This week’s edition of #SocialMediaMonday covers top news and stories from Facebook, Twitter and Google+! Social media marketing is constantly changing and updating and RS Digital keep you up to date.
The Federal Trade Commission are currently looking into the proposed privacy policy changes in which Facebook announced back in the later part of August.
These changes have not yet gone into effect but have already been drawing criticism from a range of privacy groups. A total of six have sent letters to the FTC in the last week saying that the recent revisions violate a settlement with the agency that was set back in 2011. In this said settlement Facebook did agree to get explicit approval from users before making any changes, no matter how big or small to its privacy controls.
Although Facebook are adamant that the proposed changes do not give the company any additional rights to use any consumer information in advertising the FTC says that they are monitoring compliance closely as they do with all of their cases.
Sao far the agency have NOT launched a formal investigation.
Facebook Ads
In other Facebook news you may have already noticed that their ads are getting noticeably bigger, this however is no surprise as they did announce that we would see changes earlier this year. In some cases ads will even be 3.5 larger that they were in the past.
By making a change to these ad sizes it is clear that Facebook are making things less difficult for advertisers. With a consistent size across platforms, advertisers no longer need to come up with campaigns consisting of images in a range of sizes. These ads will also look the same on the iPhone as it does the desktop.
There are however some negatives to this change. Previously users had to click on a hyperlink within an ad to be rerouted but not if a user clicks on the text or an image of a page ad they will be quickly relocated to the advertisers landing page. This may prove to be annoying because a number of the ads in which we see on Facebook will not be for things that we are interested in, therefore the chances of us being redirected to somewhere we don’t want to go have increased.
Google+
On Monday Google+ yet again added a couple of new features, including a great tool in which allows both bloggers and content creators to embed public Google+ posts on other sites.
Now, if you wish to highlight a Google+ post within a news story or a personal blog you will be able to do so simply by clicking the tab named “Embed post” which is located in the drop down menu in each post’s upper right-hand corner.
Once embedded on another site, according to a Google+ blog post it should still be completely interactive; this means that other users should be able to comment, like or even follow the authors post from the embed.
“We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”
But what does this mean? We will break this down completely for you… First of all the SEC is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Twitter has filed the required forms to be considered public by the SEC!
Even though Twitter publically tweeted about this, it will not be going ahead just yet. At the moment they are still considering a “secret” IPO. Choosing to file a confidential S-1, they do not have to disclosure certain information to the public at this time, including financial performance and potential market risks.
The option to have a secret IPO only started in 2012. It enables promising growth companies to get the process started before revealing the whole entire financial assessment.
But why have Twitter done this? Often companies file confidential IPOs when they are looking to minimise scrutiny when preparing a deal with an SEC review but as you can see Twitter have chosen to Tweet about their decision so they have opened themselves up for scrutiny anyway.
It seems that the company want as much time as they can get to advance its financial portfolio before the public get to view it. Before the offering actually occurs the public will of course have access to its financial information.
What is interesting is that only companies that make less that $1 billion in revenue are allowed to file a confidential S-1 so we now know that Twitter cannot be generating more than that!
