Facebook

As part of Facebook’s growing push to simplify its advertising offerings, the company announced Monday that the commonly-used page post link ads will become easier to use and customize. Page post link ads are usually a brand’s best bet to drive conversions from Facebook, and the company wants to make them easier to create. One of the main complaints from advertisers regarding this ad unit is the lack of customization available. Advertisers previously have been unable to upload a new and optimized teaser image to accompany the ad, so Facebook built this capability and launched it Monday. Additionally, Facebook simplified the flow for unpublished page post link ads and improved the process of creating an ad. Facebook announced changes to the creation of page post link ads in a blog post: Choosing the right image is essential to creating a great ad, so we’re are rolling out image customization for Page post link ads across all of our interfaces, which means more flexibility for advertisers in choosing their creative. With this feature, advertisers can upload any image they believe will drive the most conversions to their website (rather than Facebook’s automatically sourcing a thumbnail image based on images on the linked site). Image customization is now available via the Page composer, create flow, Power Editor and the API. Facebook is continuing to do more in the realm of unpublished posts, so that way brands can create an ad without having to promote an already-published post. Now the page post link ad has received this treatment. Since advertising is a highly visual endeavor, Facebook reworked the flow for creating a page post link ad, so advertisers can see how it will look not only in the News Feed, but in the sidebar, as well. This way, advertisers can choose what kind of ad they want to publish: We know Page post link ads in News Feed can outperform domain ads on the right-hand side, and we want to encourage marketers to take advantage of this enhanced performance for off-site conversions. So now when a marketer enters an offsite link as the ad destination, rather than defaulting to a right-hand side format, we’ll automatically allow advertisers to choose a domain ad for the right-hand column and/or an unpublished Page post link ad for News Feed. This removes the guesswork when transitioning from advertising on the right-hand side to advertising in News Feed. Advertisers: How do you feel about the changes to the creation flow of page post link ads?

Rumors are circulating that Facebook may be adding video to Instagram at its June 20 product announcement. Many news outlets suggested that Facebook would be introducing a news reader prior to this speculation. The introduction of video to Instagram would be a direct response Twitter’s video sharing service, Vine. Since its public release for iOS in January, Vine has grown significantly in popularity and its release for Android earlier this month has only bolstered this following. There are several clues suggesting that video may be the next step for Instagram, which now boasts of 100 million active users. For example, Facebook has prevented Vine from using its friend-finding feature. By doing this, Facebook looks embed users into its platform first, rather than a service like Twitter. Another instance of Facebook protecting its brand is how it is preventing Instagram uploads from being posted directly onto Twitter. Users can still share Instagram photos on Twitter, but users need to click the link to see them. By directing users back to the Instagram platform, users will spend more time in the photo sharing application. It also helps with ubiquity for the Facebook and Instagram brands. From another perspective, it would also be strategic for Facebook to introduce short video sharing to its ecosystem. With talks of adding auto-play video ads into the News Feed, Facebook could be looking to familiarize users with the concept. With more users sharing short videos, video ad units may not seem as intrusive. For the June 20 product announcement, Facebook sent snail mail invitations with the outline of a coffee mug. Though this motif would suggest that Facebook would be announcing a news product, some have speculated this as simply a diversion to the actual announcement. With the introduction of hashtags last week, it is also possible the social network may be introducing an improved blogging platform made more powerful with Graph Search. Though it may be one of these assumptions or the other, it is likely that Facebook will add all of these features in the nearby future. Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook will introduce a new product Thursday, but what will it be? Early speculation has focused on two completely unrelated products, both of which have been bandied about recently: a video-sharing service for Instagram, or a reader for RSS feeds. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

An issue that many users have when it comes to Facebook chat is that Facebook shows when you’re online. Even if you sign out Facebook changes your online status when you get back online on Facebook, why? The answer is in a new Facebook setting that allows friends to see when you are online! Facebook might be having problems with account status feature which is why the online status of the accounts are going from offline to online without prompting the user. The new setting is very important in regards to your privacy. In particular, the area of focus is the applications used by friends, who can access your information by default! How to disable your friends from find out if your Chat is Online This guide is actually also a trick that you could use with your friends, to find out who isn’t chatting but it is actually online! With this setting it is possible to connect in chat from any application (also by FB messenger on yoru  phone or by applications such as these ) to see who is online! How to disable and not allow others to see we you’re online? Go to your account settings, then  the applications tab ( direct link ), scroll down the page and click on the “edit” under “Applications used by others.” Here are a variety of options, all available to any application once your friends allow access. The new setting of interest to us is the one you see in the image below, checked. Uncheck / Remove the selection to the item “ If I’m Online” and save the changes. That’s it. From this moment on your friends will not see if you are online on Facebook (unless you’re not actually chatting to that friend). If you value your privacy you should also uncheck all other boxes. PS: Share the article with your friends to help protect their privacy.

