s more and more studies find, the News Feed is the most effective place for advertising on Facebook. While an ad can get noticed on the sidebar, Facebook users are much more likely to engage on News Feed.

News Feed ads, compared to the sidebar, have 44x higher clickthrough rates (CTR), 67 percent lower cost per click (CPC) and a 5x higher conversion rate.

Marin saw a 45 percent increase in mobile-only Facebook advertising spending from Q2 to Q3. Marin’s data also indicate that CTR is 187 percent higher on mobile, while CPCs for ads served on mobile News Feed are 22 percent lower.

many marketers and Facebook page admins are reporting that they’re seeing an extreme drop in organic reach — as much as 44 percent in some cases — and it has been going on for months.

Komfo, a social marketing firm, studied fan penetration among 5,000 Facebook pages of various sizes from August through November with the following findings: 42% decrease in fan penetration 31% increase in viral amplification 28% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR)

In a study of 689 posts of 21 large brand pages found that in the week of Facebook’s announcement, organic reach dipped an average of 44 percent. Tobin pointed out that the previously accepted reach percentage of 16 percent can now be as low as 3 percent.

the exponential growth of sharing may not, actually, be helping Facebook. And with the explosion of dedicated mobile sharing apps, the industry may be evolving in ways that Zuckerberg never foresaw.

Facebook is now trying to cram so much "sharing" through a single service that it is overwhelming many of its core users.

Facebook knows it has a problem. It planned a major redesign that gave users more control over the News Feed. But it was scrapped when the first batch of users showed low engagement with the new design. 

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.

.Designate staff and agency roles: “Make sure everyone essential is there and that each person has a clear set of responsibilities”,

5.Streamline necessary approvals: Obtain pre-approvals where needed from legal. Capital One even had a lawyer on call to ensure their ability to react fast.

6.Rehearse the process: The command center team needs to practice “to see who makes the final calls and pushes the buttons”, said McLean. MasterCard does “mock examples first so we’re ready for prime time”, Cohen reported.

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.

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.)

hen you advertise with +Post, not only do you get an ad placed within the Google+ network; you get your social post placed – as an ad – throughout Google’s entire display network. That means access to ad space on over 2 million sites worldwide.

This lets brands think of the entire web as their social stream.” This is pretty powerful, and creates more of a two-way conversation than other networks have been able to do for advertisers. Now a social post – whether it’s a photo, video, or even a Google Hangout – can be used as a display ad, so not only can an advertiser drive clicks to their site, but drive engagement with an interested audience, no matter where that audience spends their time.

Ignite analysts reviewed 689 posts across 21 brand pages (all of significant size, across a variety of industries) and found that, in the week since December 1, organic reach and organic reach percentage have each declined by 44% on average, with some pages seeing declines as high as 88%. Only one page in the analysis had improved reach, which came in at 5.6%.

As reach declined, the raw number of engaged users plunged as well, falling on average by 35%. Some pages saw engaged users fall as much as 76%. Only one page in the data set had an increase in the number of engaged users, coming in at 0.7%.

To add salt to an open wound, current research from Forrester and Wildfire shows that engaged users are a brand’s best customers.  They are more likely to purchase, recommend and prefer brands when they are socially engaged with that brand.  With fewer engaged users (-35%), brands bottom line are further penalized by the recent changes.