Facebook will bring its Timeline profile pages to brands this month in the U.S., according to executives briefed on the company’s plans.

At its F8 conference in September, Facebook introduced a dramatic transformation of profile pages for its more than 800 million users with the Timeline format, which generates picture-heavy, scrapbook-like collages spanning users’ entire history on the social network. It has been rolled out slowly, and users still have the choice to opt in.

At the time of the announcement, the company said it would wait to roll out the new feature for brands. Facebook VP-Marketing and Business Partnerships David Fischer said Timeline for brandswould be “consistent” with the Timeline look-and-feel, but not a carbon copy.

The new pages for brands will start in beta with a handful of partners and then be released to more marketers in stages, according to the sources. Facebook declined to comment on the product or the timing.

So what will Timeline for brands look like? For one, the tabs or apps marketers currently host on their Facebook pages to sell products or take polls may turn into boxes on the brand’s Timeline, much like how apps for Spotify or Washington Post Social Reader live on users’ Timelines.

The format change could put the onus on brands to develop their own apps using custom verbs other than “like,” in the same vein as Pinterest, which has a Facebook app that tracks when its users have “pinned” something. Promoting the use and development of “Open Graph” apps, which can have their data tapped for ad targeting, is an area of increased focus for Facebook.

Timeline has significant implications for Facebook fan-page management. One top consideration is that a brand’s Facebook presence no longer must date to when it joined the site but can be represented with content populating its Timeline from throughout its history. (Coca-Cola, for example, could hypothetically add an event for 1892, the year it was founded.)

Facebook is expected to go into detail about the new pages at its first-ever fMC event, a day-long conference in New York on Feb. 29 specifically for marketers.

As reported in AdAge

Two years ago, the Winter Games in Vancouver were just beginning. When they ended, NBC Universal reported a loss of $223 million.

Now, with the Summer Games in London five months away, NBC is hoping to avoid a big loss on its $1.18 billion rights fee, the most paid for the Olympics by a United States network.

Television is America’s No. 1 pastime, with an average of four hours and 39 minutes consumed by every person every day.

But more and more young people are tuning in elsewhere.

Americans ages 12 to 34 are spending less time in front of TV sets, even as those 35 and older are spending more, according to research that will be released on Thursday by Nielsen, a company that tracks media use.

The divide along a demographic line reveals the effect of Internet videos, social networks, mobile phones and video games — in short, all the alternatives to the television set that are taking up growing slices of the American attention span. Young people are still watching the same shows, but they are streaming them on computers and phones to a greater degree than their parents or grandparents do.

It has long been predicted that these new media would challenge traditional television viewing, but this is the first significant evidence to emerge in research data. If the trends hold, the long-term implications for the media industry are huge, possibly causing billions of dollars in annual advertising spending to shift away from old-fashioned TV.

Read more in the NY Times

When asked the question, “Notice anything new on Facebook?” — besides the company’s  filing for an IPO, of course — my guess is you would answer it with gusto and say “Timeline” or “Ticker.” And you would be correct — at least for the most part. There was another large change that managed to fly quietly under the radar, one that’s incredibly important to marketers taking advantage of Facebook Ads: Featured Stories. In January, Facebook rolled out Sponsored Stories in users’ News Feeds and called themFeatured Stories. Now marketers can promote user activity, including posts from their page, a user’s friend liking a page or post, and a user’s friend checking into a place, playing a game or using an app.  Users only see Featured Stories in their News Feed if they are already connected to the page or through their friends’ activity. In other words, individuals will not see posts that wouldn’t pop up organically. Not only does this mean a possible foray into mobile advertising (remember the Ticker and Sponsored Stories/Ad column, which have been the current ad locations, haven’t been included in the Facebook mobile webpage or app) but it also means that Facebook is putting a stake in the ground by emphasizing content and their Open Graph over traditional Facebook advertising. So what does this mean for marketers? It means the time has come for Facebook advertising to (gulp!) take the plunge and commit to Facebook content.

Read more: Marketing Land

Facebook’s initial public offering later this spring will create a billion-dollar windfall for its founders and early investors, so it’s easy to be cynical and view the IPO as another example of insiders cashing in on the latest web phenomenon. But the significance — and symbolism  — of Facebook’s IPO goes much deeper. Facebook’s astonishing rise is an apt metaphor for the emergence over the last two decades of the Internet itself as a tool for individual self-expression and collective organization. It’s also a dramatic example of a generational shift taking place among the entrepreneurial class, one that elevates social change as a priority along with commercial success. Perhaps most importantly, Facebook’s success is a powerful argument to the transformational impact that a free, open Internet can have on society and commerce.

Facebook’s IPO — the largest in Internet history — is a once-in-a-generation milestone in the evolution of the web. It represents a coming-of-age moment for the second major phase in the development of the Internet as a widespread platform: the rise of the social web. In the initial phase, large portals such as America Online and Yahoo established the web as a repository for vast amounts of information. It wasn’t until Google indexed the web with its search engine that this phase reached maturity, allowing users to quickly find information across the Internet, beyond the borders of these centralized communities. But even as Google democratized the web by enabling ordinary people to exercise their voices and become accessible to the broader online world, the Internet remained a largely individualized experience.

