Facebook Tips and Tricks That You Should Know

Facebook, widely known as FB, is one of the most popular social networking sites people of all ages are addicted to these days. It has millions of subscribers to date. Unfortunately, not all of them really know how to navigate and make use of all the cool apps that Facebook offers. What a waste! If you’re one of these FB-newbies, you need not worry any more.  This post will help you to make most out of your Facebook profile. There are not some Facebook secret tips but most of these Facebook hacks and tips are uknown to many Fb users.

However, with people adding anyone and everyone they know (long lost friends, friends colleagues, Distant relatives),organizing and maximizing the value out of your time on Facebook also becomes a challenge. We give you these Facebook Hacks & tricks to make your life easier.

Are you ready to have your FB profile be the subject of your friends envy? Just follow these simple Facebook tips and tricks and your Fb profile will become hip and cool in a zap.

Useful Fb tricks for Enhanced Facebook experience:

1. Appear Online Only to Selected Friends:

Facebook chat is one of the coolest and most useful features in FB. My dilemma, however, was how to limit the number of people I chat with every time I log in. I certainly can’t accommodate them all but I don’t want them to feel like I’m rejecting them when I don’t send them a reply. I didn’t know back then that it is possible to appear online only to a few selected friends. A friend of mine actually gave me this idea which I’m sure would be of use to you, too.

Here’s how to do it: 

Go to Chat found at the lower right side of the page and then, click on Friends List. A small window will appear where you can type and create a new list.  You could name it anything you want. In this example I named it “Blocklist”. On your newly created list, select and start dragging those names that you wish to block. Then set your status to appear offline to this particular group of friends. With this, you now appear completely invisible to them. Try it now.

2. Upload Photos and Videos Using Your Mobile Phone:

The last time I went to Bantayan Island, I met this cool new friend who has uploaded his fresh photos and videos directly from his Blackberry Phone onto his Facebook account instantaneously. Interestingly, this process is quite simple and you can do it on all smartphones. Just visit this link and learn how you could start sharing your videos and photos via phone and email.

3. Cool Magic Circles on Facebook: This is really simple, though I admit I didn’t get this the first time. This cool magic circles appearing on your page is just one of the many secret tricks you’ll find in Facebook. You might want to give this a try.

Here’s how: Press Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Enter key then press up & down.

Now, just in case it doesn’t work on your first try, try reloading your page again by pressing F5 and repeat the process.

4. Quickly Upload Photos from Picasa Application to Facebook:

It was a great challenge for me to find an alternative photo hosting application, an application that would really work to my liking. Picasa happens to be it. I find this application to be useful in sharing and organizing photos of various events like reunions and parties. It has plenty of exciting features; one of them is the ability to upload photos directly to your FB account. Here’s what you need to do to download and install PICASA version 2 or 3:

• Click here to download.
• Once the installation is complete, click Picasa application here to install the plugin.
• Next, add the new Facebook button to your Picasa.

That’s it. You may now start uploading and sharing your photos using Picasa.

5. Display Animated Gifs On Status Update With A Play Button

Why aren’t animated gifs on Facebook yet? With giphy gifs it already is. Just find a gif that you want from giphy.com then share the link at your Facebook page.

6. Use Facebook search like a pro:

Have you experienced looking for someone in Facebook with such difficulty? If yes, then perhaps you might want to try using the Search Box. This is a powerful tool that can help you find your old friends, celebrities, organizations, or your favorite band with no difficulty. Go ahead and be like a pro – click here to learn how.

7. Facebook flip status updates:

Are you in the mood to have a little fun? Try flipping your FB status upside down. I’m sure your friends will be tilting their heads too trying to read your message. Ain’t that funny? It sure is!  Go ahead and flip your Facebook status now. Click here.

8 : Changing fonts on Facebook status:

And I’m saving the best for the last. By default your status update have only one font, but you can always use 3rd party service to change the font of your status update. Here is a cool website which you can use to change font for your Facebook status updates.

9. Facebook Keyboard Shortcuts

So there are keyboard shortcuts on Google+, and also on YouTube, it’s no surprise that Facebook has their own set of keyboard shortcuts as well. Here are some Facebook keyboard shortcuts that you can use while browsing Facebook on Chrome for Mac.