Facebook recently introduced something that has been a staple of social media for years — hashtags. However, hashtags on Facebook feel somewhat incomplete. Facebook only rolled out hashtags on Wednesday to a portion of its users, leaving brands unable to take full advantage of this new feature, as many users were bewildered. While Facebook’s younger and power users, who are also on Twitter and Instagram (where hashtags are the norm), may have understood, it confused others who aren’t on those other social channels. So why did Facebook introduce support for hashtags, which are now searchable and clickable for some users? As other sites have speculated, Facebook (empowered by its acquisition of Storylane) could possibly announce on June 20 a revamp of notes or some other kind of blogging service that would serve as a Tumblr competitor. While this is not to say that Facebook will unveil such a product, it could happen in the future. Someday, users might be able to sort through posts and notes searchable by hashtags. A Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook why hashtags were first rolled out to only a portion of users: In regards to the rollout, we are starting small and hope to reach all users in the next couple of weeks. While it was frustrating for many users who heard about the hashtags and assumed they’d be able to use them immediately, it’s understandable that the rollout process followed pretty much everything else Facebook has done in the past. Facebook traditionally introduces a new product to a portion of its userbase, examines how they use the product, and then continues rolling it out to a larger audience. Could the rollout of hashtags signal that Facebook may be working on a way to see what friends are posting about by topic? One of the must frustrating things about Graph Search now is that users can’t find what friends are talking about. Hashtags could be the first way to solve this, but Facebook hasn’t released this capability publicly. Something Facebook could announce on June 20 is a strengthening of its blogging service, to become a quasi-competitor with Tumblr. Facebook isn’t afraid to emulate other platforms, though the track record for doing so is hit or miss. When Facebook came out with the Poke app for iPhone users, it was basically a way to fire back at Snapchat — the texting app where messages dissolve in seconds. Facebook was betting that the ability to connect with Facebook friends through Poke would make it popular. The acquisition of Storylane shows that Facebook does want to be a place where users write about what’s on their minds, and in more than just the status update box. By utilizing hashtags, it would further connect users to the things they want to read about — namely, what their friends are posting about. Right now, the hashtag search function is rather weak. You can see posts from friends at the top, but then it’s just a most recent list of posts from all over the Facebook ecosystem. Even in the announcement of hashtags, Facebook called it a “first step,” showing that there is likely more to come: Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world’s conversations. By rolling out a stronger and more prominent version of Facebook Notes, it would allow users to add tags to entries, much like on WordPress and Tumblr. Then, users could easily bounce between posts their friends have written (or discover new public entries). Other than clicking on a user’s Timeline, scrolling utilizing the browser search feature, there’s not really a great way to index posts around a certain topic. If Facebook goes in this direction, it could certainly b

The Open Compute Project, which was started by Facebook in an effort to devise more efficient methods of data storage, announced the opening of its second international chapter, in Taiwan, joining the OCP chapter in Japan. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook Monday announced several updates to its page post link ads, including the ability for brands to customize images, the ability to create these units directly via the social network’s self-serve ad-creation tool, and the ability to choose between right-hand-side domain ads and unpublished page post link ads (dark posts) in the News Feed. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Page post ads in Facebook’s News Feed are becoming the ad unit of choice for marketers on the social network, mainly due to their return on investment performance, according to a study released Monday by Facebook advertising platform Nanigans. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook habitually prompts users to like more pages. The site will ask you to like similar pages after you’ve liked pages, and now some users are seeing prompts on their News Feed to like pages their friends have recommended. For some users, there’s a notification in the birthday/events area of News Feed, which leads to a list of pages that their friends have liked. It will also ask the user to promote a page that they manage. Readers, have you seen this?

From cat videos to “The Harlem Shake,” the 2012 social election is all but a distant memory, as Republican candidates are taking to Facebook in new and creative ways to stay one step ahead of the competition in the 2014 cycle. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.