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.

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.

Our click-rate did grow, but not by very much. My theory on this is that with an inline image, there’s more content for the user to consume without leaving Twitter (which is probably what Twitter wants), so they’re not much more likely to click-through.

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.

Design thinking, however, is a slightly murky concept that means different things to different people. At heart, though, it is about fusing the creative and open-ended with the analytical and operational

For us, there are two broad skill sets--strategy and design--with no buffer in between to organize them and tell them how to work together.

a lot of organizations take a slightly patronizing view of design and creative types, assuming they can’t really be expected to understand and manage things like budgets. We assume the opposite--that everyone can and should be a good businessperson.

Tumblr is letting brands buy their way into the list of what's trending on the platform's mobile product.  The Yahoo-owned social blogging site said today that it would sell Sponsored Trending Blog placements to brands looking to post messages via Tumblr's mobile app. The new ad format is Tumblr’s second on mobile and fifth advertising product overall

The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55–64 year age bracket.

The 45–54 year age bracket is the fastest growing demographic on both Facebook and Google+.

Keep older users in mind when using social media, particularly on these three platforms. Our age makes a difference to our taste and interests, so if you’re focusing on younger users with the content you post, you could be missing an important demographic.