Martin Beck says, “Facebook today announced buying, video and targeting enhancements to its mobile app advertising program. Starting this week, advertisers will be able to buy app ads that are optimized for reach and frequency. “This allows advertisers to boost awareness while controlling how often someone sees an ad,” Facebook explained in a blog post. “For example, advertisers can set their app ad campaign to reach 5 million people with a frequency cap of three impressions per person for one week. Since reach and frequency optimizes for unique reach, it should only be used for campaigns... [...]

Heather Smith says, “Retailers investing in social media marketing are finding success in terms of brand awareness, engagement and sales. As many as 93% of marketers are using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram as part of their marketing efforts. New data is giving retail marketers more insights into what social practices produce the best results. The effectiveness of using images on social networks, particularly Facebook, is no longer in doubt. Using images has been directly tied to increased engagement, with 44% of Facebook users being likely to interact... [...]

Robin Neifield says, “There has been lots of noise lately surrounding the effectiveness of marketing on social channels. But don’t be fooled – your brand does indeed need to maintain a presence on social platforms. There has been a lot of public hand-wringing lately about the new Facebook policies that require marketers to pay for marketing messages. Brands that spent a lot of time, effort, and advertising dollars in the last few years building up their fan communities are upset with new restrictions on the promotions language and messaging allowed in News Feed posts. If posts look... [...]

This week, in a Black Friday sale, Tom Murray and his partner, Stuart Frank are making a lifetime license for FanBoom 3.0 available This is a web-based service that lets you create remarkable • Contests, • Optin Pages, • Promotions, • Stores • Surveys, • And more on Facebook fan pages. Now, in version 3, FanBoom is fully responsive to mobile devices. And it has 40 themes (all responsive) you can use to customize your fan pages to look spectacularly attractive. You can get a version for your own Facebook pages or you can get an agency license so you can make attractive pages for your... [...]

Greg Finn says, “A new tool in the Facebook ad repertoire may act as a real-time focus group of its 1.35 billion users. According to AdWeek, this new platform, dubbed ‘Grapevine’, is available only to high end advertisers. ‘Grapevine’, will help give context to topics and ads so that brands can better customize their messaging. According to Facebook the data derived from the tool is both qualitative and quantitative — so users could see what users are saying about a topic and craft ads based on the sentiment. Someone could look up what people are discussing on a topic like home... [...]

Stephanie Jones says, “Everyone’s doing it these days. There was nothing lewd or raunchy meant by that, so get your head out of the gutter, folks. We’re talking about ads on Facebook, which for a number of reasons, has become the norm for businesses marketing themselves on the website. These days, it’s so easy for a company’s ads to get lost in the abyss on Facebook. It’s the same old tale: Organic reach is down to nearly nothing and businesses are struggling to reach their current or future customers. If your ads aren’t well planned (from your organization’s goals for... [...]

Pamela Parker says, “One of the hot topics at SMX Social Media Marketing this year was how marketers can get into the Facebook News Feed, given that the social network giant seems to be constantly throttling back the reach of organic content. Must we pay? Or are there other options? This was the focus of two different panels at the Las Vegas event, the “The New News Feed: How To Break Into Facebook’s Exclusive Neighborhood” and “Winning Strategies With Facebook Ads.” Both were especially timely, given the site’s announcement last week that it will show promotional and sales-oriented... [...]

Amy Gesenhues says, “According to Facebook, the number of videos posted by SMBs has nearly tripled since last year, with the number of companies posting videos nearly doubling in the same amount of time. The social network reports more than 800,000 small to medium sized businesses posted over three-million videos during September alone. Of the three million videos posted by the SMBs, 84 percent were uploaded outside of the U.S. After breaking news earlier this year that it has been averaging over a billion video views a day since June, Facebook continues to deliver more video to its desktop... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Forrester, the respected market research company, has a history of releasing reports that cast Facebook in a bad light in the eyes of advertisers. Last year it suggested Facebook was “failing marketers” by “abandoning” its promise of social marketing. Now Forrester is truly hitting Facebook where it hurts: it is advising advertisers to stop using Facebook if they want to build social relationships with their customers. The release of the “Social Relationship Strategies That Work” report follows Facebook’s announcement on... [...]

Lara O’Reilly says, “Gobble, gobble. YouTube’s dominance of the worldwide video market is under threat as Facebook continues to ramp up its charge to increase its share of the lucrative online video market. In recent months Facebook began seeding autoplay videos into the News Feed, shortly followed by premium autoplay video ads; the company has increased its mentions of the importance of video in its quarterly earnings and investor calls; and it is reportedly actively trying to poach YouTube stars to create content made specifically for its platform. The results of energized... [...]