Social Media Marketing

Facebook is testing a new feature that offers to promote users' posts and status updates for a fee. The new service is currently only available in New Zealand. There, Facebook users can pay $2 to "highlight" a post, making it more visible to a greater number of their Facebook contacts. Users can pay...

Social network MySpace settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Tuesday over charges related to how the site was using members' personal information. The social network had access to personal data from users, including their full names, ages and genders. MySpace promised users it would not sha...

Facebook is rolling out its Facebook Offers service, a way for users to get discounts and promotions from local businesses via the social networking site. The offers will be distributed through users' Facebook news feeds. Users can then sign up to receive the offers via email and redeem them at pa...

Facebook has snagged the highly popular photo-sharing application Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. It is among the biggest acquisitions in the social media space, second only to Google's $1.65 billion stock-for-stock purchase of YouTube in 2006. The deal, both in size and intent, is very ...

It finally has happened -- the number of U.S. mobile subscribers who own smartphones is just about equal to the number who own feature phones, according to new data. As of Feb. 2012, 49.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers carried a smartphone -- an increase of 38 percent from Feb. 2011, when only 3...

OK, it's time to officially close the book on the 2011 holiday retail season and to shift our attention forward to 2012. For me personally, what makes it difficult to stop looking back are the new trends that emerged that will forever change holiday shopping: Mobile made its mark, with 11 percent of...

Now is a good time to be a startup looking for funding, suggests the Halo Report, which provides data and identifies trends affecting early stage entrepreneurs and investors. Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights collaborated in the development of the report. Most notable amo...

Yelp had an excellent first day as a publicly traded company. It opened on the New York Stock Exchange Friday at $22.01 per unit -- up 47 percent from its IPO price of $15. By the end of the day, shares were trading at $24.58. The first-hour pop was surprising, even for enthusiastic advocates of the...

Facebook introduced a slew of new ad initiatives at its marketing conference, fMC, held in New York on Wednesday. Most had been leaked to industry publications prior to this first-ever event. Timeline for Pages, for example, was expected. Also expected was a mobile ad play -- Facebook had admitted i...

Facebook introduced a long-expected development on Wednesday: Timeline for Pages -- that is, Timeline for brands. It is similar in look and feel and function to the feature that was pushed out to user profiles last fall. However, the implications of Timeline for Pages are much greater for brands, bo...

Twitter launched an expansion of its mobile advertising system Tuesday, putting promoted tweets into the timelines of users accessing the service from mobile applications. Users accessing Twitter from iPhone and Android apps have been able to search out promoted trends and tweets before, and promote...

Yahoo is pressuring Facebook to pay licensing fees on several patents covering a variety of website functions like advertising, website personalization, social networking and messaging. Yahoo has a responsibility to its shareholders, employees and other stakeholders to protect its intellectual prope...

Yelp, the online local review service, expects to sell 7.15 million shares in its IPO, at US$12 to $14 each. The total potential take is $100 million. The company will list its stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "YELP." Yelp's price target values the company at roughly $778 millio...

Facebook is reportedly working on a system to put ads in its mobile services. The news comes just days after the social networking giant filed for an initial public offering, hoping to raise $5 billion. In its IPO filing, Facebook stated that the number of active mobile users of its social network i...

Zero hour is approaching as the certainty grows that Facebook will be filing for its initial public offering this week. Zero hour for excited investors and Wall Street banks -- and zero hour for privacy advocates. Even as a private company, Facebook had no problem pushing the envelope, said Consumer...