Friday, January 31, 2014
Monday, January 27, 2014
Twitter Users' Diversity Becomes Ad Selling Point - WSJ.com
Thursday, January 23, 2014
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
A Popular Chinese Social Networking App Blazes Its Own Path - NYTimes.com
Weixin (pronounced way-shin) is this country’s killer app, a highly addictive social networking tool that allows smartphone users to send messages and share news, photos, videos and web links, much like America’s WhatsApp, or Line, a Japanese communications and messaging app. In the United States, a similar version is known as WeChat.
Friday, January 17, 2014
Facebook Rolls Out Its Version of Trending Topics - NYTimes.com
Chris Struhar, an engineering manager who works on Trending as well as Facebook’s news feed, said the new service was designed to be easier to understand and more customized than, say, Twitter’s list of trending topics, which is often just a list of cryptic keywords or hashtags.
“Showing just the topic name, you kind of look at that and say, I don’t understand why this thing is trending,” he said in an interview.
Thursday, January 16, 2014
Facebook Revamps Ads to Compete With Google - NYTimes.com
Last June, Facebook released a tracking pixel, a snippet of code that allows advertisers to track customers who come to their websites from Facebook ads. For Amy Norman, co-chief executive officer of Little Passports, the pixel was a game-changer.
Ms. Norman, whose San Francisco company sends children a monthly package to introduce them to geography and history, began testing ads on Facebook to see which ones brought in more customers. In June, Little Passports spent about $30,000 on Facebook ads and the company’s revenue for the month was about $130,000. By the end of the year, the company’s monthly advertising spending on Facebook had grown to as much as $150,000 and its revenue for December was $700,000.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Social Media in Indian Politics - NYTimes.com
Social media are playing an important new role in Indian democracy. A social media campaign by the Electoral Commission drew record levels of voter registration and turnout in elections held in four Indian states, including the capital, New Delhi, in November and December.
Of 790 million eligible Indian voters, about 160 million are first-time voters between the ages of 18 and 24 years old. Political parties are also embracing social media to reach voters, including cellphone messaging. Social media are credited with helping the new Common Man party and its candidate, Arvind Kejriwal, win a surprise victory in Delhi against the Congress and Bharatiya Janata parties.