Shortcuts	Descriptions
Ctrl + Opt + 0	Help
Ctrl + Opt + 1	Home
Ctrl + Opt + 2	Timeline
Ctrl + Opt + 3	Friends
Ctrl + Opt + 4	Inbox
Ctrl + Opt + 5	Notifications
Ctrl + Opt + 6	Account Settings
Ctrl + Opt + 7	Privacy
Ctrl + Opt + 8	About
Ctrl + Opt + 9	Terms
Ctrl + Opt + M	New Message
C	Comment on a story in News Feed
J and K	Scroll between News Feed stories
I	Like or unlike a selected story
Q	Search for a friend to chat with
P	Focus on the text box when making a post
/	Search
Ctrl + G	Search conversations
Ctrl + Q	Show/hide keyboard shortcuts
Ctrl + Delete	Archive/unarchive conversations
Ctrl + C	Mark as spam
Ctrl + C	Start a new message
Ctrl + I	Go to inbox
Ctrl + U	Go to other

A Brief Guide TO Facebook them Insights

Some marketers love them, some hate them and some just plain don’t understand. From impressions to new likes, the following graph explains the size and relationship of audiences in each metric in Facebook insights. The Model is not to scale since every page is different, but the circles show the relationship between the number of users and actions recorded in each metric.

For more knowledge: What not put in your social network profile

• Friends of Friends – This is everyone you have the potential to influence. The extended network is often hundreds of thousands or even millions of people. All other metrics are a fraction of this number –less than 1%
• Impressions –This is the total number times people saw anything from your page in the news feed or ticker.
• Reach –The number of people who received impressions. It’s likely your content was seen by people more than once, so this number is smaller than total impressions.

For more knowledge: Using Facebook as a marketing tool

• Post Impressions –This counts how many times your post was seen in a news feed or ticker. Regular impressions record all activity. This metric is limited to, post from you.
• Post Reach –just like reach is the number of people who received impressions, post reaches tell you how many people your posts reached.
• Engaged Users –Engaged users is the number of people who clicked on one of your posts.
• Talking about this –People talking about this are people who created a news feed story from your content by liking, commenting or sharing. When their friends view these stories in Newsfeeds and tickers, impressions and reach grow.
• New Likes –New likes count as people talking about this because liking creates a story. Of the HUNDRED OF THOUSANDS of people you have the potential to reach, this is the SMALL FRACTION that acted.
• Other Metrics
  • Logged-In Page views –This is the number of people who viewed your timeline while logged into Facebook. Since the majority of views come from logged-in users, this is a pretty good indication of everyone who came to your page.
  • Consumption/Consumers –When you post any media (link, photo, or video) it is “consumed” when a user clicks to view. The number of consumers is the total number of people who create consumptions.

Why Facebook Is Making You Pay to Play

Have you noticed a slow but steady decline in your organic reach on Facebook? If your answer is yes, rest assured that you are not alone. While that assurance may not make you feel much better, the good news is this decline is not a content problem, it’s a platform problem … and we are all in it together. So what’s the solution?

 

Let’s start at the beginning. The good ol’ days of being a Facebook marketer are gone, and they have been for two years. In 2012, Facebook introduced the Facebook Exchange, a way for companies to purchase ads through real-time bidding. You might also remember that was the year the social media network was closing in on having 1 billion registered users.

Enter organic reach’s demise.

How Facebook shrank your audience

In the fourth quarter of 2013, Facebook generated $2.34 billion in advertising revenue. On its tenth birthday last month, Facebook had 1.23 billion users – that’s 230 million new users since January 2012! And what’s been happening to your brand’s content? It’s been viewed by a smaller and smaller percentage of your audience.

According to AdAge, Facebook has stated, “We expect organic distribution of an individual page’s posts to gradually decline over time as we continually work to make sure people have a meaningful experience on the site.” The fact of the matter is your Facebook content isn’t just competing with your competitors’ in a finite space. It is also competing with content from every other brand page your audience members like, as well as the content your audience members’ friends are sharing.

Last summer, Facebook gave marketers some insight into the competition they are facing. Every time a user visits the News Feed there are, on average, 1,500 potential stories to see. Using a priority-ranking algorithm, Facebook shows an average of 300 stories out of the 1,500 to each user every day.

