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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.

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.

By aggregating personal data and preferences based on your check-ins, applications can begin to tailor suggestions for you, effectively driving decision-making and transactions. 

With Foursquare’s latest iOS update, the company is continuing its vision of telling you where to go next, not just where you are.

Foursquare is rolling out push notification recommendations and an application redesign that makes it easier for users to find out what’s happening around them.

Back in April, the fast feeder was re-launching its Facebook page and in an effort to get a fresh start, offered all of the followers of its previous page a free Big Mac to not join the new page (giving away up to 1,000 Big Macs). The rationale: the brand had low engagement and a lot of fans whose activity consisted of making negative cracks and asking for discounts. In the wake of the stunt, about two-thirds, or 28,000, of its Facebook fans took up the offer, leaving just 8,000 fans on the new page.

Burger King Scandinavia marketing director Sven Hars stands by the decision to prioritize quality over quantity. "This campaign gave us the opportunity to get rid of all the fans that just liked us because of freebies," says Hars. "We stopped focusing on how many likes we had, and put time and resources into finding out what to talk about and how to engage our fans."

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.

“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.”

To date, there are still more installed PCs in the world than there are smartphones or tablets. Next year, that's likely to change.  According to projections from mobile analyst Ben Evans, the number of smartphones in use around the world will pass that of PCs for the first time next year. According to a chart from Evans, the estimate of installed PCs in the world is a little north of 1.6 billion. The global install base of smartphones is near 1.3 billion and growing at a much faster clip than PCs. If you add tablets into the equation (with a tick more than 200 million installed across the world) then mobile devices are almost on par with PCs already. Evans predicts that the total number of installed smartphones in the world will eclipse PCs in 2014 sometime in the second quarter.

IDC predicts that 314.2 million PCs (desktop and laptop/notebook) will be shipped in 2013, down from 349.4 in 2012. That is a 10.1% shortfall year-over-year, the biggest single year drop in PC history.  On the other end, smartphones are predicted to eclipse one billion shipments this year. IDC shows smartphone shipment growth of 39.3% year-over-year with little sign of slowing down.

IDC predicts that 1.7 billion smartphones will ship in 2017, versus estimated PC shipments of 305.1 million. Shipments, of course, don't equal sales of actual devices to consumers. It is also important to note that even sales do not mean an addition to the installed base, as many as older models are replaced by newer ones. In aggregate, the install base rises over time—just not at the rate of shipments or sales. 

Recent changes to Facebook’s News Feed algorithms have lavished online publishers with unprecedented referral traffic, creating a ripple effect throughout the news industry. In September, stately newspaper sites set a digital traffic record, seeing an 11% gain in visitors since June, while Facebook referrals from BuzzFeed’s diverse partner network of sites increased by 69% from August to October.

But traffic-bound publishers are growing anxious that yet another algorithm change could erase the big gains of the last few months — that traffic could disappear just as quickly as it came. “We’re starting to get very nervous,” one staffer at a major paper told BuzzFeed. “It’s scary that they can get everyone hooked on such high referral traffic then take it away so quickly with a quick flip of their algorithm,”

“They’re gonna keep tinkering with the algorithm, so I expect the referral surge will taper off. I’m not worried, though. Facebook has a hundred billion reasons why they need to support ‘high-quality content,’ which means they won’t abandon publishers anytime soon.”

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

Although peak Twitter hours coincide with the workday, retweets are actually higher during our off hours. On average, we retweet more on Sundays than we do on any other day of the week, and Twitter sees more retweet activity from 10-11 p.m. than it does for the rest of the day. Hashtags and at-replies help: The use of hashtags and at-replies was also found to have a positive effect on the amount of times a tweet would be retweeted.

tweets with images are almost 25% more likely to get retweeted--an increase from .404 retweets/1K followers to .496 retweets.

tweeting in all caps will net you .8 retweets on average per 1,000 followers, as opposed to tweets with only one-tenth of their text in caps, which averages out to .147 retweets per 1,000 followers.