Facebook Ads Grouped 3-In-1

Facebook is going to start grouping advertisements in threes rather than just one at a time. These will come in a horizontal unit known as ‘Pages You Might Like’.

The change was implemented in the News Feed of the desktop version over the weekend. The change helps Facebook to fit more ads into the feed without having to take up too much space.

The idea to fit multiple advertisements into a space that would normally fit one could have come due to the fact that the mobile version of the social platform has been implementing it since August last year.

The new update means that ads on the mobile application will appear simultaneously with those that appear on the desktop version. These are mostly Sponsored Stories meaning that a friend of the user has previously connected to the page. Ads which are not connected however will sometime appear in the unit as well.

The social platform needed to move more ads into its feed rather than have them in the sidebar in order to increase revenue. Ads that are seen in the News Feed have a higher rate of click-throughs and in doing so will be able to create more revenue with every impression.

Facebook is able to put more ads into the sidebar of the site, but these are then not transferred onto the mobile equivalent and so do not create as much revenue for a business.

Although some ads in the News Feed can be disruptive and annoying to users, the chance to be noticed and in the forefront to users is likely to create a larger impact for a business than remaining in the sidebars.

The social giants also began to test a ‘Games your friends are playing’ unit for the desktop feed this weekend. Both of these additions come at a similar time as the addition of ‘More Pages You May Like’ which takes the user to similar Pages that they have just liked.

These updates all show Facebook’s willingness to improve user interaction and maintain that users remain within the site whilst also viewing other pages or businesses.

The increase to having three ads instead of one will obviously see more companies given the opportunity to appear in the News Feed and have a bigger chance of impressions, going on to larger revenue.

What do you think of these changes?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below

A New Study Shows How Twitter Can Monitor Disease Outbreaks

A recent study by a computer science class from Brigham Young University has found that Twitter could be used to track the outbreak of diseases.

The researchers sampled 24 million tweets from 10 million unique users, discovering that 15% of the tweets could be located using GPS or information from the users profile.

In fact, only 2% of the tweets in the survey contained GPS data, far less than suggested by survey data, a figure that surprised BYU professor Christophe Giraud-Carrier:

“There is this disconnect that’s well known between what you think you are doing and what you are actually doing,” Giraud-Carrier said.

Each tweet was then searched for words such as “fever,” “flu” and “coughing”, to find out whether flu had been contracted by people in a city or state.

“One of the things this paper shows is that the distribution of tweets is about the same as the distribution of the population so we get a good representation of the country” said Giraud-Carrier. “That’s another nice validity point especially if you’re going to look at things like diseases spreading.”

To monitor outbreaks on Twitter, says Scott Burton, lead author of the study, health officials can use the GPS and keyword information:

“The first step is to look for posts about symptoms tied to actual location indicators and start to plot points on a map” said Burton.  “You could also look to see if people are talking about actual diagnoses versus self-reported symptoms, such as ‘The doctor says I have the flu.’”

The advantage of using Twitter to monitor epidemics is obvious: the speed of the service provides information in real-time, speed which could help health officials warn those living close to an outbreak:

“If people from a particular area are reporting similar symptoms on Twitter, public health officials could put out a warning to providers to gear up for something” said Professor Josh West who collaborated on the project. “Under conditions like that, it could be very useful.”

Professor Giraud-Carrier (@ChristopheGC) and his students have published the study in an issue of the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

Do you think Twitter could be used to monitor epidemics?