Through Facebook’s social plugins, businesses are finding new and innovative ways to attract readers and customers. At the recent AllFacebook Marketing Conference in San Francisco, Jason Jedlinski, vice president of digital products and platforms at Tribune Broadcasting, and Jay Budzik, chief technology officer at Perfect Market, showed attendees how a Los Angeles TV station found viewers through creatively using Facebook’s data.
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
Facebook is making its plugins work even faster. Recently, the social network rebuilt the recommendations plugin, and now it’s the activity plugin that will get the speed boost. This will make it easier for users to indicate through Facebook that they’ve read something, watched something, or any other kind of action verb.
Rumors began surfacing in March that Facebook would add a Twitter staple, hashtags, and now developer Tom Waddington uncovered evidence that the social network is getting closer to incorporating the feature in the form of a mention of “hashtag” in the software-development kit for JavaScript.
Upworthy wants to share content with the world — and use Facebook to do so. The company is in the developer’s showcase for utilizing social plugins and successfully using its Facebook page to engage its audience. Facebook reported that as Upworthy.com grew to 10.4 million unique users in one year, its Facebook page grew to 1.3 million likes over the same period. Upworthy credits Facebook for a large portion of its traffic.
Facebook continued its efforts to boost the speed of its social plugins, with Software Engineer Stoyan Stefanov detailing in a post on his blog how he was able to double the speed of the social network’s recommendations plugin.
Facebook used its Facebook Mobile DevCon 2013 event in New York Thursday to announce that 81 of the 100 top-grossing iOS applications, 70 of the 100 top-grossing Android apps, 82 of the 100 top-grossing iOS games, and 75 of the 100 top-grossing Android games are integrated with the social network, and to introduce three new mobile products: easier integration of Open Graph on mobile, an improved login with Facebook, and a new software-development kit for iOS.
The plugin for WordPress launched by Facebook in June has been downloaded more than 180,000 times, and Engineer, Developer Relations Matt Kelly, who worked on the project, shared his experience in a note on the Facebook Engineering page.
Facebook launched a new plugin Thursday that allows users of applications to manage their default privacy settings, as well as the settings for individual posts, directly via the apps, without having to return to the Facebook environment.
The creators of Facebook WordPress plugin WP4FB will begin beta-testing the sequel Tuesday, Aug. 21, at which time it will be available to the public — WP4FB 2.0, which adds several new features to the ability to create custom Facebook pages via WordPress.
Operation Developer Love, indeed: Facebook continues to announce features aimed at aiding developers, introducing new documents covering third-party plugins and third-party software-development kits.