(MORE: Read Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s IPO Letter)

The emergence of social networks like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook gave rise to the second major phase of the web by establishing it as a platform for social interaction. For the first time, these social networks allowed users to establish personal identities on highly-scaled platforms in order to connect and share with others. These services delighted and empowered users by making them feel ownership of their own pieces of digital real-estate, which they could use as personal calling cards to project themselves into cyberspace. Thanks to savvy marketing and engaging design, Facebook caught on like wildfire, first among college students, and later among the public at large. As it grew, Facebook leveraged the network effect of millions of people connected to each other to create an unstoppable momentum that vanquished its social networking foes.

Read more: TIME Business

As the country prepares for this year’s presidential election, political devotees have been following the nuances of every debate, caucus, straw poll and primary. A new application for Facebook users, however, is intended to encourage those who are not as engaged to talk about the election issues that are most important to them.

The new app was created during a 24-hour “hackathon” this month with engineers from Facebook and representatives from the advertising agency R/GA, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, at Facebook’s Manhattan headquarters. The goal was to create a social application that could share users’ political views on digital billboards in Times Square.

“We’re at the intersection of social media and branded event advertising,” John Mayo-Smith, executive vice president and chief technology officer at R/GA , said to the group. R/GA has worked with Times Square2, which owns the Thomson Reutersand Nasdaq signs in Times Square, on other interactive projects for brands including Verizon, Nike and McCormick.

At Facebook headquarters, a group of about 20 broke into three smaller groups to brainstorm on how to create an app that brought together the billboards, Facebook and the election.

“Facts don’t spread. Emotions do spread,” said Paul Adams, a brand experience manager at Facebook, in a presentation before the group.

“We need to think about what an interaction looks like in that environment,” he said, referring to Times Square.

Read full article in the NY Times

How Your Website Loses 7% of Potential Conversions. Download speed matters. A one-second delay could result in 7 percent fewer conversions, 11 percent fewer page views, or even a 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction. Over the last 15 years, I’ve told that to clients and it’s been confirmed by third-party research. So if speed affects business results, then why would you add a second to a page’s load time?

The Google +1 button and the Facebook Like button add over one second of load time to your page, according to a recent research study by TagMan, a tag management and acceleration company. Of course, visitors clicking on +1s will impact rankings. That’s why you’ll want to add the code to your website.

To complicate things further, Google for years has been telling anyone who will listen that website speed is as an important factor in determining rankings. “One of the 10 things we hold to be true here at Google is that fast is better than slow. We keep speed in mind in all things that we do, and the +1 button is no exception,” according to a post published this week on Google’s Webmaster Central Blog.

Read more at Clickz

Taken from this Clickz article

If you’re wondering how important Facebook advertising is, check this out:

Facebook marketing studies show that brand campaigns have doubled and CPC and CPM prices on the social site are on the rise. If your marketing team aspires to have a formidable Facebook presence, there’s no time like the present.

ClickZ News has gathered three brief case studies from emerging online companies – to catch a glimpse of what practices are working in the Facebook advertising field.

ClickZ News has gathered three brief case studies from emerging online companies – to catch a glimpse of what practices are working in the Facebook advertising field.

Travel Site Says Facebook Ads Beat Search Marketing by 7X

Over several recent weeks, U.K. travel site On the Beach began testing Facebook ads to see how they compared to its paid and organic search efforts. Increasing Facebook followers was secondary.

Based on 30 campaigns, On the Beach said Facebook trumped the search marketing channel by a considerable margin. For every seven sales where Facebook ads were the first click in the purchase funnel, there was only one conversion originating with either a paid or organic search click. The site revealed the data-point in conjunction with its Facebook ads technology vendor Upcast and marketing agency I Spy.

They targeted 18- to 64-year-olds initially, but testing helped them whittle the target group down to women 35 to 54 years old. They tested dozens of ad creatives and day parts before launching the campaigns that brought in the 7X figure.

Read more at Clickz

Taken from this Clickz article

You think your brand is popular? Here are 10 animals with more fans than major media outlets.

Let’s face it. Animals rule the Internet. Between LOLcats and upside-down dogs, people just can’t get enough cute. Even serious news stories can’t compare to the viral power of a sneezing panda or giggling slow loris.

In the world of social media, animals have been tweeting with more than just their beaks. They’ve been updating Facebook and YouTube accounts as well. The human faces behind these animal status updates spend precious time managing fictional animal accounts, but many have more online followers than major media outlets.

We’ve collected the most popular animal social media accounts and compared their fan bases to those of prominent media organizations. The results should shed some light on the Internet’s priorities.

Read more at Mashable

Taken from this Mashable article