10 IMPORTANT NEWS RELEASES RE: Facebook

1. Social Reach Is Almost Billion Users! Yes, that’s right! Facebook is just a small country away from reaching the Billion user mark! At 955 Million users, do you still think it’s going away? If you said “yes”, we’re not laughing at you, we’re laughing with you! J  Facebook is here to stay, data and all. Embrace it as a means of marketing and discover it’s potential.
2. Politicians Should Beware On Facebook. 85% of Americans surveyed would be “angry” if they discovered Facebook was serving ads for political candidates based on their profile information. ~ A new study from the Annenberg School for Communications. What would you do? Despite the “wants” of Americans Political campaigns can use to the new Social Optimizing tool to find campaign volunteers. Cutting out all social awckwardness, the tool suggests potential volunteers to existing Facebook users that are already connected via Facebook connect.
3. Facebook Phone Rumors were put to rest. CEO, Mark Zuckerberg in the statement, “it wouldn’t really make much sense” for Facebook to build it’s own phone. Rumors when The New York Times reported that  Zuckerberg hired more than a half dozen former Apple employees who had previously worked on the iPhone or iPad hardware. The Rumor can sleep for now. 
4. Launched New Recommendation Bar. In order to spread news fast & furiously. Similar to the “Like” button, the “Recommendation” button allows users to easily share on directly on Facebook by recommending news articles, blog posts, and website pages to friends. The new feature gives users personalized suggestions based their friends Learn more in these step-by-step instructions compliments of Facebook. 
5. Mark Zuckerberg Visits Wal-Mart Headquarters. And I’m absolutely disgusted by the thought of Facebook partnering or even visiting Wal-Mart. Why? Watch this documentary before you comment.  During press releases after the meeting, these statements were made to confirm the potential partnership to be announced soon: “Wal-Mart is an important partner for Facebook and we look forward to working together to deepen that relationship,” Facebook said in a statement to The Orlando Sentinel. “In addition, we admire the company Wal-Mart has built over the past 50 years and believe we can learn from their experience and management team about building a strong, durable and valuable company for the long term.”
6. Facebook Tests Pinterest Like Design For App.  The designs could already be showing up in your news feeds from sites like Etsy.com. Facebook representative told Mashable “We’re always testing new Platform features, but we have nothing further to announce. 
7. Edit Facebook Posts. I believe it’s fair to say that we’ve all made a Facebook posts with a grammatical error or simply wanted to reword the post. After posts make their way to X number of LIKES, it’s hard to press the DELETE button and start over hoping for the same magical results. Problem solved! After posting it’s easy to edit Facebook posts on both the desktop and mobile versions. Simple go to the Activity Log on your mobile device or the exact post and EDIT on the desktop version. Wahhhhhla! You’re in control.
8. Chats Monitored For Criminal Activity.   Facebook works with investigators “where appropriate and to the extent required by law to ensure the safety of the people who use Facebook,” according to a page on its site. “We may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders, or other requests (including criminal and civil matters) if we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law. This may include respecting requests from jurisdictions outside of the United States where we have a good faith belief that the response is required by law under the local laws in that jurisdiction, apply to users from that jurisdiction, and are consistent with generally accepted international standards. “We may also share information when we have a good faith belief it is necessary to prevent fraud or other illegal activity, to prevent imminent bodily harm, or to protect ourselves and you from people violating our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, courts or other government entities.”  
9. Weddings + Engagements Can’t Be Missed On Facbeook. In the location of Friend’s Birthdays, Facebook just rolled out an update that includes Weddings and Engagements; making it easier to congratulate the happy couple versus the news getting lost in the feed.
10. Tab Engagement Down 53%. Since the launch of Facebook’s Timeline, there’s been a significant decline in tab pages aka. landing pages. Tabs are less visible with the new layout. Brands can no longer set a landing page, they go directly to Timeline.According to PageLever, tab engagement has dropped off 53% since brand Pages began adopting Timeline. The findings were drawn from approximately 500 Pages with more than 10,000 fans on each page.

Zuckerberg and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg meeting with Walmart executives in Bentonville, Arkansas.

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