As the number of Facebook users continues to grow, the number of published stories also grows. Facebook’s News Feed has reached the point where there is far more content available than its users are able to consume. And since Facebook is a social network built for users – not marketers – content from brand pages is what’s getting pushed out of the News Feed most often.

That is, unless a brand pays to play.

Facebook ads are the solution to brands’ plummeting organic reach numbers. As Facebook’s number of users continues to grow, marketers wanting to maximize the reach of their content must be prepared to implement a paid distribution strategy.

Facebook page redesign: the good, the bad and the ugly. All you need to know

This has been our favorite subject this week, we first wrote about it here, concerned that the app tabs didn’t show up on the first screenshot of the scheduled redesign, then, we began rejoicing here after having seen the second screenshot Facebook shared which finally displayed app tabs on the left column of the page.

This morning, we finally had access to a page with the new design.

There’s good news, bad news and some really ugly stuff. I’lll start with the good news.

The good news

#1 Applications are still visible on the page. Not only are they accessible under the “more” drop down button as many were guessing a couple of days ago, they’re also displayed in the same format as they are today (with the tab image and app title) in the left side bar. You just have to scroll a little to see them.

That’s pretty good news.  The visuals will be less visible than what they used to be (at the top of the page) but still easily accessible. In fact, the position they have today is not worse than the one they had in the 2011 version of pages (it was a tiny icon in the left side menu).

#2 You can still pin a post to the top of the timeline. Page admins can still make sure that the first thing page visitors see is the post promoting their apps.  No change here.

#3 Page posts are now larger. They are 511 pixel wide as opposed to today’s 410. This is better for your content’s visibility. And since you only have one column now, the pinned post, if you use it, will be even more visible. No more scanning left to right between columns, good stuff!

#4 Fan posts and reviews for local pages are still here. This was another of the major questions page admins were worried about in these comments which followed the announcementof the new design. No more worries on that side.

The bad news

#1 The page header remains on screen after apps are launched. Bad news. Page headers are pretty high (360 pixels). Once your app is launched, it’s content is now low on the screen. Your users will be forced to scroll down in order to see it.

The current design gives apps the full screen, once launched, your promotion’s visuals and copy cover the screen from top to bottom and users only need to scroll see or enter a contest if you designed it that way. Knowing that users hate to scroll and anything that’s below the fold gets much fewer clicks and traffic, this is not a good move.

Applications are now displayed under the page header, pushing them way down the page. Users will have to scroll down in order to participate, this is not good news

#2 Page suggestions are now displayed within apps!  Ouch!  Can this be for real?  If your app contains a like gate (which is the case in 99% of Facebook apps), users who click the like button will automatically see a widget suggesting other Facebook pages you may want to like.  These suggestions are determined by location, category and other pages your fans like- possibly your competitors.

Not only is this distracting your visitors, pushing your app content further down the screen, it’s an invitation for your participants to move immediately to another page displayed in that widget. At this point, for most screens, your app will basically disappear if users don’t scroll down to see it again. Very, very bad for conversion rates.

After you’ve clicked “like” to enter the contest, a widget is automatically displayed below the page header, pushing your app even further down, below the fold.

#3 the like button has moved and is less visible. In the current design, the like button is at the top right of the page and is standing alone on a white background. Pretty visible and easy to spot. In the new design, as the page header remains visible on top of your app throughout the process, the like button has not only moved further to the left, but is also on your header image background. It will be less visible, especially if you have a background with a lot of visual noise.  You’re going to need to change your “click the like button here” visuals to point users in the right direction.

The very bad news

If you were not upset enough already, here comes the worst part.

If you’ve opted for the fan gate, like the other 99% of all Facebook apps, clicking on “like” will not reload the page to take users to the next step. Clicking on like, leaves users on the like gate step.  It basically does nothing. You’ll only be taken to the next step by manually reloading the page. Yuk. This is obvioulsy a bug on Facebook’s side, and it will hopefully be fixed soon, but you need to be aware of that before opting to take on the new design.

If you do move to the new design, you’re likely to lose most of your participants who won’t understand what to do once the page fails to reload itself.

