SEARCH ENGINE JOURNAL — Driving traffic to your website or Fan page through Facebook advertising is becoming a popular trend these days. And for good reason too! Facebook is easily capable of sending you thousands of highly targeted visitors! But with all of the advertising Facebook users are subjected to, what can you do to make your ad stick out? Traditionally, Facebook ad click-through rates (CTRs) are pretty horrible. From my research I’ve seen that an average performing ad will have about a 0.02% CTR. A few weeks ago when I had decided that I wanted to use Facebook ads to drive awareness to a contest I was running called RavenHunt, I found my ads falling into that average category (or worse!). I had setup these two ads...

NEW YORK TIMES — Facebook, the world’s biggest social network, is selling more ad spots to big companies like Wal-Mart Stores, Procter & Gamble and PepsiCo. But the site’s pages are also home to countless ads from smaller companies that can be funny, weird or just plain creepy -- those suggesting you are, say, eligible to get a free iPad because you are exactly 26 years old, or entreaties to see what your offspring would look like if you had a child with a celebrity. Odd Web ads, like the dancing women promoting mortgage brokers, are not new. But on social networks like Facebook, where people go to communicate with one another, advertisers seem to be trying especially hard to intrude on the conversation...

THE SOCIAL TIMES — I recently had the chance to have a few words with Sean Rad from ad.ly, an advertising service for Twitter. Ad.ly describes itself as "an in-stream advertising platform that matches top-tier Twitter publishers with top-tier brands." In short, ad.ly connects big brands with the biggest Twitter accounts on the web, and allows brands to propose advertising to the top publishers. Some of their publishers are TechCrunch, Kim Kardashian, Newsweek and Gossip girl, and some of the brands are NBC, Sony, Microsoft and Universal.  Reports have indicated that Kim Kardashian earns up to $10,000 USD per tweet...

ALL FACEBOOK — While not the first company to do so, Scion released a new promotion last week that uses Facebook Connect to put you directly into an advertisement. The campaign, which resembles the Doritos advergame and the Prototype game trailer, places you and your friends in a video in which you are the featured D.J. at a local club and you are driving to the event in your new Scion tC RS...

ALL THINGS DIGITAL — What will Twitter’s long-awaited ad platform look like? Something like Google’s. That’s the general description of Twitter’s plan, according to people who have been briefed by the company. Here are the very broad strokes...