promotion

If you want to get more attention for your engagement announcement or an event like a garage sale or a party, Facebook has got a way for you to do it -- if you're willing to pay.

The social network started testing a new feature in the U.S. today that lets people buy promoted posts. Facebook will push your selected post to the top of news feeds, increasing the likelihood of your friends and subscribers seeing it.

A Facebook representative said the company is not confirming how much promoting a post will cost, because the feature is still … Read more

Three years ago (an eternity in the social media world), Facebook was trying to become more like Twitter. Facebook, while big, wasn't the dominant force it is today, and Twitter was growing at record speeds.

This scared Facebook, of course, so Zuckerberg and his team set out to counter the Twitter threat with updates of their own. Facebook added public status updates and a real-time search engine. It even released Facebook Lite, a simplified Facebook interface that drew a lot fo comparisons to Twitter's sparse and simplistic design.

Fast-forward to today. Facebook has grown to 950+ million users … Read more

Facebook, as part of its ongoing attempt to make money off mobile, is letting businesses with Facebook pages promote posts using an app on their smartphones.

The newest version of Facebook's Pages Manager app allows users to pick their promoted posts -- i.e., posts the social network will shoot out to users far and wide, for a modest fee -- directly from the app. The app is only available on iPhone and iPad.

The ability to buy the ads directly from mobile phones was a widely requested feature from small businesses, according to Facebook.

It's just the … Read more

Foursquare has taken off the kid gloves and is ready to start making money. After rolling out "Local Updates" last week, letting any merchant allure potential nearby customers by sending out status updates, it launched "Promoted Updates" today.

Promoted Updates, which is still in pilot, takes the idea of Local Updates up a notch. Rather than being available to any merchant using the check-in service, Promoted Updates is only for those merchants willing to pay Foursquare on a "cost per action" model, according to TechCrunch. While in pilot, there are roughly 20 participating companies, … Read more

Twitter will start its ad services in 50 countries this year as the company continues to grow overseas, the Guardian reported.

CEO Dick Costolo made outlined the expansion of Twitter's mobile business strategy at an advertising conference in Cannes, France. The first markets to have access will be Latin America, including Brazil, and west European countries such as Spain and Germany.

Twitter's advertising products include promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts.

While other social media and Internet companies are finding it challenging to make money on mobile platforms -- -- Facebook has been dinged particularly soundly on … Read more

In today's show, Yahoo gets a fresh coat of CEO, iCloud gets a lift and it's IPO week for Facebook:

After four months on the job, Scott Thompson resigned as Yahoo's chief executive. Although he has been in the middle of a scandal about the false statements made about his education, he also is leaving for health reasons. It's been reported that Thompson told the board he's battling thyroid cancer. Yahoo named ad-guru Ross Levinsohn as interim CEO. Levinsohn is the sixth Yahoo CEO in the past five years.

After Best Buy dropped the prices … Read more

Twitter has finally begun a slow-motion rollout of a plan to generate advertising dollars from small businesses with a low-key, self-serve ad program.

Initially, only a small group of businesses will have access to this new advertising opportunity -- Twitter wouldn't say how many, although a spokesman allowed that the number of participating small businesses will "steadily increase" in coming weeks. If it works as advertised --no pun intended --this could be a very big deal for the company, one that could allow it to tap into a huge new swathe of potential advertisers.

The hope within … Read more

By way of advertising, Twitter's mobile platform is about to look a lot more like its Web site. The microblogging giant announced today that "promoted" tweets and accounts will appear in Twitter timelines on mobile apps for iPhone and Android.

"Today, we are taking an important next step in making our Promoted Products available to those users," Twitter wrote on its blog today. "This will help ensure that people see important Tweets from the brands they care about."

Before today, Twitter's mobile users saw limited advertising in its search function, but now … Read more

The promise is seductive. Two of the biggest technology companies on the planet are combining forces to give their adoring fans free iPads and iPhones? Yes! And all you have to do is give up all your personal information for that chance.

That's what spam scammers are hoping you will do once you see the quasi-personal letter from everyone's favorite friend networker, Mark Zuckerberg. The e-mail will come off as somewhat legit, singling you out as a randomly selected winner of a one-time only promotional event sponsored by Facebook and Apple.

So, you've already won a free iPad or iPhone, but there's a catch. Mark Zuckerberg just needs your e-mail address, phone number, and other account information to confirm. And of course, the site that Zuckerberg chooses to use to acquire that information is not Facebook, but a random promotional company.… Read more