Facebook photo albums go multimedia (FB)

Facebook's photo albums have been revamped with new features, TechCrunch reports, including the ability to add videos, text posts, and check-ins to albums; exhibit "featured" albums on your profile; easily add friends as contributors to albums; and follow friends' albums to be notified when they're updated.

These features are now available in Facebook’s Android app and will roll out to iOS soon.

The substantial update to Facebook photo albums serves several strategic objectives:

This update may also yield benefits relating to Facebook’s original video efforts. The company’s original video rollout is delayed, supposedly because it hasn’t figured out the user experience, and how to house this content, on its platform. One of the photo album updates here could serve up a solution — the feature for following friends’ albums, to be notified when they’re updated, would also work perfectly for keeping track of video programming, to know new a new episode in a show is uploaded.

Mobile-app makers and content creators are vying for consumer attention in a crowded and noisy market.

Even if an app can stand out enough to prompt a consumer to download it from among a list of millions, it then faces the challenge of enticing him or her to use it enough times to recuperate development, maintenance, and marketing costs. To make matters worse, those marketing costs have hit record-high levels over the past year as discoverability has become more challenging.

And while consumers are spending more time in apps, most of that time is spent in a few favorites. Consumers spend almost three-quarters of their total smartphone app time in just their three favorite apps, according to comScore.

But it's not all doom and gloom: There are numerous tools at a publisher's disposal to engage and re-engage consumers, and there are new products and solutions coming to market that can help alleviate some of the issues around this app engagement crisis.

Jessica Smith, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on app engagement that explores the current state of the app market, the issues around engaging consumers, and the tools at a publisher's disposal. It also identifies best practices for the implementation of some app engagement tools, and presents the pitfalls that some publishers fall into in this pursuit.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

In full, the report:

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it: