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
Instagram Makes Ads Available to Businesses of All Sizes, Everywhere: “Starting this month, advertisers both large and small can run campaigns on Instagram.”

Facebook Updates Facebook for Business Pages to Be More Mobile-Friendly: The new features of Facebook pages will “help businesses build mobile presence and communicate with customers more easily” and “make it easier for the more than 45 million active businesses on Facebook to highlight important information and reach their goals.”

Periscope Now Supports Landscape Broadcasting: “In the latest version of iOS and Android, Periscopers can now hold their phones either in portrait or landscape.”

More social media news worth noting:
LinkedIn Introduces Next Wave: LinkedIn Next Wave is “a new quarterly series celebrating professionals and companies that are doing extraordinary work and transforming their fields.”

Here are some cool social media tools worth checking out:
Ghost: This new publishing platform is incredibly simple, completely customizable and open source.

Creative Marketplace: This new platform offers ready-to-use community-generated design assets from creators around the world, including graphics, fonts, templates, themes, photos and more.

Looking for something to make your life easier?
Discover the tools we recommend to drive engagement, save you time, and boost sales across your entire marketing funnel or business.
Whether you need help planning content, organizing social posts, or developing your strategy, youâll find something for every situation.
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Some Interesting Studies to Note:
2015 State of Employee Advocacy: SocialChorus surveyed 250 employee advocacy buyers to learn how to increase consumer and employee engagement with brand content. A majority of respondents believe that less than 5% of employees share brand content on social media and only 7% of respondents rate their brandâs efforts to engage employees with brand content as effective. The report explores the top goals businesses aim to achieve with employee advocacy and the current methods brands rely on to engage employees to advocate.
2015 Instagram Influencer Report: The latest Instagram Influencer report from Simply Measured looked at the Instagram activity of the 77 “most followed” people on Instagram as per Business Insider and Socialblade. The list excluded traditional brands and instead focused on “people as brands.” This report shows how these influencers use Instagram to build their brand, engage audiences and promote themselves.
The Lifetime Value of a Blog Post: A new study commissioned by IZEA from the Halverson Group reveals that the lifespan of a post is nearly 24 times the currently accepted measurement of 30 days. Posts experience a spike in impressions within the first week of being published, followed by a slow decline over the following month. Seventy-two percent of impressions are generated in the first month a post is published, but it's only after two years that a blog post will obtain 99% of its impressions. This shows that traditional measurement practices are imprecise and undervalue the performance of a blog post.
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What do you think? Have you tried ads on Instagram? Please share your comments below.

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