Social Media Training for Marketers

The people talking metric lumps together the number of people who have liked, commented or shared a brand's post or page, or engaged in some other way. But some advertisers place different values on various forms of interactions - for instance, attributing a higher value to a comment than a like.

Without Facebook-reported daily likes and comments, marketers and agencies will need to track them manually. For those tracking larger pages with multiple posts, that could get tedious. Companies like PageLever could benefit from the change.

"Our study finds that the mere presence of social media icons on a Web page where we shop appears to cause us to feel as if our purchases are being watched by our social network, and we adjust our buying decisions accordingly," said Claudia Townsend, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Miami School of Business Administration, in a statement. "Marketers should be aware that the placement of these symbols in their Web design strategy could have a major impact on buying behavior."

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."