The latest update for the Android Facebook app adds the ability to “edit your posts and comments and tap to see all your changes.” However, the editing has not been enabled on any of the Android devices we experimented with.

The editing feature will roll out to Facebook users on the web and Android devices over the next day, Facebook confirmed to Mashable. The editing feature is not included in the latest iOS app, but will likely get pushed out in the next update. Users will see the option to “Edit Post” when they click on the drop-down arrow in the top-right corner of a post.

Editing posts was potentially dicey territory for Facebook, since the it brings the danger of a bait-and-switch with followers. A user could conceivably write, “Who likes ice cream?” and get hundreds of Likes and affirming comments, then edit the post to read, “Who wants to beat up some cats?”

Facebook addresses this issue by marking the post as edited and letting users access the history of any edited post with a click. Google+, which has let users edit posts for some time, works in a similar fashion.

Facebook has been slowly granting users more editing capabilities over their content. Users can edit photo captions (that is, status updates with a photo attached) and the ability to edit comments arrived a few months ago.

It’s likely Facebook examined all the potential abuses and concluded the risk in letting users alter posts was minimal. It makes sense: Any user who would mislead followers or friends with a post they intend to maliciously edit would likely soon find themselves with few followers or friends of any value.

For journalists on Facebook, the value of editing posts is even greater. As Mashable’s Emily Banks has argued, being able to edit a post in a transparent fashion makes Facebook posts more like articles on a website, and now reporters will be able to make corrections without deleting entire updates and losing conversation threads.

What’s your take on editing posts: Yea or nay? Have your say in the comments.

Image: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images

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One of the owners, Admir Adil, noticed his 15-year-old daughter was incessantly checking Facebook, so he thought it only appropriate to create a flavor for other fans obsessed with the social media behemoth.

Admir and his brother Ibi Adil created their Facebook-flavored ice cream by simply mixing blue syrup atop vanilla ice cream and placing a small sign with a Facebook logo on it. Selling a scoop for a euro ($1.32), the ice cream apparently tastes like sugary sweets and chewing gum, but it’s become a hit as many passersby were immediately drawn to Facebook’s trademark logo — as well as the novelty.

The duo said they have not contacted Mark Zuckerberg for trademark use.

Image: Dusko Jaramaz/PixSell

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When users sign in to an app like Lyft or Words With Friends using their Facebook login credentials, they can now specify exactly what they would like to share with Facebook in a two-step process. The first step asks for “read permissions,” which dictate the information from the app accessible to Facebook. The second step presents “write permissions,” which if accepted, allow the user to post directly back to his news feed through the app.

Previously, the two permissions were a package deal, meaning you couldn’t agree to one without also green-lighting the other. The update in April granted users more control and enabled them to accept just one or the other if they weren’t comfortable accepting both, according to Chris Daniels, director of business development at Facebook. The update is now fully available to all users, and a recent study of certain “high quality” apps by the social network found that 80% of users accepted the permissions when prompted.

Facebook benefits from users logging in to third-party apps using their Facebook profile. Those who log in with Facebook count as “active” users for the platform — more logins mean more content shared back to the site. Facebook has more than 850 million login events per month, and 81 of the 100 top-grossing iOS apps support Facebook login features, according to the company’s blog post. On Android, 62 of the 100 top-grossing apps support Facebook logins.

The new permission option was based on feedback from users and developers who felt they needed more control, Daniels said. Often, users timid about sharing back to Facebook saw the permissions page and simply elected to bypass logging in altogether.

“We understand people’s concerns about apps posting on their Timeline or to their friends,” Facebook posted on its blog. “The recent changes to Login are just the beginning of more improvements you’ll see as we continue working to provide useful services for developers that are easy for users to understand.”

Have you ever skipped logging into an app because of Facebook permissions? Tell us in the comments below.

Image: Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images

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In an attempt to make it easier for businesses to create a Facebook ad, the company announced a deal with Shutterstock on Thursday that will provide free access to millions of images for use in ads. The photos will be available in Facebook’s ad creation tool.

“This is important especially for small businesses who may not have resources for sourcing quality images,” Facebook noted in a blog post.