As of today, the new design is not being pushed globally to all pages. Many of you have probably seen a message on the page inviting you to register on the waiting list for the new design:

[WARNING]: Before applying to the waiting list, consider the possible consequences to your current fan gated applications. As long as the bug mentioned above remains unfixed, I recommend sticking with the current design.

5-Step Strategy To Improve Your Facebook Engagement & Growth

Thanks to numerous Facebook changes recently, many businesses are thinking about dropping Facebook entirely. Engagement is in the toilet, and the page just isn’t growing.

Before you do, it pays to take a fresh, close look at your Facebook strategy. Often the problem lies there and has absolutely nothing to do with algorithm changes.

Here is a sneak peek at part of my evaluation processes to identify where the disconnect lies.

1. Figure Out Who Your End Buyer Is

When a business doesn’t really know who actually makes the purchase decision for their product or service, they don’t know who their audience is.

Without understanding that audience, odds are slim that the content being posted will resonate with them. If the target customer isn’t something a company can rattle off the top of their head, then it’s important to do a quick analysis of who has purchased their product and why.

If I am working with a security company, for example, here are the types of questions I might ask:

• Do you sell commercial or residential solutions?
• Residential -> Are most of your buyers men or women?
• Women -> Do you know what triggered their decision to improve security?
• If you were to set aside the fear tactics so common to the security industry, what kinds of things would interest them? Engage them? Build a relationship with them?

Questions that dig into buyers and their purchase decision make the foundation of your social media strategy. They tell you who you are talking to, what concerns they have, and what brought them into your sphere of influence. It gives you a basic foundation to begin understanding who your prospects might be.

Once you understand the largest segment, you can branch out into looking at smaller segments.  Then, you can start being creative with how to reach them because you understand who these people are and what motivates them.

In keeping with the security company as an example, I might create a Facebook presence around a fake “thief” that posts  stories of his/her activities.

Targeting women? Maybe it’s a cat burgler that is actually feline. Furry fun to entertain and trigger laughter while educating.

I’d use Fiverr or (preferably) a local illustrator to create some custom images with captions, if the budget allowed. Or perhaps we would create a sexy fake Sean Connery-styled James Bond who does residential burglary and corporate espionage. Have fun with it! Don’t be scary, be interesting.

(Note: These ideas are my intellectual property. Don’t steal them unless you hire me and have my permission.) 

You can’t be successful on Facebook without understanding your customers and prospects.

Once you understand who they are, you can put on your thinking cap to focus on what might interest and motivate them. It’s important to keep the niche narrow – don’t try to sell everything to everyone.

Then, forget about marketing. Start conversations. Tell stories. Fit your activity to your audience.

2. Realize They Just Don’t Care

Other than current customers, who make up the bulk of fans for most Facebook pages, understand that the general population doesn’t care about your brand, product or service. They care about their own needs and interests.

Most people follow very few brand pages, so giving them a compelling reason to stick around is critical.

What can you give them that they can’t find anywhere else? Education? Entertainment? Emotional reactions?

Get over any ego and assumptions that make you think they are innately interested. Your customers might care because you’ve already proven your value – which is why Facebook is a wonderful customer retention and customer service platform – but prospects? They. Just. Don’t. Care.

How are you making them care?

3. Do an Audit of Your Facebook Page

Now that you understand the buyer and target audience, look at your existing Facebook page. Would it appeal to them? Why or why not? Are you giving them reason to engage? Are you promoting too much and acting in YOUR interests, instead of theirs?

That’s common. Entrepreneurs and marketing professionals that think of social media as a marketing tool often lose sight of what matters. Remember: It’s not about you, it’s about being a part of your community and providing value.

Take an honest look at your page from an outsider’s perspective. Consider asking your customers/prospects what they like and don’t like about it and take their recommendations into account as you re-vamp your Page.

4. Define Your Marketing Objectives and Customer Acquisition Goals, Then Map Them to Your Facebook Strategy

Understanding your audience is essential because it helps you build community and engagement. But what good is that if it doesn’t lead to revenue, website traffic, or other marketing objectives? Be clear about what you are trying to accomplish. Common objectives include leads, traffic, reach, and sales.

