Kenshoo Social, a platform for Facebook advertising, has shared the results of a study it recently commissioned by Forrester Consulting called “The Key to Successful Social Advertising.” The survey of 105 U.S. advertisers spending more than $100,000 per year on social ads found that more than a third were not satisfied with their efforts. At the same time, it found many social advertisers were not using advanced optimization tactics like granular targeting or automatic bid management.

However, satisfied social advertisers were more likely to be paying to promote content — as opposed to creating branded apps and other organic efforts. Among satisfied advertisers, those who paid to promote their content were more satisfied by their campaigns’ ability to generate awareness, and those who ran other types of paid advertisements on social networks were more satisfied with their campaigns’ ability to drive purchases. Overall, the study concluded that although organic efforts are more popular, paid social advertising is more successful.

Kenshoo and Forrester will go over these findings in a webinar at the end of the month.

Expion

Social media management software company Expion announced this week that it has added support for Instagram and Foursquare to its platform, allowing brands to better monitor and respond to activity on those networks. Expion is among a small group of companies with access to the Instagram API for moderation. Brands can now use Expion to view and comment on Instagram photos based on location. They can also easily share their Instagram photos across Facebook, Google and Twitter.

Nimble

Social CRM platform Nimble this week announced that it won the SIIA 2013 CODiE Award for Best Relationship Management Solution. Nimble helps marketers and salespeople manage their contacts from email and social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Foursquare. The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) is a trade association for the software and digital content industries. Nimble was one of 27 CODiE Award winners in software categories.

Facebook added 17 new positions to its careers page this week, including a Manager of Public Policy for Instagram and a number of openings on the user operations, finance and sales teams.

New listings added to Facebook’s careers page:

• Manager, Public Policy (Instagram) (Menlo Park)
• Financial Analyst, FP&A – HR (Menlo Park)
• International Payroll Lead (Dublin)
• Privacy Counsel (Washington)
• Data Product Manager (Menlo Park)
• IT Operations Lead (Menlo Park)
• Security Engineer (Menlo Park)
• HR Specialist (Austin)
• Data Center Facility Operations Engineering Manager (Altoona)
• Associate, Risk Ads (Hyderabad)
• Specialist, Risk Operations (Hyderabad) (Hyderabad)
• Analyst, User Operations, Site Integrity (Hyderabad)
• Team Lead, Product Operations (Menlo Park)
• Global Account Manager (Mexico City)
• Head of CPG (Sydney)
• Vertical Client Partner, Retail (London)
• Vertical Client Partner, Telco (London)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Instagram today announced a new way for users to tag their friends and other accounts, along with “Photos of You,” a new section of the profile that displays all the photos a user or brand has been tagged in.

The feature is similar to Facebook’s own photo tagging, where users can tap an area of a photo to add a person’s name. The person will be alerted and have the option to approve the photo before it goes on their profile. Previously, users could mention other users in the caption of their photos, but there was no way to clearly indicate who was in a photo and where. There also wasn’t a way to quickly access all the photos users themselves were in.

One difference from Facebook is that users can easily tag brand accounts. Facebook allows tagging of pages from desktop but never brought the feature to mobile, a missed opportunity since so many photos are uploaded from mobile devices. Instagram, with hashtags and now photo tagging, is closer to Twitter in being a platform for connecting with public figures, brands and people that users don’t know in person. Facebook on the other hand has struggled on this front in large part because there isn’t an easy way to tag non-friends or to notify those brands and public figures that they’ve been mentioned. Instagram’s all-private or all-public approach to privacy, like Twitter has, means it doesn’t have to deal with the same subtleties that Facebook does when it comes to these settings.
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Facebook removed 34 job listings from its careers page this week, likely after filling roles in the areas of marketing, sales, UX research and others.

Also noteworthy this week, Instagram hired Emily White as director of operations. White was formerly Facebook director of mobile partnerships.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Revenue Forecasting Analyst (Menlo Park)
• Payroll Manager (Menlo Park)
• Commercial Counsel – Inbound (Menlo Park)
• Data Editor (Menlo Park)
• Product Manager, Growth/Engagement/Mobile (Menlo Park)
• Product Manager, Platform (Menlo Park)
• Software Engineer, Security Tools (London – Menlo Park)
• Associate Quantitative Researcher (Menlo Park)
• UX Researcher (Seattle)
• UX Researcher (Menlo Park)
• Systems Administrator, Security (Menlo Park)
• Business Strategist, Creative Solutions (Menlo Park)
• Creative Strategist (Menlo Park)
• Internet Marketing Manager (Menlo Park)
• Internet Marketing Analyst (Menlo Park)
• Head of Global Small Business Marketing Communications (Menlo Park)
• Head of Operations, Global Marketing Solutions (Hyderabad)
• Analyst, User Operations, Korean (Dublin)
• Senior Data Reporting Analyst, User Operations (Dublin)
• Account Manager, Finance (New York)
• Account Manager, Mobile (New York)
• Account Manager, Travel (Menlo Park)
• Strategic Partner Development – Entertainment/Music (Mexico City – Miami)
• Media Solutions (Tokyo)
• Team Lead, Media Solutions (Mumbai)
• SMB Analyst, Pages (Austin, TX) (Austin)
• SMB Regional Manager, EMEA (Dublin)
• Agency Client Partner (London)
• Country Manager, France (Paris)
• Account Manager Japan (Tokyo)
• Client Partner Gaming (Singapore)
• Client Partner Japan (Tokyo)
• Client Partner, Entertainment (New York)
• Manager, Product Analytics (Menlo Park)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Instagram today announced that nearly half of the service’s users are active on Android. The company reported 100 million monthly active users in February.

