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social media scientist Dan Zarrella found in research prior to this change that Tweets using pic.twitter.com links were 94% more likely to be Retweeted.

Dan also found that Tweets including Instagram links were 42% less likely to be Retweeted.

Favorites increased quite a lot. Along with Retweets in the graph below, this shows a lot more engagement with the Tweets themselves. Clicks, on the other hand, show engagement with the original content. This could explain why clicks didn’t increase as much--if Twitter is hoping to increase engagement on average with Tweets within your stream, it appears it’s working from our early indications.

The site posted on its Facebook for Business blog that pages will likely soon see a decrease in organic reach as a result of recent changes to the News Feed algorithm.

People are connecting and sharing more than ever. On a given day, when someone visits News Feed, there are an average of 1,5001 possible stories we can show. As a result, competition for each News Feed story is increasing. Because the content in News Feed is always changing, and we’re seeing more people sharing more content, Pages will likely see changes in distribution. For many Pages, this includes a decline in organic reach. We expect this trend to continue as the competition for each story remains strong and we focus on quality. Facebook notes that page admins can try advertising and boosting posts to make up for the loss in reach: As the dynamic nature of News Feed continues to follow people’s patterns of sharing, Page owners should continue using the most effective strategy to reach the right people: a combination of engaging Page posts and advertising to promote your message more broadly. Advertising lets Pages reach the fans they already have and find new customers as well.

Twitter has confirmed our scoop with the announcement of Tailored Audiences - its name for retargeted ads. Available globally to all advertisers via a slew of adtech startup partners, advertisers will be able to target recent visitors to their websites with retargeted Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts.

Twitter’s users are on mobile. Seventy percent of its ad revenue already comes from the small screens, and it likely follows that a majority of engagement is on mobile, too.

retargeting happens like this. You visit a website, say a travel booking site, and look at a page for buying a flight to Hawaii. You chicken out at the last minute, don’t buy, and navigate away, but the site has dropped a cookie for that Hawaii flight page on your browser. Then, when you visit other sites or social networks that run retargeted ads, they detect that cookie, and the travel site can show you an ad saying “It’s cold in SF. Wouldn’t a vacation to Hawaii be nice?” to try to get you to pull the trigger and buy the flight it knows you were already interested in. But without cookies on mobile, you can’t retarget there… …unless you can tie the identity of a mobile user to what they do on the computer. And Twitter can. It’s one of the few hugely popular services that individuals access from multiple types of devices.

“Marketers are on social media to sell stuff,” Vaynerchuk says. “Consumers, however, are not … If you want to talk to people while they consume their entertainment, you have to be their entertainment.” If users are on Instagram to see beautiful pictures, don’t interrupt their experience by posting a picture of a coupon. Instead, post a beautiful picture of your product in a picturesque setting.

hashtags are like waves--and the best way to surf is to ride the wave, not create it. “You’re not single-handedly getting a hashtag to trend on Twitter unless you’re the Biebs,” Vaynerchuk wrote on his blog. “On the flip side, your ability to pay attention to what’s going on and jump into it, over-indexing the performance of a normal tweet, is pretty consistent even for people who are somewhat average social media users.”

Google on Thursday updated its Gmail service so that you'll never have to click that pesky “Display images below” link again. Gmail will now automatically display images in email, the catch being that Google will host those images on its own servers. Prior to the change, most emailed images would be loaded from third-party servers—often enough, those of marketers.

But by filtering these photos through its own servers, however, Google may have shut out the use of Web bugs or beacons—bits of code that lets an advertiser know that an email has been opened. Marketers use images as beacons because, at least until now, services like Gmail would upload such images from an advertiser’s own web server. Any image can be a beacon, even an invisible one no more than a pixel wide.

the following likely consequences for his audience: Marketers won't be able to tell whether you've opened an email for the second or subsequent time Web bugs won't report reliable geolocations for opened emails, as they'll pick up the IP addresses of Gmail servers, not recipients Countdown clocks sent as animated images won't show the right time if email is opened a second or subsequent time Analytics will only track the first time an email is opened Marketers won't be able to update or change images once they're sent out

Only 34% of websites use a serif typeface for body copy.

Two thirds of the websites we surveyed used sans-serif fonts for body copy.

the most popular font sizes ranged from 18 to 29 pixels, with 18 to 20 pixels and 24 to 26 pixels being the most popular choices.

