Social Media Marketing

Strong revenue figures helped Yelp beat analysts' expectations for the second quarter of 2013, sending its stock soaring by more than 20 percent following the Wednesday release of its earnings report. While the company reported a loss of 1 cent per share, revenue rose to $55 million, representing a ...

When a tweet goes out on Twitter that a user didn't send, the concern is usually that the account has been hijacked by a malicious user. This week, however, three users on Twitter were surprised to find out that their user names and images had been used as examples in a marketing campaign created by...

Social commerce website Fancy has racked up $53 million in funding from investors including American Express and actor Will Smith, according to press reports citing a July 3 SEC filing. The company currently is valued at $600 million. Fancy reportedly brings in about $3 million per month, and its ba...

There's no question that books have gone digital. Sure, there are still paper books aplenty in a smattering of brick-and-mortar bookstores -- and available online as well -- but there's no escaping the proverbial writing on the wall that book-selling behemoth Amazon now sells more electronic books t...

The Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection on Monday issued a letter to search engines including Google, Yahoo and Microsoft, advising them to provide better labeling and notification of advertising that appears alongside search results. The letter is an update to guidelines issued...

Buzz is building over Facebook's rumored plan to launch a mobile video app for Instagram at an event on Thursday. Video functionality in Instagram, the company Facebook purchased for $1 billion in April of last year, would be a direct challenge to Twitter's Vine app. Vine lets users take 6-second vi...

Movie studios and TV networks increasingly are turning to social media for help with generating buzz about their upcoming releases and programming. Communities are building around favorite movie franchises like the Twilight and Avengers series and TV shows like Downton Abbey and The Walking Dead. Ha...

Facebook will simplify its advertising structure in an effort to make it easier for marketers to determine which products will help them best reach consumers, the company announced this week. Advertisers currently face a choice of 27 different formats on the social network, but the streamlining effo...

Twitter's Vine sprouted on Android devices Monday, allowing users to post 6-second videos in their tweets. Earlier this year, Twitter launched its Vine app for Apple's iOS, but until now, Android users have been left out of the fun. Now they can get into the thick of it as well. "Android owners: Wel...

Pinterest on Monday announced new features and relationships with brands that will bring more functionality to its pins. The features, according to the social bookmarking company, will make the pins more "useful." Pinterest introduced its new features in a Monday blog post. Pins now show more inform...

The FTC recently updated its guidelines for online advertising to address the growth in mobile and social media marketing. Now a paid tweet has to begin with the word "ad," as obvious disclosure now must be included with all commercial speech. Is the link you're tweeting from an employer? A client? ...

Salesforce.com expanded its advertising initiatives this week with the launch of Social.com, a platform designed to help brands tie ad campaigns to what's trending on social networks. The new platform bundles Salesforce.com features that resulted from the company's acquisitions of Buddy Media, a pro...

Twitter will soon significantly expand its advertising reach after the social network agreed to a deal with Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group, one of the world's largest advertising agencies. Starcom's top clients, which include Coca-Cola and Microsoft, will now win some of the premier advertising s...

Facebook may soon be adding video ads, a key step in the development of an advertising platform that needs to draw interest from brands that may have previously questioned its return on investment. Video ads could start to run on Facebook as early as June or July, according to published reports. Ad ...

Thanks to its agreements with big data providers, including Acxiom, Epsilon, and Dialogix, ads on Facebook should become more relevant, if not personal. Advertisers and agencies can now drill down into more than 500 groups to target an audience for their ads.