Facebook Video Cards: This Week in Social Media

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 Say Thanks: “An experience that lets you create personalized video cards for your friends on Facebook.”

Facebook Updates Terms and Policies: Facebook introduces “Privacy Basics, which gives you tips and a how-to guide for taking charge of your experience on Facebook.”

Facebook Introduces New Ways to Control What You See in Your News Feed: “News feed settings will now show a list of the top people, pages and groups that you've seen in your news feed over the past week.” Also, “if you see a story you're not interested in or don't want to see, you can tap the arrow in the top right of that story to hide it.”

Instagram Launches Faster Way to Find People You Want to Follow: “When you open Explore, you'll now see two tabs: Photos and People.”

Instagram Adds Ability to Go Back and Edit Captions: “You'll find a new Edit option in the menu beneath your image.”

Dropbox Introduces New Share Button: This new features makes “it even easier for you to share your stuff from Dropbox.”

WhatsApp Indicates When Someone Has Read Your Message: “Check marks will appear next to each message you send.”

Interesting News to Follow:

Facebook Reduces Overly Promotional Page Posts in News Feed: Pages that post a lot of promotional content “will see a significant decrease in distribution.”

Twitter Shares Insights Into Product Developments: One of the features includes native video. Twitter expects users to see these in the first half of next year.

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PhotoTime: “The smart photo management app that automatically organizes, sorts and tags all your photos, including those from your camera roll and social networks, to make them fast and easy to search and find.”

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Here are some recent studies worth noting:

STUDY: 74% of Online Shoppers Are Unlikely to Share Purchases to Facebook: According to a recent study by Visual Website Optimizer, 74% of respondents said they were not likely to share their online purchases on Facebook or other social networks. As for products that are shared on social networks by friends, only 25% of respondents said they would likely check out those products. VWO's study also found that Facebook helped inform the purchasing decisions of 53% of respondents, far higher than Pinterest (19%), Twitter (17%) or Snapchat (5%) combined.

The Social Lifecycle: Consumer Insights to Improve Your Business: A new study from HubSpot reveals that consumers expect companies to be present on an average of 3.4 different social platforms. Facebook and Twitter are the most popular platforms, with 84% of respondents expecting a Facebook presence and 64% expecting a Twitter presence. YouTube is third with 44% expecting a presence on this platform. Stats on other social platforms (Instagram, Pinterest and Google+) are more complicated when segmented by age and gender. The key takeaway is make sure to focus on the correct platforms for your target audience.

Content Marketing Effective for Lead Gen but Most Difficult Tactic to Execute [Study]: A recent study from Ascend2 shows content marketing (50%) and email marketing (51%) are two of the most effective lead generation tactics online, while social media was ranked as only 22% effective. Yet nearly half (48%) of the surveyed professionals ranked content marketing as the most difficult to employ effectively. Social media marketing came a close second at 43%, ahead of SEO, which is generally viewed as a more specialized task.

Innovation in Marketing: A 2014 Survey Report: Marketo surveyed a group of senior-level marketers across a variety of B2C and B2B sectors on innovation in marketing. The results showed that 80% accept innovation as an important part of their role and 46% consider a deep understanding of the target market as the single most important requirement in driving innovation. If marketers could innovate freely, they would prioritize three things: marketing automation and technology, market research and insight, and multi-channel integrated campaigns.

The Value of Marketing: Why CMOs and CFOs Differ: The Value of Marketing report, published by Econsultancy in partnership with Marketing Week, reveals a gap in perceptions between CMOs and CFOs when looking at the value of marketing to the overall organization. This gap is attributed to the finding that 83% of marketers and 76% of finance directors surveyed admit not knowing what the return on investment from their company's marketing efforts actually is. Not surprising, marketers have more enthusiastic perceptions of their worth to the business than other parties.

How Consumers Feel About Sharing Data With Businesses: According to a recent report from SAS, more than two-thirds (69%) of global consumers say recent events in the news have increased concerns about sharing personal data with businesses. Consumers' willingness to share their personal data varies widely by industry and type of information requested. However, a majority of respondents say they would be willing to share their personal information in exchange for something like personalized and relevant offers, discounts or free merchandise.

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