50 percent of social network users share or repost news stories, images, or videos, while 46 percent discuss news or current events on their networks, and 11 percent have submitted their own content to news websites or blogs. Pew reiterated its findings from a report earlier this month that Internet users who arrive at the 26 news websites it analyzed by directly typing in those sites’ URLs or via bookmarks spend far more time on those sites, view more pages, and return more times per month that Internet users who arrive via Facebook.

78 percent of Facebook users see news while they are on the social network for other reasons. Only 34 percent of Facebook news consumers like news organizations or individual journalists, which Pew interprets to mean that most of the news they see on the social network is shared by their friends. Facebook news consumers reported seeing entertainment news the most, followed by “people and events in my community,” sports, national government/politics, crime, health/medicine, and local government/politics. News consumers on LinkedIn were high earners and college-educated, while those from Twitter were younger than those from Facebook, Google Plus, and LinkedIn.

One-half of Facebook users get news there even though they did not go there looking for it. And the Facebook users who get news at the highest rates are 18- to-29-year-olds.

This past October, Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, was purchased for $650 million, and its website, newsday.com, was put behind a pay wall. For just $5 a week, users could gain access to the site, but after three months on the market, how many had subscribed? Thirty-five people.

close to 49% of respondents used free micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, that doesn't mean any ever plan to spend money on the services. When asked if they'd ever pay for Twitter, 100% said no.

Rupert Murdoch's London Times had gained just 15,000 paid subscribers after putting up its new pay wall. What's more, the wall cut Web traffic by two-thirds, with some estimating it could plummet as much as 90%.

The story makes the numbers interesting. The numbers make the story credible

write a post that presents the mystery and leads your reader through the investigation to its incredibly satisfying conclusion.

Simply restating a problem is boring. Offering new tools and perspectives to solve problems helps your reader get closer to their goals — and that makes you someone whose content they’ll want to read every time you come out with something new.

When you sign up for Flattr, a social micropayments service, you dedicate a flat fee per month to the site. As you're surfing the web, you can click "Flattr" buttons next to a blog post, song, or podcast to put your money where your "likes" are. At the end of each month, your flat fee is evenly divided amongst the creators you've chosen.

communities of creators (podcasters, citizen journalists, open source 3d printer hackers) are increasingly adopting Flattr as a virtual tip jar. The site's still small--70,000 users. The amounts are small, too--users pledge an average of 3 euros a month and click just a handful of times, with each click averaging half a euro in value. But as cofounder Linus Olsson told Fast Company today after his SXSW panel, the cultural impact of this kind of crowdfunding is growing.

"Money's just another tool to help people do what you think is important."

Despite shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters, journalism is in fact thriving. The art of information gathering, analysis and dissemination has arguably been strengthened over the last several years, and given rise and importance to a new role: the journalistic curator.

with the push of social media and advancements in communications technology, the curator has become a journalist by proxy. They are not on the front lines, covering a particular beat or industry, or filing a story themselves, but they are responding to a reader need. With a torrent of content emanating from innumerable sources (blogs, mainstream media, social networks), a vacuum has been created between reporter and reader — or information gatherer and information seeker — where having a trusted human editor to help sort out all this information has become as necessary as those who file the initial report.

“Curation,” says Sayid Ali, owner of Newsflick.net, “gathers all these fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content.”

Whoever invented the term "social media" didn't do the world a favor because, while that's the accepted term now, it's completely wrong, and I believe it's part of what drives this disconnect. Social media is not really media. I think of it as a channel, more like a telephone than a TV commercial. And when's the last time a CEO asked, "How are we monetizing the telephone?" And has a CEO ever threatened to not invest in phones because the company can't make money off of them?

Truth is, companies monetize the telephone quite well, and if you don't think so, take away your company's phones and see what happens to your top and bottom lines. Likewise, companies can monetize social media, but they have to stop thinking about it as a way to market products and start thinking about it as a way to communicate and build a brand.

Formal research typically takes months and requires healthy investment and long planning cycles. Smart companies are trading in highly rigorous research for quick, nearly scientific data collected through social media platforms.

By such orchestrated interplay of all media, whole cultures could now be programed in order to improve and stabilize their emotional climate, just as we are beginning to learn how to maintain equilibrium among the world's competing economies

I'm not advocating anything; I'm merely probing and predicting trends. Even if I opposed them or thought them disastrous, I couldn't stop them, so why waste my time lamenting?

Resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.