Facebook Wants You To Accept More Friend Requests
Women tend to send and accept fewer friend requests than men do, and the advent of the subscribe button has given us a polite way to handle requests from strangers. But now Facebook wants us to respond to unanswered friend requests, or so a test module on the home page suggests. By virtue of its larger size — see the screenshot to the right — the test module draws more attention than the friend request notification that appears at the top of the screen. The average Facebook user has around 130 friends, a number that’s steadily increasing over time. That would only go up faster if the social network continues to prompting people to respond to unanswered friend requests. The more friends people have, the greater the potential for viral marketers for via word of mouth messaging on the site. Facebook’s data team recently discovered that acquaintances contribute more to the spread of information than close friendships do. So we’re curious to see whether this module becomes a more permanent fixture on the site. Readers, do you reply to all friend requests on Facebook — and have you seen any additional prompts to do so?
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook Makes Native iOS Apps Easier To Discover
Facebook extended its single sign-on and deep-linking options to native iOS applications for the iPhone and iPad, enabling them to be more easily discovered by mobile users of the social network. Developers who enable SSO for their apps can ensure that the apps are included in Facebook’s mobile news feed, timeline, requests, bookmarks, and search. And deep linking allows developers to direct users to specific pages within their apps, instead of a landing page. Facebook offered more details in a post on its developer blog: When we introduced social app discovery on mobile in October 2011, we enabled distribution directly to native iOS apps. Today, we are introducing granular controls for native iOS apps to provide an optimal user experience when driving traffic to your app from Facebook for iOS. By default, published news feed or open graph stories will link back to the provided story URL. For example, you may link these stories to your mobile website, or you may link to an intermediate page that then redirects to a mobile website, desktop page, or native URL. When a link is tapped in the Facebook for iOS app with deep linking enabled, the user is immediately directed to your iOS app. If the app is not installed, the user is taken to the App Store to download your app. To ensure an engaging user experience, you should process the incoming link when your app is activated. For example, a news app will have the incoming link correspond to a news story. You would want to direct the user straight to that story instead of a generic app landing page. More information for developers is available here.
Read more [All Facebook]
Yahoo, greeting cards, dating, Tetris, YouTube, Shufflr, more on this week’s top 15 growing Facebook apps by DAU
Yahoo topped our list of growing Facebook applications by daily active users this week, although there were a significant number of greeting card applications, a pair of dating apps, a few games, a YouTube for pages app, photos and more. The titles below grew between 240,000 and 9 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week Yahoo grew by 9 million DAU, far more than any other app on the list. Then there was a series of greeting card apps that ask users to select from a list of friends who have upcoming birthdays and send them greeting cards. Dating apps, Onedate and Niik, require users to create accounts within Facebook to fully utilize the apps. A trio of games made the list: Tetris Battle, Angry Birds and 我的王國(My Kingdom). YouTube for Pages is a tab app from Involver. Photo app Mis Fotos allows users to Like and comment upon their friends’ photos in a consolidated interface. Shufflr is a video app. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Facebook May Release New Premium Ad Product Feb. 29
Facebook may announce a complete overhaul of its premium ads at next Wednesday’s invitation-only Facebook Marketing Conference in New York. February 29 is shaping up to be a monster day for Facebook, as the social network will also reportedly announce the beginning of beta-testing of timeline for businesses, also at its FMC event. The information below, as well as the screen shots, comes from leaked documents obtained by Peter Corbett, chief executive officer of social agency iStrategyLabs, and posted by GigaOM. According to the documents, the following ad types will be phased out at the end of this month: Premium standard ads (links to destination off Facebook, photo and video) will still be available, as will marketplace ads, which are not affected since they are not considered part of the homepage. The leaked document outlined the six types of premium ads that will be available as of the end of February: The leaked documents say that the social network will offer the same analytics reporting options as it does with its current classic and premium ads. However, the revamped premium ads will only accommodate impression tags, and not click tags for third-party tracking. The documents also say that Facebook’s team will provide advertisers with specific instructions based on their needs for each campaign. The introduction of the new premium ads reads: The ad is created from the content of your page post. Anything you can post on your page, you can turn into an ad. When the person seeing your ad has friends who are fans of your page, we’ll automatically expand the ad with enhanced social context about those friends, at no extra cost to you. When fans see your ad, they’ll see an expanded interface below the ad that lets them like or comment on the post directly from the ad. And the documents’ concluding pitch is as follows: At Facebook, we believe that businesses will be better in a connected world. We connect 800 million people and their friends to the things they care about. Your page is the place where your business connects with people, and premium ads and featured stories help you reach those people, and their friends, more often. Premium Ads are more effective when they start from page posts. These ads put your page’s voice on the homepage, in front of your ideal audience. For your fans and their friends, it will expand to show how friends are connected to your brand alongside your message, all in one. This social context appears at no additional cost to you. Premium Ads with enhanced social context are 80 percent more likely to be remembered, driving 40 percent higher engagement and a significant increase in purchase intent.
Read more [All Facebook]
Watch Out, Facebook; Google May Lead 2013 Ad Sales
Facebook’s lead in online display advertising sales could be short lived, as Google’s business is growing faster than anticipated. A new report from eMarketer says Google’s display ad sales could surpass Facebook’s by next year. Facebook this year will have 16.8 percent of U.S. display ad sales, up from 14 percent in 2011 and 11.5 percent in 2010. By contrast, Google will have 16.5 percent this year, up from 13.8 percent in 2011 and 12.1 percent in 2010, when the company closed its deal to purchase AdMob. Facebook and Google together will account for one third of all online display ad sales this year, and that could grow to 38.8 percent by 2014, making for what eMarketer calls a “two-horse race.” The latest eMarketer forecast also includes a slight downward revision of Facebook’s figures after the company’s S-1 filing revealed a slower-than-expected growth rate for 2011, particularly in the fourth quarter. However, Facebook’s global revenues are expected to grow 64 percent to $6.1 billion this year, up from $3.7 billion in 2011. By contrast, eMarketer estimates that one in ten advertising dollars spent in the U.S. will go to Google, since the total U.S. ad market is rising to $169.5 billion in 2012 from $158.9 billion in 2011. Readers, what do you make of these latest numbers from eMarketer?
Read more [All Facebook]
What Pages And Profiles Want On Facebook’s Timeline
A handful of commerce vendors have applications for timeline and Want is one of them. Whether or not timeline for pages enters beta testing at the end of the month remains to be seen, but in the meantime, we asked Want Vice President of Sales Greg Links what he recommends that retailers do on the social network. Want does not offer a specific button for Facebook store pages. Like most, we have found that the consumer simply prefers to shop directly on the retailer’s site. Facebook is a great way to gain and leverage exposure, but in and of itself, it has not proven to be an effective selling platform. What Want offers for both retailers and shoppers is much different than what has been attempted on Facebook. The Want button leverages the power of social communities to connect retailers with shoppers who actively want their products. Wanting a product is arguably the most important expression a shopper can offer a retailer, other than “add to cart.” When someone wants a product on the retailer’s product pages, that product is then shared with the Want community and can also be shared with the shopper’s Facebook friends. This not only drives exposure for the retailer’s product, but it also provides contextual benefits; like-minded shoppers will see that product, potentially resulting in more traffic and more sales. Facebook has proven to be a much more effective vehicle for brand recognition and exposure than it has for selling merchandise. Retailers should absolutely have Facebook pages, of course, but actual storefronts on the Facebook platform has been a hurdle that has not yet been cleared. Ultimately, my advice for retailers selling on Facebook would be to measure, measure, measure. It is critical that retailers put accurate and reliable metrics in place to quickly determine if the return makes it worth their time, money and resources. As with anything, measuring the performance of the stores will be the determining factor in whether a retailer should continue to keep their Facebook storefront. For retailers, having a Want button that is fully integrated with Timeline is a major breakthrough. The ability to communicate targeted messages to shoppers is hugely beneficial. And for the shopper, having a universal Want list that is inherently social is a brand new way to shop that is both fun and easy. It makes a lot of sense to use our Want button, because no other button has the ties to ecommerce like it does, plus it’s extremely easy to set up and roll out. When it comes to shopping and discovering products, the Want button provides a universal opportunity for retailers to further engage with shoppers.
Read more [All Facebook]
Get Shoppers To Share More On Facebook: Evershare
Social commerce solutions provider Sociable Labs announced the rollout of EverShare, an all-in-one solution that allows online retailers to take advantage of frictionless sharing initiatives on Facebook, including open graph, timeline, and ticker. The company cited the rise of socially curated sites such as Pinterest and Fab.com as the motivation behind developing EverShare for retailers. Sociable Labs said components of EverShare include: Chief Executive Officer Nisan Gabbay said: There’s a real convergence happening in the retail space. Facebook has widened the user sharing pipeline, and social curation has captivated the interest of shoppers for discovering and sharing new products. The two together will have a profound impact on how retailers merchandise their products in the future.
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook insights lag for some pages
Insights for a number of pages haven’t updated in days — a bug that Facebook has marked as as high priority. According to a bug report filed on the Facebook Developers site Sunday, some page owners are only seeing insights data up until Feb. 12. Typically, page insights are two days behind. Facebook responded to the report with, “We are looking into this.” The company has not made mention of the problem on its pages, marketing or “known issues” pages, and it has neglected its page about insights since June 2011. Jeff Widman, co-founder of Facebook analytics platform PageLever, first informed us of the issue after creating WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotWorking.com to raise awareness about the bug affecting many businesses. Our own InsideFacebook.com page insights are stuck at Feb. 18. Bugs are common on the platform — there are 73 open bugs tagged “insights” right now — but as more companies come to rely on Facebook, the social network will need to work to make its platform more reliable. It’s also worth noting that bugs are sometimes an indication that the company is making changes to a product. With a marketing conference in New York City at the end of the month, Facebook could be preparing to offer new insights features. Page owners can follow the progress of the latest insights bug fix here.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Facebook Backs Safety Initiative: A Platform For Good
The Family Online Safety Institute, an international nonprofit organization dedicated to online safety that counts Facebook among its members, announced an initiative aimed at allowing parents, teachers, teens, and kids to team up and focus on online safety. A Platform for Good, which will launch in September, will provide the following resources for each group mentioned above. FOSI Chief Executive Officer Stephen Balkam said: All too often, online safety discussions focus on the dangers of technology. It’s time to transform the discussion and create resources to inform, inspire, and empower kids to make the right choices online. That is why FOSI is so proud to announce A Platform for Good, which is unique in its positive and holistic approach to digital citizenship education. And Kim Sanchez, chair of FOSI’s board and a director of privacy and online safety at Microsoft, added: A Platform for Good is an incredible opportunity to provide people with a positive message about online safety education. I am pleased that so many industry leaders are stepping up to make this initiative possible; it demonstrates the power that collaboration and innovation can bring to help families enjoy safer online experiences. Other FOSI members besides Facebook are: AOL, AT&T, BAE Systems Detica, BT Retail, Comcast, Disney, the Entertainment Software Association, France Telecom, Google, GSM Association, Microsoft, the Motion Picture Association of America, NCTA, Nominum, Optenet, RuleSpace, Sprint, Symantec, Time Warner Cable, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telmex, USTelecom, The Wireless Foundation, Verizon, and Yahoo.
Read more [All Facebook]
Monitor Facebook Conversations: SocialVolt Channels
As brand monitoring and oversight continue to increase in importance for companies using Facebook and other social networks, SocialVolt introduced a new solution, Channels, which combines monitoring, publishing, moderation, and risk management in one suite of tools. Scott Oppliger, founder and chief executive officer of social media management provider SocialVolt, and Director of Marketing Joe Cox spoke with us about Channels, with Oppliger mentioning one of the main reasons Channels and similar offerings are necessary: “Companies and agencies make major gaffes on clients’ accounts and live to regret it.” Channels allows its users to monitor Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube, and “millions of blogs,” and some of its features, as described by Oppliger and Cox, include: Oppliger added in a press release: Channels is a fresh and much-needed approach to brand monitoring that not only allows enterprises to track relevant social conversations, but also lets them immediately engage as needed with its intuitive moderation and publishing features. Channels checks all of the necessary brand-monitoring boxes, but also includes robust social media risk-management capabilities.
Read more [All Facebook]
Why Aren’t Facebook Insights Working?
If you’re the administrator of a page, you rely on Facebook insights to get better results. But you’ve probably noticed this data is never up to date. The folks at PageLever (who provide even more detailed and useful analytics for Facebook pages) found themselves answering that question over and over again: “Why is my data not up to date?” So PageLever created a new site called WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotWorking.com to give you the latest. Notice the button below it that allows you to tweet the delay. Who knows- maybe that will put some pressure on Facebook to invest in servers that’ll be able to keep up. Brian Carter is the author of The Like Economy: How Businesses Make Money With Facebook.
Read more [All Facebook]
You’ve Been Served, On Facebook; U.K. Court Okays
Residents of the U.K. can serve legal briefs via Facebook, according to a landmark ruling from the country’s High Court today. This blog has already reported on the use of Facebook to serve court papers and summons in countries like Australia, New Zealand and to a limited degree in the U.K. But the ruling today is the first time the social networking site has been approved at such a high level in the British justice system. According to the U.K. newspaper, The Telegraph, the court approved the use of Facebook in a commercial case where there were difficulties locating one of the parties. One of the lawyers in the case, Jenni Jenkins, told the newspaper that the High Court’s ruling sets a precedent and makes it likely that Facebook will be used more routinely in serving legal documents: It’s a fairly natural progression. A High Court judges has already ruled that an injunction can be served via Twitter, so it’s a hop, skip and a jump away from that to allow claims to be served via Facebook. Among the lessons learned from this case is this: Be careful who you befriend on Facebook if you are wanted by the law. When there was doubt whether the defendant still lived at his last known home address, the attorneys turned to Facebook to track him down. And, after seeing the defendant accept a few recent friend requests, the law knew they had the right account. Busted!< The U.S. hasn’t explored the use of Facebook to the degree the U.K. and other countries have. I wonder whether the size of the U.S., where Facebook’s largest user base is located, might be prohibitive; or, whether approving Facebook’s use by the U.S. courts would overwhelm an already crowded judicial system. Readers, what do you think?
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook seeks to improve iOS app discovery
Facebook added additional settings to help native iOS applications get traffic from the mobile News Feed, search and other avenues, the company announced today in a blog post. Developers can optimize distribution by allowing single sign-on and deep linking. Apps that enable Facebook SSO can get distribution from the Facebook iOS app in News Feed, Timeline, requests, bookmarks and search. That’s why Pinterest, for example, is discoverable through mobile search, but Yahoo’s web-based social reader is not. In October 2011, Facebook introduced social app discovery for mobile devices. With the platform, iOS users can be taken directly to a native app after tapping on a story from Facebook. Users who have not downloaded the app are directed to the Apple App Store. With deep linking, users can be directed to specific pages within an iOS app rather than a landing page. Facebook reminds developers that users can click on links from a number of contexts — native apps, web and mobile browsers — so the link iOS apps provide should work for these users, too. For details on how to integrate Facebook with iOS applications, see the developer tutorial here.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Embed Links In Facebook Photos With ThingLink Tabs
A picture may be worth 1,000 words, but to marketers using interactive image provider ThingLink, that picture could be worth a lot more if it’s on Facebook and created with the ThingLink Tabs editor. ThingLink Tabs allows marketers to directly embed into a single Facebook picture rich media links to content anywhere on the web can also be added, and marketers can use the photo editor to build custom, branded tags. Images can be shared with one click to Facebook, Twitter, or email, as well as embedded into any blog or website. ThingLink Tabs also features HoverClick metrics, allowing marketers to track engagement with the interactive components of their pictures. The company said ThingLink Tabs is available with its Plus and Pro accounts. Plus accounts include one Facebook page and 500 image uploads per month for $5 monthly, while Pro accounts, at $20 per month, cover five Facebook pages and include unlimited images. ThingLink added that its users include Van Halen, Gucci Maine, Blink-182, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio), Canadian newspaper National Post, British comedian Alan Partridge, and the U.K. music weekly NME. Readers: Would you click through to links embedded into pictures on Facebook?
Read more [All Facebook]
Australia’s Facebook Users Like Snack Foods Most
Australia’s top industry in terms of Facebook likes is snack foods. That’s according to social media agency The Online Circle, which found that other two most liked on Facebook industries down under are fashion and beverages. The chart below lists the 12 industries in order of total Facebook likes. Following are the individual leaders in each industry:
Read more [All Facebook]
Nebraska Mulls First Law Putting Deceased’s Facebook Accounts Into Estate Plans
The Nebraska state legislature has been mulling a law that would require Facebook to grant access to a deceased person’s account to the executor of that person’s estate. State Sen. John Wrightman introduced the proposed law last month at the behest of the Nebraska Bar Association, and it’s the first such bill we know of. This proposed law would encompass not just Facebook, but all online accounts a deceased person had, stating: Facebook currently creates memorialized profiles of the deceased upon receiving notification from family members that the individual has passed. Like Nebraska’s Journal Star newspaper explained when Wrightman introduced the bill: When an account is memorialized, Facebook says, it can change privacy settings so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or find it in a search. It removes sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. And it prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts. This also stops the site from suggesting a deceased person as a possible friend to the bereaved. None of these practices are addressed in Nebraska’s proposed law, which would go into effect in 2013, if enacted. The legislation also doesn’t appear to have any effect on the growing number of third-party offerings that address the virtual memorial space, which include 1,000 Memories, Entrustnet, and If I Die. Readers, do you think estate planning needs to include social media?
