Category: Social Media Marketing

The social network is currently testing out advertisements placed on mobile web pages for a considerable expansion.

The largest social network in the world is using its Facebook Audience Network (FAN) in order to test new mobile ad placements on smartphone friendly web pages according to recent reports issued by AdExchanger.

The initial reports of this new mobile marketing effort has said that the placements are being made with almost 10 publishers.

Prior to this recent mobile ad placement strategy, FAN had been used for placing advertisements in smartphone apps. In the last quarter of 2015, there was a reported $1 billion run rate achieved by FAN. Therefore, by adding mobile web pages on top of the placements that are already being added to apps, there could be a considerable opportunity for Facebook and advertisers, alike.

Among the firms to test out the new mobile ad placements is the social publisher called Diply.

That publisher is testing out the mobile marketing strategy in a closed beta test. This was confirmed officially by Facebook by way of the AdExchanter report. This latest step in mobile advertised is believed to be the most recent move that Facebook is taking in order to provide advertisers and marketers with an alternative to using AdSense through Google.

By heading in this direction, it means that Facebook’s FAN will gain access to a full new range of publishers that are looking for new opportunities in mobile marketing. This could potentially present a threat to the market share held by smartphone ad network operators that have already established themselves such as Apple, Google, and Millennial Media (owned by AOL).

FAN was first launched two years ago when Facebook acquired LiveRail. Last year, it was upgraded in order to be able to include native video, greatly changing the nature and scope of this advertising path.

As FAN starts to make its first mobile ad steps into the smartphone optimized web, it has also been speculated that Facebook could start to shake up the current situation in desktop media, as AdSense is currently very established there as the leader but where alternatives have been attempting to chip away at that vast advertising share.

The social network has warned some of its users of the chance for state-sponsored hackers accessing their data.

Twitter has now released an alert for some of the users of its social network, cautioning them of a certain online and mobile security issue that may have involved state-sponsored hackers attempting to access sensitive data from within their accounts.

This is the first time the company has issued this type of warning to any of its users.

Within the mobile security and online privacy notice, it indicated that as of that time, there had not been any indication that would suggest that the hackers had actually managed to access any of the sensitive information from within a “small group of accounts” that had been targeted during the attempts. That said, the letter didn’t provide any more information about the attack, nor did it suggest any potential suspects that were being sought as a part of the company’s investigation into this issue.

This mobile security and privacy notice is only the latest among several data breach concerns from state-sponsored organizations.

Twitter is far from alone in the threat it has faced by way of cyberattacks. Many companies, government agencies and media outlets have all seen their fair share of data breaches from hackers. Several news sites have now been reporting on the warning that Twitter has issued. Among them, one was actually a recipient of the notice. It was a company called Coldhak, which is a nonprofit organization based in Winnipeg, Canada.

That company’s notice explained that the cyber attackers could potentially have been seeking to breach mobile security or online privacy barriers in order to gain access to information such as IP addresses, email addresses and/or telephone numbers. That organization’s own Twitter account (@coldhakca) has since retweeted a several reports from other people who have also claimed to have received the notification from Twitter.

Neither Coldhak nor any of the other users have given any indication as to why they may have been targeted for this type of cyberattack. One of the directors of the nonprofit, Colin Childs, said that despite having received the notice from Twitter, his organization has detected “no noticeable impact of this attack.” Facebook and Google have also issued their own versions of notifications to let users know when state-sponsored attacks have targeted their accounts.