Digital Week in Review: Almost All Brands in 2014 Will Be Using Social Media, Microsoft’s Stock is Up, Tweets With Pictures Are Most Popular, and AllFacebook Releases New Infographic Amsive Digital Published: November 15, 2013 2 min read Categories: News In this week’s Digital Week in Review: Ninety percent of brands will be using Social Media as a marketing effort in 2014, Microsoft’s stock is highest its been in years, Twitter posts with pictures yield higher engagement rates, and an infographic detailing how consumer packaged goods perform on Facebook. Almost 90 Percent of Brands in 2014 Will Be Using Social Media Brands are now looking to increase their budgets even more for marketing efforts within social media. In the Social Media Advertising Seven Trends for 2014 report, 100 employees from US companies were polled by eMarketer. It was found that 88 percent of them plan to use social media for marketing in 2014. That will only be an increase of 1 percent from last year (87%), and 3 percent from the year before (85%) which is not a huge difference overall but it does illustrate a consistent and high interest in social media as a brand marketing tool. Read more here. Microsoft’s Stock Up 42 Percent Microsoft’s stock has been struggling for years but is now trading at its highest point since year 2000. This year Microsoft’s stock has gone up a total of 41.93% causing it to hit $37.91 Thursday. On December 31st of last year (2012) the stock closed at $26.71. The fall in stock price over the past several years can be attributed to a weaker consumer market when buying PC computers, and declining Windows OEM revenue, among other things. However, the stock’s recent surge in price could be a factor of Microsoft’s strong Office revenue, new billion dollar businesses, and the rumors of a potential CEO change and reorganization, has seemed to give people a refreshed new look on the company. To see a full description of Microsoft’s stock behavior, read the article at TechCrunch here. Twitter Posts That Have Pictures Are Way More Popular Want to increase engagement within your Twitter profile with your followers? The answer is simple, add pictures. According to AllTwitter, posts which contain pictures will get 18 percent more clicks, 89 percent more favorites and 150 percent more re-tweets. Twitter has recently added inline images so that pictures uploaded in your Tweet will appear as an actual picture in your feed and not just a link. “In a mini study, Buffer analysed the last 100 tweets that included links sent from their profile on Twitter and compared the engagement data between tweets that included images and those that did not. And the results? Tweets with images received 18 percent more clicks than those without.” – AllTwitter Read the rest of the article here. How Consumer Packaged Good Perform on Facebook AllFacebook has released an infographic detailing how consumer packaged goods perform on Facebook. “Facebook users are twice as likely to click on ads for consumer packaged goods, and mobile CPG ads drive 2.2 times the engagement of desktop ads and lead to five times more likes, according to a recent study by enterprise marketing technology provider Unified. Unified also found that CPG brands’ costs per click are lower than non-CPG brands, as are their costs per thousand impressions (CPMs).” To see the whole infographic click here.