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. 
What has the third-largest newspaper in the U.K. and the largest free newspaper in the world done to result in a fourfold increase in traffic coming from Facebook? Metro shared its Facebook strategies with the social network for a case study on its developers page.
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.
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 Preferred Marketing Developer OpenGraphy started the engine on a new Facebook application for automaker Volkswagen in Belgium, with the social network’s open graph actions providing the fuel.
Facebook giveth, and Facebook taketh away: Just one week after pages’ like totals began dropping due to the social network’s purge of fake profiles and likes, reports surfaced of like totals increasing due to links sent in private messages, and not to users actually liking pages. Facebook responded that it was working to fix a bug in its social plugins, and that the totals being impacted were actually on counters that measure likes and shares.
Irish eyes (and those of the rest of the European Union) are finally smiling on Facebook, as Ireland’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner announced that “the great majority” of the privacy recommendations it made to the social network to keep it in compliance with those of the EU have been “fully implemented to the satisfaction of this office.” The major concession by Facebook: Its tag suggest feature, which enabled facial recognition for Facebook photos, has been turned off for all new users in the EU, with existing users to lose access to the feature by Oct. 15.
Only 30 of the top 500 online retailers, or just 6 percent, have added the option of logging in with Facebook to their account-creation process, and of those 30, 30 percent are shooting themselves in the foot by requiring users to create separate password for their sites, according to the results of a new study from Sociable Labs.
Facebook wants users to belly up to the bar, as in the social plugin it debuted Thursday, the recommendations bar.
