Facebook is in some great company right now, with Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo, on the Fortune 500 list. Fortune announced that the social network cracked the prestigious list for the first time, coming in at No. 482 — 12 spots ahead of Yahoo.
Lisa Raphael (left), the social media producer at Katie Couric's daytime talk show Katie, is one of our featured speakers in Mediabistro's upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp, an online event and workshop starting June 6, 2013. Lisa will share a case study on how the hit show uses Twitter to build interest and buzz around upcoming segments. Learn more about our our twelve event speakers and register here. 
You can’t get to 1.11 billion friends without spending a few dollars: Consumer Watchdog reported that the social network spent $2.45 million on lobbying efforts during the first quarter of 2013, up a whopping 277 percent from $650,000 in the year-earlier period.
Facebook commerce provider Ecwid reported continued momentum for small and midsized retailers using its storefronts on the social network, saying that orders rose 37 percent in the first quarter versus the year-earlier period, while sales jumped 26 percent during the same period.
Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is No. 1 — at least according to Glassdoor, as the social jobs and career community released its list of the 50 highest-rated CEOs, as voted on by employees, and the leader of the social network led the pack.
Many Facebook users worry about their personal identities being compromised on the social network through unfortunate photos or tagged posts. But a University of Cambridge study shows that it’s possible to gain information such as political affiliation and ethnicity just from seeing Facebook users’ likes. Social security firm Secure.me also published a top 10 list of the Facebook applications that require this information when users connect to them.
Facebook secured a spot on Fortune’s 30th annual World’s Most Admired Companies list — barely. The social network came in at No. 48 on the list of 50 firms.
Five websites accounted for 20 percent of all search activity during the fourth quarter of 2012, and Facebook sat atop that list, as the subject of 8.48 percent of all searches during the period, according to the latest research from Experian Marketing Services.
More companies are catching on to a Facebook ad product that used to be mainly used by Amazon: domain sponsored stories. For instance, if you share a link from Amazon, the company can then share that link again on friends’ news feeds at a later date. Facebook marketing expert Jon Loomer wrote in-depth about how a page administrator can create a domain sponsored story and gain successful click-through rates on those ads, but Inside Facebook noted that they can often be confusing for users.
Last week, Facebook entered the gift card market with the Facebook Card — a new addition to Facebook Gifts. Unlike other gift card options offered by Gifts, this is a plastic card that can be used at Target, Sephora, Jamba Juice, and Olive Garden. Noah Mallin, vice president of social media for brand agency Digitas, thinks that the Facebook Card could be a very powerful way that brands learn more about users’ spending habits, and it could also revolutionize mobile ads.
Facebook is poking around into what users of its recently released Poke iPhone application think, tapping research firm Ethnio to conduct phone interviews via Skype or GoToMeeting.
