Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool that nonprofit organizations can use to quickly, cheaply and personally engage with funders, volunteers and clients. But while the benefits of using social media are vast, challenges and legal risks exist. Here are some tips and traps to keep in mind and discuss with...

Engaging the customer has always been fundamental to doing good business. It's just that now that engagement often starts in digital, social media realms. The trick is to figure out how to make one's content as interesting as all the other content that shows up in the newsfeed, and this is where soc...

It appears that Pinterest may have a greater propensity to inspire its users to buy products after viewing them on the site than other social networks, based on recent research. For example, Pinterest users are 79 percent more likely to purchase something spotted on Pinterest than Facebook users are...

The honeymoon is over for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, it ended before it began. Facebook's long-awaited and much-hyped IPO is just over a week old, and the blame game is on as the company has lost 16 percent of its value since the initial offering. Wall Street's take on Facebook has gon...

The image-based social networking site Pinterest has raised $100 million in a financing round, and this brings the value of the company to around $1.5 billion, an unnamed source told All Things D. Rakuten, one of Japan's biggest online retail operators, led the round of financing. It was joined by a...

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook because the ad campaigns are not paying off in any measurable way. At $10 million, the company's ad spend on Facebook is relatively small. The reaction to GM's decision, however, has been disproportionately big. The timing of the news, of course, ...

Facebook is testing a new feature that offers to promote users' posts and status updates for a fee. The new service is currently only available in New Zealand. There, Facebook users can pay $2 to "highlight" a post, making it more visible to a greater number of their Facebook contacts. Users can pay...

Social network MySpace settled with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission Tuesday over charges related to how the site was using members' personal information. The social network had access to personal data from users, including their full names, ages and genders. MySpace promised users it would not sha...

Facebook is rolling out its Facebook Offers service, a way for users to get discounts and promotions from local businesses via the social networking site. The offers will be distributed through users' Facebook news feeds. Users can then sign up to receive the offers via email and redeem them at pa...

Facebook has snagged the highly popular photo-sharing application Instagram for $1 billion in cash and stock. It is among the biggest acquisitions in the social media space, second only to Google's $1.65 billion stock-for-stock purchase of YouTube in 2006. The deal, both in size and intent, is very ...

It finally has happened -- the number of U.S. mobile subscribers who own smartphones is just about equal to the number who own feature phones, according to new data. As of Feb. 2012, 49.7 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers carried a smartphone -- an increase of 38 percent from Feb. 2011, when only 3...

OK, it's time to officially close the book on the 2011 holiday retail season and to shift our attention forward to 2012. For me personally, what makes it difficult to stop looking back are the new trends that emerged that will forever change holiday shopping: Mobile made its mark, with 11 percent of...

Now is a good time to be a startup looking for funding, suggests the Halo Report, which provides data and identifies trends affecting early stage entrepreneurs and investors. Angel Resource Institute, Silicon Valley Bank and CB Insights collaborated in the development of the report. Most notable amo...

Yelp had an excellent first day as a publicly traded company. It opened on the New York Stock Exchange Friday at $22.01 per unit -- up 47 percent from its IPO price of $15. By the end of the day, shares were trading at $24.58. The first-hour pop was surprising, even for enthusiastic advocates of the...

Facebook introduced a slew of new ad initiatives at its marketing conference, fMC, held in New York on Wednesday. Most had been leaked to industry publications prior to this first-ever event. Timeline for Pages, for example, was expected. Also expected was a mobile ad play -- Facebook had admitted i...