Back to the security company. Say we decided the primary target audience is women homeowners purchasing residential alarm solutions. If the marketing objective is website traffic, how can your posts trigger click-throughs? If your marketing objective is building your email database, how are you giving them incentive to subscribe?

I follow the 80/20 rule – eighty percent of social media activity is entertaining, conversational and/or educational, and twenty percent is marketing about the company/product/service. All of it works to build the brand, but in different ways and always being careful not to over-promote.

After all, this is social media, not advertising.

5. Define Your Brand Attributes, Then Make Sure Your Posts Fit Them

Brand attributes aren’t the graphic standards you use – they are the attributes you want your company, product, or service to be known for.

What do you want to build your reputation around? Is it complicated installs? Knowledge of iPad integration? Complex computer security? Inspiring women to put safety first?

Posts should connect with these attributes and tie in with your marketing objective. It’s part of what makes you different. Unique. Worthy of interest and connection.

Identify your top 3-4 brand attributes, then connect them to your activity. Showcase these brand attributes in everything you do: your cover image, your tabs, and every post you make. Make it smack-upside-the-head obvious, so page visitors and fans don’t have to guess.

You can also include product or service attributes. These are your key differentiators on a product or service level, instead of a company level. Are you different due to uber simple control panels when everyone else offers a hot mess of complicated computers? Or your panel is a crazy simple smartphone app? Or your installation service is faster and cleaner? Then your Facebook posts would speak to those specific attributes and create conversation about it. Know what makes you different and build on it so your audience has something to connect to.

As you start integrating your attributes, some will interest your audience more than others, so don’t forget to try new ideas for your page! Make sure they fit your audience, objectives and attributes, but constantly test new ideas and monitor the results using Facebook Insights.

Putting It All Together

This is just a quick, down, and dirty overview of my basic process, but I urge you to give it a try before you delete your Facebook page.

Map out these strategies in a spreadsheet or Word document that you can refer to often and you may be able to identify a major gap that is killing your success.

Facebook Ready To Start Selling Video Ads On News Feeds

Watch the Video here :- Selling Video Ads

Facebook announced today that it will offer marketers the ability to buy video advertisements to run in users’ News Feeds. Facebook, which has been testing “Premium Video Ads” since December, said it will be limiting the program to a small group of advertisers and will be rolling it out slowly in the next several months.

The video spots will be 15 seconds long and play automatically (and soundlessly) when Facebook users scroll through their News Feeds. If you click on the ad, it will open and the sound will play. Facebook has been displaying video this way since last fall.

It’s a natural step for a company that has been trying to add more ways to serve ads. Facebook said it has set up Premium Video Ads to be bought and measured similarly to how advertisers already buy and measure TV ads.

The ads are bought based on Targeted Gross Rating Points to reach a specific audience over a short period of time. Delivery is measured by an independent third party, Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR), and advertisers only pay based on what Nielsen OCR measures.

Facebook also said that it doesn’t want to flood user news feeds with annoying, schlocky ads, so it will be working with a company called Ace Metrix to “objectively measure the creative quality of the video in the Facebook environment, and highlight performance indicators for advertisers such as watchability, meaningfulness and emotional resonance.”

Report Says Facebook’s Organic Reach Will Hit Zero. Our Response? Of Course It Won’t.

A recent report from social@Ogily warns of a world with no organic reach for any brand pages where all brands have to pay to play. Dubbed “Facebook Zero: Considering Life After the Demise of Organic Reach” the study paints a grim picture for the free marketing that brands can harness on Facebook. While the statement may instill fear and doubt into the minds of marketers, the survey instills more questions than answers in our minds.

It’s quite certainly true that the overall reach of Facebook Page posts has dropped. However, a drop does not equate to a statistically relevant deduction that organic reach will not exist. The assumption that a decline automatically equates to total eradication is foolish. This is comparable to a quarter of NYSE monthly losses and the proclamation that all stock values will be non-existent.

While the study does not list any specific specific facts supporting that Facebook organic page reach will be zero, it does mention that “Facebook sources were unofficially advising community managers to expect it to approach zero in the foreseeable future.”

Firstly, this doesn’t make a lick of sense for marketers. Why curate a page and content if there is no way to reach a user? Why even have a page unless using for customer service (as the study accurately points out). Yes, Facebook Page reach is declining. No, having zero reach is not a good for Facebook. They want active brands on the network and they want goodwill to gain more marketing dollars.

