On Tuesday, Facebook announced that all User Profiles are converting to the new Timeline format in the coming weeks.  Facebook now accounts for 1 out of every 7 minutes spent online globally (according to a recent comScore study).  Views of User Profiles account for 21% of that unprecedented share and Timeline will very quickly become a ubiquitous [...]

Forbes’ Rob Hof wrote an article about Facebook Actions, which are now live and targetable by Advertisers on the Facebook platform. Here’s a quote from the piece: What’s more, this stuff is complicated, especially for delicate creative minds at agencies and marketers. “I don’t think brands have their heads around how to use it and it [...]

I grew up both with and without Hostess Brands. You see, as a kid growing up in South Africa, reading US comic books I would forever see ads for Hostess Fruit Pies; then watching movies like Ghostbusters I saw the Twinkie as an appealing snack food: and yet, these products were unattainable to me until [...]

As part of its “State of…” series of articles with industry executives, AdExchanger.com sat down with Leathern to discuss his company, his views on the space, and the state of XA.net today. What is different about the targeting data that’s available through Facebook versus anywhere else? There are two things that are important. One is [...]

Let’s say you’re a brand manager or a newly-minted social media director of a mid-to large-sized brand. You sit down one day to look at your Facebook presence. Or more importantly, to start analyzing your engagement levels across social media. Chances are, you’re going to fit into one of these five buckets: Newbies: no Facebook [...]

Optim.al users now have over 1 Million creative images to bolster ad creation and experimentation SAN FRANCISCO, CA – September 14, 2011 – XA.net, the leading provider of data-driven social advertising optimization, today announces a strategic partnership with Getty Images.  Under the terms of the agreement, XA.net will gain access to an extensive breadth of [...]

As we shared on the optim.al blog, social media advertising done well is all about finding correlations and relationships between audience data. Marketers can use the knowledge available in one social domain to inform targeting decisions in another, letting the full richness of data in the social web bleed through an entire portfolio of digital [...]

Our optim.al data team set out to learn what cities on Facebook have the highest proportion of college graduates, and in doing so to shed light on what makes these cities unique and what they can teach us about the way people in America cluster. The findings give recent graduates an idea of where it [...]