Social Media, Advertising | featured news

The design of Tumblr, the blogging tool and social network, is guided by feeling. In particular, the feelings of David Karp, the company’s 26-year-old founder, whose instincts tend to run counter to current Web conventions. Tumblr does not display “follower” counts, for example, or other numerical markers of popularity that are viewed as crucial social-media features, because Karp finds them “really gross.” The culture of public friend-and-follow reciprocity that theoretically expands a social networking service can, in his view, “really poison a whole community.”

On most days, Twitter is now generating the majority of its revenue from ads shown to its users on mobile gadgets, rather than from ads on Twitter.com, company executives said. One key reason: People who see a Twitter ad on their phones are more likely to click or interact with it in some way, which is how Twitter gets paid for advertisements.

Coca-Cola's marketing chief, Joe Tripodi, said that advertising with Facebook probably helps drive sales. The comment marks a powerful endorsement at a time when some advertisers, such as GM, have expressed doubt about putting ad dollars into Facebook.

Facebook Inc., owner the world’s largest social network, says it’s working on a location-based mobile-advertising product that will allow companies to target users with real-time data showing their whereabouts.

Stung by claims in recent weeks that its advertising doesn’t work, Facebook is pouring on the public relations to insist that in fact, ads work just fine on the site. But while some of the claims of critics rest on shaky evidence, many questions about Facebook’s value as an advertising medium remain among the brands that constitute the bulk of all advertising online and off.

We've heard rumblings that Facebook was testing a system called Highlight that would allow people to pay to promote a post, and now obnoxiously enough, it's starting to show up.

General Motors Co said on Tuesday it will stop advertising on Facebook, even as the social networking website prepares to go public, with a source familiar with the matter saying the automaker had decided Facebook's ads had little impact on consumers.

Facebook's reach is wide but not deep. Few users surveyed in an Associated Press-CNBC poll say they click on the site's ads or buy the virtual goods that make money for it.