Facebook Releases New Commenting System

Facebook is rolling out a new commenting system to “improve conversations.” The new system allows users to reply directly to comments left on a post on that person’s Facebook profile or Page. By doing this, users can also start threaded conversations.

Conversations will be re-ordered based on relevance according to three factors: the amount of positive feedback such as likes and replies a post received, the number of participants or connections in a thread and the number of marks-as-spam made by a Page administrator, which will lower a posts relevance in a thread.

The goal is to encourage more dialogue on the platform, initially on the desktop version with plans to make it available on mobile as well as the Graph API in the future.

Brand Page administrators can turn this on in the admin panel on their Facebook Pages and enable it through the Manage Permissions section. Your Page may already have it as Facebook turned it on for Pages with more than 10,000 followers, but whether you enable it or not, all Pages will have the feature by July 10.

The update should help users and Page administrators manage conversations and communicate better one-on-one with individuals. It encourages a back-and-forth dialogue in a more logical way than tagging individuals in replies, which was the only way to respond personally before. All of this increased interaction will also encourage people to stay on Facebook Pages for a longer period of time. This should be a welcomed feature by community managers.

For more on Facebook’s new commenting system, read it at VentureBeat.

LinkedIn Updates Search

LinkedIn introduced a major upgrade to its search feature this week. The first part of the update is a unified search experience that no longer requires users to search for companies, people, groups or jobs separately. Everything can be done through the same search box and results will cover all categories when relevant.

It also introduced suggested searches and auto-complete features to make searching faster and easier. Searches can be filtered by things like location, company and so on. The system gets smarter. As a user searches, results get more personalized.

Search is one of LinkedIn’s most powerful and important features, and making search better is a good move by LinkedIn. This makes the feature easier for users, which will likely increase search behavior on the platform, but it also makes the platform more valuable for advertisers who want to promote their companies and recruiters who want to get their job in front of relevant candidates.

Read more on LinkedIn’s search overhaul at MediaPost.

Facebook Exchange Ads Go Into Testing

Facebook has announced what it calls a “small alpha test” of ads delivered by Facebook Exchange on desktop versions of the news feed. Up to this point, ads were currently only being seen by users on the right-hand rail of Facebook.

Facebook Exchange is a real-time-bidding ad platform that allows advertisers to target ads to users on Facebook based on their off-Facebook browsing behavior. The ads point back to landing pages for advertisers to drive direct-response conversions.

For users, this does not mean more ads. They’ll see the same amount.

This really places Facebook Exchange ads in all new territory: the news feed, which is Facebook’s most engaging feature. That’s where people spend the most time on Facebook. The feature offers new opportunities for ecommerce as well as travel marketers looking to retarget messages at the most opportune time. Users are often visiting Facebook several times per day, so this allows advertisers to reach them after they’ve visited their sites with additional messages to convert them to customers.

Read more on Facebook Exchange Ads at CNET.

News Quick Hits

• Google+ announced that users can now make animated GIFs their profile photos. The announcement also included a link to learn how you can create a GIF of your own. The move is interesting given Google+’s emphasis on simplicity. (Read more at Mashable)
• Ning, a social network that’s been working to gain prominence among users since it was founded in 2004, is re-vamping to become a personal blogging platform for brands and people. The idea is to bring your followers from multiple platforms to a single destination, which has been the approach of platforms like Tumblr and WordPress as well. (Read more at GigaOm)
• App.net, the subscription-based social network, has launched a new app called Climber. Climber allows users to make multi-take videos up to 11 seconds long, similar to Twitter’s app Vine. The development shows the growing trend of short-form video content creation. (Read more at SocialTimes)
• Digg has officially announced that it is developing an RSS aggregator to fill the gap left by the shutting down of Google Reader. You can stay up-to-date by joining a mailing list. (Read more at ars technical)
• Facebook updated its application install ads to allow advertisers to target by mobile operating system and whether or not a user is on Wi-Fi. (Read more at AllFacebook)
• Amazon will be acquiring Goodreads, a community for reading enthusiasts founded in 2007 with more than 16 million users and 30,000 book clubs. Goodreads lets users share and review books and track what their friends are reading. (Read more at Wired)
• Delicious has joined many websites before it to add Facebook and Twitter log-in options for users. The update allows users to automatically save links shared on Facebook and Twitter directly to Delicious. (Read more at TechCrunch)
• Vine is now letting users embed Vine videos at full 600 x 600 resolution on any website. The functionality is available when someone clicks the embed button on a video, they can choose the options right for them and then get the embed code. (Read more at Mashable)