Facebook Thursday unveiled the closest thing to a Facebook phone, with Home. Select Android devices will have access to Home starting April 12, and it will later become available to more users. This news was met with curiosity, excitement, and a little bit of fear, knowing that Facebook would go from being a part of the phone to being a part of the entire mobile experience.
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. 
Not long after Facebook Co-Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the redesign of News Feed, several social media, Web, search, and design experts shared their thoughts with AllFacebook. While some love the News Feed’s visual aspects, others worry about what this could mean for pages, as many users may navigate directly to the all friends feed.
Social media agency We Are Social has primarily focused on earned and owned media, but the company feels that as the lines between paid, earned, and owned Facebook media are becoming blurred, it’s time to expand its offerings. We Are Social announced that it is offering support for companies that plan to pay for advertising on Facebook and other social media sites. The company hired David Gilbert, formerly of TBG Digital, to run this new program.
Not long after Facebook made changes to its algorithm (which people often refer to as EdgeRank) in September, many page admins started noticing greatly decreased reach. We Are Social teamed up with Socialbakers to gather some hard data on how the changes have affected pages. They found that while, yes, reach has gone way down, engagement has pretty much held steady since August.
Several Facebook page administrators are up in arms over the site tweaking its EdgeRank algorithm, making users more likely to see brand-based posts with higher levels of engagement and not posts with only a comment or two. After We Are Social conducted an experiment to see how the page’s reach has fallen recently, the site commented on how pages can react to these changes and get back into the news feeds of their fans.
People are doing just about everything nowadays through Facebook — except buying ketchup. Heinz has not been seeing the results it has hoped for through Facebook’s storefront, and a marketing director spoke recently at a conference in London about how it’s tough to sell through Facebook.
