AdRoll, a Facebook Exchange partner, announced Wednesday that it has rolled out ad retargeting in the News Feed. The company launched this capability earlier this month in beta, and opened it up to all AdRoll customers Wednesday. This way, advertisements can be tailored to target users’ activity off of Facebook.
We're kicking off our upcoming Social Media Marketing Boot Camp with a special keynote presentation by Ella Chick (left), the digital producer at Anderson Cooper 360°. She'll discuss how the network uses social media for breaking news and leverages social media to draw attention to organizations and causes. Learn more about our program and register here. 
Facebook has recently shared that on Facebook Home, engagement with the social network has increased 25 percent compared to the standard Facebook mobile application. In this case, engagement refers to the expected: commenting, liking and sharing, but also refers to additional time spent in the app such as messaging.
Facebook has been aggressively rolling out new advertising vehicles over the past few months, but it appears as if the site is going to focus on what it’s got going now. In an earnings call Wednesday with investors, Facebook’s top officials said that the company is more set on making sure that the types of ads that are currently in place are the kinds that will be relevant for users and generate engagement. However, as some brands improperly use or overuse News Feed ads, users may be less likely to do much more than keep scrolling.
In an effort to attract advertisers, Facebook has partnered with firms such as Datalogix to find out how the social network influences online purchasing behavior. These efforts will likely be ramped up, as TechCrunch reported Thursday that Datalogix has raised $25 million in Series B funding, led by Institutional Venture Partners.
So your company is based in San Francisco, but you’ve got a big fan base in Berlin. Posting to your Facebook page at 3 p.m. from California means it’s midnight in Germany. Post Planner has recently launched a way to solve this, by allowing Facebook page admins to post to a determined time zone among fans’ locations. For instance, an admin can make sure that a post will be seen when their fans across the world will be ready to engage with it.
Facebook has been tweaking the options within promoted posts for pages, but social media expert Jon Loomer noticed recently that page administrators can now promote posts to everyone on the social network.
Recently, Facebook announced something called partner category targeting, which lets us run ads based on a user’s retail shopping behavior and other offline information.
Three years ago, you could drastically reduce your cost per click by just running a ton of ads. The mainstream pay-per-click vendors, experienced with Google, applied their same techniques to Facebook — multiplying tons of ad combos by headlines, images, and body copy. While that technique was positioned as smart optimization, it was really spamming the system with thousands and thousands of terrible ads. If a general message against a particular audience wasn’t effective, making 10,000 variants of the same thing wouldn’t matter.
As a digital marketer, I’m reading far too many articles taking jabs at the Facebook advertising platform. The argument runs that because the ads you see against your profile are sometimes irrelevant, Facebook’s business model is flawed. Most of the articles of this ilk focus on this being Facebook’s problem, with this being a product-related issue. From a user and business perspective, this is simply not true.
No, I didn’t receive an email from Princess Zuckerberg asking me to save her family fortune from the hands of the rebel forces. This is not the typical Nigerian 419 scam. In this version, Facebook is unknowingly misleading its advertisers about its vaunted targeting abilities. If you buy ads targeting the U.S., it is now very likely that you are getting traffic from Nigeria and other parts of Africa, as well.
