands. Being engaging, authentic and shareworthy is the cost of entry, with advertising and content both put to the same litmus test; they’ll either switch off if it’s not relevant or engage if it is.

Graph Search also enables the user to search, for instance, for "photos of my friends taken in national parks" or "photos of my friends taken before 1990".

Tom Stocky, another Google import, showed what appeared to be a market researchers' dream tool: the new feature allows users to ask, for instance, what TV shows are most liked by doctors (Grey's Anatomy, House, The Doctors), or software engineers (Big Bang Theory).

A search for music liked by those who like Mitt Romney revealed Johnny Cash. Obama-likers liked Michael Jackson.

Brian Blau, who tracks social media for the tech research firm Gartner, said the service offered a brand new way for users to experience Facebook. Confined to Facebook's eco-system, the service was not an immediate threat to Google but would gradually increase in importance, he said. "In the future, you know Facebook will figure out how to monetize this. It's going to change the way people think about search."

The study had professional marketers evaluate 400 Facebook ads against six traditional criteria for advertising creative: Whether the ad has a focal point, how strong its brand link is (ie: how easy it was to identify who the advertiser was), how well the tone of the ad fits with the brand's personality, how noticeable the ad is, how effective it is at getting its point across, and whether there is a "reward" for reading it (ie: Did it make you feel good? Did you learn something?).

The study found that the ads that performed best were the ones that also did the best job of hewing to advertising fundamentals, especially focal point, brand link, and tone. The most important criteria, says Bruich, was that the ad needed to have some kind of reward.

our posts receive the most engagement during off-peak hours when less overall posting is going on. Try to find your engagement sweet spot by determining the intersection of time when the majority of your audience is on Facebook and the time when the least overall posting is occurring.

When is a good time to post on Facebook?√ Early morning

Between work and dinner

Bedtime

The best time to post on Facebook is when your audience will see it

Advertising is a key way that Facebook will monetize its 751 million mobile users.   Earlier this year, the number of active daily visitors checking Facebook on mobile devices surpassed people checking the social network on the web.

Photos are still the most popular item of personal content that we share right now with nearly 550 million+ photos shared each day on various internet services and this is expected to double within the next 12 months.

Advertising in the News Feed has moved towards bigger pictures and richer media and it will continue to go in that direction.

fashion brands have always understood storytelling in a way other brands haven't." That might explain why the fashion/retail brands examined averaged 46 repins for their every pin, whereas user-generated fashion/retail pins usually only notch 6 repins. On the other hand, auto brands typically see only three repins versus 10 repins for users’ auto-related pins, and electronics brands average five repins compared to their users’ 14 repins.

best day and time for brands in each vertical to pin—3 p.m. ET on Friday for fashion/retail, noon ET on Friday for auto and 10 p.m. ET on Monday for electronics—but both Bitterman and Gupta said it's hard to decipher how marketers should view those findings. Bitterman inferred that Friday afternoons make sense for fashion/retail and autos because many people shop or take test drives over the weekend and begin planning those outings on Friday. "Electronics kind of stumps me," he said before inferring that Pinterest users interested in electronics may be a relatively smaller population whose prime Web browsing time correlates with prime-time TV.

Brand growth, they maintain, is attained not by reaching a few loyal fans but a larger number of light and medium buyers. In this understanding of the marketing and media worlds, social is just another media channel useful for its reach rather than any notion of engagement.

Facebook fan bases skew toward heavy buyers rather than the more casual shoppers that a brands needs to reach in order to grow