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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.

Today Facebook announced an update to its news feed ranking that emphasizes shared news posts over memes and similar airy material that's often shared on the social network.

Facebook’s push to incorporate more news into timelines could be a response to Twitter’s success as a news platform. According to Pew Research, Facebook still has some catching up to do—only 47 percent of Facebook’s total users get their news on the site, compared to 52 percent of users on Twitter.

Facebook says people prefer “high quality content” over popular memes, so the company is putting an emphasis on tracking how frequently articles are clicked on from news feed on mobile to deliver more relevant posts.

In 2009, a Facebook account holder Liked, on average, 4.5 Pages. In just four years, this number increased to an average of 40 Pages! Not only that, but brands have been expanding their use of social media in their marketing campaigns, raising the number of Facebook posts that they make from an average of five times per month to 36. This means that in 2009, Facebook users only had to keep up with a manageable 23 updates per month, whereas they are currently bombarded with around 1 440 updates per month!

Some countries Like even more Pages than the 40 Page average, making them even harder to penetrate. The US takes the lead, Liking a whopping 70 Pages! The UK and France are tied, with their Facebook users Liking 48 Pages, on average. Mexican Facebook users follow closely, Liking an average of 41 Pages.

Our figures show that FMCG brands in the US may find it especially difficult to reach their fans, as this industry has the most Liked Pages.

Product Manager Andrew Song detailed the new initiative in a Newsroom post, using a post from Bleacher Report about Houston Rockets Center Dwight Howard as an example, and saying that the post may appear in the News Feeds of users who follow or like Bleacher Report, Howard, or both.

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.

more than 85% of U.S. adults turn to social media for connecting with friends or family, according to Pew Research. News is not the primary reason we turn to Facebook.

According to Digimind, 62.5% of companies use Twitter to glean market intelligence, surpassed only by LinkedIn (69.4%). Facebook? Less than 50%. 

Pew Research finds just 4% of people list Facebook as the primary way they get news, even though a whopping 78% stumble upon news while on Facebook despite not looking for it. Newsy information, in other words, is not Facebook's raison d'être. Friendship and personal communication are.

Facebook Exchange retargeting ads that appear within News Feed deliver an average increase in ROI of 197 percent compared to FBX ads on the right hand side of Facebook.com, according to an early study by Nanigans.

Sponsored Stories and Page Post Ads in the feed can have 10 to 20 times higher clickthrough rates than sidebar ads.

an average 17.1 times higher CTRs and 51 percent lower CPCs for FBX in News Feed versus in sidebar. As mentioned, ROI was 197 percent higher as a result.

The news audience is evolving faster than news providers, though. Gingras told us that, only a few years ago, 50% of the inbound audience went to the front page, and the other 50% went straight to stories or other pages. By now, 75% of traffic is going to stories. A minority of visitors ever see a site's front-page curated presentation of the news.

the value of information is not just in the knowledge of it; it's in what you can do with it.

News isn't just about information. It's also storytelling. Anyone can publish text, photos or even video to the Web now. But technology enables new, compelling storytelling techniques that could shine in the hands of dedicated news organizations.

Readers of some of the top U.S. news sites are more engaged when they go directly to the website rather than through Facebook, according to a study from the Pew Research Center released on Monday. The research found that users who come directly to a news site spend about three times as long per visit, or almost five minutes on average. Those who find the news by searching or through Facebook spend about two minutes.Direct visitors also view about five times as many pages per month as those coming through Facebook referrals or through search engines such as Google Inc.

yet the research shows that those readers who come to an article or video through Facebook are younger and more fickle in their loyalties.

"Even sites such as digital native BuzzFeed and National Public Radio's npr.org, which have an unusually high level of Facebook traffic, saw much greater engagement from those who came in directly."

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.

to determine if any given Page post shows up in the news feed, Facebook looks at four main factors: If you interacted with an author’s posts before: If you Like every post by a Page that Facebook shows you, it will show you more from that Page. Other people’s reactions to a specific post: If everyone else on Facebook shown a post ignores it or complains, it’s less likely to show you that post. Your interaction with posts of the same type in the past: If you always Like photos, there’s a better chance you’ll see a photo posted by a Page. If that specific post has received complaints by other users who have seen it, or the Page who posted it has received lots complaints in the past, you’ll be less likely to see that post. This factor became a lot more prevalent starting in September 2012.

Let’s say Darth Vader posts that he and Luke Skywalker have confirmed that they are father and son. To determine if Yoda saw this post in his news feed, Facebook would look at: whether Yoda had Liked or interacted with posts by Vader in the past, if Leia and Han Solo Liked the relationship post by Vader when Facebook showed it to them, whether Yoda tended to interact with relationship change posts in the past, and whether anyone else had complained about Vader or this particular post by the Sith Lord.