Read more [All Facebook]
Affiliate program lets page owners earn commission on hotel, ski resort bookings
Social commerce app company Columbus Internet partnered with Hotels.com and SkiHorizon to launch a first-of-its-kind Facebook affiliate program in Europe. Page owners can add the Hotels WithMe app or the Ski WithMe app to their Facebook page and earn commission on bookings made through the apps. The program is meant for pages that provide a reason for people to want to travel: local attractions, concert venues, conventions, city fan pages and others. Traffic to page tabs pales in comparison to News Feed and Wall views, but with these social booking apps hosted on multiple pages, they could see more conversions. Page owners have incentive to promote the feature since they receive 4 percent commission on hotel bookings and 7.5 percent on ski trips. It’s an interesting model that could be applied to a number of industries if it finds success. About 30 hotels have already added the Hotels WithMe app to their pages, according to Columbus Internet spokesperson Alex McKerrell. Other affiliate partners include travel agencies and tour companies in the UK, Italy, France, Sweden and Germany. McKerrell says the company hopes to have bands and sports teams add the app to their pages now that page managers can present the group’s entire tour and let users search for hotels near each venue. Hotels WithMe has about 1,000 monthly active users and 100 daily active users, according to our AppData tracking service. Launched in September 2010, the app peaked during the holiday travel season with 7,000 monthly active users. Ski WithMe is a newer app with only 300 monthly active users. Page owners in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands can add the app and join the affiliate program.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
VOTE: Will Facebook Announce A Mobile Ad Plan 2/29?
Facebook earlier this month signed a deal with mobile payments provider Bango that could help quiet all criticism about the social network not getting a revenue stream going from handheld devices. Today, a couple of media outlets suggest that Facebook might reveal more details about mobile advertising at the marketing conference the social network is hosting in New York in eight days. Since the social network isn’t giving any previews of what it will announce at the Facebook Marketing Conference, all we can do is guess — and ask you, readers, for opinions on what the company might unveil on February 29. Please let us know what you think by participating in our poll below and sharing your rationale in the comments section beneath this post. Be sure to check back later to see how others are voting. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Will Facebook announce a mobile advertising strategy on 2/29?
Read more [All Facebook]
SNEAK PREVIEW: Timeline On A Facebook Page
German social media agency 247 Grad has created a mockup of timeline on a page, and a visual prediction of what tabs might look like. The company has upgraded its Photoshop template for Facebook pages for timeline and will offer this material for download from 247Grad’s Facebook page. Additionally 247Grad’s Sebastian Schneider said in an email, “Our Tabmaker tabs will be ready right from the start to be implemented into the new timeline design.” Get a load of the preview imagery below, and if you double click you’ll be able to see them in a larger size that’s truer to what the live timeline will look like on pages. What do you think of 247Grad’s rendition of timeline, readers?
Read more [All Facebook]
New Facebook platform industry hires: Buddy Media, BranchOut, Involver
Buddy Media, BranchOut and Involver made several new marketing hires this week. If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn. Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry. Here’s this week’s list of hires: Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Students Can Pay Bills Via Facebook: SmartClick
Students spend enough time on Facebook, so they might as well be able to pay their bills while they’re on the social network. That’s the thinking behind SmartClick, a payment interface that incorporates Facebook plugins to accomplish that task. SmartClick is the payment portal used by Campus Apartments, which manages more than 32,000 student housing slots at over 70 colleges in 24 states. According to ZDNet’s iGeneration blog, users who set up SmartClick accounts can access a portal via Campus Apartments groups on Facebook that allows them to set up automatic monthly payments, link their credit cards, and handle customer-service and billing issues via the portal. Multiple users of an account, such as parents and guardians, do not need to be connected via Facebook, keeping the students’ Facebook content private. Readers: Do you wish you had a payment option like SmartClick back in your college days?
Read more [All Facebook]
Jesus, Whitney Houston, Jeremy Lin, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages
Jesus Christ topped our list of the fastest growing Facebook pages by Likes this week, followed by number of musicians and other celebrities. Big brands, from McDonald’s to Skittles to Intel, were also popular. Pages on our list this week grew from between 438,500 to 1.6 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook. Several artists’ pages grew partly because of recent awards ceremonies for musicians. Adele, for example, was second on the list and won big at the Grammys, where Whitney Houston was honored after her death. Shakira made the list, as did Tito El Bambino, both of whom were either honored or involved with Univision’s Premio Lo Nuestro awards. The recently popular basketball player Jeremy Lin has had explosive growth on his fan page. He appears to be updating statuses from his phone and getting tens of thousands of likes, comments and shares. As a result of this growth and fan activity, Lin’s ratio of People Talking About This to total Likes is one of the highest we’ve seen — more than 60 percent.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Using Facebook Profiles To Predict Career Success
It has already been well documented that content in Facebook profiles can influence hiring managers and recruiters, often negatively, but can they use profiles on the social network to predict users’ success in academics and the working world? The results of a new study from Northern Illinois University, the University of Evansville, and Auburn University seemed to arrive at that conclusion, as researchers profiled a group of 274 Facebook users and a group of 244 college students. According to The Wall Street Journal, the researchers spent about 10 minutes looking at photos, wall posts, comments, education, and hobbies on each profile, and answering personality-related questions including whether the subject was dependable and whether he or she was emotionally stable. After six months, they compared their results with those submitted by the subjects’ supervisors. Peter A. Rosen, associate professor of management information systems in the Schroeder Family School of Business Administration at the University of Evansville, outlined the results from the two groups: For the 274 Facebook users, the study found that the Facebook personality ratings: And for the group of 244 college students, the Facebook personality ratings: Northern Illinois University Professor of Management Don Kluemper, lead researcher on the study, told the Journal students who traveled, had higher friend totals, and had extensive hobbies and interests scored well, adding that photos of those students partying didn’t necessarily reflect poorly on them, as it showed that they were extroverted and friendly. And Rosen said: A rapid expansion of social media over the past decade has resulted in the use of social networking websites beyond their initial purpose. University administrators and hiring managers have begun to view this technology to evaluate students and employees, despite controversial legal issues associated with this practice. Our research provides evidence from two studies that Facebook can be used by trained evaluators to reliably assess various personality traits — traits shown in existing literature to predict academic and job success — and to be legally defensible for selection purposes. Although further study is needed, perhaps when viewing applicant social networking profiles, there is more to it than meets the eye. Readers: Do you think social network profiles should be fair game for job recruiters and hiring managers?
Read more [All Facebook]
Hype Alert: Countdown To Timeline For Pages, Profiles
The only thing Facebook has announced about what will take place on February 29 is the company hosting its ever marketing conference in New York, which you can watch livestream on the social network here. Rumors have circulated to the effect that Facebook might on that date unveil the first ever brand pages with timeline on them, marking the beginning of a limited beta test that would eventually expand to more participants. However, we’re all still waiting for the sitewide rollout of timeline for profiles; Facebook has previously told us this would start in a single small country for final performance testing before expanding across the site. So now that the marketing conference is only eight days away, it’s possible that February 29 might include an announcement of timeline on profiles. We explained all this to Simply Zesty after the social media agency unveiled a webpage that counts down to the start of the Facebook Marketing Conference. The agency’s potentially mislabled countdown page leads to a general checklist for page administrators anticipating a switch to timeline. While this list could also benefit from some serious copyediting, we’ve reconciled the material as follows:
Readers, what do you expect Facebook to announce on Wednesday, February 29?
Read more [All Facebook]
Timelin? Jeremy Lin Launches Facebook Timeline Profile
National Basketball Association flavor of the month Jeremy Lin has had a Facebook page since August 2010, but he added to the “Linsanity” by launching a timeline profile over the weekend. Lin has been the talk of NBA fans and the social media universe in general after his sudden emergence this month, going from being released by two other teams and riding the bench for the New York Knicks to seizing the starting point guard job and putting up superstar statistics, leading the team to eight wins, versus just two losses. Lin’s Facebook page has been active since August 2010, according to The Daily Dot, and he is closing in on 1 million likes, totaling nearly 930,000 at the time of this post. His Twitter account, @JLin7, has nearly 500,000 followers, and a YouTube video he is featured in, How to Get Into Harvard, has been viewed more than 2.1 million times. Lin’s new timeline profile was fast approaching 70,000 subscribers at the time of this post, and while the Palo Alto, Calif., native didn’t mention one more connection to Facebook, we will: He attended Harvard University, where another student you may have heard of, Mark Zuckerberg, created a website called Facebook. Readers: Have you gotten caught up in the “Linsanity,” or did you look at the headline of this post and say, “Jeremy who?”
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook, Where’s My Event? Users Say Posts Disappear
Have you posted an event on Facebook and subsequently not been able to find it later? If so, you’re not alone. Dean Bromley of Connecting Element pointed out a thread in Facebook’s help center showing that over the past week, event postings seem to be disappearing. Participants in the thread, reproduced below, have said they’ve been able to find events that seem to have disappeared by typing in the name of the event in the search bar; however, this tactic hasn’t worked universally, prompting Bromley to submit a bug report on the matter. We’ve asked Facebook to comment about this and will update the post accordingly. Meanwhile, readers, have any of your event posts on Facebook disappeared?
Read more [All Facebook]
ThingLink’s image-tagging technology now makes Facebook Pages more interactive
Finnish startup ThingLink has announced the latest feature for its image-tagging platform, with ThingLink Tabs for Facebook letting users create an interactive Page from any photo. We first reported on ThingLink last March, when it announced a partnership with SoundCloud which enabled audio to be embedded within otherwise static images on websites. A few months later, we checked out its new rich media tagging technology, allowing for greater interaction with external media platforms such as social networks and video-sharing websites. This meant that users were able to consume more external content from within an image itself, rather than it simply linking to external content, and covers content held on YouTube, Vimeo, Google Maps, Spotify and more. Later in 2011, ThingLink partnered with Eventrbrite, to enable event tickets to be sold through an image, and then at the Wired event in London, the startup announced it was taking its technology into the physical world with Rich Media Notes, a tool to create printable versions of ThingLink images using Near Field Communications (NFC)-enabled rich media tags, which are readable by smartphones and other enabled mobile devices. So it was a pretty busy year for company. Now, however, ThingLink Tabs for Facebook, lets anyone from artists to small businesses host and share their content inside a single image on a Facebook Page. “Facebook has a billion users, which means if you’re a business of any size doing anything online, your audience is there,” said ThingLink’s chief marketing officer Neil Vineberg. “ThingLink Tabs for Facebook turns any Page into an interactive Web experience that drives engagement.” ThingLink Tabs is available with ThingLink’s new PLUS ($5 a month) and PRO ($20 a month) accounts. The former includes one Facebook Page and 500 image uploads, while PRO includes five Facebook Pages and unlimited image uploads. The new feature has been used by a handful of Pages already, including NME music magazine and Alan Partridge, as you can see here: ThingLink images are compatible with all websites and devices, and can also be published and edited on any Tumblr, Blogger, WordPress.org, and WordPress.com (VIP). We’re big fans of ThingLink here at The Next Web, and you can expect to be hearing a lot more about this startup in the months and years ahead.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
Improving App Distribution on iOS
When we introduced Social App Discovery on Mobile in October 2011, we enabled distribution directly to native iOS apps. Today, we are introducing granular controls for native iOS apps to provide an optimal user experience when driving traffic to your app from Facebook for iOS. You can set up and configure distribution from the Facebook iOS app to your app through the Dev App. To enable requests, bookmarks, and search results to link back to your app, you must configure your settings as follows: To enable any News Feed and Open Graph stories to deep link back to your iOS app or to the App Store (if the app is not installed) you must configure this additional setting: We will now show you how you can implement deep linking to optimize the experience for your users, drive re-engagements, and close the viral loop. When a link is tapped in the Facebook for iOS app with deep linking enabled, the user is immediately directed to your iOS app. If the app is not installed, the user is taken to the App Store to download your app. To ensure an engaging user experience you should process the incoming link when your app is activated. For example, a news app will have the incoming link correspond to a news story. You would want to direct the user straight to that story instead of a generic app landing page. Your app will be invoked in one of two ways: 1) If the user has authenticated your Facebook App: 2) Non-authenticated user: Where [ORIGINAL_LINK] corresponds to the link in your app, for example, http://pinterest.com/aryehs/cool/. You can parse the target_url to deep link your users to the correct content in your app. Your app user experience may not depend on the user being logged in. If this is the case, you will handle both the logged in and not-logged in flows in the same way. You would do this in the App delegate methods that are invoked when your app is opened, for example the application:openURL:sourceApplication:annotation: method. If your app requires an authorized user you should handle the processing of the target URL in the SDK call backs implemented after a successful login, the fbDidLogin method. We will show code for the case where the user does not need to be logged in to properly deep link them. This code is added to the application:openURL:sourceApplication:annotation: app delegate method where we will check for a target URL. In the code sample we are simply displaying an alert view to the user but you could direct users through the appropriate flow for your app. In our sample code set up we will inject a deeplink parameter to the News Feed story and check this same parameter back to signify an incoming News Feed story link. In this simple example we use the deeplink parameter in the News Feed story link to direct users in your app. You could have additional parameters or URL paths to better direct users. Note that whatever URL you specify in your Feed Story or Open Graph object will be echoed back in the target_url passed to your app. Note: The ref in the Feed Dialog is a text reference for the category of the post. This category is used in Facebook Insights to help you measure the performance of different types of post as documented here. The ref parameter does not appear on the actual posted story, it is for your reference only. View additional step-by-step documentation and sample code in the iOS Getting Started Guide.
By default, published News Feed or Open Graph stories will link back to the provided story URL. For example, you may link these stories to your mobile web site or you may link to an intermediate page that then redirects to either a mobile web site, desktop page, or native URL.
You may want to turn on this setting once you have optimized your iOS native app user experience for deep linking. Keep in mind that when you publish a link in News Feed or Open Graph, a user can click on it from a Facebook in a number of contexts, including a desktop browser, an Android browser, an iOS mobile browser, the native Android app or native iOS app. This deep link setting enables you to enrich the linking behavior to your iOS app, but the link you provide should work well in all other contexts.
