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Welcome to our weekly edition of what's hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What's New This Week?
Facebook Introduces Rooms: Rooms is “a new app that lets you create places for the things you're into, and invite others who are into them too. Check out the Rooms blog to learn more.”
Facebook Makes It Easier to Comment as a Page on Other Pages: This new feature makes it easier for Facebook admins to switch between commenting as a profile or a page.
Tumblr Introduces First Desktop App for Mac: “It lets you post to Tumblr from almost anywhere on your Mac.”
Snapchat Starts to Run Ads: “An advertisement will appear in your Recent Updates from time to time, and you can choose if you want to watch it. No biggie. It goes away after you view it or within 24 hours, just like stories.”
Groupon Announces Pages: “The launch of more than 7 million new listings for merchants called Pages—making Groupon the first place to go for ratings, tips, money-saving opportunities and other useful information for local businesses in the United States.”
Facebook Updates Paper App: “It's fully optimized for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.”
Vine Updates iOS App: “This release is packed with updates that help you find great Vines to watch, take advantage of iOS 8 extensions and improve Vine for iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus.”
Here's more interesting news worth following:
Twitter Introduces Fabric for App Developers: Wired reports this as “Twitter's Audacious Plan to Infiltrate All Your Apps.”
A couple of cool social media tools worth checking out:
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Here are some recent studies worth noting:
Forrester Research Social Media Forecast, 2014 to 2019 (US), Q3 2014 Update:
Forrester expects social media spending in the US to reach $18.7 billion by 2019, up from $8.2 billion in 2014—growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.9%. This forecast was revised upward by 15% from their previous update due to the faster-than-expected advertising revenue growth of US social media companies.
Not Surprisingly, Brands' Organic Reach Down, Paid Reach Up on Facebook: A 3Q 2014 report from Adobe Digital found that impressions for organic Facebook posts by brands are down 50% in 2014 compared with 2013. Meanwhile, paid impressions are up 5% during the same time period and are expected to grow by 10-20% during the upcoming holiday shopping season.
Marketers Increasingly Opting for Facebook Video Over YouTube: According to a study published by Socialbakers, the number of videos Facebook admins directly upload to the site could soon surpass videos linked from YouTube.
Hootsuite Announces Social Business Benchmark: The Social Business Benchmark 2014, a survey conducted on behalf of Hootsuite by Harris Poll, revealed common social media benefits and challenges for businesses. One key finding is that 88% of organizations recognize that social media is a valuable source of competitive and industry-specific business intelligence. However, only 40% actually use the data generated by social media to inform business decisions.
Combine Email Marketing With Facebook Ads: The study conducted by Facebook and Salesforce Marketing Cloud revealed that customers of an unnamed retailer who were exposed a combination of email marketing and Facebook ads were 22% more likely to purchase than those who were only exposed to one or the other.
Consumers Reach Peak Engagement Within 24 Hours of an Event: A report by social data and sharing tool provider ShareThis shows that Facebook dominates overall social sharing of major events, but Twitter and Reddit activity ramps up the closer you get to the event. Facebook accounts for 85% of the sharing activity, but Twitter engagement jumps by a factor of 3 within 2-3 days of the event.
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