Facebook needs to beef up its privacy protections in France or it could face sanctions.
On Monday, the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL)—a data protection authority in France—issued Facebook a formal notice that the social media giant must update its data collection practices within the next three months. The CNIL levels that several of Facebook’s practices don’t comply with the French Data Protection Act.
Social media is a tremendous way to increase exposure and traffic for your business, create loyal customers, and generate leads and sales.
Spoiler alert: Facebook remains King Social Network. It is the social media platform of choice for the majority of marketers–and for good reason.
It’s never been cheaper to build your brand and create new demand for your products and services.
If you aren’t already advertising on Facebook, you’d be crazy not to. Especially if you want to grow like crazy in 2016.
Here are nine reasons Facebook ads will help make your business super successful in 2016, starting right now.
WE LOVE SHORT.
Concise 140-character limits. GIFs. Texts. Snaps. Vines. Photos. Summaries. Notifications. Emoji. Slang. Yo.
But some of Silicon Valley’s biggest, smartest tech companies and investors are going long on long. And not long videos, either. They seem to be doubling down on good old-fashioned words.
Last week, Facebook updated its little-known Notes feature to encourage users to write “more beautiful and customizable” posts separate from status updates. Medium announced a $57 million round of funding (on Medium, of course) and is holding a VIP event next week to reveal new features. Everyone’s favorite unicorn Slack relaunched its Posts feature to help users write longer at work. And Re/code reports that Twitter is building a product to allow users to share posts longer than the typical 140-character limit.
Over the weekend, a Facebook page appeared that claimed it existed for families united against “autistic shooters.” It’s unclear whether or not the administrator of the page was attempting satire or parody or being serious or somewhere in between, but the entire page used a jocularly vicious tone in its extended series of false claims that could have had no other effect but to cause harm and damage to autistic people.
Given the glee that the administrator evinced over the negative response to the page, the intent could not be in doubt: to compound for the autism community the pain that we all feel over yet another national tragedy.
To my certain knowledge, within hours of the page’s appearance, there were hundreds of requests to Facebook to remove this page, in addition to a petition to request that it be removed, which had thousands of signatures. From what I understand–and from my own experience–for almost two days, Facebook’s repeated response was to assert, again and again, that the page did not violate Facebook’s community standards. ETA: Evidently, Facebook continues to think that because the page, taken down last night, is back up again.
On Sunday evening, Google announced two new ad products it hopes will help it gain more share of the mobile advertising market.
The new products are quite similar to a service and a format already available from Facebook. And they’re two of the advertising products marketers love most about the social network.
First up, Google has announced a new product called “Customer Match.” It works in a similar way to Facebook’s popular “Custom Audiences” product, which the social network rolled out to all advertisers back in 2013.
The end of last year, and the beginning of this year, was rocky for businesses on social media. Instagram and Twitter dumped a bunch of fake accounts, and Facebook changed its policy so that inactive accounts would longer be including in a page’s total fans. Of course ostensibly this is a good thing – why would you want to market to a bunch of fake and inactive followers – but as most people know, higher follower counts on social media do help to boost a business’s credibility online. Losing a ton of people, then, can feel like a real shock. But don’t panic; there are a few things you can do.
Figure out why
Now, if you bought followers and, one day, they all disappeared, you know why. But a lot of small business owners never saw the point to buying fans, and they still occasionally see drastic dips in their follower totals. If you count yourself among them, there are few things that may have happened. The first is that you simply haven’t done very much in a while.
Facebook’s photo-sharing app Moments will not be made available in Europe due to concerns about its use of facial recognition, it has been revealed.
The app, which allows users to share mobile-phone photos with friends without posting them publicly, was launched in the US this week.
The Irish data regulator said that users must be given a choice about whether they want it, with an opt-in.
There is currently no timetable for such a feature, said Facebook.
Richard Allen, Facebook’s head of policy in Europe said: “We don’t have an opt-in mechanism so it is turned off until we develop one.”
Moments arranges the photos on someone’s mobile phone into groups, based on when they were taken. The facial recognition technology can identify Facebook friends to whom users can then forward the photos.
Q: What are the best kinds of posts to share on Twitter, Facebook, etc.?
A: There are a lot of ways to generate “likes” and “shares” on social media, but to use it to build a sustaining brand, you should align your social content with your brand strategy.
Videos of cute cats and aphorisms like “life is better with bacon” may get shared widely and boost your brand exposure, but they don’t do anything to build your brand equity. If you only care about the number of retweets or favorites you get, you’re missing the opportunity to tell your brand story and create a compelling narrative on social media.
Face it, ladies: your DIY projects rarely turn out like the ones you see on Pinterest, and your Facebook posts aren’t universally “liked.” But a new survey suggests that despite such woes, social networking is still good for you.
The survey found that women who frequently use social media, along with other technologies, to connect with friends and family report feeling less stressed than women who connect less often.
Both Twitter and Facebook are competing with other tech giants, including Apple, Google, PayPal and the leading credit card companies to own the emerging mobile payment sector, which is immensely popular with consumers and has proven fertile territory for startups. More specifically, the leading technology companies are seeking an advantage in so-called peer-to-peer payments, which are typically smaller payments sent from one person to another. Individuals could use such payments, for example, when they are splitting a bill or to wire money.
Dispatches From The Front 