VEVO has witnessed a 142% year-over-year increase in audience registrations and the video-sharing platform is giving a good chunk of that credit to Facebook. In February 2012 VEVO relaunched its website, iPhone and Android apps with facebook integration and after that move the number of daily registrations increased by 200%.

According to VEVO by March 60 percent of its traffic was coming from timeline app stories that had been published to Facebook.

The company also uses Facebook to personalize playlists by syncing them to a users’ liked Facebook pages and iTunes libraries.

A recent study found that unlike Facebook the VEVO system typically doesn’t have a bad effect on workplace productivity since a majority of its video views are completed from 6 p.m. through midnight.

Here are a few impressive quarterly metrics shared by VEVO’s Matt Marquess: read more

Five years ago Facebook announced the Facebook Developer Platform and since it was announced at the 2007 f8 conference with 70 app developers the program has sky rocketed in use. In fact one year after it was first revealed the program already had 30,000 apps.

Adding to Facebook’s reach was the Connect platform in 2008, the first glimpse into third-party website integration for the company.

Eventually we were treated to the Facebook “Like” button, tons of games from the likes of Zynga and the Open Graph.

Fast forward to 2012 and the Facebook developer platform has created more than 182,000 American jobs with an economic value of $12.19 billion.

Throw in Facebook Timeline which is hated by many users but offers the potential for even closer app development integration and its easy to see why Facebook continues its meteoric rise, even as people complain about privacy issues and other Facebook missteps.  read more

In 2008 President Obama launched the most successful online campaign in the history of US politics and now as team Obama gears up for their 2012 re-election challenge they have announced an even more robust campaign that offers its own set of social media campaign tools.

Known as “Dashboard” the new platform offers almost everything a brick-and-mortar campaign office offers but in digital form. For example specialized tools will allow helpers to make calls to recruit other to join the team while organizing campaign events and even communicating with Obama’s leadership team. The platform can be access from desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone devices which makes grassroots campaigns more mobile than ever.

The Dashboard design is similar to Facebook’s interface and brings with it social media driven metrics reports.

Users will also be able to find Obama supporting groups to join in their area.

The Dashboard app however isn’t just for local users, the staff for Obama’s administration will be able to set specific goals for individual Obama supports while tracking their success rates. Groups will then be able to engage in and compete in a friendly competition with one another.  read more

Facebook this week began testing a new Facebook Timeline output that cleans up the first bit of information users see when they access a users page.

Posted on Talking Points Memo on Tuesday morning the new version of Timeline features a condensed area for user details, specifically the information that shows their name, occupation, education and location. Those options now appear on top of, rather than below the cover photo.

Facebook has then taken the carousel thumbnail images that shows friends, photos, places, likes and other information and compressed them next to sit on the same level as their main page thumbnail.

Users will also notice that before the carousel images Facebook has added a “Summary” section which we assume will highlight key events inside a users Timeline. read more

Facebook “power users” are the most addicted social network users the site has to offer and they make up nearly 20-30% of the social networks user base. If you log into your account multiple times per day, leave messages on friends walls, post constant “Likes” and more you are probably a “power user.”

The team at DemandForce wanted to highlight some of a power users typical site uses and released an infographic to showcase that use.

According to the company a “power user” will “like” content up to 14 times per month and they will share at least nine status updates and contribute 21 comments during that same one month period.

Not only do Facebook power users share more content, they are invited to share more, according to the company 11% of those users are invited to join a Facebook group and 63% of those users have received friend requests in the last one month period. read more

When a new user joined Twitter’s microblogging service they are given a set of recommendations that are fairly similar to everyone else’s recommendations, that’s because Twitter has no way of knowing your interests to make better recommendations. Now Twitter is testing a new feature in some countries that dives into your browser history and makes recommendations accordingly.

In a blog post on Thursday Othman Laraki, Twitter’s director of growth and international business wrote:

“After all, even though millions of people love Justin Bieber, FC Barcelona or Kim Kardashian, not everyone using Twitter may want to follow them.”

Twitter buttons and widgets are located on millions of sites which means the company will be able to use data collected from their own pieces of already installed technology to gather information for the recommendation engine.

As Laraki explains:

“By recognizing which accounts are frequently followed by people who visit popular sites, we can recommend those accounts to others who have visited those sites within the last ten days.” read more

Twitter on Thursday gave privacy advocated a big win by announced a new “Do Not Track” setting that allows users to opt out of being tracked by Twitters platform.

The plan was unveiled at an Internet Week panel in New York Thursday morning by chief technology officer for the Federal Trade Commission, Ed Felten.

Twitter also revealed the new Do Not Track button, tweeting:

“The Federal Trade Commission’s CTO, Ed Felten, just mentioned Twitter now supports Do Not Track. We applaud the FTC’s leadership on DNT.”

Users can take advantage of the Do Not Track option using any browser that already support the option. The new feature prevents Twitter from collecting information about users through the use of cookies which are typically placed on a users computer. It should be noted that the Firefox Do Not Track feature only works if websites agree to enable the feature as Twitter has done. read more

Gogobot, a Facebook travel app that just launched in January 2012 announced on Wednesday that it has passed the 1 million registered users mark.

Gogobot officially launched in private beta 18 months ago but came out of beta in January. The company now claims that a new users signs up for the program every 15 seconds and that more than 5 million locations have already been shared on Gogobot.

The travel app allows Facebook users to share vacation photos with friends and strangers while giving recommendations to people who post questions about general travel and specific destinations.

Users of Gogobot can also create a “passport” that lists the places they have been alongside reviews and recommendations for those locations. read more

Foursquare users checking in with Facebook permissions synced to their accounts will now find their check-ins plotted across their Facebook Timeline maps thanks to deeper integration announced by the location based service on Tuesday.

Until this point in time only Facebook check-ins and Instagram geo-tagging options were plotted on the Facebook Timeline maps.

Using the program means integrating your Foursquare account with Facebook and then simply checking in at which point your locations will be plotted on the Facebook Timeline map using standard pin placements.

Facebook and Foursquare have also made it so check-ins already map have been updated to mapped out pinned location markers.  read more

Before the days of LinkedIn and the Facebook app Branch Out recruiters looking for employees had to rely on resume websites (Monster, CareerBuilder), emailed resumes from interested parties and even headhunting agencies that specialized in finding resumes online.

Now thanks to digital recruiting platforms employers can quickly and efficiently find potential employees with the skills they require.

Thanks to the team at  Jobvite we now have a nicely integrated infographic that shows how far “social job recruiting” has come since the 1990s.

According to a recent Pew Research estimate 65% of job seekers now use social media to look for new jobs. Jobvite found that 49% of people already holding down a job will use social recruiting websites to find a new job in 2012 while 55% of company’s plan to invest more money for social recruiting this year. read more