Read more [Facebook developer blog]
Brand pages on Google+ growing 4x faster than on Twitter, but Facebook is still king
Last week, we took a look at a report that showed that the most popular pages on Google+ were becoming more consumer-focused. Now, according to a recent report from Socialbakers, those brand pages are growing faster on Google+ than on Twitter. The analytics site is measuring that growth by the number of followers a page has gained in one month. Google+ introduced brand pages in November, while Twitter made the move, in an official manner in December, albeit limited to a few heavy hitters. But Twitter’s official brand pages are really a moot point here, because marketeers took to Twitter, capitalizing on the existing audience long before Twitter afforded them unique features that enhance the brand experience. In reality, Twitter has been home to brands far longer than Google+. The fact that Google+ brand pages have only been around for four months could be part of the explanation as to why the growth has exceeded Twitter’s. On Twitter, out of the top 5 growing brands, H&M has seen the most growth with over 88,500 new followers in one month. On Google+, H&M snags the second spot, after having added 287,000 new followers. The fastest growing brand on Google+ is Angry Birds, adding over 350,000 new followers in one month. Continuing with H&M as an example, looking at the total number of followers, on Twitter, the company has just over 816,000, while on Google+ the number sits just over 530,000. There appears to have been a surge in growth on Google+ in December, according to a report published a few days ago by BrightEdge Social Share. As Simply Zesty point out, none of these brands have hit the 1 million follower mark despite the significant growth of 1,400% in the past couple of months. There are certain factors that always need to be taken into account when looking at these figures. For example, could it be that the very same people who already follow H&M on Twitter are heading over to follow them on Google+? The fact that Twitter has been around longer means that the growth may have plateaued a little in comparison to Google+, a relatively new social network. Looking at the Bright Edge report, we also see that most of the growth has been among the top 10 brands. H&M, Samsung, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Sony, Intel, eBay, Google and Amazon together account for more than 3 million of the 3.1 million fans following the top 100 brands. More importantly, however, is the matter of engagement. All the followers in the world aren’t really much use if they’re not coming back to your page, or aren’t engaging with your brand. The H&M Twitter account fields a lot of questions, and as seems to be the trend on Twitter, it is serving more of a customer service function. On Google+, on the other hand, there are photo albums of the latest collections, contest announcements, and videos from launch parties. Some of these links have been posted on Twitter but are lost in the midst of replies and retweets. Users don’t need to follow the brand account to get the most out of great customer service on Twitter. On the other hand, it’s far easier to look at a Google+ page and see the number of shares, +1s and comments a post has received. On Twitter, good luck trying to find all of the manual retweets or replies. The only thing you’re going to find with any ease are Twitter’s native retweets – and H&M isn’t getting any. The most recent posts on Google+ are getting between 40 to 70 +1s, 10 to 30 comments and around 10 shares. The nature of Google+ is far more in line with what a brand may expect when it comes to interacting with users, and so should the real comparison here be with Facebook? If that’s the case, taking a look at Socialbakers’ figures, there really is no comparison. According to the BrightEdge report, “Google+ still has less than 1/100th the number of total consumers interacting with the top 100 brands that Facebook has.” The fastest growing brand on Facebook, Angry Birds, gained a whopping 4 million new fans in one month. And looking at H&M’s own growth on Facebook, the page has added 730,000 fans in the past month, for a total of 9.9 million fans. As far as engagement is concerned, the numbers follow the same trend, with interaction with brands on Facebook far exceeding anything seen on their Google+ counterparts.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
This week’s headlines from across Inside Network
A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you from Feb. 13 to Feb. 19. Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms and virtual goods. Monday, Feb. 13 Tuesday, Feb. 14 Wednesday, Feb 15 Thursday, Feb 16 Friday, Feb 17 Saturday, Feb 18 Covering all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms. Monday, Feb. 13 Tuesday, Feb. 14 Wednesday, Feb 15 Thursday, Feb 16 Friday, Feb 17 Saturday, Feb 18 Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers. Monday, Feb. 13 Tuesday, Feb. 14 Wednesday, Feb 15 Thursday, Feb 16 Friday, Feb 17 Saturday, Feb 18
Read more [Inside Facebook]
More media sites integrate Open Graph as social readers grow
MSNBC.com, The Daily Show, The Huffington Post, MTV News and other media companies launched Open Graph integrations last week to enable site visitors to share their activity back on Facebook. With the announcement of the new apps, Facebook revealed statistics about existing media partners who are seeing success with Timeline: According to our own AppData tracking service, here is how the first batch of Open Graph news applications compare as far as daily active users and monthly active users: Top Social News Apps Note that USAToday+Me launched Jan. 19 so it is further behind the others that became available as early as September 2011. Also note that Rockmelt is a web browser that integrates Facebook so its user numbers include activity from people who are using features besides the social news function. Here are links to the latest news sites that allow automatic sharing to Timeline: CBS Local: Los Angeles and New York
CMT
The Daily Show
GetGlue
Buzzfeed
Huffington Post
Mashable
MSNBC.com
MTV News
Pixable
Sporting News (launching in March)
TODAY Show
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Games, birthdays, WashPo, Pinterest, Scribd, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages by MAU
Hidden Chronicles led our list applications growing by monthly active users. There were also a few birthday calendar applications, Yahoo, the Washington Post Social Reader, Pinterest, Scribd, tab apps and more. Titles on our list gained the most monthly active users of all apps on the platform, growing from between 320,000 and 2.3 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week Hidden Chronicles grew by 2.3 million MAU. Other games on our list paled in comparison; the second closest app in terms of growth was Fruit Ninja Frenzy with 700,000 MAU. Then there were a pair of birthday apps that ask users to invite friends to create a calendar of friends’ birthdays, growing by 1.5 million to 400,000 MAU. Yahoo’s Open Graph app was popular with 1 million MAU, then there was Washington Post Social Reader — which has a variety of ways to post to the stream. Pinterest was not too far behind; this app also has a variety of ways to post feed and Ticker stories. Friend quiz app 21 Questions features the option to publish feed stories when users answer questions of their friends. The Open Graph integration of Scribd was also popular this week. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Ad Agency BBH Moves Into Social Gaming, Seeks Developers Who Like Lollipops
Bartle Bogle Hegarty today became the latest company to make the leap into social gaming, and it is on the lookout to give seed funding to social gaming developers who want to make the jump with them. The ad agency’s Singapore-based Asian division, BBH Asia Pacific, has opened a new venture, Chuck Studios, which will be run in partnership with one of its longtime clients, the confectionery giant Perfetti Van Melle — makers of Chupa Chups lollipops. Together, the two will invest in social games promoting the brand, in exchange for a share of whatever revenue is made from the content. The first product of the venture, Chupa Chucker, made in partnership with studio Atommica, goes live today on Facebook. Future games will also run on iOS, Android, and HTML5, BBH tells us, and may extend to other brands, too. The news of BBH’s move into gaming was first reported last week by AdAge, although BBH has clarified to us that this venture will not cover investments into more capital-intensive areas like video games. Rather, it is, at least for now, only limited to the smaller, more casual social games that have spread like wildfire through social networks like Facebook and have lifted the fortunes of companies like Zynga many times over. It is nothing new for agencies to enlist the help of games developers to create engaging marketing content to promote a brand. But what is perhaps more interesting about this launch is that it puts BBH and Perfetti Van Melle into a potential partnership to actually generate revenues from these games — rather than simply throwing money into making games as part of marketing spend. Atommica, in addition to developing games, also has created its own “cross-promotion and monetization platform” for social games — presumably this is incorporated into the game, and will help drive that revenue generation. In addition to giving the developers access to the brands’ IP, BBH says it will also assist in helping to market the games once they’re published. Product director Pieter Walraven tells us that BBH is not disclosing how much it will typically invest in each game, and in any case it will vary, depending on the work involved. “Deeper games that monetize better often require more capacity to develop which requires a higher upfront investment to lower the risk for the partnering developer and show our commitment,” he says. He says before a partnership gets the okay, BBH models out the estimated installs on a particular platform and figures out the ARPU per game. “The only requirement is that the numbers have to check out.”
Read more [TechCrunch - Facebook-tagged]
9 Facebook Pages To Watch On President’s Day
President’s Day is a time to remember the contributions of U.S. leaders from the recent, and not so recent, past; and Facebook can serve to connect users around the world with the nation’s unique history. Facebook pages have enshrined the accomplishments of many of the nation’s great presidents. Here’s a look at nine of them, starting with the current Commander in Chief. President Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign maintains a Facebook page with more than 25 million supporters. Fans can expect to find frequent updates about policy issues to more intimate glimpses into his family life, like photos of daughters Malia and Sasha frolicking with the family dog. Obama’s page encourages a two-way discussion about the issues that matter to people who like his page. Since the nation’s 43rd president launched his Facebook page in June 2010, he has amassed over 1.7 million fans. On Facebook, Bush supports programs like the Women’s Initiative Fellowship Program and highlights his world travels to countries as diverse as Haiti, Zambia and Ethiopa. Thousands of Facebook users like and comment on Bush’s posts: His 2011 Christmas card received more than 73,000 likes. President Bill Clinton uses his Facebook page to promote the work of the Clinton Foundation, which brings together global business leaders and nonprofit activists in pursuit of climate and health access reforms. Clinton frequently posts photos and videos from his world travels, and engages directly with Facebook users by challenging them to contribute to humanitarian causes like the Haiti Relief Fund. President Jimmy Carter’s Presidential Library has an official Facebook page, with posts that seek to build on the former president’s legacy of promoting education and humanitarian development throughout the world. Carter’s page features downloadable educational materials on humanitarian work and presidential history for teachers. The Ronald Reagan Library and Foundation Facebook page serves as a collaborative experience for visitors and fans of the 40th president. The library regularly posts memorable Reagan quotes and users have posted images and videos from their visits. The page was also a centerpiece for Reagan’s 101st birthday celebration this month. And memories of U.S. presidents from the nation’s less recent past are also kept alive on Facebook. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum page frequently posts notes and messages that provide glimpses inside the life of President Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis. Hundreds of photos and personal notes are available for the page’s nearly 14,000 fans to peruse and share with friends. President Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential library page has over 2,500 fans and posts updates nearly every day. Recent posts have highlighted some of the musical performances at the Eisenhower Library, as well as marking National Salute to Veterans Week. This year, the library commemorated Salute to Veterans Week with a photograph of President and Mrs. Eisenhower greeting wounded soldiers. The nation’s 26th president is remembered with a user-created page that features more than 23,000 likes. Fans from countries around the world routinely post quotes from Roosevelt’s speeches, vintage video from his 1904 and 1912 presidential campaigns, and images of Roosevelt on safari and on the campaign trail. The page is a testament to Roosevelt’s ability to inspire more than 100 years after his presidency. Even one of the Founding Fathers has a Facebook presence, with over 14,000 fans collaborating to build the page called Thomas Jefferson: American. The page is a decentralized project by Facebook users to build a prominent digital home for the third president. The page features links to Jefferson’s writings on political philosophy, as well as links to other political Facebook pages that are discussing Jefferson’s ideas and writings.
Read more [All Facebook]
New Indian court petition pushes Facebook for stricter user authentication
Facebook is facing calls to increase the level of authentication it asks of users in India, adding to the pressure that it is under with two legal cases pushing it, and other Web firms, to reform its measure for censoring content in the country. As a report from Times of India reveals, a new petition has been sent to the high court by network analyst Pradeep Kumar Manukonda, who is requesting that the world’s largest social network makes its users authenticate accounts with official identification documents. Manukonda believes that Facebook’s current system, which the company says prevents fake accounts from being created, is not stringent enough and should be adjusted to make things stricter to ensure all users are who they claim to be. The petition is also concerned with security issues and primarily the fact that deleted Facebook accounts are not permanently removed from its system. It calls upon the Indian government to look into the issue and oversee a change in the policy. Indeed, to that point, Times of India reports that it is “seeking directions to the central government” in order to get the necessary authorities involved in forcing a change. Fake and anonymous accounts have been a key part of previous court hearings that are concerned with unsuitable content, which is reported to include images that degrade religious figures. The new action is aimed at cutting down on anonymous and fake profiles, which are alleged to be the source of the such content thanks to a lack of accountability. India’s acting telecom minister Kapil Sibal was the centre of controversy when it was reported that he was keen to introduce real-time screening of Internet services to prevent unsuitable content being published online in India. Sibal since claimed he had been misquoted, and that such a system would be impossible, but he did admit he is aiming to reform India’s legal system which is not suitably empowered to remove content or force services to do so. Things have settled done somewhat since as the content in question has now been removed by Facebook and others, while Indian ministers have stressed that they are not trying aiming to censor the Web on a number of occasions. However, the new high court petition has the potential to open a new debate over social networking in the country. China is set to introduce a mandatory real-name verification system next month which will mean existing and new microblog users are required to validate their profiles with official ID. It appears that this is the type of move that the new legal challenge is looking to encourage, but ministers are already not keen on implementing restrictions and it remains to seen whether they’d adopt regulation used by China’s censorship-heavy regime. Facebook sees India as a key market and it just became the world’s second largest Facebook country behind only the US. Previously Google’s Orkut has reigned supreme in India but, with 43 million users, Facebook is the first choice for the country’s 120 million plus Internet users. We’ve contacted Facebook for comment and will update this article with any response that we receive.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: SponsorPay, Spooky Cool, Plumbee and more
The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at SponsorPay, GREE International, Inc., Social Point, King.com, Atari, TinyCo, Addmired, PlayMesh, Spooky Cool Labs, Identified, XMG Studio, FashionPlaytes, Inc., Stealth Mobile Startup, Plumbee, Mobile Deluxe and Game Show Network. Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.
Stealth Mobile Startup
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Facebook Roundup: fellowship, Africa, shareholders, Windows Phone, more
Facebook announces 2012 fellows - Facebook announced 12 picks for its Fellowship Program this week. The company had about 300 applicants for the positions which include a year’s worth of tuition, a $30,000 stipend, $5,000 for travel and $2,500 for a computer. Fellows have specialties including mobile computing, computer networking and cloud computing, machine learning, storage systems, search, distributed systems, programming language technology, computer security, programming languages, computer security, distributed data storage and programming languages and computer security. Mobile coverage in Africa could mean growth for Facebook – French mobile carrier Orange announced a new service for low-end mobile phones in Africa, meaning that about 70 million subscribers may now be able to access Facebook. ISS criticizes Facebook’s shareholder rights – Institutional Shareholder Services analysts wrote this week that Facebook’s dual-class share structure may cause problems if the structure ever changes. Analysts wrote that this dual structure potentially divides owners into opposing groups, creating potential for future conflict. Microsoft’s Windows phone Facebook app upgraded - A new version the Facebook app for Microsoft’s Windows Phone, was introduced this week and includes a new profile design, banner images, access to pages, groups, the ability to view Likes and more. Australian film simultaneously released in theaters, Facebook - “Tomorrow, When the War Began” is an Australian film that is set to be released into U.S. theaters, Facebook and VOD at the same time, on Feb. 24. The film is being distributed by Milyoni’s Social Cinema technology. [Image via Facebook] Paul Ceglia owes Facebook $76K – The man who claims to own part of Facebook, Paul Ceglia, owes the company a hefty sum of legal fees, according to U.S. Magistrate Judges Leslie Foschio. The judge ordered Ceglia to pay about $76,000 in legal fees to the company. Vitrue’s SRM livestreams Coldplay across 240 pages – iHeartRadio used Vitrue’s SRM technology to livestream a Coldplay concert across 240 Clear Channel-affiliated pages last week.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Gap, Nordstrom, J.C. Penny, Gamestop Close Facebook Storefronts
Four major retailers have closed their storefronts on Facebook over the past year. Bloomberg said the Gap, J.C. Penny, Nordstrom and Gamestop all opened and closed stores on Facebook because fans haven’t bought anything. Fans of these brands have preferred shopping on the retailers’ websites over doing so on Facebook, where people prefer to share wishlists and discuss purchases rather than buy anything on the site. That made it impossible to recoup a return on investment in the tab software providing storefront capabilities. Forrester Research Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru told Bloomberg: There was a lot of anticipation that Facebook would turn into a new destination, a store, a place where people would shop. But it was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar. Facebook would not comment on the matter when we asked. A spokesperson for the Gap told Bloomberg that the retailer would continue to evaluate whether to reinstate Facebook commerce in the future. Marketers refrain that social commerce may reach $5 billion by 2015, but perhaps the push for Facebook commerce is too much, too soon. Consumer resistance to shopping on the social network reminds us of how people felt about shopping on the Internet back in the early-to mid-1990s. Once they became more comfortable with the technology and more confident about the security, people began buying things on the web. The same pattern might occur with Facebook commerce. That leaves the folks peddling Facebook commerce software with the task of helping educate people about how social shopping works and why it’s safe. One of the sources Bloomberg quoted, Wade Gerten, chief executive officer of 8th Bridge, responded to the article in a Forbes post, saying: The best way to monetize social media is to empower people to promote products to their friends not for brands to spam you on Facebook. Online shopping experiences are better when they’re social. Readers, what strategies do you think Facebook storefronts ought to use to entice people to buy things on the social network? Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Read more [All Facebook]
Brighter Option combines Page Insights, Ads API to improve Facebook ad planning
Facebook Ads API partner Brighter Option announced an update to its Social Ads Manager tool that makes ad creation and optimization more efficient. Most notably, the company now integrates the Page Insights API to help businesses choose effective ad creative for page post ads. Page post ads are a relatively new offering from Facebook. Instead of developing creative with a headline, body copy and image, businesses can promote posts they already made on their Facebook pages. Brighter Option now shows posts’ engagement metrics within the ad creation section, which gives advertisers more context than Facebook’s self-serve dashboard and other ad tools provide. Brighter Option CEO Peter Goodman says part of the goal with this feature is to solve some of the problems that result when companies have different agencies doing advertising and page management. Bringing page insights to the ad builder increases efficiency and we imagine it will encourage advertisers to rethink what type of content works best in Facebook ads. The Social Ad Manager has come a long way since we profiled the tool in 2010. The London-based company has introduced several features that make Facebook ad planning and campaign management less onerous. We liked the easy navigation between analytics and scheduling, the find-and-replace feature for making copy changes across multiples ads, the ZIP code area map and shortcuts in the creative builder. For advertisers seeking a software solution rather than managed services for Facebook advertising, Brighter Option is worth testing. The company offers a free trial of its tool.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Tabfusion Releases Pinterest Facebook Tab Application
Tabfusion jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon, rolling out a tab app that allows users to display their content from the fledgling social network on their Facebook pages. Members of both Facebook and Pinterest can install the application and enter their login information from both sites, and their Pinterest content will automatically appear on the tabbed page on their Facebook pages. Tabfusion said only Pinterest feeds are displayed thus far, but once the Pinterest application-programming interface is released, boards, pins, and likes will be added. Readers: Are you on Pinterest, and do you see the need to import content from that site onto Facebook?