In addition, businesses can use multiple images in different ads to test which ones work best and then place their buys accordingly. Ben Pavlovic, founding partner of VineSprout, a Chicago-based PR firm, says adding such functionality will help small businesses. “Before you had to take your own [photos] or find your own free service,” he says. “I also think you have companies out there that wouldn’t think twice about pulling a Google image.” Pavlovic says photos are an integral element. “Just in terms of engagement, finding the right image can make or break your ad,” he says.

As part of the announcement, Facebook also updated its Android and iOS Pages Manager apps. Users can now upload multiple images from their mobile phones and edit existing Page admins and add new Page admins to Pages they manage.

The upgrade comes after Facebook announced in June that more than 1 million advertisers are using the platform.

Image: Flickr, Orin Zebest

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In an attempt to make it easier for businesses to create a Facebook ad, the company announced a deal with Shutterstock on Thursday that will provide free access to millions of images for use in ads. The photos will be available in Facebook’s ad creation tool.

“This is important especially for small businesses who may not have resources for sourcing quality images,” Facebook noted in a blog post.

In addition, businesses can use multiple images in different ads to test which ones work best and then place their buys accordingly. Ben Pavlovic, founding partner of VineSprout, a Chicago-based PR firm, says adding such functionality will help small businesses. “Before you had to take your own [photos] or find your own free service,” he says. “I also think you have companies out there that wouldn’t think twice about pulling a Google image.” Pavlovic says photos are an integral element. “Just in terms of engagement, finding the right image can make or break your ad,” he says.

As part of the announcement, Facebook also updated its Android and iOS Pages Manager apps. Users can now upload multiple images from their mobile phones and edit existing Page admins and add new Page admins to Pages they manage.

The upgrade comes after Facebook announced in June that more than 1 million advertisers are using the platform.

Image: Flickr, Orin Zebest

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When it comes to Facebook, however, monthly active users have become a mere side dish to the more relevant main course that is “daily active users.” During the company’s Q2 earnings call, there was an entire menu of them: Daily actives worldwide (699 million), mobile daily actives (469 million in June), and even the number of active users during America’s daily primetime television hours (88 to 100 million).

So when Facebook unveiled its daily active users figure for the U.S. last week — 128 million — it didn’t simply break the industry standard, it began the process of rewriting it.

“A lot of people focus on monthly active users or even registered users to demonstrate their size and scale,” the Menlo Park, Calif. company wrote in an email to media. “We think this is becoming on old way of looking at the media world. In this world, understanding who comes back at least once a month is only part of the picture.”

Facebook defines “daily active users” as those who “actively visited/engaged with Facebook.” In other words, active users are considered anyone who uses their Facebook login, even if it’s for a third-party app.

A company spokesperson said the announcements highlighting daily active users won’t come regularly, and that there is still value in monitoring and publishing monthly active users. Facebook’s actions, however, seem to demonstrate its dedication to using the new metric.

For a company with the social-media giant’s user base, there are multiple benefits to releasing daily user figures. For starters, they uphold the network’s position as an industry leader, but these figures can also have a major impact on ad sales by providing marketers with information on exactly who they can reach and when.

“Our clients rely on Facebook to connect their message with the people that matter to them, every hour of every day,” Will Platt-Higgins, Facebook’s director of global accounts, said in a statement. “We want to provide marketers with helpful metrics and insights on consumer behavior, across all devices, to maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns. If a business has a sale on Monday, or if a film is premiering, Facebook gives marketers the certainty that they are reaching the right people, on any given day.”

Of course, changing the industry standard — intentionally or not — requires participation from said industry. Other social networks don’t break out daily active users, although some appear to share Facebook’s mindset.

“We look at a number of signals for engagement, but since most members rely on Nextdoor on a daily basis, it makes sense for us to focus on daily and weekly actives,” Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, said in a statement. Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, does not reveal its daily active user data.

Path, a social network for close friends and family, has a similar view.

“What we care most about is that people use the app multiple times every day,” Nate Johnson, the company’s vice-president of marketing, said. “We pay very close attention to that.” Path also doesn’t publish daily user data.

