@Publish

At a time when every new piece of tech or service seems to be an app or digital entity, we’re craving the tangible.

We don’t allow schemes that buy and sell Pins or pay people per Pin, follow, etc. We know that some popular Pinners have relationships with approved affiliate networks or participate in paid social media campaigns, and that’s still okay, as long as they’re not being compensated for each action on Pinterest. So if you're in a deal to earn $1 every time you pin a corporation's products, you're out of luck. But if you’re a highly influential blogger in a five-figure partnership with a brand, making money is A-OK. Here's more: A business can pay someone to help them put together a board that represents their brand. For example, it’s okay for a guest blogger to curate a board for a local boutique’s profile. We don’t allow that boutique to pay the blogger to Pin products to her own boards. A person can be given commission by an approved affiliate network. For example, it’s okay for a blogger to get paid when someone purchases a product that blogger has Pinned. However, we don’t allow the blogger to be paid just to Pin. In other words, Pinterest isn’t trying to keep brands or bloggers from making money. It just doesn't want anyone paid for filling up its network with garbage images.

“[Pinterest] will be a tremendous type of ad unit—truly based on your interests as a person,” Gupta said. “In a traditional demographic based ad, I might give you an ad for camping equipment because you’re 25 to 35 and male. But on Pinterest, I’d advertise it because you’re pinning a lot of camping equipment. I don’t care that you’re actually 55. I know you’ll be a buyer.”

It’s clear that Pinterest is simply trying to keep its content authentic, not transactional. But when you’re weighing that against a billion dollar valuation, the company has to move carefully.

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.

Brands with fraudulent fans have a potentially significant handicap when it comes to organic reach. When a brand posts, Facebook trickles that post out initially to a tiny fraction of the brand audience. Based on those fans’ initial engagement with the post, Facebook determines post quality and what percentage of the brand’s full fan base to feature that post to. If 50 percent of fans are fake and never engage, the post will perform one-half as well as it should on the initial test run, and, therefore, suffer from low organic circulation, a very common gripe for brands.

The most basic change is to stop counting likes. Focus on engagement. As the founder of a company that’s positioned itself as “after-like marketing,” I’ve long emphasized engagement as primary, and like counts as secondary, but in light of what we’re learning, it might be best to remove likes even as a secondary success metric.

According to GWI, mobile access to social media sites actually overtook traditional PC access in Q4 of 2013, as 66 percent of users accessed their social networks by mobile compared to 64 percent by computer. However, microblogging sites — which include Twitter and Tumblr — are apparently best reserved for the tablet, dominating over both traditional computers and mobile for usage.

No matter what the device, Facebook remains top dog across the board overall – account ownership, active usage and visit frequency, across all regions — although it has seen minor decline as other social networks gain mindshare. The key winner in this year’s new class of social networks is Instagram: A nearly 25% rise in active users betwen Q2 and Q4 of 2013 bring the estimated total of active users on the website to more than 90 million. It’s also popular for the kids, too, as teens represent the dominant demographic on the site, with a 39 percent share of active users. According to GWI, the only other social networks that can boast teens as their dominant users are Youtube and Tumblr.

GWI’s data only indicates that Facebook’s teens shrank two percentage points, leaving a rough user estimate of 34.19 million

“Internet Everywhere means that our old conception of the world separated into an online and an offline space is no longer relevant. Traditional social media required that we live experiences in the offline world, record those experiences, and then post them online to recreate the experience and talk about it,” Spiegel said. But constant connectivity means there’s no longer a disconnect between when media is taken and when it could be shared. Or, as Spiegel said, “We no longer have to capture the ‘real world’ and recreate it online – we simply live and communicate at the same time.”

“The selfie makes sense as the fundamental unit of communication on Snapchat because it marks the transition between digital media as self-expression and digital media as communication,” he said.

Last week Princeton researchers released a widely covered study saying Facebook would lose 80% of its users by 2015-2017. But now Facebook’s data scientists have turned the study’s silly “correlation equals causation” methodology of tracking Google search volume against it to show Princeton would lose all of its students by 2021.

the critical error in the non-peer-reviewed study is stating that since the volume of searches for “Facebook” began declining in 2012, it must mean there’s an ongoing decline in Facebook usage. Yeah, no. Back in Facebook’s web heyday around 2007, many people did surf to the social network by searching for “Facebook” or “Facebook login.” But then this thing called mobile came along and people started getting to Facebook by opening an app, not searching for a website. So searches for “Facebook” declining doesn’t prove much considering over half of Facebook’s traffic now comes from mobile. Since 2012 Facebook has kept growing to its current 1.19 billion users, and it has never had an overall decline in user count.

While the online ad industry falls deeper in love with native ads that fade into the background of Web pages, consumers prefer ads that get in their face by taking over their computer screens. At least, that’s according to a new study on high-impact ads conducted by Ipsos ASI on behalf of Undertone.

It’s perhaps not surprising that Undertone and Ipsos found bigger ads drove more brand recall, since consumers are likely to remember big ads that interrupt their Web surfing. But it is surprising that respondents said they liked full-screen takeovers the best. These ads received likability scores that were 30 to 49 percent higher than standard display units, according to Undertone

One word of caution: This study primarily focuses on display ads—that is, it compared high-impact display ads with standard banners. Native was not part of the research. It would be interesting to see what consumers thought of native ads vs. full-screen takeovers, if given the choice.

Since September, referrals from Facebook have grown 48.85 percent, and represented 17.41 percent of all website referrals in November.

The findings were based on 200,000 websites from around the world, accounting for more than 250 million unique visitors each month.

Last month, this behemoth of a social network drove more than twice the referrals all 7 of the other social media platforms sent to sites, combined.

In 2014, internet penetration in the main Western European markets will continue to vary substantially, from 58.0% and 64.0% in Italy and Spain, respectively, to more than 74% in France and Germany.

The social network decided that since status updates from pages behave differently than photo, video and link posts, they should be treated differently. While users may see more status updates from friends, pages may see a decline in reach for these types of posts, writes Facebook’s Chris Turitzin, Product Manager, News Feed Ranking:

Page admins can expect a decrease in the distribution of their text status updates, but they may see some increases in engagement and distribution for other story types.