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook Wins Three-Year-Old Suit Against Power.com
In yet another example of our speedy justice system, Facebook was declared the winner of a lawsuit originally filed in December 2008 against Power Ventures and Power.com, which accessed and stored users’ login information without permission. Bloomberg reported that U.S. District Judge James Ware ruled in favor of the social network, and the next step will be a hearing on damages. Meanwhile, time has not been kind to Cayman Islands-based Power Ventures, as Bloomberg reported that Power.com is on the block. Facebook said in the lawsuit that Power.com allowed its users to access their Facebook messages and other information from Facebook’s servers, without permission, according to Bloomberg. The social network also accused Power.com of copyright infringement, computer fraud, and violating unfair competition laws. Ware said in his ruling, as reported by Bloomberg: The undisputed facts establish that defendants circumvented technical barriers. Craig Clark, lead litigation counsel for Facebook, told Bloomberg in an email: We are pleased that the court ruled in our favor. We will continue to enforce our rights against bad actors who attempt to circumvent Facebook’s privacy and security protections and spam people. Power Ventures Chief Executive Officer Steven Vachani responded, also via email to Bloomberg: Facebook has established a dangerous precedent for the future of users’ rights to own and control their data. We intend to aggressively continue this fight.
Read more [All Facebook]
Should Facebook Worry About Google Plus’ Brand Page Growth?
Search and social management platform BrightEdge reported explosive growth for the top 100 brands on their Google Plus pages. So should Facebook be concerned? According to BrightEdge, Google Plus fans, or the number of users in circles, for the top 100 brands soared by more than 1,400 percent in January, to 3.1 million, from 222,000 in December. BrightEdge provided Google Plus follower totals for the top brands, which it refers to as the G+ Ten. While the growth rate of the these pages is impressive, we’re not sure Facebook needs to start sweating yet. Below is BrightEdge’s G+ Ten, with Google Plus fans followed by Facebook likes. The differences are staggering. Facebook obviously had a head start, with Google Plus launching this past June, but closing these gaps will take time, and plenty of it, unless Google Plus can actually maintain monthly growth rates comparable to the one it posted in January. And even at that pace of growth, it would take a while before Google Plus becomes big enough that people want to log on more frequently. Readers: How long do you think it will take for Google Plus to pose a significant threat to Facebook when it comes to brands, or will it ever happen?
Read more [All Facebook]
Hacker jailed for infiltrating Facebook servers from his parents’ house last year
Many hackers will tell you that they aren’t trying to cause any issues when they’re sniffing around areas of a site that are off-limits. Some do it for the thrill, and some do it to teach the company they’re targeting a lesson. Either way, it’s illegal as one British hacker found out this week. The Guardian reports that twenty-six year old Glenn Mangham, who previously hacked secure areas of Yahoo to teach them how to bolster its security, has been jailed for eight months for doing the same to Facebook last April. After being caught Mangham admitted to the breach in said he wanted to help Facebook but the prosecution wasn’t buying it and said he: “unlawfully accessed and hacked into Facebook and had stolen “invaluable” intellectual property, downloaded on to an external hard drive.” Facebook claims that it cost the company over $200,000 to investigate the crime and fix security holes that Mangham uncovered during his two-month long hack. Internal access to a few of Facebook’s main servers was gained by hacking into an account of one of the employees at the company. He was arrested by the FBI in June and has just now been sentenced. London’s Chief Prosecutor Alison Saunders said of the attack: This was the most extensive and flagrant incidence of social media hacking to be brought before British courts. Fortunately, this did not involve any personal user data being compromised. As with most hacking cases like this, when Mangham is freed from jail he will be banned from using a computer for a set amount of time as part of his probation. He’s a software development major in school at the moment, so he might want to think about pursuing another line of work and study for the foreseeable future. Notice that I made it through the entire article without mentioning that I think that a 26-year-old living with his parents just feeds into the hacker stereotype? Oops.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
What Timeline For Facebook Pages Means For Third-Party Developers And Brands
Since Facebook began converting personal profiles to timelines, people have speculated about when pages will follow suit. Whether or not this begins happening at the end of the month, changes are imminent that will affect everyone. Facebook could have created a closed, static platform that gave every page the same basic features. Instead, the Facebook platform is open to creations from third-party developers, and this says a lot about its approach to its relationships with developers and businesses. Custom tab applications allow businesses to create applets that encourage fans to interact with each other, help increase a brand’s presence, provide content, offer contests, and do promotions. Companies also rely on custom tabs for gathering user data, generating sales and providing customer support. Businesses also spend lots of money on Facebook ads to drive traffic to their custom tabs. According to February 2012 data from Kenshoo, Facebook ad budgets grew 109 percent month-over-month in the fourth quarter of 2011. Third-party services and applications have contributed to this growth and we expect that to continue. The good news is that since the introduction of pages, the platform has always allowed for businesses and brands to offer more than just an information tab. It would be a surprise to see Facebook get rid of these features. No one knows exactly what Facebook is going to do next until there is an official announcement. However, Facebook does have a 90-day notification policy for breaking changes to the platform, which will give third parties time to learn how to adjust their services to timeline. What businesses need to keep in mind is that there is going to be a lot of hype and a lot of press around this change. Rumors will fly and the energy will be hard to ignore. However, it’s in Facebook’s best interest to expand upon current capabilities, not limit the things everyone loves and relies on. Facebook has gone through numerous overhauls in the past and businesses and third-party platforms have stayed ahead of the game and adjusted. This time shouldn’t be any different. Guest writer Jim Belosic is the chief executive officer of ShortStack. AllFacebook.com edited an image from Shutterstock.
Read more [All Facebook]
Santorum gains most new fans; Gingrich gets Timeline this week on Inside Facebook’s Election Tracker
Rick Santorum continues to gain more new Facebook Likes per day than other Republican primary candidates. His page averaged more than 2,600 new fans per day, according to our Inside Facebook Election Tracker. Santorum also has a very high ratio of People Talking About This to total Likes — about 48 percent compared to Newt Gingrich’s 18 percent, Ron Paul’s 9 percent and Mitt Romney’s 6 percent. Part of this is attributable to the influx of new fans after Santorum swept the Super Tuesday elections. The other factor is how active his team has been making between 9 and 17 posts each day. Gingrich has had the slowest fan page growth of all the candidates this month. He is the only candidate, however, to create a Timeline profile and enable subscribers. He has fewer than 2,800 subscribers as of this post, but if he can work with Facebook to get a verified account, Gingrich could start to see more subscribers. So far his team is making more posts to the fan page than Timeline, but we will watch how the use of each space evolves over the course of the campaign. The next primaries are in Arizona and Michigan on Feb. 28.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Tabs, Jewels of the Amazon, Walmart, Angry Birds, more on this week’s emerging Facebook apps by MAU
Page tab and other page applications were popular on our list of emerging apps by monthly active users, there were a group of games led by Jewels of the Amazon, an app from Walmart and Angry Birds, too. The apps grew from between 130,000 and 310,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. Top Gainers This Week Tab apps, ranging from sweepstakes, iFrame, HTML, FBML and badges on our list grew from between 310,000 MAU to 140,000 MAU. The My Local Walmart app helps users locate their local stores via zip codes. Angry Birds Seasons is an app that allows users to send cards to their friends. Quiz app 21 Preguntas asks users to invite all their friends to the app before using it. Games were also popular on the list, as we mentioned, ranging from Jewels of the Amazon which grew by 260,000 to Lucky Cruise with 140,000 MAU. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Badgeville Integrates Klout Scores To Identify Influential Facebook Users
Social gaming technology provider Badgeville, which enables brand managers to reward their most engaged customers with badges, added social influence scores from Klout to the mix. Badgeville’s gamification platform will now factor in users’ Klout scores, helping it to reward Facebook users and members of other social networks who are most likely to engage with and share content from Badgeville clients. Badgeville announced an initiative in November to target Fortune 1000 companies with its suite of social reputation, gamification, and social networking solutions, promising to involve employees, partners, developers, and customers in helping to boost engagement, loyalty, revenue, and performance. The Klout integration will be offered to Badgeville customers at no additional cost through the first half of 2012, the companies said, but details for pricing after that were not revealed. Badgeville Chief Executive Officer Kris Duggan said: Enterprise leaders require innovative ways to identify the most influential and social online customers and employees. Klout’s influence-ranking technology adds another layer of intelligence by enabling our clients to increase online engagement by more accurately and efficiently identifying which customers carry the greatest influence, and, in turn, provide the greatest business value. Klout Chief Executive Officer Joe Fernandez added: Our goal is to empower every user by unlocking their influence. Being integrated into Badgeville’s behavior platform is a great way for Klout to help organizations identify and reward top influencers in their community, and Klout has a unique set of information to help them do that. Readers: Do incentive programs like Badgeville’s push you to engage more with brands’ pages on Facebook?
Read more [All Facebook]
Microsoft Takes Aim At Social Media (Again) With msnNOW, Tapping Facebook Data
Microsoft’s latest attempt to inject life into its middling MSN web portal is msnNOW, which aims to be a one-stop shop for topics and breaking news getting the most buzz from Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and BreakingNews.com. The software giant said the editorial staff for msnNOW will monitor hot trends and topics, in 100 words or less (eat your heart out, Twitter!), to create a single source of fresh, relevant content, along with “key insights on why it’s trending, if it’s true, what people are saying about it, and where to find out more.” The site also features Biggest Movers, which displays topics that are on their way up or down. Content on msnNOW is divided into categories, including: Users can access msnNOW via PCs, mobile, tablets, Facebook, and Twitter. Facebook users can share their experiences with their friends via the msnNOW Facebook Reader. Microsoft’s Demand Dashboard is the engine that propels msnNOW, sorting and analyzing Facebook posts, tweets, Bing searches, shared URLs, and breaking news from the past 24 hours and detecting patterns. While there is no disputing Microsoft’s software dominance, with examples including Windows and Office, web content and social media have never been strong suits for the company, and msnNOW does little to change that. Readers: Will you give msnNOW a test drive?
Read more [All Facebook]
Fanzila Backs New Facebook Apps With Blogger Promotion
We’re not sure what’s more unusual — the promotion Tel Aviv, Israel-based social application developer Fanzila is running to back its three new Facebook applications, or the apps themselves. Fanzila announced the launch of Facebook apps for “contact us,” “about us,” and RSS. Are apps really necessary to add these components to pages? And the developer is promoting its three new apps by offering free one-year Premium licenses, valued at $1,188, to the first 200 bloggers or website owners who announce the launch. Fanzila said blogs must be at least three months old, and have at least three published posts prior to February 14. Posts must include mentions of the apps, a description of the promotion, and a link to the Fanzila website. Fanzila-powered blogs are not eligible. Entries should be emailed to bloggers@fanzila.com. At the time of this post, according to Fanzila’s Facebook page, 140 free premium licenses were still up for grabs. But we still want to know: Does anyone really need apps to implement these features?
Read more [All Facebook]
Mayor Bloomberg Puts N.Y. Government On Facebook
Today, New York City is getting on board with social media in a ginormous way. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced at Tumblr headquarters the unveiling of New York government-sponsored Facebook pages. To pull this off, the city linked arms with New York-based Buddy Media, which provided tools and page-development consultation. The government took note how, in recent years, social media has played an increasingly imperative and useful resource during emergencies, observing that more than 400,000 impressions occurred during Hurricane Irene. The pages, found at Facebook.com/nycgov, target the citizens of the metropolis, providing them a way to interact directly with the government as well as gain city-based news and critical information, watch videos, learn about new city initiatives, explore interactive features, and, perhaps what we’re most ecstatic about, scour a citywide events calendar. Well, that and the wall, which is sure to attract the voices of the city’s most prized possession — intelligent, creative, off-the-wall, eccentric, always outrageous, sometimes erratic (in the best possible way) locals — who will populate what is sure to be a most noteworthy wall. The Facebook presence, as well as three additional social-media channels (Twitter, Foursquare, and Tumblr), will be managed by the mayor’s office of media and entertainment. Facebook’s Vice President of U.S. Public Policy, Joel Kaplan, said at the press conference: We’re pleased that Mayor Bloomberg and the City of New York are using Facebook to reach people in a direct, personal, and simple way that was unimaginable a decade ago. Today’s announcement builds on the Mayor’s visionary Road Map for a Digital City and will help connect citizens with important information and services. The Commissioner of the Office of Media and Entertainment, Katherine Oliver, attended today’s ceremony, as well as Facebook and Bitly representatives, plus Cornell NYC Tech Campus Dean, Daniel Huttenlocher, among others.
Read more [All Facebook]
POLL: Have Facebook Users Accepted Timeline?
The explosion of negative feedback that followed Facebook’s announcement that timeline would become mandatory for all users in a matter of weeks seems to have died down. Like it or not, timeline is coming, as are applications designed for it. There’s no turning back at this point. So are you seeing more acceptance of timeline among your friends on Facebook? Let us know what you’ve observed by participating in our poll below and noting your rationale in the comments section beneath this post. Be sure to check back later to see how others are voting.What happened to the outcry over Facebook’s timeline profile?
Read more [All Facebook]
Analyst: Facebook Will Make $1.2 Billion Annually From Mobile Ads
No, Facebook is not advertising yet on mobile devices. Yes, that hasn’t stopped people from speculating on what it will mean when it does. The latest: an estimate of how much the social network stands to make from mobile advertising: more than $1.2 billion a year in the U.S. and its five biggest markets in Europe — the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. The numbers come from UK-based analyst firm Mobile Squared, which has worked out that Facebook will be making an average revenue per mobile user of around $6.50 per year — some $2 more than Facebook currently makes per users online, using figures supplied in its S-1 earlier this month. The caveat here is that the modelling appears to be hinged on mobile display-style ads, while in truth it’s not known what Facebook will do when it comes to formats; and several reports have pointed to them first opting for something altogether different — sponsored stories. This is how Nick Lane, chief strategy analyst, arrived at these figures: He estimates that across these six markets, there are a total of 185.3 million users of Facebook on mobile. (That’s something worth noting in itself: Facebook has something of a long tail when it comes to mobile users it seems, with the top six markets still accounting for less than half its 425 million mobile users.) Within this, the average user spends 12 hours per month on the site, he writes. Here, he notes that comScore puts the average monthly usage at 24 hours. The average amount of time, he tells me, that a mobile app serves up a new ad is around every 20 seconds, and he puts a CPM on Facebook of $0.25 — calculated, he says, partly based on what other social networking sites are generating on mobile. CPMs, it should be noted, vary wildly — Lane says as low as $0.10 and as high as $50. (Which app brings in that, I wonder?) The U.S. will account for roughly half of that revenue, at $653.7 million in 12 months, with the UK bringing in $166.6 million, $100 million in France, Germany and Italy, and $70 million in Spain. He tells me other markets — particularly emerging ones like Turkey, Brazil, and Indonesia — will also add more to the pile, but those CPMs are less stable and were therefore not included in these calculations. He estimates that Indonesia currently has 30 million Facebook mobile users, with another 20 million in Turkey, and 26 million in Brazil. While it’s worth pondering how much money Facebook could make from mobile ads, there are some big caveats to this kind of number crunching. One thing Lane does not cover are ad formats: the rumors have been that Facebook will first present ads as sponsored stories, rather than traditional display ads, that appear in a user’s timeline. Would these take a different kind of metric other than a traditional CPM and if so, what? Lane tells me that separate research his firm did for a mobile marketing company found that only 10 percent of respondents said they would be comfortable with brands reaching out and engaging with them through Facebook. Ninety percent said the opposite. If click-through-rates on mobiles is currently 0.5 percent, “expect that figure to drop significantly on Facebook Mobile,” he writes. There are also still some question marks over what, exactly, the value is of “liking” a brand on Facebook. “Thirty-six million follows, but what does that mean in relation to a brand like Coke?” Lane asks.
Read more [TechCrunch - Facebook-tagged]
Power.com responds to Facebook’s legal victory, deems it a “dangerous precedent”
Earlier today, we broke the news about Facebook winning a 2008 lawsuit filed against Power Ventures, the owner of former social networking hub Power.com. Yesterday, a court ruled that Power Ventures violated state and federal law by accessing Facebook “without permission”, spamming users, and circumventing technical measures that put in place by Facebook to stop their activity. Read our earlier post for more background about the legal tussle between the pair. In the meantime, Power.com founder Steve(n) Vachani got back to our requests for comment with a response to Facebook’s win in court. Here it is, in full: Today, Facebook has established a dangerous precedent for the future of users rights to own and control their data. Power, together with unwavering support from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has fought tirelessly over the users rights to truly own and control their data. This decision dangerously manipulates and broadens laws so that that millions of users who want to access their own data or tell their friends about new services could now face criminal liability. With this decision, ironically Facebook could now face billions of dollars in damages and endless lawsuits and criminal damages over the tools it has provided hundreds of millions of its users tools to import their contacts and invite nearly 1 billion of their friends into Facebook. Our commitment to fight for users rights to own and control their data will now only get stronger and we intend to aggressively continue this fight to ensure that Facebook will eventually be held responsible and accountable for the damages caused its systematic suppression of startup innovation that threatens its business interests and for its ongoing history of gross abuses against the rights of its own users. Steven Vachani, CEO of Power Please also refer to the Electronic Frontier Foundation comments on this issue. On June 17th, the Electronic Frontier Foundation clearly articulated just how dangerous this decision could be to the future of the Internet “Facebook wants to prevent users from choosing follow-on innovation that it doesn’t like, so it’s asking the court to broaden computer crime laws in ways that would let it manufacture and cherry-pick lawsuits against users and competitors,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Marcia Hofmann. “Facebook’s position would create legal uncertainty for tech start-ups everywhere, stifling innovation and competition. No one would want to challenge a behemoth like Facebook with the specter of criminal charges looming over interoperability.”