Other social networks such as LinkedIn, however, are not convinced.

“LinkedIn will continue to use monthly average users as a way to gauge engagement,” according to a company statement. “Because we focus on the quality of time spent by our members rather than the amount of time, monthly average user continues to be a meaningful metric for advertisers who want to drive engagement over time.”

Both microblogging service Twitter and Google+, the second-most popular social platform behind Facebook based on monthly active users, declined to comment. (Vine, the video-sharing service owned by Twitter reported total registered users on Tuesday, but not monthly actives.)

For the time being, Facebook appears to be in a league of its own, and said it plans to continue releasing monthly active user metrics. After all, it is the industry standard.

Would you rather receive data about a social network’s daily or monthly active users? Give us your take in the comments, below.

Image: Flickr, Robert Scoble

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Kenshoo Social, a digital marketing company that works with “hundreds” of customers that advertise on Facebook, explored more than 75 billion Facebook ads over the past two quarters, finding evidence that the ads are not only working, but are in some cases undervalued. Kenshoo is considered a preferred marketing developer (PMD), meaning the company has been uniquely identified by Facebook as a marketer “driving outstanding positive impact.” In other words, Kenshoo and Facebook work closely together to ensure ad success for both companies.

Facebook advertisers who work with Kenshoo, including brands like Sears, Ticketmaster and CareerBuilder, reportedly saw an 18.5% increase in click through rates in Q2 over Q1, and revenues driven by Facebook ads were up nearly 30%. Click rates increased 16% and user interactions with the ads — likes, shares or comments — also increased by 57%. The research is not indicative of all Facebook advertisers — only those Kenshoo works with — but with 75 billion ads in the sample, it does offer a snapshot of Facebook ad performance.

Even with ad metrics up, advertisers using “last click conversion” attributions — that is, giving the ad credit only if a sale is directly from a user click on Facebook — actually undervalue Facebook ads by 30%, according to Aaron Goldman, the CMO of Kenshoo. This does not give the ad credit in scenarios in which users view an ad and then make a purchase at a later date, still driven by the ad but not immediately from Facebook.

Kenshoo isn’t the only marketing company to claim social media ads are undervalued. Monetate, which offers cloud-based marketing technology to customers, described a similar trend in its Q1 ecommerce quarterly report earlier this year. The report pointed to the “stickiness” of social media as a reason click through rates aren’t higher; users don’t want to leave the page so they store the ad information in their head for later use.

Facebook’s apparent increase in ad success can be attributed to two factors, Goldman said. First, advertisers are getting better at narrowing down their target audiences and honing in more appropriately on users who may find the ad engaging. Plus, Facebook’s algorithm is improving, meaning the site can better pinpoint relevant users within an advertiser’s target audience.

Ampush, another Strategic PMD who works with dozens of companies advertising on Facebook, is also seeing increases in user ad engagement. For Ampush, mobile use and the increase of page post ads and mobile app install ads has been another major driving factor. “The overall growth in mobile has definitely correlated and contributed to the overall trend towards improved ad metrics overall for Facebook,” says Chris Amos, Ampush co-founder and CMO.

A separate recent study by Salesforce Marketing Cloud explored Facebook’s ad performance over the first three months of the year, noting a major difference in ad performance based on region. Both Europe and Asia-Pacific saw substantially higher click through rates on ads than the Americas, with Asia-Pacific more than 60% above the global average. Salesforce, a third Strategic PMD, has not yet released its finding from Facebook’s Q2, and a spokesperson declined to comment on whether or not Salesforce saw increases similar to Kenshoo and Ampush.

Image: Kim White/Getty Images

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There’s still plenty of debate about whether advertising on Facebook (or social media in general) is worth it, and whether it’s more useful as a lead generation tactic than a direct driver of sales. But as anyone on Facebook can see from the sheer number of promoted posts and sponsored stories, that businesses large and small are opening their wallets.

