The Wall Street Journal To Launch A LinkedIn Competitor

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Wall Street Journal To Launch A Social Network (The Times Of London)
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. announced plans to launch a social network for its publication, The Wall Street Journal, which would directly compete with LinkedIn, as well as an instant messaging service for financial professionals, according to The Times Of London (a News Corp. property). The news comes shortly after Bloomberg got caught spying on clients who used its popular messaging services on Bloomberg terminals. Read >

The Rise Of Social Commerce — Turning Pins And Likes Into Retail Sales (BI Intelligence)
Today's mobile-savvy consumers in their teens and early twenties are accustomed to shopping online and tend to see their smartphones and tablets as their main computing device, and an important shopping tool. Pinterest's average user is between the ages of 30 and 49, which is an age bracket with considerable disposable income. Also, Pinterest users tend to be women (anywhere from 80 to 85% of its user base is female). Marketers know that it is women who usually control the purse strings for household purchases related to clothes, home decoration, and gifts — three strong areas for Pinterest. Read >

5 Tips To Reevaluate Your Social Media Marketing (salesforce)
For brands that have been exerting minimal effort in social media, it may be time to reach a little farther. Social media has changed marketing forever, and it's important to constantly be reevaluating where you are experimenting:

Dedicate resources to social media measurement
Consider social media advertising
Tweak goals to better align with business objectives
Ask your community for feedback
Create a transition plan

Mary Meeker's Latest Presentation On The State Of The Web (Business Insider)
Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers partner and former analyst Mary Meeker published her latest report on the "State of the Web." Meeker believes the next 10 years in technology will be focused on wearable computing and personal data and that the rise of mobile will continue driving audience growth for social networks and e-commerce. Read >

Facebook Launches Verified Pages And Profiles (Facebook)
Following Twitter's lead, Facebook now offers verified Pages for prominent public figures and brands. Each verified page will display a "Verified" badge, so fans can differentiate between impostors and the real thing. For now, verified pages are only being rolled out to a "small group." Read >

Facebook Testing Poll Feature For Newsfeed Posts (All Facebook)
Veteran News Feed users are spotting a new polling feature that asks how interesting they find content from pages users have liked (not from friends' content or user-generated posts). Read >

Twitter Updates iOS and Android Apps (Mashable)
With an update to its iOS and Android apps on Wednesday, Twitter improved the photo uploading experience and made it easier to switch between multiple accounts. When creating a new tweet, your avatar and username will now appear on the page, making it easier to differentiate which account you are about to tweet from. Read >

Twitter's Dick Costolo: We "Complement" TV, Not "Competing" (VentureBeat)
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo spoke on Twitter's relationship with TV at the D11 Tech Conference. "We view ourselves as complementary to what those folks are doing, and we try to create complementary experiences," Costolo said. Last week, Twitter announced a new television partnership, which advertisers can use to combine TV and Twitter ad campaigns. The rise of Twitter as a companion app to TV viewing is part of the so-called Second Screen phenomenon, via which TV audiences interact and comment on TV content via smartphone. Read >