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The rise in mobile shopping also brings about another fascinating trend, what we’re calling “always-on shopping”. Computer-based traffic to ecommerce sites traditionally peaked between Monday and Friday and trailed off during the weekend. Mobile traffic has somewhat opposite behaviour since shoppers use their phones most during the weekends. So when you combine mobile, tablet and computer traffic to ecommerce sites, you no longer find any discernable spikes when people are shopping online. In other words, shopping is no longer something people go and do anymore; it’s something they are always doing.

No doubt, the Gallup results are accurate. It just turns out that we are not the individuals we imagine. Our consumer behavior is predictable, including our denial of that behavior.

Do consumers engage brands because they are already customers, or do we become buyers because of the brand exposure on social media? This is research that needs to be conducted. 

Poshmark saw a 37% increase in app installs, along with a 28% reduction in ad costs. Target launched a campaign to drive installs of their mobile Cartwheel app, resulting in an uptick of downloads and 43% savings per install on new users.

Instagram users do not want to know that they are being advertised to. Instead, be subtle and charming with your ads, fitting in with the context your users expect. 

Actions A suite of action buttons are now featured prominently near the top of Pages. These buttons enable people to take actions like book an appointment for a haircut, order a pizza, send a message or write a Recommendation.

More visibility for stories Since launching stories in 2017, Facebook has been experimenting with ways to make it easier for people to engage with your story and with this update, people can view your business story by tapping on the Page profile photo.

Events ticket sales 700 million people use Facebook Events each month and now businesses will be able to sell tickets directly through Facebook Pages. Facebook is also creating event-specific ads to help with promotion and marketing.

when a user gives Facebook a phone number for two-factor authentication or in order to receive alerts about new log-ins to a user’s account, that phone number became targetable by an advertiser within a couple of weeks

I’ve been trying to get Facebook to disclose shadow contact information to users for almost a year now. But it has even refused to disclose these shadow details to users in Europe, where privacy law is stronger and explicitly requires companies to tell users what data it has on them.

To test the shadow information finding, the researchers tried a real-world test. They uploaded a list of hundreds of landline numbers from Northeastern University. These are numbers that people who work for Northeastern are unlikely to have added to their accounts, though it’s very likely that the numbers would be in the address books of people who know them and who might have uploaded them to Facebook in order to “find friends.” The researchers found that many of these numbers could be targeted with ads, and when they ran an ad campaign, the ad turned up in the Facebook news feed of Mislove, whose landline had been included in the file; I confirmed this with my own test targeting his landline number.

“I think that many users don’t fully understand how ad targeting works today: that advertisers can literally specify exactly which users should see their ads by uploading the users’ email addresses, phone numbers, names+dates of birth, etc,” said Mislove. “In describing this work to colleagues, many computer scientists were surprised by this, and were even more surprised to learn that not only Facebook, but also Google, Pinterest, and Twitter all offer related services. Thus, we think there is a significant need to educate users about how exactly targeted advertising on such platforms works today.”

There are certainly creepier practices happening in the advertising industry, but it’s troubling this is happening at Facebook because of its representations about letting you control your ad experience. It’s disturbing that Facebook is reducing the privacy of people who want their accounts to be more secure by using the information they provide for that purpose to data-mine them for ads.

When I asked the company last year about whether it used shadow contact information for ads, it gave me inaccurate information, and it hadn’t made the practice clear in its extensive messaging to users about ads

Create multiple versions of your campaign that are identical in every way but the subject line, and we'll send them to randomly selected parts of your list. We'll automatically send the campaign with the best open rate to the remainder of your list, and you'll learn a little about what kind of subject line appeals to your subscribers. Create an A/B Testing Campaign

Instagram also outlined its coming Creator Profiles, which code hacker Jane Manchun Wong previewed recently (below), while it also shared some usage stats, including that 69% of users say they come to Instagram to interact with celebrities, and over 80% of accounts proactively follow a business on the platform.

Instagram also noted that it will continue to ramp up its push to remove inauthentic activity, including purchased followers and likes, in order to clean-up its platform and improve the integrity of its metrics

The company is also debuting Video Ad Sequencing, which will allow marketers to string together a variety of different ad types should they chose. For example, advertisers can show a 15-second TrueView ad (which are the skippable type) to build awareness, followed at the next opportunity by longer spots (because that's what consumers want, right?) to further the brand story and later a 6-second bumper ad to drive purchase.