Pinterest is often overlooked as an advertising platform, but the virtual pinboard has 250 million active monthly users. It is hugely popular for people seeking inspiration for weddings, cooking, fashion, home renovation and more.

Given its widespread use in sparking creativity among users, Pinterest is perfect for promoting new brands, products and ideas.

Lifestyle brands not advertising on the platform are missing opportunities for customer acquisition.

Today we wrap up our Social Audience Targeting series looking at how to best create a social campaign within Pinterest.

Twitter has 328 million monthly active users with over 500 million tweets sent each day. It offers a plethora of targeting options that are similar to Facebook's ad platform, but also has the ability to do keyword, event, and TV targeting. In today's Audience Targeting Social series, we're looking at how to capitalize on the enormous activity to capture ROI.

LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network with 260 million monthly active members and 8 million business pages. This is where B2B companies can shine. The network is designed specifically for business networking and is a great place to advertise business solutions, higher education and recruitment. LinkedIn reports that four out of five of its members drive business decisions.

As we continue in our Social Audience Targeting series, we're sharing the building blocks for LinkedIn social campaigns that can deliver results for your business.

Facebook has more than two billion active users every month Instagram and Messenger each have more than one billion monthly active users. With so many active users across social platforms, it means there is something for everyone. Facebook owns Instagram and Messenger, so the targeting capabilities are very similar, and brands can run fairly seamlessly across both.

However, to truly get traction with your social marketing plan, you'll need to understand how to best leverage the targeting options and ad formats available.

For those thinking about local business marketing, social media and mobile optimization might not be the first strategies that come to mind, as they're often associated with large corporations.

But marketers who don't think about mobile-first connections may be missing out on an effective way to grow a customer base and build loyalty, according to recent research from Facebook.

When it comes to the world of advertising, the only constant is change. Wildly successful ads from the 1960s are often laughable by today's standards. But while we poke fun at the old campaigns' massive blocks of text and questionable art choices, modern trends are changing at breakneck speeds — especially when it comes to Facebook advertising.

Here are a few things you'll want to keep in mind to ensure your campaigns are relevant, engaging and drive enough return on ad spend (ROAS) to make your efforts worthwhile.

Facebook says it recently discovered a security breach affecting nearly 50 million user accounts. This hack is one in a long line of hacks impacting large brands, like Facebook, in the past year.

In a blog post, the company says hackers exploited its "View As" feature, which lets people see what their profiles look like to someone else. Facebook says it has taken steps to fix the security problem and alerted law enforcement.

To deal with the issue, Facebook reset some logins, so 90 million people have been logged out and will have to log in again. That includes anyone who has been subject to a "View As" lookup in the past year.

Facebook says it doesn't know who is behind the attacks or where they are based.In a call with reporters on Thursday, Zuckerberg said that the company doesn't know yet if any of the accounts that were hacked were misused.

Facebook has more than 2 billion users worldwide.

Here are 3 tips to increase your account security.
1: Change your password frequently.
2: Use two-factor authentication.
3: Be careful which third party apps you connect directly to your Facebook account.

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Gaining competitive intelligence on social media is perhaps the single best way for brands to gauge the industry landscape and cull insights about consumer sentiments, needs and behaviors.

The information you can get from social is instantaneous; you can gain the most up-to-date data and findings. Indeed, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and the like are treasure troves of valuable competitive insights, so how can businesses use them to their fullest extent?

For starters, Facebook is making competitive intelligence on social a little easier by allowing users to view the ads being run by a page. The move is meant to provide transparency into the social network's ad platform, but it also provides a whole new window for marketers to view ads other businesses are running.

Twitter is urging its 330 million users to change their passwords after a bug exposed them in plain text. Chief technology officer Parag Agrawal issued a statement Thursday explaining the problem:

After two days and hundreds of questions, Facebook's chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg survived 10 hours of questioning by Congress.

Facebook's data practices were the official topic of the hearing, prompted by its issues with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that improperly accessed 87 million Facebook users' names, "likes" and other personal information.

Even after all the testimony, however, many Facebook users and businesses still have questions about what the data scandal means, from what to do if an account is affected to what data Facebook has collected about them. Here are answers to some of the Facebook data breach questions below: