Instagram to Start Sharing Data with Facebook in January

Instagram updated its privacy policy today, revealing that it will soon start sharing data with Facebook.

To go into effect from 16 January, Instagram’s new privacy policy reveals that the company will start sharing data with Facebook, following the social network’s acquisition of the firm back in April.

The update policy reads, “We may share User Content and your information (including but not limited to, information from cookies, log files, device identifiers, location data, and usage data) with businesses that are legally part of the same group of companies that Instagram is part of, or that become part of that group (“Affiliates”).

“Affiliates may use this information to help provide, understand, and improve the Service (including by providing analytics) and Affiliates’ own services (including by providing you with better and more relevant experiences).”

However, Instagram is quick to point out that users will be able to choose who sees their Instagram photos, and says users can opt out of posting all of their images on Facebook. Thank god.

This move doesn’t come as much of a surprise, given that following its acqusition of the firm Facebook moved Instagram staffers into its office and has been working closely alongside them.

The move might have been spurred by Instagram’s recent falling out with Twitter, despite reports that the microblogging website once tried to acquire the photo sharing app. µ

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.

How Facebook Changed our Mobile Traffic

Mobile. Social. Those words seem to follow each other in most conversations.
Facebook recently shared that more than 425 million monthly active users have used Facebook mobile products in the last month.

At first, we were less bullish about the connection among Digg’s users. Typically people reading on the Digg iOS app and m.digg.com were not logged in to share their activity on Digg. Tap, Tap swipe did not seem to encourage conversation around the news they were reading.

But when we took a look at mobile traffic since the launch of our Facebook Timeline app in December, the story appears to be different. Since December:

• Unique visitors to m.digg.com are up 29 percent
• Mobile accounts for about 35 percent of our traffic from Digg Social Reader
• Of the people coming from Facebook to Digg, 27 percent are on a mobile device

Knowing this, we’ve made a few changes to our mobile experience rolling out later this week. Firstly, if you’re currently using our Digg iOS app, we’ll ask if you want to upgrade to add reads, comments and Diggs to your Facebook Timeline, allowing you to easily sync your Digg activity between your desktop and IOS device.

Secondly, if you’re reading Digg.com on a mobile device, you can now use the new Mobile Newsbar, which is built especially for the mobile touch devices. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Newsbar allows you to click through a number of related headlines quickly and directly from the browser; which we think is a better way to read content on-the-go.

So go forth and be mobile. And social. We think the party is just starting.

Source: http://about.digg.com/blog/how-facebook-changed-our-mobile-traffic

Facebook Continues Display Ad Domination

According to new data from comScore, Facebook had 27.9% of all online display-ad impressions last year, up from 21% the previous year.

According to the firm, Yahoo was in second place at 11% (up from 10.9% the year before), leaving Microsoft, Google and AOL each with less than 5%.

That would make three years in a row that Facebook led the charge. And why not? Who has better targeting, and where are users spending more time?

Facebook, of course, is expected to file for its huge IPO this week, and this news should only help. Add that to the various ways Facebook is expanding its advertising offerings.

This month, for one, ads came to the Facebook news feed.

The company is incentivizing advertisers to stay with Facebook with a 45% reduction in CPCs,according to TBG Digital’s recent Global Facebook Advertising Report Q4.

Recently, we’ve seen reports of Facebook cold emailing businesses, offering phone consultation on Facebook advertising.

Facebook is expected to start offering mobile ads soon, and there’s always that possibility that the company will eventually launch an AdSense like network for publishers. That one’s pure speculation, but come on. How could they not?

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-continues-display-ad-domination-2012-01

Facebook Accounts For 80% Social Media Traffic World-wide

What type of social media site dominates a culture can say a lot about the people who use that site. Or the people. Or both. Without extrapolating any big conclusions from their data, Palo Alto Networks has taken a look at some of their data collected at the end of last year to see who is using which social media site and where.

Palo Alto has already shown us the that growth of people are using social media sites at work is rising astronomically, but what’s intriguing is that despite 54% of businesses saying they don’t allow access to social networking sites at work, the bandwidth at businesses used for web mail and social networking has increased 500% since 2010. Seems that businesses either have flexible definitions of what is considered work-related social networking, or they just don’t want to set the precedent outright that states, “Hey, you can work here but feel free to use Facebook all you want.”

Breaking down the social media traffic for countries around the world, Palo Alto found some telling statistics in their data. One that sticks out for perhaps it’s obviousness is that Asian markets such as Korea and China “have more usage of other social networking apps in the enterprise than Facebook.”

Another fun take-away from Palo Alto’s report: French people use social networking games and plug-ins 50% more heavily than the global average. I guess that preoccupation explains why theycouldn’t participate in Wikipedia’s SOPA protest earlier this month.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-accounts-for-80-social-media-traffic-world-wide-2012-01

Alert the Media. Facebook Explains Advertising

Do you know what confuses me? Advertising. I don’t understand why these little boxes with product names show up on web pages I visit. And I really don’t understand why people interrupt my TV shows with short videos about cars and food and cleaning products. What’s the point?