Sounds like the legal battle is far from over after all.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
Facebook Reveals Fellowship Program Winners, Finalists
Facebook announced the 12 winners and 30 finalists of its fellowship program, which supports PhD students working on research in the areas of social web and technology. Topics of research included, but were not limited to, data storage, mobile computing, and programming language technologies. Each winner will receive tuition payment, a $30,000 stipend, $2,500 toward a PC, $5,000 toward conference attendance and travel, and a trip to Facebook’s headquarters to meet with engineers working on related projects. The winners, and their areas of focus, follow: The finalists were:
Read more [All Facebook]
3 Tips for Being A Responsible Facebook Friend
With the ever increasing presence of cyber bullying, a growing number of suicidal status updates, it’s important that we understand potential online warning signs and how to react to them. Here are three ways to make sure you are being a responsible Facebook friend. It’s important to keep an eye out for any warning signs indicating your friend or family member might be depressed. Providing an open, comfortable and empathic environment is key, both online and off. Be a good listener and encourage others to do the same. Once they have support in their every day life, they may not need to turn to Facebook to bolster or hinder their self-esteem or to purge sad and hateful messages. If they’re closing themselves off to you in person, the next best place to see how they’re feeling is on Facebook. If a friend of yours is utilizing Facebook in a way that is uncharacteristic of them — posting a lot of statuses that seem out of the ordinary, or dropping off the face of the Internet world when generally they’re very active — this could be a warning sign. Keep an eye on the content they’re posting and reach out to them directly, or report the content if you’re concerned by their online presence or absence. This has recently been made even easier for all ages with counseling services now available on Facebook. In the highly publicized case of Simone Back, only one of her 1,082 Facebook friends took her plea for help seriously. If more had, perhaps the outcome would’ve been different. It’s imperative that if you see a status implying the poster might do harm to him or herself, you report it immediately by clicking the report link and filling out this form. When you do, an email is sent to the Facebook user who posted the content, encouraging him or her to contact a distress hotline via phone or the new instant messaging chat, which is even faster. In addition, carefully screen your own online content, and encourage your children and teens to do the same: Avoiding overly morbid sarcasm and dark humor that might be desensitizing or seriously worry those reading it. If you see any kind of activity online that might require someone to use the new service, take action immediately by reaching out directly to the user and reporting the activity. Guest writer Sarah Beauchamp is a freelance blogger.
Read more [All Facebook]
Developer Spotlight: Pinterest
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We are beginning to highlight timeline apps that have great user experiences and to give you an idea of what is possible with the Platform. Today's developer spotlight is on Pinterest. Overview Pinterest’s goals are to attract new users and re-engage existing users through the Open Graph. What Pinterest Did Well Implementation Profile Result We're excited to see how the use of simple Platform techniques can help drive an app's success so dramatically.
Pinterest is a virtual pinboard which lets you share all of the interesting things you find on the web with your friends.
Pinterest focused on the most frequent and social things people do on their site - pin and follow - and built Open Graph stories that people could identify with. Pinterest also prompts people to add the app to their timelines through a clear call out that is integrated into the design of the site.
Aggregations
Since launching their Open Graph integration less than a month ago, the number of Facebook users visiting Pinterest every day has increased by more than 60%.
Read more [Facebook developer blog]
Scoop: Facebook wins legal battle against Power.com over spam, unauthorized access
We’ve received word that Facebook has emerged victorious in court after a long legal tussle with Power Ventures, the VC-backed company behind now-defunct (and up for sale) social networking hub Power.com. We’ve since obtained the court judgment documents and have verified and confirmed with Facebook that it has indeed won. A timely victory for them, too, as they gear up for their big IPO. I’ve embedded the docs below but allow me to break down the story for you. Power.com, which aggregated data and content from a variety of social networking sites in a single, Web-based interface, originally launched in November 2008. Facebook didn’t much care for Power.com collecting information about its users and displaying it on their own website, and promptly sued. Power.com then filed a motion to dismiss the case, which was denied. In a subsequent counter-claim, Power.com alleged that Facebook engaged in monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior by placing restraints on its ability to manipulate users’ Facebook data even when their consent was given. A California court didn’t find Facebook guilty of such behavior, though. When Facebook filed suit against Power.com in December 2008, the social networking company alleged that Power Ventures also sent more than 60,000 unsolicited and misleading commercial messages (okay, okay, spam) to Facebook users, and that it had intentionally circumvented measures that Facebook put in place to block access to the site. Yesterday, a court ruled that Power Ventures’ conduct did in fact violate state and federal law, because their access to the site was “without permission”, and court also agreed that Power.com had circumvented technical measures that were designed and put in place by Facebook to stop their activity. The court asked for additional briefings on the amount of damages Facebook should now be awarded, and whether or not Power Ventures founder Steve Vachani should be held personally liable. I’ve tried to reach Vachani through multiple channels over the past few hours but have not been able to reach him. After contacting Facebook, a spokesperson sent me this statement, attributable to the company’s Lead Litigation Counsel, Craig Clark: “We are pleased that the court ruled in our favor. We will continue to enforce our rights against bad actors who attempt to circumvent Facebook’s privacy and security protections and spam people.” And double pleased considering the timing of the ruling, I’m sure.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
It’s not just Apple: Facebook may face trademark woes in China
As Apple feels the pressurefrom Chinese authorities over its disputed iPad trademark case against Proview, other technology companies — including Facebook — have begun questioning the legitimacy of their intellectual property in the country. The social networking giant has been active in China, already filing 61 trademark applications on the Facebook name since 2006, covering both English and Chinese translations, according to the Trademark Office of China’s industry and commerce authority. However, according to Facebook representative East IP Group, many of the names have been registered domestically, including the Chinese definition of ‘Facebook’, leading the company to assess its options over how it will be able to claim ownership on the marks. An East IP representative told Chinese reporters that the company was “collecting evidence”, adding that it was hoping to “reclaim these trademarks based on Facebook’s popularity and social awareness.” Though the company continues to evaluate the potential of the country, where it is blocked, Facebook has admitted that “does not know” if it will ever find an approach that is deemed satisfactory to both the social network and Chinese authorities. Chinese trademark registrations have become a hot topic in the past few weeks following Apple’s courtroom loss over its ‘iPad’ trademark ownership. Local technology company Proview asserted that whilst it had sold many of its iPad registrations to an intellectual property firm representing Apple, it had not relinquished marks in China and the Cupertino-based company was infringing on them with its iPad tablet. As a result, some local Administrations of Industry and Commerce began confiscating iPad stock where it had been found on sale, in response to the earlier trademark ruling in China. Apple is appealing the decision, which could cost it millions to overturn. Proview Chairman Yang Rongshan today weighed in on the debate by claiming that the American company must compensate the Taiwanese firm “properly” if it is to use the term ‘iPad’ in China.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
Facebook-Related Jobs Listed On Mediabistro
This week, TinyCo has several new openings. The San Francisco-based company is hiring a game designer, a data analyst, a product manager, a C++ game engineer and a UI artist. Get all the details on these positions below, and find additional just-posted gigs on mediabistro.com. Game Designer TinyCo (San Francisco, CA) For more job listings, go to the Mediabistro job board<, and to post a job, visit our employer page. For real-time openings and employment news, follow @MBJobPost.
Data Analyst TinyCo (San Francisco, CA)
Product Manager TinyCo (San Francisco, CA)
C++ Game Engineer TinyCo (San Francisco, CA)
UI Artist TinyCo (San Francisco, CA)
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook tests ‘suggested guests’ for events
Some Facebook users now see a “suggested guests” module on events they plan to attend. Suggested guests are listed on the right side of the event page along with an invite button. Facebook seems to serve suggestions based on interests relevant to the event and mutual friends attending. This test feature could increase awareness and attendees for public events. For instance, an event page for a concert might suggest friends who listen to the artist on Spotify and could lead people to decide to go together. This is more likely to occur if users can see why a person is listed as a suggested guest. Currently the module displays friends without any context. This is another of several recent improvements to the events product. About two months ago, the social network introduced “Suggested Events“ to give users recommendations about events based on Open Graph activity, pages they Like and events that friends are attending. In November 2011, Facebook updated the event page UI. We’ve also seen Facebook testing a “Make Plans” option above News Feed.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
U.S. Wants To Ban Facebook Use By Drivers
The U.S. Department of Transportation wants to stop Facebook use by drivers. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has asked automakers to redesign devices that currently let drivers to access social networks to not function while a car is moving, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. In a set of non-binding, or voluntary, rules issued today, the agency is also calling for disabling devices that enable manual texting, Internet browsing, 10-digit phone dialing and the ability to enter addresses into a built-in navigation system for drivers unless a car is parked. The guidelines are part of the U.S. government’s broader effort against distracted driving, which killed 3,092 people in 2010, according to the National Highway Transportation and Safety Agency. While the Transportation Department is calling for the voluntary disabling of wireless and Internet connectivity devices in cars, the automobile industry has been following their own self-imposed distracted driving guidelines since 2002. Their guidelines call for a ban on any tasks that take longer than two seconds away from focusing on the road. Will a ban on Internet use in vehicles — which would halt Facebook and Twitter updates — really come to pass? It’s unlikely a mandate from a government agency will do the trick. As Facebook’s mobile applications start to include advertising and other features, it’s feasible that even more time will be spent per visit to the site. In order to ban texting while driving, each state had to pass its own laws. This year opened with 35 states banning text messaging while driving, according to HandsFreeInfo.com. The effort at the state level took more than a decade. It could take nearly as long to extend these new rules to include social networks, such as Facebook. I don’t think avid Facebook users will have anything to worry about in the short-term. And it will be interesting to see how and whether new state laws reduce the number of deaths that result from distracted driving.
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook’s Open Graph may be bringing a younger audience to media outlets
In a blog post today, Facebook announced some new apps that are utilizing its Timeline functionality, all of them being media related. The company also reported some interesting statistics for those who have been using the Open Graph platform since it was announced in September at Facebook’s f8 conference. With over 850M users, Facebook hosts a wide-range audience of users from every demographic. That’s precisely what makes the company so valuable as it enters its initial public offering, especially to advertisers. One service that Facebook uses as an example is The Guardian, it says that The Guardian’s Facebook app has been installed over 5 million times. That alone is impressive, but the part that jumps out the most is that more than half of those using the Facebook app are 24-years-old or younger. The 18-34 demographic is the most hotly sought after demographic for any media company on any platform, be it the web or television. It’s not just The Guardian who is seeing these types of results, Yahoo! News has said that its Social Bar app on Facebook has over 2 million daily users and the most active demographic is 18-34. What Timeline does for these companies is give it a piece of real-estate on a Facebook users profile to serve up content as it’s read and shared. This bodes quite well for the massive social network as it should begin being publicly traded sometime in May of this year. People who wish to invest in Facebook want to know that it will be able to engage its userbase in content consumption and sharing which means that these media outlets are getting more eyeballs on its own advertising. While it remains to be seen how effective Facebook’s own advertising platform will be, the company is making itself an indispensable piece of the content distribution model for media companies. By having a simple “Like” button on news and videos, companies can get the type of circulation that it can’t get elsewhere. Now with Open Graph, these same companies can take things a step further with their own apps. It’s a huge win for Facebook too, as content keeps people engaged, and engagement means people are staying put on Facebook rather than going elsewhere. If the Newsfeed became empty one day, its users would start surfing other sites. Other apps launching with Timeline functionality today are: CBS Local: Los Angeles and New York, CMT, The Daily Show, GetGlue, MSNBC.com, and MTV News. These are all huge media properties and wins for the Facebook platform. If advertising ever does make its way into the Newsfeed, those apps will probably include some type of revenue sharing with Facebook for displaying them, which will make shareholders very happy and more importantly, very comfortable with the future of the company.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
Who Screens Flagged Facebook Content? Not Who You’d Expect
If you’ve ever wondered how Facebook has the resources to screen all of the content that users report as objectionable, here’s a hint: The contract workers who sift through the mountains of material aren’t exactly paid U.S. minimum wage. Gawker shared the story of 21-year-old Moroccan man Amine Dekourai, who receives paid the princely sum of $1 per hour from an outsourcing firm that screens flagged Facebook content. Dekourai told Gawker he was hired by California-based outsourcing firm oDesk, which counts Facebook and Google among its clients. After passing a written test and surviving an interview, he was assigned to an oDesk team of roughly 50 from third-world nations including Turkey, the Philippines, Mexico, and India. Team members worked four-hour shifts from their homes, and they were paid $1 per hour, plus “commissions,” which, the job listing said, should quadruple their base pay. The team used a Web-based tool to view reported photos, videos, and wall posts, Dekourai told Gawker, and they were tasked with confirming the flag (which resulted in the deletion of the content), unconfirming the flag (allowing the content to remain), or escalating it for Facebook staff to examine. Facebook was never mentioned, Dekourai told Gawker, adding, “It’s humiliating. They are just exploiting the third world.” Gawker was able to get in touch with other former moderators, and their descriptions of the job, and why they left it, included: Think like that there is a sewer channel, and all of the mess/dirt/ waste/shit of the world flow towards you, and you have to clean it. You had KKK cropping up everywhere. Pedophelia, necrophelia, beheadings, suicides, etc. I left (because) I value my mental sanity. They did mention that the job was not for the light of heart before hiring me. I think it’s ultimately my fault for underestimating just how disturbing it’d be. Dekourai shared documents with Gawker, including a 17-page manual (embedded below) and a one-page cheat sheet (pictured). One amusing guideline: “Versus photos,” or photos comparing two people side-by-side, are banned — ironic considering that Facebook Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s original website, FaceMash, was created to do exactly that. A Facebook spokesman confirmed to Gawker that the social network is a client of oDesk, saying: In an effort to quickly and efficiently process the millions of reports we receive every day, we have found it helpful to contract third parties to provide precursory classification of a small proportion of reported content. These contractors are subject to rigorous quality controls, and we have implemented several layers of safeguards to protect the data of those using our service. Now we have a better understanding of why Facebook encounters accusations of censorship: The people charged with making decisions about flagged content are underpaid subcontractors. If there were some way to do this inhouse for a reasonable cost, perhaps fewer disputes would arise over content pulled erroneously. Readers: What is your reaction to Facebook’s use of third-party, third-world contract workers at low rates of pay to screen its flagged content?
Read more [All Facebook]
The Daily Show Is Among 12 Media Brands That Upgraded Apps For Facebook Timeline
A dozen media companies have just unveiled applications with open graph actions, to appear in the right-hand column of timeline. Facebook’s Director of Media Partnerships, Justin Osofsky, announced the 12 in a blog post. They are: As was the case with the 60 applications unveiled a few weeks ago, most of the apps in today’s announcement are really upgrades rather than completely new. Speaking of apps that have already existed, today’s blog post contains some performance statistics on media applications that had upgraded to social platforms in the fall:
Read more [All Facebook]
Neiman Marcus, Christian Louboutin Contest Taps Facebook
Social media contest and promotion creator Votigo strapped on its shoes for a campaign it is powering for Neiman Marcus — Christian Louboutin shoes, specifically. The Sole Seekers social media challenge incorporates Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and runs through March 10. The campaign was created to celebrate the footwear maker’s 20th anniversary. Participants can submit photos of their own Christian Louboutin shoes, the brand’s shoes in Neiman Marcus stores, or the brand’s billboard on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles via Instagram or Twitter, and they must contain @NeimanMarcus, @LouboutinWorld, and #NMLoubiLove in the caption. Multiple entries can be submitted, but each image must be different. Shoes made by manufacturers other than Christian Louboutin will also be given the boot. The photos will then appear on the Nieman Marcus Facebook page. One random entry will be selected March 10, and the person who submitted the photo will win a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes. Votigo Co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Risner said: We are thrilled to collaborate with Neiman Marcus and Morpheus Media to create a first-of-its-kind promotion that truly integrates the visual content of Instagram, as well as Twitter, yFrog, and TwitPic. Running the sweepstakes on the Neiman Marcus site, and on Facebook and mobile, is the perfect combination of a luxury brand that consumers love, plus a great incentive to share across multiple platforms. Readers: Have you entered any similar contests on Facebook?
