Facebook's E-Commerce Experience Is Unfriendly To Consumers And Companies

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Why Is Facebook’s E-Commerce Offering So Disappointing? (GigaOM)
As commerce increasingly shifts online, why isn’t Facebook a more attractive option? Phillip Rooke, of Spreadshirt, says Facebook’s e-commerce experience is unfriendly to consumers and companies. It definitely needs a more friendly way to integrate a shop. Facebook could improve its mobile offering, as the rise of the tablet begins to dictate online sales. We all know that brands need to maintain their relevance on Facebook with engaging and topical content that activates fans, makes them into advocates and creates a presence for the brand via their fans’ news streams. Yet, so far we haven’t come across anyone in e-commerce who’s truly excited by Facebook. Facebook has to change that if it’s going to make e-commerce a success. Read >>

How To Grow Your Twitter Following (Econsultancy via Garner SEO)
Twitter has grown to be a perfect tool for businesses from all sectors and of all sizes. Tweeting is easy from desktop or mobile device. But how to Twitter for business effectively takes a little more planning and determination.

This infographic (click here for the full version) from Econsultancy gives a great case study of the reach, benefit and scale of Twitter showing just why and how to tweet for business. Scaled either way it provides a great insight of the potential for any business. A revenue increase of 4,091 percent between 2009 and 2012 directly from Twitter is pretty amazing and indicative of the potential. Read >>

Why We Need To Change Direction With Social Media (Business 2 Community)
There are countless problems with a majority of social media marketing plans. Are you guilty of them? Let’s have a look at a few major ones:

1. Unrealistic expectations
2. Lack of integrated marketing communications
3. Poor business and marketing knowledge
4. Immune audiences, brands post too much and audiences begin to ignore them

The direction social media marketing is going is not the best one. It’s up to marketers to change this. Read >>

The Real Reason Facebook Is Buying Atlas (All Things Digital)
Given the likelihood of Facebook buying Microsoft’s Atlas platform, lots of speculation has swirled around what the social network company would want to do with the ad server. The popular answer: Facebook is looking to take Atlas's capabilities for operating across the Web, combine them with Facebook social graph data, create a new ad network and go after the third-party ad serving business. Namely, Google. But really the Atlas play would be about attribution. After all, it is attribution that’s the biggest driver of ad dollars online since day one. It’s that ease of attribution that made Google into the most successful direct marketing property in history. Read >>

Former Facebook Executive Says Twitter Is Better For Journalism (Fast Company)
So how helpful is Facebook to driving traffic to good news stories? According to one of its former employees, not so much. New Republic owner and former Facebook executive Chris Hughes said that his former company wasn't his go-to social media for journalism. "Facebook has an interesting challenge when it comes to news feed products," he said. "They tend to reward images rather than links and the sort of journalism we do. It means we spend more time (on) Twitter." Read >>

How Facebook Can Break Into The Markets Of Craigslist And eBay (AllFacebook)
With its open graph platform, Facebook can re-imagine two big peer-to-peer markets with real identity, discovery, and imitation enabled by open graph at the center. The classifieds marketplace is currently being cannibalized by services that operate in vertical niches. The problem is discovery. Facebook is very good at discovery and is in a unique position to partner with niche companies and bring their listings together to form a full-fledged classifieds site. eBay doesn’t own the peer-to-peer buy/sell market. Craigslist doesn’t own the classifieds market. Google doesn’t own the search-engine market. They just serve the market. If somebody comes along with a product that can serve the market better, the market responds. Read >>

Facebook Made $1 Billion, Will Pay No Taxes (Fox News via BGR)
Facebook managed record profits of roughly $1 billion last year. Despite this, Facebook will pay no federal or state taxes on its income. In fact it will get a $429 million refund instead, thanks to a tax reduction for executive stock options. Fox News reports that Facebook will continue to get huge tax breaks totaling about $3 billion in the coming years, as well. "The employees cash in stock options, and at that point there is tax deduction for the company," Robert McIntyre of watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice told Fox News during an interview. "Because even though it doesn’t cost Facebook a nickel, the government treats it as wages and they get a deduction for it. And usually it doesn’t wipe out companies' whole tax bill, although many companies get big breaks from it." Read >>

A Strategic Business Model For Effective Social Media Marketing (Brain Storm Group via Mediabistro)
Making social media work for your brand takes planning, time and effort. It takes work. This infographic proposes a paid, owned, earned model for planning your social media strategy, with a detailed list of tips, suggestions and recommendations to help get your party started. Read >>