Group items tagged

You can see tab engagement begin to decline on Feb. 28, the day brands were able to opt-in to Timeline. There’s a steeper leading into March 30, the day all Pages were forced to convert.

Why the general drop-off? PageLever founder Jeff Widman believes it’s a combination of two things: That brands can no longer set a custom tab as their default landing page for non-fans, and Tabs are less visible in the Timeline layout.

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.

The rule does NOT apply to standard images you upload to your page, but only images you promote in the newsfeed Thumbnail images for videos or links that you promote in the newsfeed as ads are subject to the 20% rule As of this week, announced in a tiny update on Facebook’s Developer Blog, the rule applies to application icons (which includes timeline tab images too) ***UPDATE***: Facebook reps have indicated that the text rule does NOT apply to the thumbnail icons, but they still recommend using images with little to no text.

Product shots (i.e. real life photos of a product) do not count against the rule. This means name tags, stop signs, text on the actual product, etc. – that’s all good to go and does not count towards your 20% text allotment “Tune-in” images for TV shows or movies have leeway as the title of the show/feature, the tune-in info, and the names of the actors and actresses involved do NOT count towards the 20%

consumers are more trusting of content they can find on their own terms, rather than that which is pushed out to them by brands.

Looking solely at US respondents, only 15% trust social media marketing, 12% information about companies on mobile applications, 10% ads on websites, and 9% text messages from companies or brands.

Consumers display far more trust in what Forrester tabs “self-selected digital pull content.”

30% of teens name Twitter as their most important social network, close behind the 33% who tab Facebook, per results [pdf] from Piper Jaffray’s 25th Semi-Annual teen research project, which surveyed more than 5,000 teens.

the proportion of teens naming Facebook as their most important has dropped 9% points, while those naming Twitter have grown by 3% points. Instagram is also gaining, up 5% points to 17% indicating it as their most important social network.

Facebook’s drop is a worrisome sign for the social network, as teens are often used as a leading indicator of future trends. According to data from Experian Hitwise, Facebook’s leading share of US visits to social networking sites and forums has dropped from 63.2% in March 2012 to 58.5% in March 2013.

That all makes sense given separate results from the same survey indicating that 71% of company marketers plan to increase their digital marketing budgets this year.

Content marketing edges SEO (65%) and email marketing for engagement/retention (also 65%) as the most popular digital channel tabbed for a budget increase.

Other digital channels and disciplines to get a budget hike this year include social media investment (for engagement/retention – 62%), mobile marketing (for acquisition – 61%), and social media investment (for acquisition – 61%).

After Facebook Watch, Lasso, and IGTV failed to become hits with teens, the company has been quietly developing another youthful video product. Multiple sources confirm that Facebook has spent months building LOL, a special feed of funny videos and GIF-like clips.

LOL is currently in private beta with around 100 high school students who signed non-disclosure agreements with parental consent to do focus groups and one-on-one testing with Facebook staff.

Facebook confirmed it is privately testing LOL as a home for funny meme content with a very small number of US users. While those testers experience LOL as a replacement for their Watch tab, Facebook says there’s no plans to roll out LOL in Watch and the team is still finalizing whether it will become a separate feature in one of Facebook’s main app or a standalone app. Facebook declined to give a formal statement but told us the details we had were accurate.With teens increasingly turning to ephemeral Stories for sharing and content consumption, Facebook is desperate to lure them back to its easily-monetizable feeds.