We’ve all seen friends post about how they had great customer-service experiences at stores or share offers they’ve claimed on Facebook. But do these posts really influence purchasing behavior? An infographic from PPC Associates shows that women aged 35 through 44 were most likely to make purchases based on friends’ Facebook posts.
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. 
BookScout, the book-centric Facebook application from publisher Random House, announced the addition of seasonal book recommendations, as well as the launch of a mobile app.
Facebook is constantly tweaking its News Feed algorithm, so users generally see the stories they will like, comment on, or share. Now the social network is starting to ask old News Feed users how interesting they find page posts in their News Feeds.
Social media agency Pandemic Labs created its own take on Facebook analytics from scratch, resulting in Watchtower, a comprehensive tool that allows page administrators to analyze their pages, as well as those of their competitors.
Recommendations are a huge part of Graph Search. When users seek restaurants or bookstores their friends have liked, Facebook shows the average amount of stars their friends have assigned when rating those places. Previously, star ratings were available only through mobile and through random sidebar polling, but Inside Facebook noticed that Facebook recently added the ability to visit pages from desktop and rate them.
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.
LinkedIn may be a great resource for professionals to connect with and contact other people regarding job opportunities, but about those who are fresh out of college with resumes full of part-time jobs and internships? Eyal Grayevsky figured that college students and recent graduates usually have more Facebook friends than LinkedIn connections, so he helped create FirstJob to enable the newest job seekers to find employment through Facebook relationships. The site officially launched Monday.
Stik, a reviews website for local businesses that taps into Facebook’s social graph and authentication, announced the closing of a $2.3 million series-A financing round.
Facebook users: Online restaurant-reservation provider OpenTable wants to know where you’ve been eating, and new Facebook application Places I’ve Eaten is aimed at helping it find out.
Facebook’s newest addition — graph search — can change the way brands not only market on the site, but find potential customers through the social network, provided they’re savvy enough. Graph search takes the recommendation power of Yelp and combines it with Facebook’s tremendous social graph to make it more important for businesses to cater to their Facebook fans and brick-and-mortar customers.
