Sponsored Stories to gradually roll out in users’ news ticker

News on Facebook Marketing, according to Brafton : TechCrunch announced that Facebook will now permit businesses to pay to sponsor stories that will appear in users’ news tickers. Sponsored Stories will increasingly roll out in the site’s ticker, a Facebook’s PR representative told TechCrunch.

Like any other real-time activities, the stories will appear in the user’s feed but to differentiate them from the user-generated content on the website, the word Sponsored will be included. As content from Pages Liked by specific users and friends will be displayed by Facebook, placement of the stories will be targeted to individual users.

Brafton reported that an increase of 46% clickthrough rate was observed by Facebook since the roll out of Sponsored Stories last year. However, Sponsored Stories only appeared in parts of the website occupied by ad content.

Some users may not like Facebook’s move in putting the stories to the news ticker but they will never see irrelevant content as the ads will be contextual. Context has been reported by Brafton as an important mean to a successful social media marketing content.

With Facebook’s more than 800 million active users, they will always have enough room to implement a risky promotional content.

Read more at Facebook to include Sponsored Stories in news ticker

Start-Ups eyes image-driven social platform, Pinterest

News on Twitter Marketing, according to The Wall Street Journal : Howard Lindzon, StockTwits Chief Executive, blogged a frustrated response, calls Twitter’s adoption of so-called cashtags a “hijacking” of his company’s idea and time when Twitter announced a ticker symbol feature to enable searches for stocks and companies using the dollar sign.

Lindzon wrote on his Web site, “It’s interesting that Twitter has hijacked our creation of $TICKER i.e. $AAPL. You can hijack a plane but it does not mean you know how to fly it.”

To limit how third-party clients access the micro-blogging service, additional restrictions, including required authentication and display conditions, has been announced by Twitter.

With StockTwits’ experience with Twitter, other businesses are already beginning to invest on Pinterest. Long awaited IPad and Android applications will soon be released by this latest social media darling.

Some new companies are already turning to Pinterest to drive their businesses even though the image-driven social platform has yet to release an API for third-party developers to write custom programs.

For now, to understand their progress, the few companies in Pinterest have mostly limited themselves to data analytics and marketing tools for brands.

Analytics for Pinterest may just be the start for start-ups willing to take a chance on building their businesses on the social bookmarking platform.

Read more at VCs and Start-Ups Pin Their Hopes on Pinterest

Businesses to reach more people with Facebook’s non-fan news feed ads

on Facebook Marketing, according to TechCrunch : before, people who weren’t fans could only be reached by Pages through ads in the web sidebar or Sponsored Stories noting their friends had interacted with the Page. Today, an aggressive web and mobile news feed ad unit, that lets Pages pay to show their posts to people who didn’t subscribe to them, is being tested by Facebook.

Although Facebook’s new non-fan news feed ads is part of a very small test, it will let Pages push their best content all across the social network. Apparently, this new ad unit is currently available only to a limited group of businesses and shown to only a small percentage of the service’s users.

Facebook though, made a promise not to overload the news feed with ads saying “We want to be thoughtful about how we introduce ads in news feed, so we have limits in place to ensure that people’s news feeds are not filled with advertising, but we don’t have specific numbers to share.”

With this new non-fan news feed ads, Facebook thinks that this will make it easier for businesses to reach more people. But it also leads to some questions by businesses that have spent hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in building up fan bases.

Now, advertisers may be more conservative about buying fans in the future as a Page with no fans could buy their way into millions of news feeds.

Read more at Facebook Tries Letting Pages Show News Feed Ads To Non-Fans

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