If only there was someone who could explain it all to me!

Oh, wait! Now there is! Facebook has a whole web page and video that explains advertising in a way that is simple enough for a three-year-old. The video is so juvenile, the only thing missing is Bert and Ernie.

Here’s the process:

And why do they do this? Because. . .

“It takes a lot of money to hire the best engineers and build the technology needed to keep Facebook up and running. Last year it cost over a billion dollars. From the beginning, the people who built Facebook wanted it to be free for everyone, delivering ads is how Facebook can pay for this, so you don’t have to.”

So, let me get this straight. Websites cost money to run. If a lot of people use them, it costs even more money and so either the user has to pay (not gonna happen) or they run advertising in order to raise the money.

When you put it that way, it all makes sense!

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Yikes. Is there really a Facebook user on the planet who needs this lesson in economics? Do they think it will stop people from complaining about ads on their wall? As if folks are going to watch that video and come away feeling sympathetic for Facebook?

If it wasn’t December 23, I’d swear it was April Fool’s Day.

All Facebook Employees Required To Have Facebook Accounts

This may seem obvious, but all Facebook employees are required to have Facebook accounts. Facebook Director of Engineering Andrew “Boz” Bosworth confirmed as much on Quora.

In response to the question: “Are there people at Facebook that do not have a Facebook account?” Bosworth responded:

“No, our tools require that all employees have an account.”

Bosworth has been fairly active on Quora, dropping nuggets about the company here and there. Another recent question he addressed was: “Are there any employees of Facebook that feel uneasy about their company’s success and its future, going into 2012, and would like to elaborate on it?”

He said, “Probably not.”

When a Quora user asked, “How many Facebook messages can I send to anyone or specific person per day?” he said:

“There are no fixed limits. We have numerous safeguards against abuse which could limit you if your behavior appears to be spammy or unwanted and even those are adaptive so there is no set rule.”

Anyone recall the guy who sued Facebook for $1.00 after being labeled a spammer by the company?

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-employees-accounts-2011-12

Facebook Photos Get Faster

Back in August, Facebook launched the ability to share larger photos, and that load times were twice as fast. Today, the company announced some further speed improvements.

In a new update to that original announcement on the Official Facebook Blog, Facebook’s Justin Shafferwrites:

We’re excited to announce an update to Photos that makes it faster and easier to share photos on Facebook. Now, when you upload photos to an album, you can see each photo as it uploads and watch the upload progress in real-time. In addition, we’ve made some improvements so you don’t have to wait for the album to finish uploading to start adding details and stories.

Now, you can start adding captions and location details to each of your photos right away. You can also add an album title, description, and location at the top of the uploader. Just as before, you can choose who can see your album before you post and adjust your selection later if you change your mind. You can also continue to track how long your upload will take.

If you don’t see this version of the Photos uploader yet, you can expect to see it over the coming weeks as the rollout continues.

So there you have it. If you’re impatient about Facebook photo uploading, today’s your lucky day.

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-photos-get-faster-2011-11

Facebook Pageviews: That’s A Lot of Faces

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-pageviews-thats-a-lot-of-faces-2011-08

Here’s a quick explanation concerning the concept of just how big one trillion is,here’s a quote from children’s author, David Schwartz. “A billion seconds is 32 years. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years.”

Now, while I’m not sure how that would convert in relation to pageviews,but we’ll just go with this: For those of you who think a billion pageviews is impressive; and it is, it’s nothing compared to one trillion pageviews, which, if we go by Schwartz’ standard, is ten thousand times larger than the petty one billion’s worth.

And that, folks, is the amount of pageviews Facebook has received since coming online, the most of any site listed in Google’s “The 1000 most-visited sites on the web” list. At the top, with that gaudily impressive trillion count–here’s what it looks like in numeric form: 1,000,000,000,000–is Mark “I’m NOT Jesse Eisenberg” Zuckerberg’s social networking creation.

For those of you who are uncomfortable with such a claim, especially when you consider Facebook’s acknowledge membership count has not surpassed one billion members yet, a post from Digital Inspirationhas you in mind:

Officially, Facebook has 750+ million users but the number of unique visitors who flock Facebook every month is much higher because certain sections of the site – Facebook Pages and Profiles for example – are open to non-users as well.

A perfect example of this is AT&T’s Facebook page. Granted, it’s not a personal page, but even without being signed in, you can at least view AT&T “Like this page” invitation. Upon “liking” AT&T, users then “get access to everything AT&T.”

How that’s accomplished through a mere social network site, I’m not sure, but the offer’s out there. Of course, you could also point out that you have to be a Facebook member to “like” AT&T’s page, but the fact is, you can still see at least one part of their content if you are not.

