Facebook does a lot for its marketing customers, allowing brands and businesses many resources to let them advertise to a huge group of people that they otherwise would not be able to reach. The popular social network is constantly coming up with new and improved ways to get marketers the results that they desire and then give them even more. Many people criticize Facebook’s marketing resources and tools, but the truth is that the social network is the most effective advertising and marketing source for countless businesses, both big and small. Now, once again Facebook has added a little something to bring in better results, with hopes of getting Facebook users to like more pages.

Recommended Pages on Facebook have been around for quite some time, and they have done a pretty decent job at extending the reach of many businesses with Facebook Pages. However, a problem with these Recommended Pages has been that they are missed by many Facebook users while scanning their News Feeds. Essentially, if a user does not see what pages are recommended for their Liking, then the efforts of the marketer are useless. Even though these Recommended Pages are made quite hard to miss, many users will even ignore them as a result of more interesting things happening within the News Feed.

However, with their newly added Recommendations page, Facebook will allow for more clicks to be had by brands and businesses. With a page dedicated to Recommended Pages, there is no way for users to miss them.

As one could imagine, the Recommendations Page resides under the Like Pages link on the left-hand column of the Facebook home page. Upon clicking the link, users are brought to a large list of pages that are recommended to them. For brands or businesses using Facebook Pages for marketing purposes, this is good news, as having your page show up in users’ Recommendations page will guarantee a like from an user looking to Like pages that they are interested in.

In an InsideFacebook article, where the addition of this new little feature was reported, the company writes:

Getting users to Like more pages will help Facebook show users more relevant ads. Even though it’s advertisers who choose their target audience and users who define who they are on the site, the social network often gets the blame when users see ads they don’t relate to.

Although Recommendations have taken the place of the old ‘Like Pages’ page, the main page that used to be in its place still exists, by simply going to facebook.com/pages.

Despite Facebook’s heavy delving into the world of display advertising, their Pages and Promoted Posts from these Pages have probably been their most useful form of marketing that they have offered. A page dedicated to Recommended Pages will be useful, and more likes will almost certainly be seen as a result.

Google+ is the network that everyone is saying has died, and has become a ghost town of people that were interested for a day or two and then forgot all about it after that. Marketers around the country are convinced that Google+ will never reach the level of marketing potential that other social networks have, and that has caused for very little use of the new network by anyone other than the everyday internet user. However, is should dawn upon many marketers and brands out there that Google+ is still functioning quite well and remains a relevant name on the web, so it can’t be that useless, can it?

In fact, Google+ just recently announced a new feature that they are offering to their users called Communities. Google+ Communities are much like Facebook Groups, allowing users to become members of groups based on any given topic. For example, some of the Communities that already exist on the network are based around things like Running, Star Wars, Classical Music Enthusiasts, Go-To Parents Community, and even on well-known brand names like Call of Duty and Audi. With communities being created with brands as their only reason for coming together, there are clearly ways that brands can take advantage of Communities as marketing tools on Google+.

Here is how Google has described their new feature:

Gather together
Whether it’s for your family, your book club or people around the world who share your interests, communities give each of your different groups a home base.

Have rich conversations
Post beautiful photos and videos, plan events or even have face-to-face discussions in a hangout. And stay connected on the go through the Google+ mobile app.

Explore your interests
From foodies, to volunteer groups, to football fanatics, communities help you find people who are into the same things you are. Share news, ideas and passions with just the right people, or meet some new ones by joining public communities.

As for Google+ being a ghost town, that is not true either. At the same time that the network announced their new, potentially beneficial feature, the network announced that their user count has finally reached 500 million. Granted, that is only around half of what Facebook has, but it is definitely a step in the right direction toward showing the online community that Google+ is not and never has been the failure that people have chalked it up to be.

Of the 500 million users, 235 million are users that actively use Gmail IM, connect to other users through search, or use the +1 button, which still shows up all over the web and proves to be a viable way to measure popularity or clicks. Another 135 million users are only active on the network through the stream, much like the majority of Facebook’s user base with the News Feed.

It seems that Google+ has a lot more life than people have made it seem in the past few months. Of course there are marketers that see the potential of Google+ and use it, but those who don’t may see reason to reconsider.

The innovation of today’s current, most popular advertising methods is what keeps the marketing industry running smoothly. Marketers constantly look for new ways to advertise to the world of digital consumers that has formed in the past few years, which is the reason for some of today’s biggest developments in advertising. One such development that is brand new, so new that it is still in its beta testing stage, is shoppable video from Google’s incredibly famous social video network, YouTube. Surely, it is no coincidence that this has been put into action just before the holidays, during the heaviest shopping time of the year.

What a shoppable video actually is, is not really something that could not have been seen already with YouTube. For a long time YouTube has allowed the annotation of videos posted on the network, with these annotations containing links to other pages, most of the time to other videos on YouTube. In almost all of the most popular videos, boxes in a wide range of sizes will pop up during the video at any chosen point, some with text and some without, that lead users to other videos or publisher pages. Now, with shoppable videos, YouTube will allow video publishers to link to purchase pages within the videos, through the use of annotation boxes.

This is similar to what we see with page annotations in news articles, for example. So far, the feature is in its beta stage, and is being used mostly by fashion and retail video ad publishers on YouTube. A great example of the feature is given by a Juicy Couture video advertisement that was posted on November 9, being one of the very first demonstrations of the feature. In the video, we can see many annotation boxes pop up at different points in the video, usually when a wardrobe change occurs with the main actress in the video, and upon clicking these annotations, the video pauses and takes you to a new tab where the purchase page for a product seen in the video loads.