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook starts verifying popular accounts
Facebook will allow a small number of public figures to verify their accounts beginning today, a spokesperson from the company confirms. Users with verified accounts will appear more often in “People To Subscribe To” recommendations on the site, but unlike on Twitter and Google+, there will be no visual indication that a profile is official. These users will also have the option to display their more well-known pseudonyms, if applicable. For example, Curtis Jackson could choose to go by his stage name 50 Cent across the site, instead of displaying it as an alternate name as he does now. (See image below.) Facebook says users with a large number of subscribers will see a notification to verify their accounts. Not everyone who allows subscribers will see this option, and for now, users cannot request to be verified. For Facebook, verifying accounts seems to be about improving its recommendations systems. Recommendation modules around the site have been key to the growth of the social network’s new subscribe feature. This will ensure that Facebook is presenting users with the real profiles of people they’re in which interested. Serving quality recommendations and being flexible about names helps Facebook compete with Twitter as a platform for asymmetrical relationships. Public figures who are known by pseudonyms will appreciate the option to display that name more prominently. A verified user’s birth name will still be shown in the About section of Timeline. Currently, there isn’t a way for users to definitively tell whether an account is the official profile of someone to whom they want to subscribe. There are already plenty of fake celebrity profiles on the site, and as more public figures begin to use Facebook, the number of impostors will likely increase. The company will need to do something to distinguish its verified accounts or work harder to eliminate the fakes. Facebook didn’t offer details on how verification might affect search. Subscriber numbers do not currently seem to influence how a user is ranked in search. This is frustrating for users and could lead some people to connect with fake pages.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Don’t Create Fakes To Hack Facebook’s News Feed
Facebook’s printed rules specifically prohibit users from creating fake accounts, yet that’s exactly what some page administrators have resorted to in order to try to make their posts more visible in the news feed. Since Facebook revamped how the news feed organizes posts this past fall, engagement has more of an influence than ever on a post’s visibility. Wise Metrics reported that some unscrupulous page managers have resorted creating fake Facebook accounts to like and comment on their own posts in order to boost their visibility in the news feed. However, this tactic only works within the first hour after a post goes live. We agree wholeheartedly with Wise Metrics’ five reasons why page managers shouldn’t try to fake engagement with posts. Here’s our rendition: Readers, does the idea of marketers creating fake profiles on Facebook unsettle you at all?
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook hires and departures: legal, privacy, search, engineering, data centers, more
Facebook’s Careers page this week shows that the company removed a listing for IP counsel, as well as engineering positions in search, ads and several data center positions in Oregon and North Carolina. According to Facebook’s LinkedIn feed, the company hired its Lead Privacy Counsel — Joshua Smith, formerly of Yahoo. Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.
Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Facebook career postings: engineering, mail, search, data centers, more
Facebook expanded its engineering offerings this week, posting positions for a mail, game, prepaid card partnership and several search engineering positions, according to its Careers page. Other positions included data center jobs, partnership, account management and support staff. The company’s LinkedIn feed this week showed insights and support staff positions were posted. Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.
Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Protect Facebook Group Posts With Chrome Extension
Psst! Facebook group users can now shield their conversations against prying eyes with a new Google Chrome extension that encrypts posts. When most people think of Facebook interactions, they immediately think of Facebook pages. But Facebook groups — public, closed and secret — are still in use. They are popular among family and friends, as well as small businesses, consultants and coaches. Because Facebook groups are easy to establish, they are ideal for hosting, small, intimate online discussions. You might think that the very nature of a Facebook group would offer the privacy that some users are seeking. But now the conversations within Facebook groups have an added layer of security. The Facebook extension is easy to install, it’s free, and it’s only on Google Chrome for now. Besides having Google Chrome and Facebook group privileges, all that’s needed is a key, which can be any random text that’s shared and only among select group members. After the Facebook extension is downloaded, just follow these steps. Selecting the text converts the post into an encrypted format that gets stored on the Facebook database. The stored text gets converted back to normal copy whenever the Facebook group’s URL is typed in Chrome, without Facebook ever having access to the conversation.Comments on posts can be encrypted in the same manner. The extension uses 256-bit symmetric key encryption to protect posts. Check out the live demo here, for step-by-step instructions for downloading and using the Facebook extension. Thanks to Shanmuga Subramanian for sharing this tip!
Read more [All Facebook]
INFOGRAPHIC: Flash Sales Triple Facebook Fan Interest
Sales with a limited time and scope can increase fan interest by 368 percent while also driving up revenue and customer loyalty. That helpful fact appears in an infographic created by ShopIgniter. A copy appears below, and we recommend that you increase the magnification on your browser before proceed any further. Let us know what you think of the infographic in the comments section beneath this post.
Read more [All Facebook]
VOTE: Notifications About Deleted Facebook Comments
Friends have kvetched that they’ve received notifications about comments, only to click on the link and discover no such post. I’ve replied that most likely the commenter deleted his or her comment. Yet some insist that’s not the case and that they’re seeing a rise in notifications of nonexistent comments. I still think these are most likely deletions that may be occurring more frequently. The issue may be that Facebook needs to upgrade notifications to disappear after someone deletes a comment or other post. The site probably needs to add a note about this phenomenon to the help center, which currently doesn’t say anything about notifications leading to things that have probably been deleted. So I thought I’d ask all of you, readers, what you’re seeing on this front. Please participate in our simple poll below and elaborate on your experiences by posting in the comments section beneath this post. Check back later to see how others are voting.
Are you seeing more Facebook notifications leading to things that don’t exist?
Read more [All Facebook]
WATCH: Facebook’s IPO Filing Makes False Promises
Facebook’s initial public offer documentation makes empty promises, says Fortune‘s Senior Editor-At-Large Allan Sloan. He thinks it’s hypocritical that a company purporting to empower the individual doesn’t even empower future shareholders, who will largely have no voting power to influence the doings of the company. Watch Sloan explain his point in the video below, and then let us know what you think in the comments section beneath this post.
Read more [All Facebook]
Orange Rolling Out Facebook To All Phones In Africa
Mobile phone users in Africa may be saying, “Orange you glad we can get on Facebook now?” France Telecom’s Orange service provider announced that the social network will soon available on any phone within its footprint across the continent, potentially giving Facebook’s mobile user count a huge boost. Orange, which operates in 20 countries in Africa, with some 70 million subscribers, launched a technology known as unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), which requires low enough bandwidth to allow feature phones, even those without Internet service or data plans, to access a scaled-down, text version of Facebook. The company said accessing Facebook via USSD does not require an application, and its customers only need to type a specific code to start sessions, followed by PIN codes to access the service securely. After an initial activation, upon which they must provide their Facebook login information, Orange customers will be able to search for friends, invite friends, accept or deny friend requests, update their status, and comment on or like status updates from their friends. Orange will offer four pricing options: per session (10 minutes to 20 minutes), daily, weekly, and monthly, with more details to be revealed as the service is rolled out. The mobile carrier launched the USSD service in Egypt at the end of last year, and more than 350,000 customers of Egyptian service provider Mobinil used it to connect to the social network within its first month. Orange Côte d’Ivoire will be the first Orange unit in Africa to launch the service, in Ivory Coast later this month, and other regions in the continent will be added throughout the year. Orange Vice President of Strategic Partnerships Xavier Perret said: Social networks such as Facebook have completely changed how people stay in contact with their family and friends, and it’s important that our customers, regardless of the phone they have, are able to access and participate in these services. We feel that it is our role to help our customers enjoy a digitally rich, connected life, and services such as Facebook via USSD make that possible for even more of our customers.
Read more [All Facebook]
Indian music service Saavn sees meteoric growth from Facebook’s Open Graph
Indian music service Saavn has just completed a month as a Facebook Open Graph partner with some very impressive results from the period. During the first 30 days following the launch of the social apps, India- based Saavn — South Asian Audio Video Network — has picked up more than 700,000 new users, taking it to a total user base of 1.3 million. Perhaps more impressively is the increased usage that it is seeing a result of the Open Graph, its daily use is up by more than 40 times while content sharing has increased four-fold. Furthermore, the number of monthly active users rocketed from 35,000 to 785,000, generating a total of 750 million Facebook impressions along the way. Those stats are mightily impressive and, if there are any indication of how other partners have performed, Facebook is likely to see a significant amount of interest from new developers. Saavn was first launched on Facebook in December, and its service allows users to share music with friends through their timeline, ticker and news feed on the social network. The company’s service is free to use and it adopts an ad-based revenue model to keep it that way. The company specialises in catering for music tastes in India with more than 1 million tracks from more than 200 producers. Its inclusion as an initial Open Graph Partner has lit the touch paper and the company is hopefully it can propel it into a position to take on the Web’s music establishment. An interesting factor in its favour is that Saavn’s deals are worldwide, meaning that its music can be accessed from any country worldwide. Better known competitors like Spotify and Pandora are unable to offer such reach, as music fans in Asia and other parts of the world can testify. Saavn could help replicate these services in Asia, particularly given that it has plans to introduce a subscription-based service. So, what is next for Saavn? It is already available on apps for Android and iOS but the company is planning to extend its reach, according to Vin Bhat, its co-founder and CEO. Given that Asia’s mobile market is particularly fragmented, the company is making the smart move to develop products for Java, Symbian, Blackberry and Windows Mobile platforms. Bhat told The Next Web that, while it is based in India, the service is available across 200 countries and a key focus of this year will be to increase its presence in emerging markets, where usage of the Web and smartphones is growing steadily. Not content with sticking to its bases, the company plans to introduce more regional content across Asia and other regions, so that Internet users in other languages can find value in its service. Interestingly, there is also a plan to move into the video space, although Bhat doesn’t have further details to disclose at this stage.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
Facebook Finally Rolls Out Verified Accounts
Facebook will finally introduce a verified-account feature for personalities today, although their real names must still be used when they sign up, but it differs from those of Twitter and Google Plus in one major way: Users will not see any kind of badge or other graphic indicating that the account is verified. TechCrunch reported that verified users’ real names will still appear on the about page of their profiles, and that they have options for the way their names are displayed on the profile, offering up Lady Gaga as an example: Her name could appear as “Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga),” or simply as “Lady Gaga,” with “Stefani Germanotta” appearing on the about page. Verified accounts will enjoy priority in Facebook’s suggestions of users to subscribe to. Potentially verified users will not be offered a method of applying; Facebook will initiate the process starting today with a notification on profiles that have a large number of subscribers. (Editor’s note: I received a prompt to validate my account when I had about 66,200 subscribers.) They will have to provide images of official, government-issued IDs, which the social network will delete after verification. Those users must also submit their alternative names, which Facebook must approve. Our take: Today’s move by Facebook is long overdue, but the lack of any sort of badge or graphic to let users know that personalities’ profiles are authentic is puzzling. One of the first things we look for when searching for personalities’ Twitter accounts is the check mark that signifies that the account is verified, and we see no reason why Facebook wouldn’t include something similar. Screenshots courtesy of TechCrunch.
Read more [All Facebook]
7 Unbelievably Cool Facebook Ad Tactics
Sponsored stories can counter a decline in organic impressions, while increasing engagement rates and amplifying your word of mouth. Facebook does this by taking your existing content and fan actions, then promoting it to their friends. Here are seven techniques for maximizing results with sponsored stories. Technique explained: The video will play in the ad itself — previously a premium feature that only big brands could afford. Enable this by posting the YouTube link on your page with a short comment. Then run an ad selecting “Facebook ads” as the type and “page post ad” as the story type. To avoid wasting impressions, add in workplace targets and “friends of connection” targeting below. Confused? Then read up on sponsored stories, connection targeting, and Facebook targeting tips. Net result: You are showing video in the ad itself, and also featuring at least one of your friends. Technique explained: If you know the names of the actual companies you’d like to have as clients, include them in the your list of workplace targets. But be careful to attract only decision makers. If you’d like to get the attention of Walmart executives, narrow down to folks age 25 and up who live within a 25-mile radius of Bentonville, Arkansas, or else you risk targeting employees in stores across the country. You might want to target folks who work at the local newspaper, too, for good measure. But know that many companies aren’t big enough to show up here. If the audience is less than than 20, Facebook will not allow you to post the ad. So add in other companies to get the estimated number up. Facebook microtargeted ads are effective when you combine workplace and demographic targets. Bonus: When you get favorable news coverage, amplify the good work with this technique. If it occurs on a website, then post that link on your wall so you can run a page post ad. Technique explained: Sponsored like stories show ads to friends of your existing fans. This peer pressure, otherwise known as social context, will double your ad effectiveness. Friends want to know what their friends are doing. Facebook will show the friends of your fans that their friend is a fan. The average Facebook user has 130 friends. So not counting overlap, if you have 10,000 fans, you can reach 1.3 million people with a message that says “Jackie likes this,” and that includes her picture. It’s an instant endorsement. Some advertisers argue that a junk fan strategy — meaning large number of fans for pure number’s sake — helps here. In other words, even if the fans themselves are not your target customers, perhaps some of their friends are. However, the endorsement value of a fan is sometimes greater than the value of the fan itself. Yes when you have a universal product — such as consumer packaged goods — and no when you sell a business-to-business product. Warning: The friend of fan connection targeting built into the sponsored like story ad unit certainly does give you a high click-through and low cost per fan, as users can click like right in the ad unit. But such “drive by” fans who never visit the page itself are not as valuable as those fans you nurture with other engagement strategies. Technique explained: The page post ad allows you to amplify any of your organic posts; you can choose a particular post, allow the system to choose the most recent one (I recommend this) or enter in the post_id (only if you’re a ninja!). Content in the news feed used to live for a day, but now it may live for only minutes. When it slides off the news feed, you can get it back in by running this ad. Bonus tip: ask questions, do “fill-in-the-blank” posts, and provoke emotional reactions to amplify further. Why this is powerful: Interactions driven by paid engagement still contribute to EdgeRank. Technique explained: We ran this ad while attending a recent hackathon with Facebook folks. By choosing a narrow set of interests, we were able to hit most of the folks in the audience. In fact, one of the Partner Engineers, Matt Kelly, came up to me to mention that he saw the ad. Key takeaway: Why would you bother to buy a booth when you can run microtargeted ads for pennies? And just wait until Facebook has ads in mobile. Technique explained: One time we got some coverage in The Wall Street Journal. We then ran a page post ad targeting fans of the Journal who have friends that are fans. Try this yourself with an ad that links to the article, and target the promotion to readers of the publication, your potential clients and even the customers o one of your competitors. Caution: Err on the safe side and obtain permission from the publication before creating an ad that links to one of its articles. Technique explained: Relevance is key, so include your city name, picture of the store, or local landmarks in the ad image. Don’t use stock art, since people will assume you’re selling health supplements or mortgage quotes, without looking further. Keep the ads fresh by rotating them at least weekly, else they burn out. Facebook shows you a metric called frequency, which is how many times on average, a user has seen the ad. We recommend changing the ad before it goes over a frequency of 10, unless you have a really small audience or are not so budget conscious. Warning: If you mention Google Plus in a Facebook ad, this is what happens:
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook Stock Trades Gain Frequency After IPO Registration — Should Lawmakers Intervene?
We’re still wondering how and why it’s legal to keep selling shares privately after registering for an initial public offer. Three auctions of Facebook shares have occurred since the company registered with the Securities Exchange Commission, and they’re occurring more frequently than ever. The last one took place just six days after the previous one, the shortest time between auctions. The most recent one closed yesterday on SharesPost, putting Facebook’s implied valuation at $98.7 billion to $105 billion, depending on how many outstanding shares you assume exist. SharesPost’s website goes with the higher number, which would mean 2.5 billion outstanding shares. The lower number means that Facebook has 2.35 billion outstanding shares. We’ve been seeing both share counts out there for the last five auctions so we have to cite both. If in fact Facebook has quietly issued more shares since the last auction, that would explain why the stock closed down $2; most likely the sellers in the latest round were eager to capture profits from the stock reaching a new record high in the last auction. But are these private auctions of stock occurring after an IPO registration something that lawmakers should be concerned with? The New York Times’ Dealbook suggests that companies such as Facebook and Twitter have essentially funded private market exchanges like SharesPost, accounting for up to a third of their revenues, in some cases. These private exchanges exist mainly to help employees and early private backers cash out some of their holdings. While Facebook has proven to be a boon for these markets, the activity has drawn scrutiny from the SEC. In fact, Facebook is working with the SEC to formulate new rules over how these exchanges are governed, according to the IPO registration documents. The social network rightly wants to exert more control over who owns their shares and how employees’ trade them. The SEC is also considering changing a rule that says private companies with 500 or more stakeholders must publicly disclose its financial results on a quarterly basis. The agency is considering raising that number. In a letter signed by SEC chairman Mary L. Schapiro to the powerful chairman of the Government Oversight and Government Reform committee Darrell E. Issa, Schapiro confirms that the agency is looking more closely at secondary market exchanges. Issa initially wrote to Schapiro with concerns that SEC rules were inhibiting companies from going public. Schapiro wrote: The staff also is currently monitoring the secondary trading activity on a variety of online trading platforms, many of which are facilitating the trading of securities of private companies. Trading that develops on online trading platforms can be beneficial in that it can provide much desired liquidity to investors, which can assist in attracting investors to smaller private companies. This benefit, however, must be balanced with investor protection concerns that can be raised when there is a lack of information available to investors about these private companies. Here’s’ a copy of the email that went out to SharesPost members around 7:30 pm Pacific Time last night: SharesPost Financial Corporation completed its auction on February 14, 2012 of 200,000 units of an investment vehicle designated to hold shares of Facebook, Inc. (“Facebook”). A clearing price of $42.00 per share was established at this auction. Members submitting qualifying bids at or above the clearing price will be contacted shortly with instructions on next steps for completing this transaction. Successful auction bidders will hold an indirect interest in the shares of Facebook, Inc. through their ownership of units of an investment vehicle designated to hold the shares. The administrator of the investment vehicle, SP Investments Management, LLC, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of SharesPost, Inc.
