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One of the many ways that ads get in front of your eyeballs on Facebook and Instagram is that the social networking giant lets an advertiser upload a list of phone numbers or email addresses it has on file; it will then put an ad in front of accounts associated with that contact information. A clothing retailer can put an ad for a dress in the Instagram feeds of women who have purchased from them before, a politician can place Facebook ads in front of anyone on his mailing list, or a casino can offer deals to the email addresses of people suspected of having a gambling addiction. Facebook calls this a “custom audience.”

You might assume that you could go to your Facebook profile and look at your “contact and basic info” page to see what email addresses and phone numbers are associated with your account, and thus what advertisers can use to target you. But as is so often the case with this highly efficient data-miner posing as a way to keep in contact with your friends, it’s going about it in a less transparent and more invasive way.

Facebook is not content to use the contact information you willingly put into your Facebook profile for advertising. It is also using contact information you handed over for security purposes and contact information you didn’t hand over at all, but that was collected from other people’s contact books, a hidden layer of details Facebook has about you that I’ve come to call “shadow contact information.”

the new social model is simply to harvest social signals and sell personalized ads, however and wherever possible.

The purpose of Facebook’s upcoming mobile ad network is to sell ads outside of Facebook.com and its mobile app. This “multiple app” strategy often accompanies a network’s own app offerings — in Facebook’s case, Messenger, Facebook Camera and Paper. According to Elgan: If Facebook’s direction or strategy isn’t clear, let me spell it out: Harvest personal data from multiple apps, then sell personalized advertising in multiple locations.   Here’s an oversimplified example: An ad for a Starbucks promotion presented to you in a mobile game (sold through Facebook’s upcoming ad network) might be based on knowledge that you spend a ton of time at Starbucks — information harvested from the Moves app.   As you can see, there’s no Facebook — no social network — involved in this series of events. But Facebook gets paid anyway.

Shazam execs' talk of using their proprietary data for advertising puts them in league with The Weather Company, Pandora and Amazon, which are all mining information like pollen count, song choices and product purchases to inform ad targeting. Mr. McGurn said the Shazam app ingests the live audio feed from 160 TV networks every day. That positions the app as an ally to TV networks trying to stem their share of ad spend from being siphoned online.

Shazam is also currying favor with TV networks as a way to drive viewership. For last fall's Country Music Association Awards, Shazam pushed alerts featuring the show's air date and time to the in-app news feeds of eight million users who might be interested in watching, like those who had previously tagged a Blake Shelton song. Ten million people received such a notification for The Grammys.

People who use Shazam to "tag" the game's broadcast this year will be shown a new Twitter-like timeline. The live content feed will document the game -- from tweets to photos to ads -- and is designed to keep people using Shazam for the duration. But even if people tune in and out of the app, Shazam has created a new ad-retargeting program that plugs into Facebook.

Facebook is reintroducing Atlas, the underused platform it bought from Microsoft last year.

it will allow them to buy ads on non-Facebook websites and apps, using Facebook targeting data

these ads aren’t “Facebook ads.” But it is also playing up the notion that the ads marketers buy via Atlas will be more effective than other big ad platforms, because they use Facebook’s data.

hen you advertise with +Post, not only do you get an ad placed within the Google+ network; you get your social post placed – as an ad – throughout Google’s entire display network. That means access to ad space on over 2 million sites worldwide.

This lets brands think of the entire web as their social stream.” This is pretty powerful, and creates more of a two-way conversation than other networks have been able to do for advertisers. Now a social post – whether it’s a photo, video, or even a Google Hangout – can be used as a display ad, so not only can an advertiser drive clicks to their site, but drive engagement with an interested audience, no matter where that audience spends their time.

For Facebook, the new Premium Video Ads are an attempt to capture TV-size ad dollars with the lure of offering targeting capabilities — as well as reach — that television can’t match.

The video ads “autoplay” when a Facebook user scrolls through his or her newsfeed, but the sound is muted by default. As with any new form of advertising, the approach risks irritating users: NBC’s promos have already garnered a few negative comments (“Why can’t I get this crap off my timeline,” one commenter said) but generally reaction has been favorable.

Beatty said NBC will evaluate the effectiveness of the Facebook video ads in the short term on engagement and metrics like number of shares.

MoPub offers a comprehensive platform that monetizes ad space on mobile platforms and social media, while providing real-time bidding for prime advertising slots and times. In 2013, the company was purchased by Twitter for $350 millio

Despite the silence from Facebook on the matter, the company has made moves in the past that would indicate at least a desire to further its reach in the mobile advertising market. Last year, Facebook released Audience Network, which is meant to build out its infrastructure and enable advertisers to run Facebook ads on third-party mobile phones. Another such program is Atlas, which tracks users anonymously and provides feedback to advertisers. Facebook has also taken out a patent on a program that would enable advertisers to target only the most “influential” people on social media. Theoretically, these programs would be stitched together as part of any MoPub-like system.

Marketers are siphoning budgets from display campaigns on Twitter to its video ads, which when synchronised with TV media buys can lead to a 10 per cent lift in their return-on-investment from the legacy medium.

To propel its own video offering, Twitter is working on features such as demographic targeting and validation, gross rating point and target rating point as well as reporting.

