You can barely keep up with your own Facebook News Feed, so it's okay if you've fallen behind on the network's updates - because we've summed it all up for you. This week, Facebook delivered a flurry of iOS updates, saw some Wall Street love, and much, much more.
Another week has passed and as per usual, Facebook pushed plenty of updates and made its fair share of headlines — including its new mobile Share button, a Pages-only News Feed, and the expansion of its Gifts service. But as there’s always more Facebook news to be had, so here are five more stories you may have missed over the week.
Facebook Emoticons now available for iOS
Emoticons add some personality to our text-filled conversations, and Facebook continues to experiment here. With the many messaging apps out there already boasting variations of smiley faces, Facebook is finally opening up access to its slate of 52 emoticons to mobile devices. As we reported last month, Facebook enabled emoticons for its desktop app, but not for its mobile apps. But fear now: Facebook is now supporting the feature as part of the iOS update. The emoticons can be found when you press the plus icon. We did notice, however, that many on the list of supported Facebook emoticons for the desktop were not the same as the emoticons offered on its mobile app.
Facebook enables tagging from your iPhone
An additional feature, announced alongside the emoticon and share update for mobile devices, is tagging. This is another tool that exists for desktop but hasn’t been available for your mobile apps, but now you can tag friends in posts and comments directly from your smartphone. Usually when there’s a post that you’d like to bring to your friends’ attention, for instance you might be bringing a news article to their attention, tagging them with the @ symbol notifies them that they’ve been tagged in a post. The update is also only available for iOS at the moment.
Facebook lock up expires and shares jump
773 million Facebook shares were expected to flood the market as the lockup expired and early investors and employees become able to cash in on their shares. Wall Street presumed that Facebook’s market cap was expected to fall since shares were freed up, but it appears that with unanticipated consumer confidence in the social network, share prices have soared more than 17 percent to $23.42 at the time of this writing. Despite the jump, Facebook shares are still more than 39 percent lower than the original $38/share IPO price.
Facebook’s “conversion measurement” advertising tool
On Friday, Reuters reported that Facebook was launching a new conversion measurement tool that has been long requested by its advertisers. The tool will enable advertisers to track the performance of an ad even a week after a user has viewed the advertisement. “It lets marketers track the impact of a Facebook ad hours or days or even a week beyond when someone might have viewed the ad. That allows marketers to understand the impact of the Facebook ad on the ultimate purchase,” Debra Aho Williamson, an analyst at eMarketer told Reuters. The tool will only show the number of people who have made a purchase, according to Facebook product manager, David Base. Personally identifiable information will be inconsequential since users will just show up as a statistic in a broader analytic that displays how well an ad is performing. Fab.com, a beta tester of the service, claims to have reduced its cost per new customer acquisition by a whopping 39 percent. According to Reuters, Fab was able to identify the groups of users more likely to make a purchase and served the ads to these individuals using Facebook’s conversion tool.
Facebook app alerts for developers
Facebook app developers out there might want to pay attention to this. Facebook announced that it is rolling out developer alerts beginning on November 16 and will notify developers of any new information regarding feature or policy changes to a their apps. The types of alerts that fall under this update are as follows as explained by Facebook software engineer, Min-Young Wu:
- Breaking changes. If your app is using functionality that we’re changing or removing, you will be sent an alert at least 90 days before the change goes into effect. As a courtesy, we’ll also send reminders at 60, 30, and 0 days. Once you’ve enabled the respective migration, we will no longer send you alerts.
- App status changes. If you have submitted Open Graph actions or created an app detail page for App Center, we will use Developer Alerts to notify you when the status of your submission changes. For example, we will send an alert when your Open Graph actions are approved.
- Policy violations and enforcement. If your app doesn’t adhere to our Platform Policies you will be notified through these alerts. For example, if your app does not list a privacy policy, you will receive an alert telling you to add one before your app is forced into sandbox mode.
Source : digitaltrends[dot]com
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