Read more [All Facebook]
Orange just made it easier for African mobile users to access Facebook on the go
Today Orange announced a new initiative which aims to make it easier for African mobile subscribers to access Facebook on the go. A first for the continent, Orange is using USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) technology, a low-bandwidth option which bypasses costly data prices in Africa, making it possible to get onto Facebook on pretty much any phone. Facebook via USSD could play a significant role in increasing Facebook mobile usage in Africa. The social networking site has seen explosive growth throughout Africa over the past year, with numbers doubling in some countries, making it the most visited site in most African countries. South Africa-based mobile network MXit has proven to be a tough competitor for Facebook, but providing users with a far more mobile experience on Facebook could help balance the figures out. Currently South African Facebook penetration stands shy of 10%, with 4.8 million users. In contrast, MXit still has double the number of South African users, with 10 million users. The new Orange service is text-based, so users who don’t have a data plan can still access Facebook, without having to shell out for an expensive smartphone. Users are able to access all of Facebook’s major features – search for and invite friends, accept and deny friend requests, update their status and interact with their friends’ posts with comments and likes. There are currently four payment options for Facebook via USSD. Users can pay either by timed sessions of 10 to 20 minutes, or they can pay per day, week or month. Orange launched the service at the end of last year, through Egyptian mobile operator Mobinil, and the service was instantly picked up by over 350,000 customers in just one month. The next stop on Orange’s Facebook-via-USSD road is the Ivory Coast, with more countries to come throughout the year. USSD sends information over 2G networks, so for areas in Africa where 3G has yet to make a mark, Orange’s initiative will no doubt be a welcome change, and its expectations for the service are high, estimating that over one million customers will use the service in its first year. “Social networks such as Facebook have completely changed how people stay in contact with their family and friends, and it’s important that our customers, regardless of the phone they have, are able to access and participate in these services,” said Xavier Perret, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Orange. “We feel that it is our role to help our customers enjoy a digitally rich, connected life, and services such as Facebook via USSD this make that possible for even more of our customers.” With the vast majority of African mobile subscribers still using feature phones, and Nokia continuing to dominate the mobile phone market, this isn’t the only initiative that Orange has launched ensuring that its subscribers can access some of the world’s more popular sites. Earlier this month, Orange launched an initiative dropping all data charges for its subscribers when accessing Wikipedia, proving that the network clearly has its finger on the pulse of what the region needs.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
Facebook’s Mobile Net Widens As Orange Turns On Access In Africa
A significant announcement today that could have a big impact on Facebook and its mobile strategy: the mobile carrier Orange, part of France Telecom, announced that it is rolling out a new service that will let those using even the most low-end mobile phones to access the social network in Africa, where Orange has operations in 20 countries, covering 70 million subscribers. The move is important because data access — both fixed and mobile — is still very minimal in many parts of the continent: Orange notes that on its own networks in Africa, only between seven and 15 percent of subscribers access data services of any kind. This gives Facebook (and potentially others) a way of getting around that issue and building up relationships anyway. The service uses a bit of technology called USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data), which is built into even the most basic GSM phones (GSM is a ubiquitous standard in Africa), and operates on a channel separate from SMS, meaning a user doesn’t even need a messaging plan to access Facebook. Functions that will be available include the ability to search for friends, invite friends, accept or deny friend requests, status updates and comment/like/unlike friends’ status updates. While the service will give Facebook — which already has 425 million active mobile users, according to its S-1 filing — a foothold in Africa, it is also being used by Orange as an additional revenue stream for itself: Users will need to buy service bundles to use the service — sold in minutes, days, weeks or months of use. However, Orange notes that USSD is already used widely in Africa for other services like call-backs and sending account information, and with that consumer familiarity it expects at least one million people to sign up for the service by year’s end. Orange’s service, which is the first of its kind in Africa, was actually soft-launched its USSD Facebook access in Egypt in December last year, with its operator Mobinil. In the last couple of months, the service has picked up 350,000 users — successful enough for Orange to decide to roll it out further. Today comes the Cote d’Ivoire, with the rest of the footprint coming online throughout 2012. Important to point out that USSD Facebook access is also taking hold in other emerging markets, too: Aircel in India has also been offering a USSD-based Facebook access service. Facebook itself has been making some moves to widen access, too, with services like Facebook Zero and its own work in feature phone apps. Among third-parties, there are other, emerging-market routes to accessing Facebook and other services like Google+ and Twitter. These include the using the SMS channel, SIM-based solutions, and of course affordable feature phones and low-end smartphones that offer data-based access to those who can get it. (Orange itself launched three of these devices last year.) One of those SIM-based solutions, from Gemalto, launched in November 2011 and has picked up 100,000 users in Argentina, with mobile operator Personal. The roll out will eventually cover PA’s entire user base, a spokesperson tells TC. As with other third-party services that have enabled Facebook access via mobile devices, this one uses Facebook’s private APIs to interface with the social network. A spokesperson for Orange says that company worked with Facebook and mobile services company Myriad to create the service. One question this leaves is how and if Facebook is considering whether it will do anything specific or different to serve these users in developing markets longer term: yes, they may all eventually be using Facebook’s own apps on smartphones and tablets one day; but, today, for most that remains an abstract idea. (Image: Madalena Pestana, Flickr)
Read more [TechCrunch - Facebook-tagged]
Platform Updates: Operation Developer Love
This week, we posted some updates for developers using Payments on Facebook Platform and Early Success Stories: Timeline Apps and Open Graph. Additionally, we invited developers to Facebook Mobile Platform Global Hacks Roadshow - Europe. We are eliminating bulk discounting of Credits from all payment flows, including the Item Purchase flow and the Get More flow. We believe that this will simplify the user experience around Credits. This does not require any action from developers. Removing the third settled callback from Payments. To ensure the best experience for users, we are asking developers to ensure that they are fulfilling the order in the callback with status=placed. We assure you that once we call you with status=placed and you respond with settled, the transaction will be complete and you will be paid. You should not be waiting for the settled callback before fulfilling the order. Returning up to 960px wide photos in "photo" FQL table and photo Graph API. On 1st March 2012 we will begin returning photos up to 960px wide in the src_big field of the photo FQL table, as well as the source field of the photo object, increasing the current max width of 720px. Please refer to the Platform Roadmap for more info. Activity on facebook.stackoverflow.com this week:
To reduce confusion we are completely removing the settled callback. For more information please read here.
Bugs fixed between Tuesday, February 7 and Tuesday, February 14
Facebook Stack Overflow Activity
Read more [Facebook developer blog]
Blockbuster Australian film will become first to premiere on Facebook in the US
Facebook is about to get it first box office coup as Tomorrow, When the War Began, an Australian smash hit title, is to become the first film to be released on the social network at the same time that it hits cinemas in the US. The film will be available on Facebook when it debuts in the country on February 24 after Freestyle Digital Media was confirmed as its launch partner. The company has wasted no time in taking a unique step with its distribute plan. Admittedly, the film has been out for some while in other parts of the world, having been released in its native Australia in September 2010 and the UK last April, but the move is a significant step nonetheless. As Milyoni, the Facebook broadcasting specialist that is handling its release, explained to The Next Web, it will become “the first movie to be made available on all distribution platforms on the same day”. Milyoni has plans to make the screening a particular social one thanks to its Social Cinema Facebook broadcasting platform and its features, which it explains allow an interactive experience. Friends can share the movie viewing experience with friends no matter where they are. Fans can chat, share their favorite clips and access exclusive content all within Facebook. Facebook isn’t the only alternative avenue that Freestyle is pursuing and, on its release date, the film will also be available through through iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, and Vudu. However, with more than 800 million members, the addition of Facebook is the standout channel and it could pave the way for other movies to be distributed in a similar fashion. A virtual Hollywood premier on Facebook is unlikely for many reasons but, considering that car companies are among the many industries forgoing tradition to launch entirely through Facebook, the channel has serious untapped potential for the film and broadcast industry. The cost of the viewing is yet to be revealed but it, alongside other details, will be confirmed on the film’s US Facebook Page in the run up to its screening. Now all you need is the expensive popcorn and comfortable chair. In case you are curious, here’s the trailer: Update: A Milyoni spokesperson has explained to us that Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of the revenues generated by the broadcast, however the company is yet to announce the viewing price for the film.
Read more [The Next Web - Facebook-tagged]
Yes, Facebook May Debut Timeline For Brand Pages 2/29, More Sources Say
Facebook may begin beta testing timeline for business pages as early as the end of this month. Business Insider had reported this last month, but today Ad Age cited off-the-record conversations with “executives briefed on” Facebook’s plans. Ad Age said that the beta test of timeline for business pages would start with a small number of businesses and gradually expand to more participants. The February 29 date of the reported launch of timeline coincides with the first-ever Facebook marketing conference in New York. If in fact this event will include an announcement of timeline for pages, we wonder whether the day would also mark the live rollout of timeline on all profiles. The last upgrade of business pages on Facebook took place in February, 2011, roughly two months after profiles had first made similar changes. A spokesperson for the social network told our sibling blog Inside Facebook, ”We hope to make pages more consistent with Timeline in the future, but we have nothing further to share at this time.” Readers, do you think Facebook will announce timeline for brand pages on February 29 — and it that too soon or not soon enough?
Read more [All Facebook]
Timeline coming soon for businesses
Facebook plans to convert business pages to the new Timeline format as early as the end of February when the company will host an invitation-only marketing conference in New York City, according to AdAge. Marketers have been dreaming up ways to use Timeline for businesses since the new profile debuted at f8, but Timeline hasn’t been an option for brands because the social network requires companies use pages instead of profiles. Timeline could be a significant improvement for pages, which users typically visit once to Like but they rarely return or spend much time on them. Giving brands more control over their presence on the social network is important for Facebook to maintain an advantage over Twitter and Google+. The change, however, could affect page tab apps, in which some companies have heavily invested over the past few years. Page owners can look forward to a new design that allows for more branding with a cover photo and the option to resize posts. On the current pages, posts get easily lost, but with the Timeline algorithm, more important posts are surfaced when a user scrolls. Users can more easily find content that was shared weeks or even years ago. With an update to Facebook pages, businesses might also gain the ability to make posts to the past, as users now can with Timeline to share their history. A car company, for instance, might share photos of old models or a drink company might post vintage commercials. A big question remains: what will happen to tab applications? Many pages — from top global brands to small local businesses — have invested in iFrame apps to welcome users to their pages or provide additional experiences. The company has frequently changed the size of tabs, forcing developers to redesign their apps, and it could do so again. We also wonder whether Facebook’s mobile product will begin to support page apps, particularly if the company plans to bring Sponsored Story ads to mobile devices soon. Most advertisers will want a custom landing page if they are running a campaign, but perhaps a unique cover photo will satisfy that need. The last time Facebook redesigned profile pages in December 2010, business pages got a matching update in February. “We hope to make pages more consistent with Timeline in the future, but we have nothing further to share at this time,” a Facebook spokesperson says.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Facebook Praised For Minding The GAAP
The biggest surprise about Facebook’s initial public offering prospectus to some in the accounting and finance communities was that there were no big surprises. Writing for Forbes’ The Street, Gary Weiss praised the social network — and cited others doing so as well –for sticking to generally accepted accounting principles, and not using non-GAAP metrics to tweak the numbers into something they may not actually be. GAAP figures reflect American accounting standards and are stricter than non-GAAP; the latter permits companies to exclude one-time expenditures and other things that might interfere with profitability. Weiss quotes accounting professor J. Edward Ketz, co-author of blog Grumpy Old Accountants, who gave Facebook an A for straightforward accounting and praised the company for not citing EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) or adjusted EBITDA anywhere in its filing. Ketz wrote: (Facebook had) absolutely no problem reporting its performance using income amounts computed using GAAP. When was the last time we saw an Internet company not make excuses about how GAAP failed to reflect reality for their operations? There are no multiple deliverable issues, as in the case of LinkedIn, or the “gross versus net” questions that plagued Groupon. Ketz did have some criticisms of Facebook, noting that its executive compensation could be considered excessive due to stock-based income, and saying that the social network seemed to be overstating its total number of “active users,” and it should not be valued on its user count. He wrote: Valuation depends on future cash flows and I don’t see what users, however defined, tells me about future cash flows. In any event, Facebook’s IPO prospectus stacked up favorably in Weiss’ and Ketz’s eyes when compared with those of: Weiss concluded: Meanwhile, props to Facebook for being a financial-statement mensch. I’m no fan of that company’s privacy practices, and I agree with Barry Ritholtz that its definition of “active user” is questionable. But at least it’s not playing any GAAP games.
Read more [All Facebook]
INFOGRAPHIC: Market To The News Feed On Facebook
Facebook users are 40 to 150 times more likely to peruse marketing messages that show up in the news feed than to visit the corresponding brand’s page on the site. That statistic appears in an infographic from Social Marketer Training, which shows that 27 percent of engagement on Facebook occurs in the news feed, which can spread marketing messages well beyond the fans of a page. Let us know in the comments section what you think of the infographic below.
Read more [All Facebook]
Did Facebook Help French President Nicolas Sarkozy With His Timeline?
Much like Newt Gingrich became the first Republican presidential candidate to upgrade to Facebook timeline, French President Nicolas Sarkozy became the first potential presidential candidate in his country to do so, but not without some controversy. France 24 reports that there has been much grumbling from the Socialist Party, the primary opposition to Sarkozy, that Facebook helped the president create his timeline and tweak his online image. French newspaper L’Express obtained an email from Socialist Party Digital Campaign Manager Fleur Pellerin in which she chastised Facebook Content Director for France Julien Codorniou, who “informally assisted Nicolas Sarkozy’s campaign team so as to create a timeline on his fan page,” and that she “cannot approve of a company taking sides in a presidential campaign.” Facebook responded in an email to France 24: We are regularly in contact with numerous public figures, including politicians, for information and advice on how to use our products and services. We give them that help, but we remain completely impartial. France 24 pointed out that Sarkozy’s timeline profile contains some 700 pictures, going all the way back to his birth, but fails to include controversial events during his presidency, nor does it mention his ex-wife, Cecelia Attias, Sarkozy’s special councilor when he served as interior minister. Our take: We see nothing wrong with the information Sarkozy left out, nor Facebook helping him for that matter. If he uses it successfully, that may encourage more users in France to want to upgrade to the advanced profile. And part of making good use of timeline involves curating the content. And since Sarkozy will obviously use his timeline as a campaign tool, why would he include anything negative? Readers: Do you have any issues with Facebook potentially helping public figures with their timelines?
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook Timeline Applications Enjoy Up To 5-Fold Daily Increase In User Signups
In just a few weeks, the more than 60 applications upgraded for timeline have managed to increase their new user signups by as much as fivefold. The new open graph actions that power these upgrades have increased content discovery, traffic and engagement, says Vladimir Fedorov in a blog post on the developers section of Facebook. Fedorov supplied specific metrics from seven of the applications upgraded for open graph, and these results follow below. Facebook also published a set of best practices along with a checklist for applications seeking strong results. Pinterest: Since launching an open graph integration less than a month ago, the number of Facebook users visiting Pinterest every day has increased by more than 60 percent. The virtual pinboard site has made it fun and easy to share the items you’ve pinned and follow the boards of people you find interesting. Artfinder: The art discovery and collector site has seen a 60 percent increase in time spent on the site by new visitors from Facebook by giving people a way to share art with friends. Foodspotting: The food finding and sharing app has seen a threefold increase in number of visits and activities shared by helping people share the dishes they want, try and ate with friends on Facebook
Pose: The fashion trend and style discovery app has seen a fivefold increase in daily web signups for its website and mobile app by helping people share the different products they like with their friends.
Fab.com: The design shopping site and mobile app has seen a 50 percent increase in traffic from Facebook as a result of the social shopping timeline app and live feed implementation.
Rockmelt: Rockmelt users are adding 14 new articles every day through the social browser, driving 20 percent more traffic and new users to the site.
Foodily: The foodie and recipe site has seen a fourfold increase in new users by allowing people to share what they crave and are cooking.
Read more [All Facebook]
New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: GREE, SocialPoint, SponsorPay and more
The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at GREE International, Inc., Social Point, SponsorPay, Addmired, King.com, Atari, TinyCo, Spooky Cool Labs, Identified, XMG Studio, FashionPlaytes, Inc., Stealth Mobile Startup, Plumbee, Mobile Deluxe, Game Show Network and PlayMesh. Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.