There are conflicting reports about the actual impact on average reach, though. Some like PageLever say it stayed stable, but others like We Are Social and SocialBakers say that average Page reach decreased by as much as 50 percent.

say ads that are disguised as content have higher click-through and engagement rates than intrusive banners because they’re contextual and have quality conte

a new survey due out today by Harris Interactive for MediaBrix, a social and mobile ad firm, says otherwise. Harris asked online adults what they thought about three native ad formats—Twitter’s promoted tweets, "Sponsored Stories" on Facebook, and video ads that appear to be content. According to the survey, a majority found the ads negatively impacted or had no impact on their perception of the brand being advertised.

45 percent found promoted tweets misleading, while 57 percent and 86 percent said the same about sponsored stories and video ads, respectively.

Facebook recently announced that it will be extending Facebook Exchange (FBX) Retargeting into the News Feed, bringing the placement of these targeted ads beyond the network’s right-hand panel

Known as one of the strongest forms of targeting available in digital media, FBX helps marketers reach users on Facebook who have demonstrated interest through browsing behavior. By targeting users in a timely and contextually relevant manner, FBX can effectively drive sales, improve customer engagement, and promote brand awareness.

Ads in the News Feed have historically resulted in some of the strongest metrics compared with other locations.

Currently, there are six different ad placements available to advertisers: Homepage All Facebook News Feed (desktop, mobile) Typeahead Logout Page (available only through Facebook IO)

Selecting “Homepage” as a placement will display your ads on the News Feed on desktop, right-hand side on homepage, and on News Feed for mobile.

Ads under the “All Facebook” place option may be shown on the right-hand side of Facebook, the desktop News Feed, or the Mobile News Feed. Facebook will decide exactly where to display your ad in order to drive the most clicks and actions, according to your budget.

If people are seeing stories from these papers on Google+, they either don't like them or they aren't bothering to tell Google. The New York Times, with over 360,000 followers, receives an average of 26,665 +1s per week. That's fewer than one +1d article a week for every 10 followers. The Times only posts to Google+ a few times per week, and it's not always posting links to NYTimes.com pages. But few of its Google+ posts have more than 50 +1s, and they theoretically reach 360,000 people.

What's even weirder is that The Washington Post, with 5% of the followers The New York Times has, gets more +1s than any other newspaper. With 33,206 +1s per week on average, the Post is the only major U.S. paper (with more than 200 followers) that gets a significant multiple of weekly +1s per follower. It gets 1.7 +1s per person encircling it, and the rest of the leaders get a small fraction of their follower count.

But so does WSJ.com, the #2 U.S newspaper in terms of Google+ followers, and its +1s are still a small fraction of its number of followers. All these papers have about the same level of activity on their Google+ pages, and their +1 activity on those posts is about the same.

The Washington Post. Its native ad program, WP BrandConnect, is adopting the multimedia, longform template that’s been used in the newsroom for features like this one. 

This isn't the first time the sales side has peeked over the proverbial Chinese wall to get inspiration from the editorial side. The New York Times has done it via its Idea Lab. The Post has an Ad Innovations team that sits in the marketing group but looks for inspiration in the newsroom. 

Publishers have been slow to migrate their native ads to mobile devices, despite native being seen as the solution to ineffective and poorly paying display advertising on mobiles. Nearly half of the Post’s online traffic comes from mobile devices

collective intelligence is not as dependent on individual intelligence as first thought. Having more women in a group improves the collective intelligence, because it raises the level of "social sensitivity." Another important factor is letting everyone talk equally, rather than having the loudest or most opinionated people dominate the conversation.

Just as a tissue is a new, bigger level of organization for a bunch of individual cells, these new social structures are a new bigger level for individual humans. And in both cases the new level breeds emergence. New behaviors emerge from the new level that were impossible at the lower level. Tissue can do things that cells can't.

optimizing groups with more women and more democratic discussion is just as important as casting your crowdsourcing net far and wide.

Couldn’t the NYT just know what I’d want to read and serve that up to me via algorithm? “Hell, yeah!” Adelman responds to that last question. “The fact that we continue to reflect that organization structure is not a statement about how we think things should be consumed. It is a statement about, there are some very natural ways for people to look for things.” Those “natural” ways of looking at things really come down to, again, user expectation. While the redesign does incorporate some algorithmically suggested sections within navigation, Adelman stresses that the NYT simply can’t remove the option to predictably click on particular topics, lest their audience question the publication’s transparency.

“There’s an element of trust that’s important in any relationship, whether it’s with the NYT or another publication, or a tool or experience you’re accustomed to,” Adelman says. “You don’t want to feel like things are moving under your feet." They also can’t merely fill the NYT homepage with articles they think someone might like to read, because then they cease to be what they are--the world’s news, presented without assumptions or bias. “I don’t think people want a customized version of the NYT homepage. They might benefit from some amount of material focused on their interests, but people come to the NYT because they want the NYT’s take on things.”

BuzzSpice found that 72 percent of the pages it studied exhibited what it called “manic-depression behavior,” not posting content in a consistent manner, but adding posts in flurries, then going silent for more than two weeks, in some cases.

Pages that do not stay in constant touch with their fans get decreasing score on the Facebook EdgeRank algorithm, lose visibility, and eventually disappear from their fans’ News Feeds.