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people in 14 countries will begin seeing a link to a “Tips for spotting false news” guide at the top of their News Feed. Clicking it brings users to a section offering 10 tips as well access to related resources in the Facebook Help Center. Facebook is also collaborating with news and media literacy organizations in several of countries to produce additional resources.

“Improving news literacy is a global priority, and we need to do our part to help people understand how to make decisions about which sources to trust,” Adam Mosseri, Facebook’s VP of News Feed, wrote in a blog post about the initiative. “False news runs counter to our mission to connect people with the stories they find meaningful. We will continue working on this, and we know we have more work to do.”

It’s working with third-party fact checking organizations to flag false content in the News Feed, the company recently announced the Facebook Journalism Project to work with news organizations on products and business models, and it’s one of the funders of the new News Integrity Initiative, a $14 million project “focused on helping people make informed judgments about the news they read and share online.”

no putting your sponsor message below the “more” button, where no one will see it. And no disguising it ambiguously as “thanks Nike,” as if Nike was just cool enough to let you use their corporate getaway beach house because you asked nicely. And! No burying the disclosure in obscure terminology, like #sp or #partner, deep in the sea of hashtags.

Seeking questions ask for product-specific use cases, and look for facts rather than opinions. “Does this hotel offer free wifi?”

Our study found that most questions asked in automotive (81%), travel (79%), and consumer electronics (79%) were seeking questions.

Samsung reps answer shopper questions on retailer sites under the moniker “Mr. Samsung,” and find that questions reveal large gaps in product information: 91% of the content they provide in answers is not already on the site.

Only 18% of clicks on Google search results go to paid results Less than 1% of clicks on Twitter.com go to paid results The best Facebook ads get less than 10% CTR (in fact the average is .05%) Etc, etc, etc.

Organic digital traffic (search, blog, links, etc) counts for 90% or more, with $5 billion of investment. While paid (affiliate, ppc, display, etc) sends the remaining 10% of traffic but gets 800% more budget at $45 billion.

1. Create A Content Strategy Not A Blog To develop a content strategy, make sure you have great answers to these questions: Are you going to be able to attract the right people? Why will they care about you? What are you doing to earn their interest? Why are thy going to share? Will they like and trust you more?

In fact, according to McKinsey, companies that adopt social technologies can see a 50% increase in customer satisfaction, 48% increase in business leads, and 24% increase in revenue.

Social business apps allow users to follow the people, data and documents that matter to them at any given time.

To be transformative, social can't be an add-on. Social must be a strategy that is integrated into business processes across the organisation.

The Facebook news feed algorithm appears to be calculated both per fan and per type of post. That means a person might see Coca-Cola’s photo posts, but not the company’s link posts. There are six post types: a text-only status update, a photo, a link, a video, a platform post, and a question. The first four are the most commonly used.

After some research, its clear that a Facebook page gets more fan engagement from photos than links, statuses, or videos. In fact, photos get as much as twenty times more engagement.

My experiments show that you can get a good amount of clicks on links above photos.

Thursdays win out for the day with the most sharing. Social sharing in general is somewhat unpredictable pattern wise. But Thursday wins 10% more shares than all other days. In fact, 31% of the top 100 social share days in 2011 fell on Thursday.

“If you don’t publish daily, I’ve found that publishing on sequential days produces a signal multiplier effect on Twitter and via RSS.

27% of all content shares occur between 8am and 12pm EST. 

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."

The question was fielded among consumers who have accessed a social networking website, asking them how likely they would be to make any type of purchase on such a site in the following 12 months. Overall, 18% of respondents said they would be very likely (9%) or likely (9%) to do so. Interestingly, only 15% were neutral on the subject, with a solid majority unlikely (12%) or very unlikely (55%) to do so.

While women appear to be the more active gender on social media, it’s men who are more interested in shopping on the platforms, according to the Javelin survey results. In fact, 23% of male respondents reported being at least likely to make a purchase directly through a social network this year, compared to 14% of female respondents.

doom and gloom hasn’t made it to Madison Avenue, where Twitter is more valuable than ever. The biggest reason is that unlike Wall Street and Silicon Valley, advertisers and agencies don’t expect Twitter to be Facebook. In fact, they’re thrilled it isn’t.

This is where one of the big Silicon Valley-Madison Avenue divides comes into play. In the Valley, everything is about scale. Big numbers are everything. But advertisers have plenty of scale options. What they’re looking for is different tools that help it solve specific problems for clients. Twitter, even with its small reach compared to Facebook, can do things Facebook cannot.

“Twitter has a more intellectually engaged audience,” Huge’s vp of user experience Jessica L’Esperance said. “It’s niche, which is why it’s powerful.”

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.

While women make up about 70% of the PR workforce, they only hold about 30% of the top positions in the industry.

This raises the question, are big agencies losing talented women — some of whom start firms that ultimately become competition because of rigid policies?

A recent study by Bain & Company found that 43% of women aspire to top management within the first two years of their position, compared with 34% of men. “Both genders are equally confident about their ability to reach a top management position at that stage,” reads a blog post on the research. “This suggests that women are entering the workforce with the wind in their sails, feeling highly qualified after success at the university level.”

. Twitter has 6 distinct communication networks The Pew Research Center and the Social Media Research Foundation combined on a report that analyzed thousands of Twitter conversations to come up with six distinct communication networks.

4. You have less than an hour to respond on Twitter Consumers expect a lot from you on Twitter, as recent research by Lithium Technologies confirms. The real-time nature of Twitter has led to incredible expectations. According to Lithium, 53% of users who tweet at a brand expect a response within the hour. The percentage increases to 72% for those with a complaint.

Native advertising has come under fire for being deceptive. It is, claim critics, an attempt to fool readers into thinking they’re consuming content produced by the publication itself when in fact they’re consuming an ad. It’s this criticism that led Outbrain CEO Yaron Galai to ban ads masquerading as articles.

Outbrain banned native advertising from the inventory of content it promotes on websites.

In an AdAge post, Rafat Ali suggests the following ways to improve branded content: Approach a native advertising assignment from the customer’s perspective, answering their questions and solving their problems. Go deep, with a narrow focus and uniquely valuable content that appeals to a defined audience subset. Offer data not easily found elsewhere that provides genuine insight, including new ways to understand the business. Approach native advertising like an editor, not a marketer.

Another way to get shared by influencers in your field is to research which sites they visit frequently. Then either guest post for one of the sites or pitch an article about your company to people who already write for it.

Involve influencers in the creation of a piece of content, and they have a vested interest to help promote it. Do an interview with a targeted expert, request a guest post for your blog or get a quote for an article you’re already writing.

Take time to research, write, edit and fact-check articles. Shift your thinking away from quick fixes and ideas that have probably already been done. Instead, come up with unique concepts and strive for more ambitious projects.

But then there’s the whole obsession now with tying content to revenues—in other words, tracking whether people who are consuming your content will eventually buy something from you, and putting a hard number on each piece of content you create. Do you think that’s misguided? Oh, I think there’s no question it’s misguided. It’s been shown over and over again to be misguided—that in a world of zero marginal cost, being trusted is the single most urgent way to build a business. You don’t get trusted if you’re constantly measuring and tweaking and manipulating so that someone will buy from you.

I don’t have any problem with measurements, per se; I’m just saying that most of the time when organizations start to measure stuff, they then seek to industrialize it, to poke it into a piece of software, to hire ever cheaper people to do it.

There are constantly trends and fads on the Internet, and people make a good living amplifying them. But I think that industrialized content marketing is one of those fads, and it will end up where they all do: petered out because human beings are too smart to fall for its appeal.