Fashion brands have been making good use of YouTube lately, along with retail brands, which is most likely the main reason that we have begun seeing these shoppable videos appearing on different brand pages on YouTube. Google’s acquiring of the video sharing network has meant countless changes and improvements being made, and these shoppable ads are yet another, perfectly timed, new feature.

In the realm of video advertising, YouTube has become top dog, making it absolutely necessary for them to continue to offer more to marketers. A sort of ad within an ad is the perfect way to increase engagement on video ads that already bring in high engagement levels. For anyone who sees a video and says, “I want that,” while watching, the linked annotations will be the perfect addition to get them to take that next step and purchase or at least visit the purchase page.

A great way for any business to get more customers interested in buying or spending any kind of money at their retail locations is with deals. Deals keep people interested in spending money, because it means spending less. Deals have become a very popular marketing technique these days, with businesses of all types. Small businesses rely very heavily on the promotion of their deals, because a deal is one of the most useful marketing tactics for businesses who do not have a lot to spend on other, more expensive forms of marketing. For long now, Groupon has been the big name in deals and promotions, and many brands have trusted the company to promote their savings to consumers. Seeing potential in the internet deals industry, AT&T Wireless has decided to jump on the band wagon and give it a go. Now, they have released AT&T Alerts, which may prove to be some decent competition for Groupon.

That is of course, only with AT&T users. Obviously, AT&T cannot offer their service to anyone with a smartphone, but AT&T is just behind Verizon Wireless in the rankings of most popular wireless carriers. Therefore, the company’s new AT&T alerts will be available to quite a large market.

The way AT&T Alerts work is quite simple; users just opt in to receive the alerts, and then through geo-location based text messages, users will receive offers and promotions to businesses that are nearby their current locations.

In their promotional video for the new feature, AT&T explains it as follows:

Your town is full of exclusive deals. When you’re near those deals, AT&T texts personalized discounts from your preferred brands and other stuff you love, right to your phone.

Yes, this is exactly the same as what Groupon Now does, and has been doing since early 2011. Therefore, it is safe to say that anyone looking for this service, probably has already found it from Groupon, or has heard that Groupon is the best place to find the service. AT&T will of course find a lot of interest from their users, but will their service be blowing Groupon out of the water any time soon? I think not.

However, for those that are interested, the process of signing up is made very simple. AT&T Wireless users simply have to text the word SAVE, to ATTAlerts, or 28833257. The list of businesses that are already showing deals with AT&T Alerts is not very long, but it includes Staples, Gap, Zales, Duracell, Discover, Motorola, Last Call by Neiman Marcus, and a few others. There is no doubt that AT&T will see significant success with their new deals platform, considering the popularity of deals amongst consumers and brands alike. However, to say that they will be big competition for Groupon, especially this early, would be a bit ridiculous.

With all of the focus that people put on social networks and mobile platforms, many other services and mediums that are highly popular today tend to be put on the back burner. Something that most marketers do not pay very much attention to is music sharing. Music sharing networks are used constantly today, and see enormous amounts of recurring traffic. It is of course understandable that music sharing websites and services do not receive much attention from marketers, as the marketing opportunities that they have put forth in the recent past have not been much to get excited about, aside from some of Pandora’s advertising features. However, a relatively new name in music sharing, Spotify, is now talking about take its first steps toward offering something real to potential marketing customers.

According to an Ad Age article, after a Spotify announcement that included appearances from such names as Lars Ulrich of Metallic and Sean Parker, the co-founder of Napster, which subsequently served as something of a root for all music sharing to grow out of, an interview delved a bit deeper into the intentions of Spotify in the near future. The Chief Advertising Officer at Spotify, Jeff Levick spoke of opportunities that marketers might find in the new features that the company announced at the New York media event on Thursday.

The new feature that was the subject of Spotify’s announcement is called “Discover,” and it allows for users to look over songs, playlists, artists, and videos that they may not have discovered yet. It is similar to Pinterest in a design sense, and it provides more of a personalized profile kind of functionality for users of the music sharing service. Based on the past preferences of users, new music to discover will show up on the “Discover” page. It is not a concept that we have never seen before in social media, but for music sharing services, it is relatively unique.

Here is a bit of what Levick stated in the interview with Ad Age:

“It’s another new canvas for us to look at the right way for brands to participate in the music experience.”

“Ads can be and should be about content and we plan to use this content-rich experience to let brands test out new things.”

With the adding of a visually focused page design to Spotify, a lot of opportunity opens up for marketers that want to tap the vast traffic that the company has. The new Spotify feature is supposed to come into the digital world after the New Year, and it is then that brands should start considering the company’s new feature as a potential place to veer away from display ads and see what advertising on a popular music sharing and discovery service will bring to the table.

The service currently has around 5 million paying subscribers around the globe, and 1 million in the U.S. who pay for the service. The majority of users, about 15 million of them, use the service for free, which means that they opt into being shown advertisements as they listen to music.

Yes, you heard it right and no, this is not a story about the Affiliate Ball party last year.  UK based affiliate network, Affiliate Window has managed to get some of their employees naked this year, and not by use of excessive amounts of alcohol but instead for charity.

As part of a 2013 calendar called the “The Naked Network,” some of their employees took off all their clothes in front of the camera to help raise money for the Encephalitis Society.

One of the marketers, Nicola Clare, an account director, said, ““Initially I was naturally a bit sceptical about being involved. But when the working group got together to discuss the fundraising potential for such a unique project, I knew I had to say yes.”

We expect that she’ll be getting a great deal of LinkedIn requests now.

If you’d like to help support the charity, and also take a look at some naked marketers, you can buy the Calendar at the official charity store here.