Digital Week in Review: New Facebook Insights, Twitter’s Stock Recovering, Apple to Buy Beats

In this week’s Digital Week in Review: Facebook’s new insights are good for marketers, Twitter’s stock recovering after terrible week, and Apple looking to buy Beats by Dr Dre.

New Facebook Insights Good for Marketers

The Audience Insights tool is a feature Facebook is introducing as a way for brands to learn more about their target demographics. Facebook will be rolling out this new tool on Thursday to American users of Ads Manager. Access for those outside the United States will be available in the next few months.

The main functions of Audience Insights is to offer brands “aggregate and anonymous information” of Facebook users including factors like, demographics, page likes, location and language, Facebook usage, purchase activity, and people connected to brand’s pages/events.

“The more customer insights you have, the better you’re equipped to deliver meaningful messages to people. That’s the thinking behind Facebook Audience Insights, a new tool designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior, and more.” –Facebook

 Twitter’s Stock Recovering

This past week was a rough week for Twitter’s stock, having fallen to $29.58 after starting the week off at $38.75. Twitter’s earnings report from last week didn’t present the user engagement numbers that the company was hoping for. Another contributing factor of Twitter’s plunging stock this week was that the period where employees could cash out and sell their stocks ended Tuesday, and many of the employees did so.

In order for a social media company’s stock to perform well, be it Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, it must prove that it is a sustainable business that can make money for investors and it is not just a social platform that users will get tired and eventually switch to something else.

To prove that Twitter is not a volatile stock, it has been diversifying itself as a big data provider, focusing on less traditional forms of advertising as a way of revenue generation, and recently acquired Gnip.

Apple Looking To Buy Beats by Dr Dre

In 2013, Beats already owned 64% of the high-end headphone market and was valued at a billion dollars. The billion dollar valuation came after receiving a $500 million dollar investment from Carlyle Group in September 2013. Beats also in September bought back almost 25% of stake held in their company from Taiwan smartphone maker HTC Corp, which once owned just over half of the company.

Apple is offering $3.2 billion for the brand founded by rapper Dr Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine. This would be the first time that Apple has made a billion dollar acquisition in over a decade, if Beats accepts their offer. Apples hope this will help revitalize growth as sales of the iPhone slow down.

Read more here.