Stealth Mobile Startup
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Open Graph launch partners see early success with Timeline apps
A number of sites and applications, including Pinterest, Foodspotting and Rockmelt, experienced significant increases in referral traffic and activity in the month since launching Timeline apps, according to a blog post by Facebook. The latest metrics reveal that Open Graph integrations can help companies bring users to their own properties. In the past, developers and marketers often felt forced to build applications within Facebook tabs or canvas environments, sacrificing traffic to their existing sites. Facebook seems to be making a point of letting these stakeholders know that Open Graph is not about bringing the entire web onto Facebook, but integrating Facebook across the web and mobile and letting more companies reap the benefits. According to the blog post, the number of Facebook users visiting virtual pinboard site Pinterest every day increased by more than 60 percent since they integrated with Timeline in January. Fashion photo app Pose has seen more than five times the amount of daily web sign-ups. Recipe site Foodily had a 4x increase in new users. Foodspotting, a food finding and sharing app, has seen three times the number of visits and activities shared. Shopping site and mobile app Fab.com had a 50 percent increase in traffic from Facebook. Social web browser Rockmelt gained 20 percent more traffic and new users to the site since adding Open Graph functionality to its social reading app. Art discovery site Artfinder experienced a 60 percent increase in time spent on the site by new visitors from Facebook. The social network says it has approved hundreds of Open Graph actions since opening up the platform last month. Lexus, Vogue Paris, Votizen, Identified, Boxee, MetaCafe and Shopkick are a few of the companies that most recently launched Timeline apps. See our overview of apps from Facebook’s launch partners here.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Hidden Chronicles Is The Fastest Growing Facebook App
Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles maintains a steady lead, and overall, social gaming applications exhibit tremendous weekly growth totals throughout the countdown. Zynga’s Hidden Chronicles hangs on to a first place ranking, this week adding 4.6 million players. Halfbrick’s growing title, Fruit Ninja Frenzy, advances to fourth place witnessing a 1.3 million weekly growth total. Returning in ninth place, 900,000 gamers compete against friends in Tetris Battle. Bubble Island, developed by Wooga, returns in 10th earning 800,000 additions. Just one place behind, Diamond Dash also makes a comeback, accruing a 800,000 increase. Fight against evil with 700,000 more social networkers now playing Bubble Witch Saga — a 17th place week. MyCalendar – Birthdays moves forward to second; 2.7 million additions aid in the app’s positive progression. MiCalendario – Cumpleaños comes in eight collecting an estimated one million weekly increase. Ahead on the countdown, remember birthdays and send a virtual gift using RockYou’s Birthday Cards; the app calculates a 1.2 million growth statistic. Yahoo Pages compiles the search engine’s many subpages in one location, and 1.8 million more Facebook users connect to stay current, for a third place finish. Yahoo‘s main application is found in seventh synching 1.2 million accounts. Washington Post Social Reader connects 1.2 million social networkers with news headlines in sixth place. Pinterest, a Cold Brew Labs creation, continues to become an increasingly successful social network in the 13th position; 800,000 users sign in using Facebook account information. Pagemodo Custom Welcome Tab is in 12th with a 800,000 seven day growth figure. Static HTML: iframe tabs combines a tabs built and view total for a similar estimated sum and comes in 14th. Static IFRAME Tab: Note Icon also shares a identical total just one place behind. TradableBits’ Welcome tab app for pages grows by 800,000 to finish 16th place. Woobox Custom Tab | Star #3 makes a first appearance in 18th amassing a 640,000 weekly growth total. Improving the Facebook presence of a number musicians, BandRx ranks in 19th equating a 600,000 total. In the final spot on the countdown, Invite Your Friends Button for Pages also has a growth total of 600,000. Readers, are you frequently using any of this week’s fastest growing apps?
Read more [All Facebook]
Australian Box-Office Smash Will Debut In U.S. Via Facebook
Tomorrow, When the War Began, which hit number one on the box-office charts in Australia, will make its U.S. debut February 24 simultaneously in theaters, via video on demand, and on Facebook, following an agreement between Freestyle Digital Media and Milyoni. The film will also be available via iTunes, YouTube, Amazon, and Vudu that same day. Facebook users who stream the film will have access to Milyoni’s Social Cinema technology, which enables features including watching with friends, commenting, chatting, and answering poll questions and trivia questions. Milyoni said further details will be available shortly on the Tomorrow, When the War Began Facebook page. A look at the trailer for the movie — embedded below — along with the fact that the film topped the box office down under makes it look like this flick might become Milyoni’s strongest offering yet on Facebook. Let us know what you think in the comments section.
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook opens up Open Graph targeting options
Facebook changed its documentation sometime last week to allow advertisers to target any Open Graph actions, we discovered. Facebook now allows Ads API partners to target users by action, even if the advertiser is not associated with the Open Graph app that created the action. Previously, anyone could target Facebook-created actions read, listen and watch, but only the developer who created a custom Open Graph verb (e.g. drink, visit or run) could target users who took that action. This latest change to the Open Graph action targeting permissions gives advertisers more options to pinpoint consumers based on their activity on Facebook and with integrated apps. It also means developers do not have exclusivity over the verbs they create. Limiting who can target which actions is not ideal for the platform as a whole, as it could result in land-grab situations where developers try to claim verbs to maintain control over advertising. However, by opening this type of targeting to all advertisers, developers have a clear way to poach users of competing apps. Facebook’s “Action Specs Targeting” feature is not yet available from the self-serve ad tool. It is in beta for Ads API partners only, but the partners we’ve talked to say they haven’t done much to test the new functionality. They say the documentation is confusing and the number of actions and users taking those actions is not yet at a scale worth targeting. TBG Digital CEO Simon Mansell and AdParlor CEO and Cofounder Hussein Fazal publicly spoke to these issues during one of our Inside Social Apps panels last week. Much of the future of this type of targeting depends on Ads API partners finding the best uses and requesting improvements. These companies have a very sophisticated understanding of targeting and optimization, and they work with high-spending clients. Their findings could help advance this aspect of Open Graph, but it seems these partners need need further support and incentive from Facebook to invest time and resources toward beta testing it. Making the documentation clearer and not changing it without notifying partners would be the first step. New Action Spec Targeting Permissions (emphasis ours): Anybody can target any action, either built-in actions or custom actions, for any app. The currently available built in actions are og:news.reads, og:music.listens and og:video.watches. For example anybody can target the og:music.listens actions created by any application. Old Action Spec Targeting Permissions (emphasis ours): Anybody can target built-in actions for any app. For example anybody can target the og:music.listen actions created by any application. Only app developers or advertisers can target custom actions for their app. For example, if you create a “drove” action for your app only you can target users or friends of users who performed this action.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
Facebook For Windows Phone Update Released
An updated version of Facebook for Windows Phone just came out, bringing several upgrades and new features. Version 2.3.0.0 of Facebook for Windows Phone offers the following changes: The Facebook application for Android devices was upgraded in December, giving it a look and feel similar to Facebook for the iPhone. Readers: Have you used Facebook for Windows Phone? If so, what are your thoughts about the app? Image courtesy of Pocket Lint.
Read more [All Facebook]
How To Launch An International Campaign On Facebook
Multinational brands constantly face the challenge of launching a campaign or promotion that’s targeted toward a specific country, but must launch the application on their global brand page. That results in backlash from the fans located outside of the region where the offer is available. Let’s say, for instance, you work for Coca-Cola and are giving away a trip for four to Disney World, but it’s only available to U.S. residents. You don’t want to have your fans in other countries to see that they can’t participate and post complaints on your page wall. Let’s assume that your contest entry mechanism is where you have a tool that allow users to upload an image, tag friends and drag and drop items onto the picture, like a funny hat or a clown nose. As Coca-Cola, you would want everyone on the global page to use the app, but want to limit the contest entry component so it’s only available to U.S. residents. This scenario is perfectly possible. You just need someone that understands the Facebook platform to execute it in that manner. There are robust features on the platform that most brands and marketers are not aware of. As a Facebook app developer and marketing strategist, you must keep a finger on the pulse with Facebook’s platform, so you are not limiting yourself to constraints that actually don’t exist. Here are two major features that are most relevant when launching a global campaign. You Can Detect Country Settings What this means is that you can detect users country settings without asking for explicit permissions. That means, no permissions pop-up. It’s actually just a parameter that Facebook passes along to your application that says: “John Doe is from the U.S.” In our Coca-Cola example above, if we knew you were in the U.S., you would see the same fun photo manipulation tool with the contest entry portion. Whereas if you were from Canada, you would see the fun photo manipulation tool but no contest entry. It’s sill the same app and the same back-end code base, but just a different view on the front-end that’s specific to the audience coming to the app. Pretty cool, isn’t it? You can detect users language settings on Facebook without asking for explicit permissions. Again, no permissions pop-up. If your language settings were set to Spanish, your fans would see this large global campaign/application you’ve created, in Spanish. If you’ve created the application to support the English speaking audience, and the users language settings were set to English, they would then see the app in English. Detecting language or country are two settings that most marketers either don’t know of or don’t remember when thinking of a global campaign. You can have permutations of the same app on the front-end, and have the app live on one Facebook tab and one single code base. Launching an application in this manner is an elegant, clean solution. In fact, it should be the only solution. If you set up multiple tabs (yes, we see many brands taking this approach) you will run into issues: It’s better to spend the time building the campaign in the right manner from the beginning: Use one code base, and then use the settings to detect countries and languages. Think global and remove all barriers. Guest writer Mario Zelaya is managing director of Majestic Media. Image courtesy of Shutterstock.
Read more [All Facebook]
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Joins Pinterest
A good leader keeps tabs on the competition, which was likely the goal of Facebook Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg when he established a profile on surging social network Pinterest. To date, there has not been much activity on Zuckerberg’s Pinterest profile: three pins, one like, 1,176 followers, and he is following 125 Pinterest users. The move by Zuckerberg is not much of a surprise, as he also has accounts on Twitter and Google Plus, with similar levels of inactivity. Zuckerberg has only Tweeted 19 times, and his tweet January 18 — which linked to a Facebook post where he outlined his opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act — was his first since March 13, 2009. His Google Plus page is even more fallow, with no public posts. Readers: Do you follow Zuckerberg on Twitter or Google Plus, and will you do so on Pinterest?
Read more [All Facebook]
Paul Ceglia Vows To Continue Fight Against Facebook
The hits keep coming for Paul Ceglia, as U.S. Magistrate Judge Leslie Foschio Tuesday ordered the self-proclaimed Facebook co-owner to pay $75,766.70 in legal fees to the social network, which had been seeking more than $84,000. Despite the fact that all of the momentum in this lawsuit has swung Facebook’s way, Ceglia is showing no signs of giving up the fight. He told ZDNet’s Friending Facebook that the contract between him and Facebook Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg that was found on his computer was planted by Facebook, and that he and his legal team will prove its lack of authenticity. Ceglia told Friending Facebook he believes Zuckerberg or law firm Orrick, Herrington, and Sutcliffe planted the document, referring to Zuckerberg as “an admitted forger and an admitted hacker,” and claiming that the Facebook co-founder deleted emails related to the case. Furthermore, Ceglia is attempting to open-source his lawsuit, as he told Friending Facebook he established the registration-only website paulscase.com to solicit legal and technical expertise and “nail him down for good,” with “him” referring to Zuckerberg. The ruling by Foschio follows the $5,000 civil contempt fine the judge imposed on Ceglia last month for obstructing one of his orders by failing to provide Facebook with information about his personal email account. Foschio ruled that the fees were justified because Facebook was required to hire forensic experts in order to present its case. Dean Boland, an attorney for Ceglia, told CNET: We have scrupulously followed the court’s orders and intend to continue doing so throughout upcoming discovery and the eventual trial of this matter. Whether parties agree or disagree, court orders have to be followed, and that is what we will continue to do. The one minor bit of good news for Ceglia: Foschio denied a request by Facebook that he be prevented from filing additional motions in the case until the legal fees were paid. Readers: Is there any chance that Ceglia can reverse the downward spiral his lawsuit seems to be trapped in?
Read more [All Facebook]
Spotify, Yahoo, Pinterest, games, cards, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by DAU
Spotify topped our list of applications growing by daily active users this week. Other popular apps included Open Graph integrations from Pinterest, Yahoo, Grooveshark and Bing. Then there were games, cards, horoscopes, friend quizzes and a tab app. The titles below grew between 180,000 and 1.7 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week Spotify grew by more than 1 million DAU; the app generates feed and Ticker stories every time it’s used. Other Open Graph apps that automatically generate stories included: Yahoo, Pinterest, Grooveshark and Bing. The greeting card applications on the list all work similarly: the apps offer users the chance to be reminded of friends’ birthdays or a personalized calendar of birthdays. Daily Horoscope offers users a daily post, offers a pop-up of reminders for users’ friends birthdays, and then asks users to share the app with friends. 21 questions and Between You and Me are quiz apps that generate feed and ticker stories. Finally there was schoolFeed, which creates an interface on Facebook that highlights high school friends. Games that made the list ranged from Words With Friends and Bubble Witch Saga to Texas HoldEm Poker and Ninja Saga. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.
Read more [Inside Facebook]
VirtuOz Debuts Customer Engagement Tool for Facebook
As customers and companies continue to meet on Facebook to address support and sales issues, VirtuOz is launching its first customer service engagement tool, also known as an intelligent virtual agents, for the social network. VirtuOz cites two data points to support its Facebook initiative. A Zendesk study found that 62 percent of consumers have used social media for customer support, generally in the retail, telecommunications and travel/hospitality industries. Facebook is also the largest social media platform for consumers to interact with businesses, having three times the volume of other leading social media venues combined, the study also revealed. VirtuOz also announced today that the first corporate Facebook page to deploy its IVA is the European travel web site Voyages-sncf.com. Visitors to their Facebook can say “bonjour” to Léa, the travel company’s virtual customer service agent, whom the agency hopes will increase customer satisfaction and encourage favorable wall posts and recommendations. Léa is able to directly answers customer questions, and can also send questions back to live agents, to ensure an issue is completely resolved on Facebook. Pam Kostka, chief marketing officer for VirtuOz, added the following statement in a company news release: Listening and monitoring social networks is no longer sufficient. Deploying an IVA on a corporate Facebook page helps companies move beyond passive social service to active social service. Through the IVA for Facebook, companies can quickly respond in a personalized way to customer requests, comments, or inquiries and provide service through one of the world’s most popular points of entry to the web for 800 million-plus active users. Have you used Facebook to get customer service questions answered? It will be interesting to see how this trend evolves on Facebook. While companies are attempting to increase engagement with consumers on their Facebook pages, the results have so far been mixed. Econsultancy reports that less than 5 percent of customer questions posted on Facebook pages get answered.
Read more [All Facebook]
UPDATE: 5 Predictions For Facebook Marketing This Year
Metia Group outlines key predictions for brands on Facebook in the new year, based on the digital marketing company’s work with such powerhouse companies as Microsoft and AT&T. Here are the highlights. Look for both brands and customers to engage more directly on Facebook. Brands are also embracing Facebook because that’s where their customers are; the top 10 consumer brands each have more than 18 million Facebook followers. Expect brands to continue using effective social plug-ins, expanding upon the like button to add more open graph. Facebook’s own data shows that the plug-ins can increase web page referrals by an astounding 300 percent, on average. As metrics for measuring social media’s effectiveness improve, look for marketers to embrace Facebook’s touch points with customers over direct mail or traditional advertising. Metia says to watch for the increase in spending on social media. Metia expects search rankings to become more integrated with social media. Facebook makes it easier for customers to find what they are looking for based on friends’ recommendations, location-based information, and users’ preferences and activities. Facebook and other social media users will make the platform an integral part of their search behavior. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn will compete more aggressively for users by enhancing features. For example, Metia says the introduction of Google Plus spurred Facebook to address security and privacy issues, as well as how photos and updates are shared. The timeline feature introduces a new way for brands to interact with consumers — expect the other social media sites to fine-tune their offerings in response. UPDATE: Peter DiBart, Metia’s regional vice president, shared a few additional insights with AllFacebook this afternoon. He believes that Facebook has evolved from a destination to become the social fabric–or connective tissue–of the web. ”An individual’s social profile travels with them and informs everything they do online,” says DiBart. That change is good news for marketers, who can leverage the users’ profile and information in the open graph to create truly interactive and tailored initiatives. For businesses, DiBart is seeing companies organize around social media channels. “We are shifting away from the idea of the social media intern, to folding social media strategies into the overall business plan.” It’s no longer about social media, DiBart adds, but conducting social business, both B2B and B2C. As for timeline, one of Facebook’s most radical changes, DiBart believes that, “(it’s) going to give organizations much more transparency in telling a narrative story about themselves, where time becomes part of their overall story.” Organizations can determine how their personal timeline will be populated now, so they can be ready to make the move to pages when that happens.
Read more [All Facebook]
