iT Rumors

Facebook continued its nearly month-long march up this week, as investors grow increasingly bullish about the social network’s potential. Besides being added to the S&P 500, Facebook is finally seeing its $1 billion purchase of photo-sharing site Instagram begin to pay off.

On Thursday, Instagram announced new features under the title Instagram Direct that will allow private group messaging. Users will be able to send photos to a select group, rather than expose them publicly, and chat about the images as well. The move comes as the competition for private message services heats up. Snapchat rejected a $3 billion all-cash offer from Facebook to go it alone, and Twitter pumped new life into its direct messaging service recently as well.

“We believe Instagram Direct has the potential to drive greater engagement among existing users and could bring new users to the platform that may have shied away from the prior, more public sharing model,” UBS UBS -0.27% analyst Eric Sheridan wrote in a new note.

Instagram’s initial wave of ads in the News Feeds also showed promise uniting bringing advertisers together with users. UBS cites a study by Curalate that found paid posts generated an average of 32x more Likes than typical brand posts.

Beyond Instagram, Facebook’s new roll-out of auto-play News Feed video and gif posts on Apple's AAPL -1.1% iOS and Google's GOOG -0.83% Android platforms has great potential as a money-making source online. Sheridan believes that the new video product could be a test ahead of a broader video advertising rollout. He has a Buy rating on the stock, with a price target of $62.

As of 11:52am EST, Facebook stock was up 9.57% on the week. The share price, touching above $52.50, is nearing Facebook’s all-time high of $54.22 set back in October.

Via: Forbes

It’s official: Instagram now has ads, and the first one appeared Friday courtesy of fashion designer Michael Kors.

A colorful image of a luxury watch sitting on a table appeared on the photo-sharing app Friday, an Instagram spokesman confirmed. It was shown to women in the U.S., regardless of whether they were following the brand.

Instagram began testing ads last week, but the Michael Kors post is the first branded advertisement to officially run on the service. More ads are on the way, Instagram said, but the company did not specify when or how often.

Facebook bought Instagram last year for roughly $1 billion, when the app had practically zero revenue. Since then Facebook has made significant progress in monetizing its own site on mobile, and Instagram appears to be its next area of focus. The aforementioned ad trial on the app encompassed 10 different companies, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said earlier this week during the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

Ads on Instagram will be labeled as such with the word “Sponsored” in the upper-right corner. By clicking on the “...” in the lower-right corner, users can hide the ad after it appears, and provide feedback to Instagram about what they didn’t like about it. This feedback, according to Instagram, will let the app deliver more relevant ads to users.

Friday’s ad is a still photograph, but ads will also appear on Instagram in video form. The ads will be designed to fit in naturally with people’s feeds, Instagram and Facebook have said. “Ads should fit the format of the product they’re part of,” Facebook’s Sandberg recently said.

Compared to Facebook’s 1.19 billion monthly active users, Instagram is small, with 150 million active users, according to Facebook. But the app’s popularity is strong, so it could become a lucrative place for ads, if Facebook doesn’t drive away users in the process

Via: PCWorld

Founded in 2010 and acquired by Facebook in April 2012 for approximately $1billion in cash and stock, Instagram has grown enormously over the past years. Earlier last month, the company announced that its user-base has grown to 150 million active consumers in just three years since its debut.  Instagram kept out advertisements from its service until now, but after achieving a sustainable position in the market, it is an expected move for the company to get into the business of generating revenues. After all Facebook wants some returns on its $1 billion investment in the firm!

The idea has been long in the offing but Thursday, Instagram dropped an official word on the subject.

"In the next couple months, you may begin seeing an occasional ad in your Instagram feed if you're in the United States," the company wrote in its blog. "Seeing photos and videos from brands you don't follow will be new, so we'll start slow. We'll focus on delivering a small number of beautiful, high-quality photos and videos from a handful of brands that are already great members of the Instagram community."

A least we can be sure of one thing, Instagram will not bombard users' feed with a bunch of ads. Users can also hide an advertisement if found inappropriate, which will help the online photo sharing service to better understand customers' needs.

Instagram also emphasized that the introduction of advertisements does not change terms of service; a valuable lesson it learnt after the debacle in 2012, when the social media created a panic with a release of its new terms of service. Instagram's terms of service included a section, which gave the company the right to sell users' photos to advertisers. But later it blamed the misunderstanding on "sloppy wording." 

"As always, you own your own photos and videos. The introduction of advertising won't change this," Instagram wrote on Thursday's blog.

Source : HEADLINES & GLOBAL NEWS

Online photo sharing services like Instagram and Pinterest can be remarkably effective branding tools. While neither platform officially employs ads, the social media teams of marketing-savvy companies often build relationships with well-followed users, either paying them to post photos of their products, or giving them stuff in trade for doing it.

Mercedes, for example, recently loaned a CLA to five top Instagrammers who took photos of the 4-door coupe during a five-day road trip. At the end, the one with the most “likes” got to keep the car.

But identifying and cultivating relationships with social media darlings individually puts an additional burden on most companies’ already stretched marketing resources. Brandnew IO wants to lend a hand. The Berlin-based startup, founded earlier this year, connects brands with influential users on Instagram and Pinterest and pays those users to share the brands’ images.

It’s not just pimping out popular feeds, though. These “publishers”—people with an average of 300,000 followers—obviously have a vested interest in not annoying and losing fans. As such, they’re under no obligation to promote content that doesn’t mesh with the ethos of their feeds.

So far Brandnew IO has about 180 publishers, people who tend to be photographers, aspiring celebrities, and bloggers who post images focused on subject areas such as fashion, beauty, and cars. Their collective reach, Brandnew IO founder and CEO Francis Trapp told me via Skype, is a massive 55 million followers.

Similar to a CPM model, Brandnew IO charges client companies per 1,000 users, with niche campaigns—ones that reach people who only upload photos of car rims, for example—going for a premium. Targeting a broader market, such as folks who like to upload photos of fashion or beauty, costs less.

Brandnew IO also provides advertisers with analytics that help them gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.

While Trapp says Brandnew IO is required to label the images publishers post as advertisements, he believes sponsored content posted by users is more effective than banner ads.

“When you look at the photos we publish throughout our campaigns, they appear in the Instagram user photo feed and [are] completely merged with the surrounding photos so it’s 100 percent native,” Trapp says. “As a result, the KPIs and conversion rates and engagement rates are a lot higher, for example, than Facebook ads and Facebook sponsored posts in the news feed.”

Instagram and Pinterest themselves are both keen on monetizing their platforms with ads. Last week at a fashion event in London, Instagram co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom said it has plans to launch ads within the next year. A few days later Pinterest CEO Ben Silberman said in an email to users the photo-pinning company will be playing around with promoting a handful of pins in search results and category feeds.

Silberman promised that promoted pins will not involve “flashy banners or pop-up ads.” Systrom’s remarks hinted that its approach might also be one in which users aren’t pushed overt ads, but rather shown products within the context of their feed, prompting them to like and comment on the post.

Such a tack would make sense considering the way companies have tended to connect with fans on these platforms so far. Followers follow because they have an emotional connection with a brand and the absence of jarring ads puts the onus on companies to share engaging content so as to woo users and win more hearts, not to mention pins and comments.

Source : PCWorld