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Facebook Adds Video And New Pricing To Its Mobile App Ads
Facebook just announced two changes to its mobile app install ads that should make them more appealing to advertisers. First, the company says it will now support video in these ad units. "Video creative has proven to be an effective way to drive engagement in News Feed," Facebook writes, and it makes sense for app ads since a video can be much more effective than screenshots and text for… Read More
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Facebook’s Referrals To Media Sites Up 170% YOY, New “Stories To Share” Tells Pages What To Post
Facebook wants to get more news content in its feed by proving to media sites it's their premier social ally. Today it announced referral traffic to media sites is up an average of 170% this year, and it launched the "Stories To Share" tool, which aims to drive even more traffic by suggesting which articles media sites should post to their Pages but haven't yet. Read More
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Facebook Experiences Partial Outage On Desktop And Mobile
If you were hoping to share your feelings about life with the world this Monday morning, you're out of luck. (Unless you prefer to do so with Twitter.) Facebook appears to be partially down at the moment, with users unable to post status updates, photos, or like things. However, you can still browse (stalk) the site easily without much trouble. Read More
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Zuck Knows If You’ve Been Bad Or Good, So Be Good For Goodness’ Sake
Like everyone else I am shocked, shocked!, to learn that Facebook's latest policy switch was one which will lead to users posting more public data. This time it's teenagers, who now "have the choice to post publicly on Facebook." which they didn't before. Why? Simple: as the NYT puts it, "fundamentally, Facebook wants to encourage more public sharing, not less ... to attract consumer advertisers." Read More
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Google Partners With Facebook To Let DoubleClick Clients Buy Retargeted Ads On FBX
Google and Facebook are getting a bit friendlier despite their social networking competition. Google's DoubleClick ad buying software will soon allow clients to buy retargeted ads on Facebook. FBX, Facebook's retargeted ads platform, has become a major player in the 16 months since launch, and DoubleClick will be a more comprehensive ad buying solution by tapping into it. Read More
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Facebook Starts Letting Teens Post Publicly Despite Risks, As It Aims To Stay Cool
Like a cautious parent, Facebook is giving teen users new freedom despite risks. For the first time, users under 18 can post publicly. The logic is that other sites don't restrict kids, teens are getting more web savvy, and young celebrities want a voice. This could let minors publicly share things they'll regret, so they must manually opt into public sharing and confirm they understand the risks. Read More
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Facebook Buys Mobile Data Analytics Company Onavo, Reportedly For Up To $200M… And (Finally?) Gets Its Office In Israel
Big news for a Monday/late Sunday night (depending on where you are): Onavo, the Tel Aviv-based mobile analytics company, has just announced that it has been acquired by Facebook. Onavo will become the anchor for Facebook in Israel -- its first office in the country. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed; we are trying to find out. Right now we're seeing reports of between $100 million and… Read More
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Study: Facebook Comments Are More Civil Than Newspaper Website Comments
Hypothesis: A person is less likely to accuse a complete stranger of being a socialist demon hell-bent on killing babies with free health insurance, when their friends can see him being a complete asshat. Read More
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You’re Not Just The Product, You’re The Ads (And Your Friends Should Thank You)
Word of mouth, sponsored. Trusted recommendations, promoted. Reviews from friends, endorsed. This is the new lexicon of advertising. As the world learns to ignore traditional advertising online, tech giants have found a way to grab people's attention: using your name, face, and words. Are we okay with that? Maybe we should be. Read More
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Google To Start Employing User Ratings And Photos In “Shared Endorsements” Ads
Google is going to start using your beautiful face and your reviews, recommendations and endorsements in its advertisements, beginning November 11, the company announced today via changes to its Terms of Service. The New York Times explains that this will allow the company to show user review for restaurants, for instance, or the fact that you follow a brand page on Google+ in their display ads on… Read More
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Facebook Removing Option To Be Unsearchable By Name, Highlighting Lack Of Universal Privacy Controls
“Who can look up your Timeline by name?” Anyone you haven't blocked. Facebook is removing this privacy setting, notifying those who had hidden themselves that they'll be searchable. It deleted the option from those who hadn't used it in December, and is starting to push everyone to use privacy controls on each type of content they share. But there's no one-click opt out of Facebook search. Read More
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What I Learned About Facebook As A Feedback Panelist
Today when I opened Facebook, as I do every day, at some point, at least once, I was surprised to see the social network asking me for some time and input. Generally speaking, it asks "What's on your mind?" or something similar in the status update entry field, but this was different; this was a genuine request for me to complete a survey as part of a new Facebook Feedback Panel program, and… Read More
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Facebook Continues To Simplify Ad Buying With New ‘Objective-Based’ Interface
When Facebook announced in June that it planned to eliminate half its ad units, it also outlined a broader vision for simplification, where the company could guide advertisers through the ad-buying process based on their objectives, eliminating any "guesswork." Today, it sounds like Facebook is making that vision a reality. The company just published a blog post announcing what it calls… Read More
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Microsoft Forms Alliance With Facebook, LivingSocial And Others To Promote Card-Linked Offers, Starts Test In Seattle
Microsoft quietly shut down its U.S.-only daily deals aggregator Bing Deals earlier this year and relaunched it as Bing Offers in April, but things got rather quiet around the service since. Today, however, Microsoft is launching a limited test of a new Bing Offers feature in the Seattle market that could give it an edge over some of its competitors. In this test market, Bing Offers users can now… Read More
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Nielsen Preps Its Twitter TV Report, While Facebook Extends Data Partnership To Foreign Networks
Nielsen is set to publish its first report with TV rankings based on data from Twitter. The report, which comes out on Monday according to the Wall Street Journal, will look at the number of tweets about a show and the size of the audience that sees them. Read More
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Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem
At its heart, Twitter is a firehose. Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your followers. It's what makes Twitter feel like the real-time pulse of the world. But it could also be preventing Twitter from growing. Follow too many people, and you lose track of those you love and stop following anyone new. Read More
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Instagram To Start Showing In-Feed Video And Image Ads To US Users
Well here it is, Instagram is getting ads and it’s starting with users in the US. In a blog post today, Instagram says that users in the country are going to start seeing video and image ads. Instagram says that the ads will start appearing over the next couple of months and will come from brands that you don’t follow. They say that this will ‘start slow’. “We’ll… Read More
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What #Music’s Failures Teach Us About Twitter’s #TV Future
Twitter #Music hasn’t exactly shaken the firmament of the musical landscape. After releasing the admittedly gorgeous app on the iOS App Store early this year, it has drifted down the charts and the general consensus is that it’s a relative dead end. How Twitter rolled out #Music, and what it learned from the app, will likely inform how it handles a move to embrace a more important… Read More
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Senior Facebook, Netflix Scientist Joins Identified To Help It Fix Professional Search, Take On LinkedIn
This summer, Identified pulled back the curtain on a new artificial intelligence technology, called "SYMAN," which it developed to help organize and clean the swaths of unstructured professional data that today lives on the Web. In doing so, the startup moved away from its original focus -- a kind of Facebook data-driven "Klout score for professionals" -- essentially admitting that if it were… Read More
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New Calls To Action In Facebook’s Mobile App Ads Can Help Publishers Reconnect With Users
The purpose of Facebook's Mobile App Ads seems pretty clear. They're supposed to drive installations, right? Well, in a new blog post, the company says its ads can now help with what comes afterward, namely, keeping users engaged and active -- and in some cases encouraging them to spend money. To illustrate the challenge on the mobile side, Facebook cites a Localytics study that found that 66… Read More