Tag: Facebook

Facebook introduces new feature that may promote social commerce among its users

Facebook has been working to successfully monetize itself in recent years, and a focus solely on marketing is not doing the trick. While Facebook has become a very prominent and attractive platforms for advertisers, mobile commerce could soon become a very powerful revenue stream. In order to engage its massive mobile audience, Facebook has begun testing a new “Buy” service in order to promote social commerce.

Social commerce continues to grow in prominence as mobile consumers become a dominant demographic

Social commerce has become a very popular aspect of mobile shopping. Social media platforms, like Facebook, are beginning to make shopping online a primarily social experience. Shoppers can easily share the products that they find online with their contacts on various media platforms. This sharing increases product exposure, and social commerce has begun a viable way to passively market products by having consumers share their finds in an easy manner.

Mobile commerce could represent a significant revenue stream for Facebook

Facebook is expected to account for 7.8% of digital ad spending this year. While Facebook is a prominent advertising platform, it believes that mobile commerce will have a more profound impact on its revenue stream in the coming years. The Buy service that the company is testing is the first step in establishing a more prominent presence in the mobile commerce space. As one of the world’s largest social media platforms, Facebook may be able to make social commerce a more mainstream concept.

Buy service will be available to a limited number of users until it proves it can be successful

The Buy service will allow Facebook users to quickly purchase products that they find through the social media platform. A Buy button will appear at the bottom of sponsored advertisements, and this button can be clicked to initiate a purchase. The new service may be particularly popular among mobile users because of its convenient design. The button will only show up for a limited number of Facebook users, but if it is successful, the social media company plans to expand its availability in the coming months.

The highly controversial “emotional contagion” study has led a digital privacy group to file a complaint with the FTC.

A digital privacy group is now landing Facebook with some negative social media marketing as it filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), with a request that those regulators look into the psychological experiments that were conducted on some of the users of the social network in 2012, without their knowledge or direct permission.

Facebook did not obtain permission before it went ahead with the social media research on user profiles.

The study altered the number of negative and positive comments in the news feeds that were seen by about 700,000 members of the site, said the Electronic Privacy Information Center’s complaint. This study has already created quite a stir and has drawn a lot of negative social media marketing attention to the network giant. The privacy group stated that sanctions should be imposed, including those that would require Facebook to disclose the formulas used within its software for determining the way in which the posts displayed in user news feeds are chosen.

Social media marketing for the company appears to have backfired, somewhat, as a result of the experiment.

The complaint filed to the FTC explained that “the company purposefully messed with people’s minds.” It also pointed out that the company made no attempt to advise the users of the social network that their data would be shared with the third party researchers for this or any other purpose.

The report that resulted from the experiment was published within the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in its June 17 edition and has been generating a massive amount of controversy since that time. It has exploded the concerns that had already been rising regarding the data privacy practices at Facebook within the United States as well as in other countries.

Last week, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office released a statement that generated additional negative social media marketing for Facebook when it said that it wished to work with the company and the Irish Data Commissioner – the lead regulator for the company in Europe – in order to gain more information regarding the circumstances of the data collection and use.