Interaction or not, this, too, counts as a pageview in Facebook’s incredibly large pageviews coffer. Here’s a look at the rest of Google’s top ten sites in regards to pageviews, and there should really be no surprises:

YouTube’s there, as is Yahoo and MSN. One noticeable absence however, is Google.com itself. A disclaimer on their “Learn more” page states:

Keep in mind that the list excludes adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites.

Based on the listed results, it’s safe to say the actual Google.com site was one of the omissions. With that in mind, do you think Google.com has more or less pageviews than Facebook’s mighty trillion mark?

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Simple Answers: Are Facebook Likes Part of Google’s Algorithm?

Source: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/simple-answers-are-facebook-likes-part-of-googles-algorithm/30594/

The QUESTION: Google has been open about using social data as a metric in the search ranking, but the company has only partnered effectively with a few social networks (and most notably Twitter). Facebook and Google have yet to partner up. But does Google still use Facebook likes and shares as a search ranking metric?

The ANSWER: No, although there may be some indirect influence.

A lot of initial data showed that sites being shared on Facebook were more likely to rank well on Google. As those studies have been examined, though, it seems that there’s just a correlation in content pupularity; if people like it on Facebook, they’re also likely to spread it elsewhere, thus making it rank higher.

Google’s Matt Cutts said very clearly and specifically that the company doesn’t crawl Facebook wall pages, where the massivemajority of the linking happens. To confirm this, several groups, including SEOMoz, did testing to see if content shared only on Facebook would get indexed. Cutts’s words held true, with Google remaining peacefully oblivious of the shared link.

It’s possible that certain services that do crawl the Facebook pages, aggregating links or compiling the most popular pages, areindexed in Google – meaning that Google indirectly gets insights into Facebook. But it’s a “friend of a friend” situation, with Facebook never interacting – as a metric or data provider – for Google.

While it’s possible that things will change, especially if Google secures a partnership with Facebook, there is no current indication that Facebook likes have a direct impact in Google search engine ranking.

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Facebook Commerce: 9 Tips to Increase Your Social Commerce Success

Source: http://www.webpronews.com/facebook-commerce-2011-06

Have you started selling your products or services on Facebook and started to explore the realms of F-commerce?

It’s great to see a number of organisations here in Ireland doing so, and over the forthcoming months I hope we will learn how this is working for the companies involved. It’s never been easier to implement a store front on Facebook as I have written about previously.

Today Micks Garage, an online retailer of car parts and accessories selling over 1 million products to customers across Europe, mentioned to me that they have introduced a Facebook Store so I took a quick look and here are five things that Micks Garage have implemented on Facebook that are worthy of note to model as you venture into F-commerce:

1. Have an attractive image for your store and give people a reason to want to explore it

2. Make use of your profile photo where you can highlight you have a new store in place

3. Add a customised tab on your Facebook Page covering frequently asked questions you may get from your customers about shopping on Facebook

4. Incentivise your Facebook Fans to purchase from your Facebook store with an exclusive offer

5. Mention your Facebook Store in a status update as most fans will not return to your Facebook Page once they have become a Fan and will access your updates from their Facebook News Feed – you could schedule updates as part of your content plan covering exclusive offers that you change during the course of the month.

Mick’s Garage have had a positive response to their Facebook Store implementation from their Fans however there has been some feedback that they would like a wider range.

If you are having to upload all your products to your Facebook Store because of using a low cost Facebook applications rather than integrating your full ecommerce shop, it is going to be time consuming. Therefore it does make sense to make the items that you sell a restricted range relevant for your Facebook Fans. You could of course ask for their input with a short poll or online survey on your Facebook Page to assess what they would like you to have available in your Facebook Store.

Here are four other ideas I recommend as you launch your Facebook Store:

1. Test the Facebook Store out yourself to make sure that you know that the process works smoothly before you launch the store

2. Consider using Facebook Ads to build awareness of your Facebook Store – you could consider using Sponsored Stories and even target the Ad to Fans of Your Facebook Page who will already be pre-disposed to you as a business and what you offer

3. Mention the launch of your Facebook Store on your website, your email footer, your voicemail, your business cards, in your ezine, in fact across all media types if it’s relevant to your community

4. Encourage people who purchase through your Facebook Store to leave a recommendation or feedback about the experience – as we know we trust recommendations online from people we know and some 70% of us across the globe trust consumer opinions posted online.

It doesn’t matter whether someone makes a purchase for the fist time on your ecommerce store on your website or your Facebook Store – that first purchase is exciting when you hear the kaching! But don’t forget that you need to continue to review the effectiveness of your F-commerce plan and adapt it to reflect the feedback from your Fans and your experience.

What other suggestions do you have for people just starting to introduce a Facebook Store and looking to benefit from social commerce? What other examples of Facebook Stores have you seen and recommend we check out?

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