
Social Media Marketing

Facebook has gotten pretty good at filtering garbage out of people's news feeds. Too good, as far as advertisers are concerned: They want the garbage put back, so they can spam people, and logically Facebook is complying.
Facebook has bought Push Pop Press, the digital book company formed by former Apple staff. In a statement on its website, Push Pop Press said: “We’re taking our publishing technology and everything we’ve learned and are setting off to help design the world’s largest book, Facebook.”
New York City-based apparel retailer Aéropostale has launched a fully integrated Facebook store powered by Usablenet’s technology platform that combines shopping and social media and extends full e-commerce functionality to the Aéropostale Facebook community.
Sears has driven new traffic to its brick-and-mortar locations by partnering with SCVNGR, a social gaming and check-in service. Here's how the partnership works: While in a Sears store, consumers can pull out their smartphone, launch the SCVNGR app and check in to the Sears location they're currently at. These consumers then create a profile and begin participating in various challenges. For example, Sears' fitness and footwear department's challenge reads: "Tread Softly: Make yourself at home in the shoe aisle and find the coolest tread. Snap a photo and then caption it with where you want to leave your mark in the world!"
Cross-channel retailers must focus on acquiring more social visitors this holiday season, as their value to brands is undeniable. According to the IBM Coremetrics Fourth Annual Online Retail Holiday Readiness Report, social media users are more than twice as likely than the overall population to convert into customers.
With the growth of F-commerce, commerceonfacebook.com has officially launched a free business directory enabling vendors of Facebook stores and third-party service companies to list their businesses.
Whole Foods and upstart natural meals brand Saffron Road are employing Facebook, Twitter and blogs to target Muslims for Ramadan, a month-long spiritual holiday beginning Aug. 1.
After a running start, Google+'s growth may be slowing down a bit. A report from Experian Hitwise found both traffic and users' average time on the social network fell last week in the U.S.
One second is how long Google’s +1 plug-in drags down page load time, and that’s not “just” a second when research shows that 10 percent of site traffic is lost for every extra second a site takes to load. Facebook’s ubiquitous "Like" plug-in stalls page load time by approximately .2 seconds. This means featuring both plug-ins on a page adds c. 1.2 seconds to its load time. That translates to more than a 10 percent loss in visitors, and by extension, in conversion.
It’s time for e-commerce and video marketing professionals to tackle the next important question: When will Facebook Credits mature into a real opportunity for the rest of us?