Facebook

Structured status updates, previously only available on mobile web and desktop, have found their way to a Facebook native application. The latest Facebook for iOS update includes the ability to share what you’re eating, watching or reading. Facebook also offered enhanced privacy settings, allowing users to change who sees content they’ve already posted. The fun status updates that have been popping up all over Facebook, saying that a user is watching The Big Bang Theory, listening to Kanye West, eating bacon or playing Xbox are now able to be posted from iPhones and iPads. Additionally, Facebook added a feature currently available on the Android native app — the ability to change privacy on things users have already posted. That means embarrassing photos only meant for college friends (but accidentally posted publicly) can now be changed from mobile. Readers: What other improvements would you like to see on the iOS app? Screenshots courtesy of The Next Web.

Facebook’s June 20 new product announcement is gathering a lot of curiosity by the technology business world. We are all in anticipation over what Facebook will release and how we think it will affect the lives of Facebook users, which now account for 1 in 7 people across the planet. Early indicators based on code released by Facebook point to some form of an RSS tool. From a user functionality point of view, a feature with RSS feed could be a new channel to find information, or track trending topics within Facebook. Similar to how Reddit has built a very successful aggregator of information through user submitted and promoted content, Facebook could potentially optimize its News Feed to include trending topics amongst Facebook users. Recent interface changes would also support this theory. For example, Facebook has added nested comments making it easier to for users to have conversations based on comments as is popular in Reddit. Other changes within the Facebook interface seem to point in the direction that Facebook is working on a much larger goal. It would appear that Facebook has their sights set on becoming a player in the search marketing business. It started with the introduction of the Open Graph, as Facebook opened their walled garden to include objects that exist outside of the Facebook network. Then they rolled out Graph Search, which makes it much easier to search socially for things like “songs my friends like” or “restaurants my friends like.” We’ve also recently seen the addition of interactive hashtags, making it possible to search for trends and other popular topics. From a business standpoint, it begs the question: Who should be worried about these changes? Google and Twitter have the most to lose should Facebook successfully enter the search game. In the short term, Twitter has the most at risk. Hashtags in Facebook are a clone of Twitter’s most popular feature and Facebook already has the larger network of users. If Facebook users quickly adopt hashtags, it could have an immediate impact on those Twitter users who use the service primarily to track trends. In the long term, Google will need to keep an eye on Facebook as advertisers look for digital advertising options. Today, Google still dominates the direct response market, especially in key categories like retail and travel based on implied behavior from keyword intentions. For example, someone who uses the “Samsung Galaxy” is most likely looking to either buy the latest Samsung Galaxy phone or they are looking to research the product. Facebook’s Open Graph Search has the potential to be more accurate than keyword intention. Instead of searching just for a keyword, consumers can tap their social network for purchasing advice via searches like “what smartphones do my friends use” or “where is the best site to buy a smart phone?” Google+ already shows that Google is playing the defensive as they try to build up a social network to supplement keyword data with social demographics. At the end of the day, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all run on the same advertising business model. The company that will succeed will be the one who can deliver the best relevance between consumer and advertiser. If Facebook can put together a search engine that enables a more natural way to find information via searchable web behavior based on Open Graph data, it will attract the big advertising budgets that currently flow primarily to Google.  Joe McCormack has more than a decade of digital marketing experience and currently serves as the CEO of Adotomi, a Facebook PMD. Joe sits on the board of directors at multiple technology companies and is a long-time expert on the advertising technology industry. Adotomi is a Social Advertising Technology company which works with some of the biggest brands, developers and agencies in the world including SodaStream, OMD, Konami, Playtika, and Wix. Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook and other social networks can be valuable tools for employees seeking to recruit “passive” candidates — those not actively looking for new jobs, but likely to switch for the right opportunity — according to a recently published a white paper on social job sharing by social recruiting company Work4 Labs. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook is targeting businesses in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa that have not yet advertised on the social network with ads directing them to the Facebook Start to Success Program, which offers free support for first-time advertisers, as well as a £25 ($39.15) credit toward advertising. