UK retailers are performing poorly on social media for customer service, but are becoming more effective at answering email enquiries, according to new research.

News agency The Press Association (PA) has started a three month pilot with RTreporter, an early warning system for detecting news on Twitter.

Facebook is being investigated by the Information Commissioner’s Office in the UK after a study showed a psychological experiment influenced what users saw in their news feeds, raising fresh privacy concerns.

The mobile ad market in the UK is set to overtake print this year in terms of adspend, and is likely to overtake TV by 2016, according to new research.

Twitter is now offering a mobile app installation format to all of its advertisers, encouraging users to download apps rather than click on links to web pages.

A fortnight on from Facebook’s announcement that is will sell targeted ads based on its user’s external web browsing habits, popular browser extension Adblock Plus is offering a special block list that prevents Facebook and 6,700 other sites from tracking a user’s behaviour.

Google Glass is facing further bans in the UK ahead of the upcoming commercial launch of its augmented reality eyewear.

Japan internt giant Rakuten is continuing to expand beyond its ecommerce and ad tech roots, buying an 18% stake in AirAsia Japan, a new low cost carrier set to be launched by AirAsia.

This chart shows the percentage of brands posts by time of day. Interestingly the majority of branded posts are made during the workday (62.7%), but this approach may offer little reach for brands as their fans may not be able to access Facebook during work hours. After hours sees brands posting 28.5% of their content, … [Read more…]

Google’s first social networking site Orkut will shut down after September, a decade on from its launch, as the internet giant looks to focus on its YouTube, Blogger and Google+ networks instead.