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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."

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.”

Target is leveraging Pinterest with a new microsite that merchandises products with the combination of top-pinned items and best reviews on Target.com.

The products are set up vertically to mimic the same experience of a mobile news feed on a social media site. Clicking on a product shows consumers the number of reviews the product has received on Target.com and its average rating out of five stars.

The video ads, which the company says are still being tested to a limited number of users, will start playing automatically as users scroll through their news feed, the central real estate in Facebook's desktop and mobile platforms. They will initially play without sound; users can stop the ad by scrolling past it in the news feed.

In a November survey of 735 Facebook users by global marketing consultancy Analytic Partners, 83% of users said they would find video ads "intrusive" and would likely "ignore" them.

Subway was among the companies that placed ads containing video that users had to start manually. Mr. Pace of Subway said roughly 88 million people saw the ad and "millions" of people clicked on it. "It worked pretty darn well," he added.

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

“[Marketers'] prioritization of images and hashtags over targeting specific audiences is completely backwards, and may reflect a more troubling lack of understanding about basic social media strategy,” she says. “How do you know which images are going to resonate with your audience if you don’t know who your audience is?”

Strauss identified that a sizable number of marketers “are using social channels in a non-useful manner: posting randomly, without a goal and without a true understanding of what can be accomplished on any particular social channel.”

If social content is to help your business, it’s important to post frequently and consistently. Thirty percent of managers post less than once a day, or they don’t have a schedule at all, leaving them outpaced by more productive users.

mobile platforms combined to account for 60% of total digital media time spent, up from 50% a year ago. And mobile apps accounted for more than half of all digital media time spent in May at 51%.

mobile sharing is dramatically outpacing desktop sharing: in Q2, sharing from smartphones and tablets grew more than 30%, while sharing from the desktop declined 5%.

Pinterest and Twitter have done the best job harnessing mobile users. While half of all shares on Facebook are mobile, that number jumps to 75% of shares on Pinterest and Twitter.

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.

Due to time constraints, there is a legitimate need for a centralized digital content hub (aka newsroom) where the dwindling number of reporters can find everything they might need.

Falkow's advice: "Take advantage of all this low hanging fruit by optimizing an oft-overlooked company asset: your newsroom aka your press page."

Search is the now most trusted mechanism for finding news and business information according to the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer, which indicates the need for companies to create multiple, highly optimized discovery paths.

I am surprised it has taken this long for Forrester to attack the performance of Facebook. It is something we have seen developing for years. The challenge is the space has evolved making it less and less relevant for brands in the eyes of the Consumer. The shift to mobile has made Facebook pages virtually obsolete. People very infrequently drift outside of their newsfeed on mobile devices.

One recent study of sweepstakes found that only 11.8% of participants shared the Facebook app with others. In the past that number was well over 50%. You add to that the way Facebook shares content (known as the Facebook algorithm or Edgerank) only 5-15% of their friends would even have the potential to see it in their newsfeed

It is interesting that blog posts shared only on Twitter tended to have 63% more page views than those shared on Facebook and 117% more page views than those not shared at all. 

Sharing your blog posts also dramatically increases the number of inbound links a post will receive. Posts only shared on Twitter had 54% more inbound links than those shared just on Facebook, and 113% more than those not shared at all. 

With each subsequent Tweet of an existing blog post, Tom noticed that he got around 75% as many Retweets as the time before. What was really interesting here is that even though he got more Retweets each time, this was directly proportionate to the number he got originally.

2. Hit multiple time zones

3. Reach your new followers

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.

Reach is not public data, and very few people (likely less than 20 companies across the globe) have the ability to access a significant number of pages’ reach metrics. So most (if not all) of what you’ve read on the subject is probably irrelevant, or greatly exaggerated.

Among the 142 industries (Facebook page categories) we have in the sample, only 18 are up or steady. But among the 124 categories seeing their organic reach going down, there are still a lot of them reaching more than 15 or 20% of their fans organically for each post.

We focused on the Organic Reach metric for posts (the only one that cannot include paid reach) of over 6,000 pages. We then averaged Organic reach by industry and compared the results between the two periods (July 2013 & May 2014)

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.

the majority of teens now consider Facebook the alternate choice. 

This speaks to a shift in thinking amongst teens, in that privacy has become a concern. Users still want to be connected, but want to choose their connections more carefully, and compartmentalize their relationships. They want to share their lives, but to target where, what, and sometimes how long something is shown.

78% of our respondents counted among those who accessed their favorite social media application at least three times a day. Regardless of which app selected (and make no mistake, Facebook is included), users log on several times daily

4. QuintlyQuintly is a social media benchmarking and analytics solution that tracks and compares the performance of your social media marketing activities. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, or all of them, their tool visualizes and checks your social marketing success, benchmarking your numbers against your competitors or best practices.