Secondly, when a drop occurs it helps to debunk by analyzing  the surrounding variables. Let’s take Facebook for example. The following post types have been on the rise:

• Ads – The overall Facebook ad revenue has been up 76% in Q4 2013
• News – Facebook has made a major push to become the best source for socially aggregated news
• Links – More prominence has been put on quality content and link shares
• More Pages – As of last summer there were 18 million pages with 1 million more added each month

Also add in Instagram activity, trending activity, friend activity, and with the coming page activitythere is simply more going on within the Facebook environment that there used to be. Could that play a role in the decline in Page reach? Possibly. Does this mean that organic reach will be zero? No.

This study does a great job highlighting the decreased Facebook reach, but jumps to many conclusions in the statement that Facebook Pages will have no reach.  While we aren’t convinced of Facebook Zero, the study does highlight a very salient point — not to over-commit to a single platform. Facebook reach is shrinking and may very well continue to shrink. Those who have cultivated their own community outside of Facebook or have diversified their social footing are now reaping the benefits.

For the full report, head on over to social@Ogilvy for the full report.

Postscript From Danny Sullivan: We are checking with the report’s author for some follow-up, but to add to what Greg Finn has written above, the report may not make sense from another perspective. If you take the current figures as proposed, where organic page reach is only 6%, then that suggests 94% of Facebook’s news feed is made up of something else. What is that something else?

It’s not ads. Anyone with a Facebook account can easily verify that 96% of what you see isn’t ads. That leaves three key possibilities:

1) A few pages are getting “richer,” that certain publishers are being greatly rewarded far beyond what they used to get.

2) Many more pages are getting visibility than before — perhaps in the past, only a relatively few pages got that double-digit visibility, not more are getting visibility, but since there’s only so much space, all of it drop.

3) Facebook has greatly increased the amount of non-Page content it is showing, say status updates, personal pictures, RSVPs to events and so on, so that page content has less visibility.

The study seems to have looked at the number of impressions that Facebook reports a particular page post has received, divided that against the page’s overall audience and come up with a percentage of reach (which is typically low). But the problem with that is looking at a per-post metric doesn’t give a stat of what’s happening in the news feed as a whole — where some of the factors above might be coming into play.

Postscript 2: Heard back from the report’s author Marshall Manson who emailed:

Let’s agree (if we can) that there are 3 kinds of content that get served into FB users’ news feeds.

(1) Content published and delivered as a result of organic reach from brand pages that the user has chosen to follow. Let’s also include here content from brand pages that arrives as the result of shares or other viral behavior from the users’ friends.

(2) Paid content from brands.

(3) everything else — updates, news, cat videos, etc that users see from their friends.

My view is that Facebook is shrinking the first, holding steady or slightly increasing the second and limiting the third.

Even if the net content hole for organic content is staying the same size, there are undoubtedly more brands publishing, so it’s understandable that less gets through.

But I don’t know of anyone, outside of Facebook itself, who could confirm my suspicions for us with hard data. (And in happy to be wrong about that. If there is someone, I’d love to see the data.)

All that said, I don’t think that our failure to address this constitutes a flaw in the work. We made a conscious choose only to address the organic home, so our point is much more straightforward — whether it’s because the organic hole is getting smaller or because there’s more brand competition to fill it — there is less organic content getting through to brand fans. That’s what the data shows — and incidentally, every single page we look at showed a net decline. The question, therefore is what brands should do about it.

For the moment, switching into the paid hole makes sense. We know that brands can achieve their objectives, each their fans, and drive engagement and advocacy. Succeeding will require different ways of working for many brands. And that’s really the point of the paper.

I bolded the key part, to me. I love the idea of there being an “organic hole,” that is, a chunk of space that brands are all vying for where they appear within Facebook for free. This is very similar to what you could call the organic or SEO hole with Google.

And as with Google, as more brands all vie for the top 10 spots with the most visibility, it gets harder to gain those as more brands and more content comes into the space.

That seems more likely as to what’s happening here. More and more brands are competing with more and more posts for the same space — or perhaps slightly less space, as ads have grown and as other content has also increased. Getting any particular post more visible might be harder. However, if more posts are going out, it’s also possible that overall traffic for some brands might be rising.

