If some of your friends have replaced their profile pictures with giraffes, you’re not alone. A recent trend on Facebook asks users to guess the answer to a riddle. Those who get it wrong are required to adopt a giraffe picture as their profile pic for three days. Reportedly started by Youtuber Andrew Stugnell, correct guessers of The Great Giraffe Challenge get to keep their profile pic and have their name added to the comment section on his Facebook page. (TheGreatGiraffeChallenge.com)
It’s Twitter’s 7th birthday. Twitter first launched on March 21, 2006. Hard to believe how much the social media scene has changed since then. How different will things be in another 7 years?
Facebook is rolling out a new retail initiative that will mirror some of the unique features of Pinterest, a social photo sharing website. Facebook plans on offering some brands the option to post pictures of products on its newsfeed with actions including ”like,” “want,” and “collect.” Products within a collection will also have a Buy link, which will enable users to click through to websites to purchase products. Facebook is currently working with Victoria’s Secret, Pottery Barn, Michael Kors, Wayfair, Neiman Marcus, Fab.com and Smith Optics on the effort, which it calls “Collections.”
These photos will only appear if the brand has been liked by a user, or any of the user’s friends. The images pop up on the newsfeed. And from there, users can comment, like and share products and collections. They can also click through and buy items directly from Facebook. The main feature that will differentiate Facebook’s new initiative from Pinterest is the “Buy” component.
Facebook’s Promoted Posts will cost users around $7 each. This new feature allows Facebook users to pay $7/post to promote their posts and bump important news/announcements, links and photos to higher, more visible positions in their friend’s news feeds.
Facebook first called the Promoted Posts feature “Highlight” when it was initially tested in New Zealand. Prior to it being available in the United States, Promoted Posts were actually offered in 20 other countries. It was available to users who had 5000 or less friends and subscribers.
The latest news is reporting that on October 6, 2012, Facebook proposed a revised 20 million settlement in a class-action privacy lawsuit. The lawsuit was first filed in 2011. “We believe the revised settlement is fair, reasonable, and adequate and responds to the issues raised previously by the court,” said Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes.
The settlement is essentially offering up to $10 each to nearly 125 million affected users, reports Reuters. If there is any money left over from the settlement (after the $10 or less claims, legal bills and other claims are paid), the residual money will most likely be donated to various internet privacy groups. Read the rest of this entry »
Since May, Pinterest traffic has more than doubled in size.
Since January, Google, Yahoo and Bing organic traffic has decreased by 15.63% on average.
These are some interesting trends. While organic search engine traffic is still very important, social media has definitely risen and requires attention in any marketing efforts.
A lot of people wrote Digg off a while back when they launched v3, but v4 was recently relaunched by the new owners, Betaworks with a new emphasis on images. Naturally, a lot of comparisons will be made to Pinterest, since they popularized the vertical tiling style, but it’s definitely a more appealing design than previous iterations.
Twitter will be implementing a new feature soon called Twitter Cards. This feature will make it possible for websites to attach media experiences when website content is linked via Tweets. For more info, see Twitter Cards.
In terms of marketing, Twitter Cards look to be very beneficial. Some possible benefits include:
LinkedIn recently revealed that tweets will no longer be displayed on LinkedIn, which ends a two-and-a-half-year partnership between LinkedIn and Twitter. This marks another shift by Twitter to try to keep users on Twitter rather than going through third party applications.
While it could be a major hindrance for a lot of social media sharers who utilized this method for content syndication, we want to take a look at the bright side of this situation. So what are some things that can be done to work around this problem?
According to TheNextWeb, Facebook is finally allowing Page administrators by allowing administrator roles and scheduled posts. The available roles are:
Manager
Essentially the main admin role (or existing administrator role)
Content Creator
Can do everything except administer roles
Moderator
Can do everything except administer roles and edit page content