We are focused on live premium content in all sports, news and politics as well as entertainment to bring together for our users what they are already talking about, what they already care about," added Bain.  The company will be hoping live streaming help lift its monthly active users. It’s been an ongoing problem for the social network and while it moved up slightly in the quarter, up to 310 million compared to 305 million in the previous one, growth has been fairly stagnant for the last year.

Advertisers will have the option to turn their promoted tweets into different ad formats while still using the same creative and targeting elements. For example, tweet engagement campaigns could become native ads and promoted video campaigns will transform into in-app video ads.

The move is part of the platform’s expansion of its Twitter Publisher Network (TPN), which has now been renamed to Twitter Audience Platform.

Problem number one: Building a relevant and engaged audience on Snapchat is difficult, compared to other social networks.

Issue number two: Snapchat has its own vibe. It may be difficult for many companies to achieve Snapchat credibility without some help from the cool kids.

the third issue is, the challenge of creating continuous, credible, snap-worthy content that disappears can be significant.

Fewer marketers are using Instagram than other networks. 58% of marketers are on Instagram, compared to 94% on Twitter and 82% on Facebook. Naturally, less competition is going to translate to more opportunity. (Of course, as more marketers catch on, this will change.)

Instagram has a younger median age (27 years old), which may account for why users are more likely to interact with brands.

slick pics actually don’t produce nearly the same engagement rates as original “non-glossy pictures shot outside of a studio” – the agency’s description of what an “Instagram photo” should look like.

40% of Internet users across the world don’t see any point in “friending” a brand online. In the U.S. and the U.K., that figure rises to 55% and 63%, respectively. In emerging markets, consumers were more open to it.

there’s evidence that they want to engage with a brand online so long as they get something out of it. For example, the majority of shoppers in the study said they are open to receiving an ad or promotion from a brand on their mobile device that’s tied to their location.

half of respondents in the study said they are interested in brands sharing other users’ brand or product experiences with them and 42% said they want brands to help them make better product choices.

Twitter has now introduced consumer video uploading, purchased video analytics provider/influencer broker Niche, launched live streaming app Periscope and rolled out auto-play video.

Twitter’s mobile focus means that more than 90% of video views on the network come from mobile devices. For another, he said, Twitter is a superior place for the interaction between creators and their fans.

Niche is another Twitter-owned avenue that can help creators make money. Niche acts as an intermediary between video producers and brands, and Singh said Niche has doubled the amount it’s paying creators since Twitter acquired the company in February. (A Twitter spokesperson clarified that the average deal is now double the previous total.)

Facebook will round up your friends’ posts and photos from a particular place, like Manhattan’s famed Dominique Ansel Bakery, so you can see what they liked (the cronut, obviously) and what they didn’t. Place tips will also include information from the business page, like hours of operation, events, and menu details.

To determine your location, the app will use Wi-Fi, cell networks, GPS, and Bluetooth beacons placed at particular locations (a limited number in New York City so far).

But place tips will make better use of Facebook’s data, putting information front and center rather than making you comb through search results. The network’s rollout of Bluetooth beacons is a move to watch. Apple has been distributing iBeacons since the launch of iOS 7 in 2013, and we’ve seen some interesting uses of the technology, but it hasn’t yet gone mainstream. With Facebook now on board with beacons, we might see businesses adopt them at a much quicker pace. After all, few marketing moves make businesses happier than highly targeted, location-based, actionable ads.

Instead of complaining that you are being “forced” into “pay for play” on networks like Facebook, embrace the fact that social paid promotion is probably the most sophisticated marketing tool ever created.

There is a steep learning curve to doing it right, and the need for a regular investment of time to properly manage campaigns. Additionally, even for paid campaigns, you still need to have content that doesn’t trigger ad blindness. But the ability to target your messages to exactly the right people, and to creatively remarket to those who have already shown interest, is unparalleled.

There is a major side benefit to moving toward that kind of content, beyond just keeping you in the news feed: Truly engaging content is better for your business. It helps make your brand more respected and remembered. It develops positive feelings toward your business that help influence people when it’s time to make a buying decision.

The company is relaunching Groups by rolling it into its main app by the end of the month after quietly pulling the standalone app earlier this year, and it will be streamlining the service by cutting out several features, including an ability for Group administrators to pre-moderate comments; and a way to email send Group posts as emails to the whole group, while also adding in new features like threaded replies and the ability to post video and other media.

Almost exactly a year ago, Facebook announced that it too was killing off its Groups app so that it could integrate the feature closer with the core app experience. In both the case of LinkedIn and Facebook, the idea is somewhat the same: while we have our wider networks of friends and Pages that we follow on both platforms, sometimes there is value in communities that are focused around more specific interests, and ultimately, that might turn out to be the lever that brings more people in and out of using the main service.

conversations taking place in Groups will now appear in-stream on the LinkedIn feed, rather than in a separate tab. When group members are replying to posts, there will now be threaded replies, which will let people respond directly to comments within the thread.

Before now brands and publishers have participated in Groups through the personal accounts of people in their companies.

In the past year, as Facebook has tried to fix the platform, it prioritized Groups as a constructive activity on the social network, connecting people on the service in positive ways. Facebook shows more messages from Groups in the News Feed, too, so they have a better chance at reaching people.