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Brands may not adopt Facebook's new ad media in large numbers: It seems unlikely, but it is possible that marketers are just not prepared for the dynamic new ad model Facebook has unveiled.

FTC pushes for much more obvious disclosure of sponsored ads in users' newsfeeds: Allowing marketers to turn their posts into ads within the newsfeed is not new--Twitter is already doing the same thing with Promoted Tweets--but is the fact these are paid ads obvious enough to users? The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a longstanding standard that people must recognize ads as such and cannot be duped into thinking advertising is content.

"MySpace felt a lot of pressure to monetize quickly after it was sold to News Corp. And I think as result, they added advertising, they added things we might consider to be spammy, things users found intrusive."

Over the past year, he's noticed more friends subverting Facebook's real name policy. "I have seen a growing trend of people who will shut down one page, let you know that they're opening a new one, and then they'll use an alias,"

Americans spent four hours and 43 minutes a day (!) watching live TV and shows on their DVRs in the third quarter of this year. That’s down from four hours and 46 minutes in Q3 2012.

Comcast, the country’s biggest pay TV provider, said 70 percent of its subscribers watch stuff on demand, and that TV shows account for 40 percent of its usage. (If you factor in pay-TV channels like HBO, the number jumps up to 60 percent.) So once you do factor in on-demand usage, you see a different story. Nielsen said that there has been a small increase in the number of people watching live TV, and a significant increase in the number of “timeshifted” TV watchers — people watching on either DVRs or VOD.

while Comcast, Nielsen and some of the TV networks are trying to figure out how to change this, right now timeshifted TV is much less valuable for them than live TV. (Hence the warm reception for Twitter’s “we’ll bring our viewers to live TV” pitch.)

100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. 

But 40 is the magic number that Jeff Bullas found was most effective in his study of retail brands on Facebook. He measured engagement of posts, defined by “like” rate and comment rate, and the ultra-short 40-character posts received 86 percent higher engagement than others.

The ideal length of a headline is 6 words

What we found is that Twitter is viewed much like Facebook was in the summer of 2012: While many advertisers use it as a marketing channel, only a minority actually place ads there.

Among the respondents, 70% currently use Twitter as a marketing channel and 80% say they plan to use Twitter in the next 12 months. But only 46% say they've ever bought an ad on Twitter, whether a promoted tweet, trend, account or an "Amplify" TV deal.

In the coming year, 59.2% said they expect their Twitter advertising budget to "modestly increase" or "significantly increase."

more “advanced” metrics had generally seen the most growth. For example, engagement—the top KPI—had jumped 32% in the past two years, while sentiment tracking showed year-over-year growth of 38%.

sales conversions and brand ambassadors dropped by 38% and 58%, respectively, between 2012 and 2014. Still, web traffic as well as followers, fans and group size—simple and relatively useless figures—ranked second and third, which Useful Social Media said was “slightly disconcerting.”

In 2016, BuzzSumo analyzed more than 800 million Facebook posts. Based on their findings, posts with less than 50 characters “were more engaging than long posts.” According to another, more precise study by Jeff Bullas, posts with 80 characters or less receive 66 percent higher engagement:

Paid posts: 5 to 18 words Every Facebook ad needs three types of content: a Headline, Main Text, and a Description. After analyzing 37,259 Facebook ads, AdEspresso found that ads did best when the copy in each element was clear and concise. According to the data, the ideal length for a: Headline, the first text people read, is 5 words. Main Text, the snippet above your image or video, is 14 words. Description, the text that lives directly below your headline, is 18 words.

Videos: 30 to 60 seconds With video, one of the primary measures of success is how long people watch, also known as your video retention rate. In 2016, Kinetic Social tracked 2 billion social ad impressions and found that 44 percent of 30- to 60-second videos on Facebook were viewed to completion. Meanwhile, videos that ran under 30 seconds or over two minutes saw completion rates of 26 and 31 percent, respectively. A more recent poll, from 2018, showed that 33 percent of Facebook users preferred to watch shorter videos, from 30 to 50 seconds long.