Today’s news comes on the one-year anniversary of Instagram launching a version of its app for Android. Many had been awaiting the release after nearly a year and a half of Instagram being iPhone only. The company says it had more than 1 million people download the Android app on the first day it was available.

Instagram could see even more growth on Android with Facebook’s anticipated new release for the platform. The social network is expected tomorrow to announce a new homescreen application that would put its apps, including Instagram, front and center on users’ devices. The images below comes from 9to5Google.

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Zuckerberg participates in Code.org video – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, along with Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey and other popular tech figures, appeared in a short film by Code.org to promote computer science education. The video, called ”What Most Schools Don’t Teach,” discusses the gap between the number of available programming jobs and the number of qualified graduates to do them. ”Our policy (at Facebook) is literally to hire as many talented engineers as we can find,” Zuckerberg says. “The whole limit in the system is that there aren’t enough people who are trained and have these skills today.” The video aims to raise awareness of the issue and make coding seem more approachable for students.

Facebook declares support for same-sex marriage – Facebook joined a coalition of about 300 companies including Amazon, Apple and Google, in submitting briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court supporting same-sex marriage this week. The briefs explain how the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 discriminate against employees in same-sex marriages and create undue burdens on companies and employees. The document argues ”recognizing the rights of same-sex couples to marry is more than a constitutional issue. It is a business imperative.”

Facebook runs sale on Facebook Gifts - Facebook continues to promote its Gifts business with new features and deals. This week some users saw offers to get $4 off a gift of $5 or more. This enabled users to send users to, for example, send a $5 Starbucks gift card for only $1. Facebook previously ran $1 gift promotions before Valentine’s Day. Image via CNET.
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Instagram today announced a new milestone of 100 million monthly active users.

Just a month ago, Instagram surpassed 90 million MAU, but before that, the company only reported registered users not monthly actives. Some had speculated that Instagram might have lost users or seen growth slow after a controversy related to its data use policy, but there hasn’t been any data to indicate that has been the case. Instagram seems to be continuing to gain app downloads, sign-ups, active users and engagement.

Facebook reached 100 million monthly active users in August 2008 – four and a half years after it was founded. Instagram began in October 2010, and has risen very quickly, in part because of the virality of Facebook, plus the new infrastructure and resources that come along with being owned by the social network.
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Instagram has launched its image feed to the web, allowing users to scroll through users’ photos on their web browsers, the Facebook-owned company announced on its blog.

Users no longer have to use dedicated mobile apps to browse through the content their friends and connections share.  The desktop feed lets users like and comment on images, but does not support uploading pictures on desktop. The feed is also optimized for mobile device users that may not already have a dedicated native app.

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Instagram today announced that the photo sharing service has 90 million monthly active users and sees 40 million photos uploaded per day.

Instagram had reported 80 million registered users five months ago, and in November, a job listing mentioned that the service had more than 100 million registered users, but the company had never reported monthly active users figures. This latest announcement refutes speculation that Instagram might have lost users after a proposed policy change.

Last month the New York Post reported that Instagram had lost about a quarter of its daily active users, citing data that was not representative of the service’s entire user base and blaming the terms of service controversy. Instagram did not reveal its true DAU count, and Facebook has cut off public access to the data used by the Post.

Instagram did share that its platform experiences 8,500 Likes per second and 1,000 comments per second. That’s up from 575 Likes and 81 comments per second announced in April 2012 when the service had 30 million registered users and 5 million photos per day.

Instagram’s new privacy policy and terms of service go into effect on Saturday. The company faced criticism for its initial proposed policy, so it decided to reinstate its original section on advertising and made a few other tweaks to clarify that it does not plan to sell user photos. In general, the new policy better reflects Instagram’s status as a Facebook affiliate and allows data to be shared between the two entities.

See also: How Instagram Has Grown Since Facebook Announced its Intent to Buy the Company

Facebook today announced changes to the way it reports user counts for apps that integrate with its platform, providing a ranking and a user tier rather than monthly active and daily active users rounded to the nearest ten-thousand, as it did previously.

Monthly active user tiers are 10,000; 50,000; 100,000; 500,000; up to 10 million. Daily active user tiers are the same but stop at 1 million. These caps mean that an app with 11 million MAU and an app with 45 million MAU will both be reported in the 10 million tier, with only their ranking number to distinguish between them.

Facebook reports these figures in its App Center, within search results and via its API. The insights developers receive about their own apps will not change. This just affects what information is publicly available to other developers and non-developers. The change goes into effect on Jan. 16.

Although Facebook is taking away some transparency, this puts it more at par with how Apple, Amazon and Google display app rankings. Apple and Amazon’s app stores rank apps by category but do not share any download or usage numbers. Google Play ranks apps and offers a range for installs: 1,000-5,000; 5,000-10,000; 10,000-50,000; and so on. However, Google Play seems to go up to 500 million installs, rather than capping its tiers at a lower number to obfuscate the data.
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