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Finnegan’s Irish Pub and Grill in Stockton, Calif., turned to a novel solution to combat an epidemic of bar fights: Only Facebook friends are admitted into the establishment after 9 p.m. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook released version 6.2 of its application for iOS devices, adding the structured status updates that were previously available only on desktop or via the social network’s mobile site, as well as the ability to edit who can see content users have shared, even if that content was shared in the past. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook Vice President of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson touched upon several topics in a conversation with Ad Age, including the future of right-hand-side ads, the social network’s mobile advertising prospects, potential advertising on Facebook-owned photo-sharing network Instagram, and possible monetization of Facebook’s new hashtags. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook recently hit the 1 billion monthly active user mark, and now the company has another major milestone to celebrate: 1 million active advertisers. The active part of that is key, as it means 1 million companies, brands and other people have purchased a Facebook ad in the past 28 days. Facebook’s Director of Small Business, Dan Levy, blogged about the company’s newest milestone: Over the past year I’ve had the privilege of meeting and learning from many amazing business owners who use Facebook. Some have just set up their Facebook Pages while others are experts who share their tips with others. I’ve learned from companies like Ministry of Retail in Singapore, Springwools in Ireland, and Scene75 Entertainment Center in Ohio…and many more around the world. I know business owners like these invest their hard earned money and time into running their companies. So today, on behalf of everyone at Facebook, I want to say thank you to them and to the over one million businesses like them who are active advertisers. You have chosen Facebook as a partner to grow your business. We appreciate the chance to work with you, and we celebrate your success. Facebook also launched a site for small business owners to share their success stories. The site also shared some statistics about how prevalent small businesses are on Facebook: There are more than 2 billion connections between local businesses and people. In an average week, there are more than 645 million views of, and 13 million comments on, local business Facebook pages. Roughly 70 percent of monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada are connected to a local business on Facebook. With these statistics in mind, it’s easy to see why Facebook recently simplified its advertising offerings, as a major part (in terms of quantity) of their ad base isn’t the Fortune 500 companies — but smaller businesses who just want to figure out how to achieve their goals. Readers: If you manage a page for a small business, what works and what doesn’t work for you on Facebook? Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook has been pushing for users to add more content to their timelines, indicating shows they’ve watched, movies they’ve seen, and books they’ve read. This information is then added to modules on the left side of the timeline. Now, the site wants to know how well users liked those things. Some users started seeing prompts on the sidebar of their  to rate these items on a star scale. This appears to be a way to push more recommendations into the system. So when users type in Graph Search queries such as “books my friends have read,” or “movies my friends like,” a star rating could someday show up to these results, similar to what a user sees when they type in restaurant-related queries. Readers: Have you seen this prompt?

Mass Relevance Social curation and engagement platform Mass Relevance and marketing communications organization VivaKi announced a strategic partnership on Monday. The partnership will give all agencies with Publicis Groupe, which founded VivaKi in 2008, access to the Mass Relevance platform. The Mass Relevance platform can aggregate, filter and display posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and YouTube in real time. Publicis Groupe is currently one of the third largest buyers in the world for social advertising. The organization’s adoption of the Mass Relevance platform will give it a significant boost. The Mass Relevance platform has already powered social experiences for the the 2012 elections with CNN and Facebook; the Olympic Games with NBC and Twitter; as well as campaigns for brands like Pepsi and Doritos. Unified Enterprise marketing technology company Unified has announced the quarterly release of its cloud-based Social Operating Platform. In its spring 2013 release, the company has added more data-driven applications for more thorough insights. These applications include an insights application for tracking audience and engagement analytics as well as a content application for real-time feed optimization and monitoring. The company has also added an advertising application for cross-channel planning and buying. With these new applications, Unified adds to its existing capabilities such as automated ad creation, targeting, optimization, and programmatic bid management for native, mobile and premium Facebook ads.