The week in social media news curated by your friends at Fandom Marketing. Facebook is testing a ‘buy’ button for eCommerce and is suspected to be posturing to take over TV. How the WSJ Facebook page got hacked and ways you can make your social data more secure. Three great lessons we can learn from brands who are still killing it on Twitter with audiences. Watch this week’s video to learn if social media really improves SEO.
Facebook Joins Twitter In Testing Out A ‘Buy’ Button For E-Commerce
July 17, 2014
E-commerce is the next big frontier for social media companies, and Facebook crossed it — again. The company revealed Thursday that it’s testing out a “Buy” button for Page posts and ads, making it easy for users to shop directly from their News Feeds without ever leaving Facebook. The new feature is part of a test involving only a handful of small and medium-sized advertisers for now.
Full story on Forbes
Attention, TV Networks: Facebook Is Coming For You Next
July 23, 2014
Mark Zuckerberg likes to use the first few minutes of his quarterly earnings calls to preview big themes that he sees as pivotal to Facebook’s future. With a particularly strong quarter of results in hand, Zuckerberg took the opportunity to sketch out a particularly ambitious goal: stealing market share from just about every other form of digital media, particularly television. Facebook users in the U.S. spend about 40 minutes per day with the service on average. That statistic is usually cited as evidence of Facebook’s ubiquity, but Zuckerberg noted that Americans spend about nine hours a day with screen of all kinds. With ears pricked, it was possible to detect numerous hints of a broader plan to go after TV’s share of mind and ad dollars. Facebook’s engineers recently tweaked the algorithm governing News Feed to increase the prominence of videos, Zuckerberg said. Making organic auto-play videos as prominent as video ads is another big priority. Meanwhile, COO Sheryl Sandberg said the old view that “creative storytelling” brand ads have to air on television is dying.
Full story on Forbes
How The Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Page Got Hacked And What Others Should Do To Prevent This
July 24, 2014
I follow the Wall Street Journal Facebook page and noticed these feeds last weekend and suspiciously validated these updates in Quora and other news websites. The news is true and WSJ became the latest in a series of victims over the last few weeks. Several readers noticed the hack and it was too late before they captured screenshots of the apparent hacking. W0rm is now claiming to have overtaken both the Wall Street Journal and Vice.com‘s user database. While W0rm claims to have also breached the Wall Street Journal’s database, a threat that given their credibility has significant merit, the company has not yet made a public statement about the potential breach.
Full story on Forbes
Facebook in talks with Uber to add car service to Messenger
July 24, 2014
Facebook Messenger is poised to become more than just a chat app. Mark Zuckerberg has plans to integrate e-commerce features into the messaging platform sometime in the future.
That explains his recent sitdown with the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, to talk over the possibility of adding the car service to the Facebook Messenger app. Such integration isn’t new, as it’s similar to several Asian competitors. Take WeChat, which permits people to secure taxi services with Didi Dache within the chat service.
Full story on Venturebeat
3 Twitter Lessons From Brands That Have a Grip on Their Followers
July 25, 2014
We’ve seen a huge shift in the way brands have embraced and employed Twitter in recent years. Four years ago, just 10% of all tweets came from brands. In 2012, when Twitter had 500 million registered users, major brands were buying in, but the learning curve was steep and they made mistakes, particularly with regard to customer service interactions. By 2013 brands were tweeting four times more than they were in 2012, with the 10 most-followed brands tweeting every six to 20 minutes. It seemed their transformation from skeptics to Twitter devotees eager to make an impact was finally complete.
Full story on Mashable
What We’re Watching
Google captures Twitter accounts and Tweets in search results. For example if you search for a person’s name, their Twitter profile will often show up in the SERP. Just search me “Melonie Gallegos” to see it in action. Additionally, Google has a special search engine for Tweets. It’s handy because it gives you a data count, not available on twitter.com currently. What we all have struggled to understand is how social signals impacts search ranking for this data and website pages on Google. If I’m really awesome on Twitter, will that help my blog rank on page one of Google? Here’s some insight from the source. (Also read: influential Twitter accounts are indexed more)
~Melonie
No Comments