We wanted to learn what’s actually working on Facebook for startups, so we asked a panel of successful entrepreneurs which Facebook advertising strategies they find most useful — and what kind of ROI they’re seeing so far. Here’s what they had to say:

• Using Facebook Paid Ads With a Darwinian Approach

  

We primarily use Facebook paid ads for ultra-targeted user acquisition for our freemium product. We are Darwinian in our approach in that we experiment with hundreds (if not thousands) of different images and copy combinations that go to a plethora of landing pages. We double down on the ones that convert at a high rate (assuming the costs are reasonable), and we quickly kill those that don’t.

• Using Facebook Ads to Grow Email Lists

  

We’ve used Facebook ads to grow our email lists at very affordable rates. The steps we’ve taken? 1) Define your target. 2) Find out what your target wants. 3) Advertise what your target wants to your target and offer it to them for free or at a discount in exchange for their email address. One example is we identified that an author’s audience was closely aligned with our business philosophies. We ran Facebook ads at the author’s audience and offered our target a free download of the author’s presentation slides in exchange for the target’s email address. By giving a little to get something in return, we spent about 10 cents for each email address, which is something we were happy with.

•  Working With a Growth Hacker

  

We have a great growth hacker working on our team. He uses Facebook in combination with PR to drive traffic to a specific target and has used this for events. Instead of trying to send Facebook traffic to a sales page, he might just send Facebook traffic directly to the article in the press publication. In the past, this resulted in a 7 percent conversion rate and a sold-out event he was promoting.

• Boosting Mobile App Installs

  

We have successfully used Facebook ads to drive installs of multiple iOS apps. One great thing about Facebook is the degree of targeting you can employ. By getting laser focused with our targeting and rigorously testing our ads, we were able to drive app installs for less than 49 cents.

• Retargeting on Facebook Exchange

  

Retargeting on Facebook works the same as other retargeting. It’s a cost-effective way to market to potential customers who have been to your site but did not make a purchase. You bring the visitor back to your website, and you get a second chance to prove how great your product or service is and keep your brand top of mind. With retargeting on Facebook exchange, we are seeing a 200 percent ROI.

• Hitting Specific Targets

  

 Our company has used Facebook marketing to directly target users we want. We found that the Facebook app Install Ads is showing amazing results in certain markets. It’s a newer feature that they have rolled out, which is how they are planning to monetize their mobile users. But while it’s new, it’s pretty affordable on the conversion rates and relatively easy to use. I can tell you without disclosing too much information that it is a very good medium for now, and the pricing will increase probably four times the amount over the next two years. If you are smart and know your user and your budget to pay for your user, it’s an amazing platform for app installs.

•  Buying Advertising to Find Discussion Group Members

  

Hands down, the most effective Facebook advertising money I have spent was on finding people to participate in our Facebook discussion group for college parents. We did a sponsored story to people who were not currently our fans. We spent $199 for nearly 200 members. Although this isn’t a ton of people, the real value for me is in having our team see firsthand exactly what issues parents are facing. It really opened our team’s eyes to the emotional difficulties and challenges that our company is focused on solving. This made it worth every penny! Because our company produces a website, we don’t often see the impact we have on families. This group has made our impact real for the team.

• Offering Contests

  

We have used Facebook to promote contests run on our site. Facebook ads got us a ton of entries at a cost below 49 cents per entry, and for each entry, the customer was required to submit his or her email address. This was a very affordable way to grow our list.

Image: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images

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Mobile Technologies, founded in 2001, built Jibbigo, an app for iPhone and Android that the company describes as “the world’s first speech-to-speech translator on a phone that runs online and even off-line.” The company will join Facebook at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

“Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution,” Tom Stocky, Facebook’s director of product management, wrote in a post. “We believe this acquisition is an investment in our long-term product roadmap as we continue towards our company’s mission.

Image: Mashable composite, Facebook and Jibbigo

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Originally built during a Facebook employee hackathon, photo comments are starting to roll out globally on the web as well as the Facebook mobile site. Users can’t yet leave photo comments within Facebook’s mobile apps, but they are viewable. The feature is expected to come to those apps in a future update.

Adding a photo comment involves clicking a camera icon beside the text box where you would typically write a message and then uploading an image from your computer.

Let us know your thoughts about the new feature in the comments.

Image via Flickr, PhotKing

Source: Mashable

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