Social Media

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets program was launched in beta a couple of months back and first results are beginning to come in. On Wednesday online brokerage company Zecco released data on the engagement levels and effectiveness of their first 50 Promoted Tweets.

During my years of experience in developing broad agency relationships with mid-to-large brands, it has become clear that as budgets become bigger, so the need for effi ciency, transparency and ROI measurement increases as well. But on their own, they are not enough.

Today Facebook announced that it now has over 500 million registered users, an increase of some 100 million in the last five months, and of 400 million in the last two years. Mark Zuckerberg has already told us that it is "almost guaranteed" that the site will eventually reach a billion users, but with no indication of when he thinks that might happen.

Facebook made a big change in their advertising policies this week.

But they did it very quietly with a letter to display advertisers telling them that if you want Facebook traffic, you’d better be buying CPC.

The letter, sent out at the end of last week, told CPM advertisers that henceforth they, “will continue to receive impressions but may receive less clicks.”

And, “if your most important objective is to drive clicks on your ads, you should change your bids from CPM to CPC.”

Last year Google ran no less than 17 different April Fool's Day hoaxes. I have always loved that a company that has so much on its plate takes the time to differentiate itself and build some positive brand equity by investing humor.