The reports come from Adobe and Kenshoo Social, which are both part of Facebook’s Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer program, meaning they drive “outstanding positive impact in [Facebook’s] marketing developer ecosystem.”

The first annual Social Media Intelligence report released Monday by Adobe found that Facebook’s ad clicks, ad impressions and advertisers’ return on investment were all higher in 2013 than in 2012. According to the study, which took into account more than 131 billion Facebook ad impressions and 4.3 billion social engagements, Facebook ads were clicked 29% more often in 2013, and the return to investors was 58% higher than last year.

Other advertising metrics like cost-per-click were lower (by 40%), meaning advertising on Facebook is becoming cheaper and more effective, according to Tamara Gaffney, principal analyst of Adobe’s Digital Index. In some cases, Gaffney said, Facebook and other social platforms like Twitter and Pinterest are being undervalued by marketers using the last click model.

The last click model means that users may see an ad for an item they like on Facebook, then buy it online at a later date without going through Facebook to the retailer’s website. The purchase is still driven by the Facebook ad, but Facebook doesn’t always get the credit.

A separate study by Kenshoo Social found many of the same ad metric improvements for the company’s Q3 over Q2. According to Kenshoo’s data, which incorporates info from 85 million Facebook ads, ad clicks were up 14%, cost-per-click was down 9% and advertisers’ returns were 3 times higher than the same figures last quarter.

These improvements were similar to Kenshoo’s findings for Facebook ads last quarter. It appears that marketers can expect similar improvements moving ahead into the future.

“Part of the reason Facebook seems to accelerate each quarter is because of adoption,” said Aaron Goldman, Kenshoo CMO. “As more and more advertisers use it, they get more and more signals about how they can improve their ad delivery.”

In other words, the ads are growing more effective over time, according to Goldman.

Facebook is not alone in its social ad success. Adobe’s report found that both Twitter and Pinterest made significant ground on Facebook in terms of referral traffic to retail sites. Facebook still holds the top spot, but Twitter’s share of referral traffic grew more than 250% last year.

“I had thought that Facebook was running away with the game,” Gaffney said. “What’s coming out of our data set is that Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr are all making inroads themselves in a marketplace that I thought was already [dominated].”

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The study, published by the Pew Research Center on Thursday, found that almost half of American users click on news in their Facebook feeds. Since 64% of adults in the United States use Facebook, that means one in three Americans consumes news on Facebook.

However, only 22% of the 30% who get their news on Facebook think the site is a useful source for information about the world, and only 4% of those think Facebook is “the most important way” to get their news.

“People go to Facebook to share personal moments — and they discover the news almost incidentally,” Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research, said in a statement. “The serendipitous nature of news on Facebook may actually increase its importance as a source of news and information, especially among those who do not follow the news closely.”

The study quotes one respondent, who said he believes “Facebook is a good way to find out news without actually looking for it.”

The importance of the social network also depends on how much of a news junkie the user is.

Among those who click on news links in their Facebook news feeds, just 38% of heavy news followers think the social network is “an important way to get the news,” but among those who follow news “less often,” 47% consider Facebook as an important source.

On Monday, Facebook announced that it was driving 170% more traffic to media sites this year than in 2012.

This is the first of a series of studies on social media and news published by Pew in collaboration with the Knight Foundation. For this study, Pew surveyed 5,173 Americans ages 18 and older. You can read the full report here (.PDF).

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