Instagram Strikes First Big Ad Deal In A Win For Facebook

Instagram had tip-toed into advertising, debuting ads in users’ streams just last November. Today, it’s reportedly moving into the big leagues with a new advertising deal inked with the agency holding giant Omnicom. Ad Age reports the deal is worth up to $100 million.

The deal opens up ads to the brands working with agencies under the Omnicom umbrella such as Omnicom Media Group, DDB, BBDO and TBWA/Chiat/Day.

“This doesn’t change our advertising strategy moving forward — people will continue to see a limited number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from select brands who already have a strong presence on Instagram,” said Jim Squires, director of market operations for Instagram, in a statement to Ad Age.

Ads on Instagram look like typical image or video posts, but are flagged with “Sponsored” label. Ad Age reports that Omnicom Media Group, which lead the deal, will work on targeting and measurement refinements with Instagram.

Squires added, “Our teams are going to work hand in hand to develop and execute campaigns that provide people with amazing imagery. This is an exciting new chapter and we’re looking forward to the great creative content that comes out of this partnership.”

Michael Kors was the first brand to advertise on Instagram. Adidas, Ben & Jerry’s, Burberry, General Electric, Levi’s, Lexus, Macy’s, PayPal, and Starwood are among the brands that quickly joined the advertising ranks on the network.

Facebook acquired Instagram in 2012 for more than $700 million in April 2012. The photo-based network has grown quickly among users, boasting 150 million active users, and with brands. In October, social measurement firm Simply Measured reported that 71 percent of top brandswere participating on Instagram, an increase of 55 percent year-over-year.

Facebook launches Public Content Solutions to help media partners with trend data

As more and more people talk about current events on Facebook, developers within the media industry are looking for some way to join the conversation. So to offer companies a solution into the data behind trending topics on the social network, Facebook announced Friday the launch of Public Content Solutions.

Public Content Solutions (PCS) offers support and resources to partners using Facebook’s Public Feed API and Keyword Insights API. Partners who take part in PCS will receive a badge to display, as well as support from the PCS team and access to Facebook’s Media Partnerships team. Initial partners in the PCS program include Arktan, telescope, never.no, Timeline Labs, Tagboard, Vizrt, Reality Check and SnappyTV.

Facebook Partner Engineer Manager Bob Morgan introduced PCS in a blog post:

Whenever something important happens in the world – from the Sochi Olympics to the crisis in the Ukraine to the results of the Oscars – people immediately take to Facebook to discuss it. With more than a billion people using Facebook and engaging in real-time conversations during these moments, it’s important for us to work closely with media companies to help them tell these stories.

In the past year, we’ve launched a series of products and resources – like our Keyword Insights API and Public Feed API – to help partners leverage the massive amounts of data and content associated with these events. As a result, we’re seeing tremendous innovation coming from amazing partners in this space, such as data analysis and visualizations, intelligent curation of popular photos, videos and posts, fan voting and polling tools, broadcast and venue integrations and much more.

See Who’s Posting From Your Facebook Page With Facebook’s Latest Feature

Facebook has quietly launched a new feature designed to make Page Managers accountable for their individual posts on a Facebook page. If you’ve ever managed a Facebook page along with several other admins you’ve probably had a “I wish I knew who posted that” moment at least once.

With Facebook’s new feature you’ll know exactly who posted it. The name of the publisher will appear underneath the company name, visible by all admins.

This information will show up whether the post was made directly on Facebook, or through a third-party app like Buffer. Another thing to note is that the feature is not retroactive, it will only show up on posts made on or after February 20, 2014.

It looks something like this:

The information showing who made the post is only accessible to other admins, it’s not made publicly available. As you can see it’s a small update but extremely important for Facebook Page managers.

Knowing who published specific posts is great for assessing an individual’s performance on Facebook. If your business has multiple people in charge of posting on Facebook you’ll know who’s publishing posts that really click with your audience, and who might need a little extra social media training.

On the flip side of that, if someone publishes a posts that really makes your company look bad, whether accidental or not, you’ll be able to hold them accountable. This is a small, but necessary update to make everything run a bit smoother.