Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Shrek, Disney, Rihanna, Zynga, Sprite and Cristiano Ronaldo
- Facebook Rolling Out More Prominent Design of News Feed Filters
- Facebook Instant Personalization on TripAdvisor Offers Social Travel Recommendations
- MXP4′s Pump It Game: An Interactive Way for Musicians to Share Songs on Facebook
| Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages: Shrek, Disney, Rihanna, Zynga, Sprite and Cristiano Ronaldo Posted: 21 Dec 2010 02:29 PM PST
Top Gainers This Week
Movies and media were a big chunk of the list this week. The "Shrek" Page made first place after adding 955,200 Likes to its 4.5 million, mostly by promoting special merchandise packages as holiday gifts. The "Harry Potter" Page came in second by adding 785,400 new Likes, mostly by posting movie-related news and coming out with 12.8 million total. "Toy Story" was sixth with 540,200 new Likes after promoting merchandise packages, ending the week with 11.4 million Likes.
The French "Avatar" Page added 517,400 Likes to take ninth place by promoting a collector's edition of the movie; the Page ended with just over 1.2 million Likes. In tenth place was "The Simpsons" TV shows, which added 506,200 Likes to reach about 16.8 million; the show's been promoting its programming on Facebook. The MTV Page came in at number 13 with 441,000 new Likes to come in at just about 12.5 million by providing programming-related news in its feed. Finally, there was Disney with 437,800 new Likes, passing 15.1 million fans, by promoting its latest movie, "Tron: Legacy." Musicians also did well on the list this week. Rihanna came in third with 654,000 new Likes, 19.1 million total, and promoting her new album by making a promotional tab the landing Page. Eminem added 531,000 new Likes to come in just under 24 million by not updating his Page at all. Shakira's 501,800 new Likes added to her 16.6 million as she continues a world tour.
The Black Eyed Peas were at number 14 with 440,800 new Likes, 7.8 million total, a Wall filled with band news and a landing Page promoting the band's presence on MySpace. Next at number 15 was Blink 182, which added 440,600 new Likes to its 2.7 million; the band is promoting its tour with a promotional tab set as the landing page. Finally, Linkin Park was number 20 with 398,900 new Likes, pushing the group over 19 million, and an interesting promotion. The band created a temporary app on Facebook allowing fans to print a coupon and receive $5 off their latest album when purchased at Best Buy. Tech companies made the list this week, too, as per usual. Zynga's Texas Hold'em Poker came in fourth after adding 604,300 new Likes to surpass 30 million total fans. Facebook followed in fifth place with 565,400 new Likes to pass 30 million, also. Google Chrome's Page was eighth and added 525,700 Likes to come in just under 5 million, partly by promoting Google Chrome apps and a charity campaign based on the number of tabs Chrome users opened during a certain time span. Finally, another Google property, YouTube, was at number 17. The Page added 424,600 Likes, falling just short of 25 million total, with a top videos landing tab.
Sprite made the Page this week after adding 455,000 Likes, passing 1.8 million and standing out in twelfth place as the only beverage on the list. Sports also appeared briefly on the list. Manchester United's Page was number 18 with 414,200 new Likes to pass 6.1 million by promoting the team's recent news. Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo also made the list after adding 402,600 new Likes to his Page by promoting his team's recent wins to finish with 16.4 million total. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Rolling Out More Prominent Design of News Feed Filters Posted: 21 Dec 2010 01:06 PM PST Facebook is rolling out a new way to filter the news feed. Users with access to the redesigned feature see a drop-down arrow beside their Most Recent news feed tab on the home page, revealing filters for status updates, Photos, Links, Pages, Games and friend lists. Facebook has implemented different designs of news feed filters over the years to help users view updates of specific content types or from certain subsets of their friends. As users add more friends and Likes, a filtering mechanism is key to keeping the feed relevant.
Use Cases for FiltersThe first listed filter is for games, replicating a similar functionality found in the Games Dashboard but in a more accessible spot. Facebook offered application filters in 2008 as a way to help gamers sort important game content out from personal updates, but later removed them. There’s no way to explicitly filter games out of the news feed for gamers, though Facebook has made it so the only game stories non-gamers see are for when their friends discover and install new games. The status updates filter creates an easy-to-consume, imageless stream more akin to Twitter. Without variations in formatting, the filter offers a less eye-straining read. Conversely, the Photos filter is visually stimulating, and is enjoyable to browse while otherwise occupied, such as during lunch. The Links filter gives users previews of articles they can read off-site, as well as videos that can be viewed in-line. The filter recreates much of the value offered by custom social news site PostPost, which assembles a Huffington Post-style feed from the links posted to Facebook by a user’s friends. The Pages filter helps user separate personal posts of friends from broadcasted posts by official entities on Facebook. As more news sites like CNN and The Daily Beast use Facebook to distribute newly published articles, the Pages feed could serve as new form of RSS reader, but which includes the opportunity of discussion and quick sharing.
The 5% of users who create friend lists should be happy to see they weren’t deprecated in this update. By creating a list of a their closest friends and filtering by it, users are free to form friendships with weak ties or professional associates without diluting their feed. Since Page updates are included in the status updates filter, the only way to create a “friends-only” feed is to add all of them to a friend list. Previously, users could choose friend lists to filter the news feed by clicking the Friends navigation link in the left home page sidebar. Since friends lists have been removed from this panel for everyone, those awaiting the roll out currently have no way to filter by friend lists. By placing the filters in the same place as the tabs for switching between a real-time stream and Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm-sorted Top News, users will filter their feeds more often. These more prominent options can make consuming the feed less exhausting, and lead to greater engagement, more Likes and Comments, and more time spent on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Instant Personalization on TripAdvisor Offers Social Travel Recommendations Posted: 21 Dec 2010 10:14 AM PST Facebook just launched a new Instant Personalization integration with travel planning site TripAdvisor. When users who are signed into Facebook visit the site, they’ll see a map of cities their friends have visited, a list of which cities have been visited by the most friends, and recent reviews and site activity by friends. Instant Personalization will automatically provide social recommendations, make it easy for users to make informed travel decisions with TripAdvisor.
People are accustomed to asking friends for travel suggestions and advice, making TripAdvisor a wise choice for the expansion of the Instant Personalization program. Without it, TripAdvisor can overwhelm users with its enormous database of travel reviews, and doesn’t provide a good entry point to exploring the site for those without a specific destination in mind. Since a person’s accommodation and travel activity preferences are often similar to their peers, reviews and destinations of friends are likely to be much more relevant than those of strangers.
The site culls data from TripAdvisor’s popular Cities I’ve Visited Facebook app to populate the visited cities map and “Your friends’ most popular destinations” list. The app became popular in the early days of Facebook applications, with users proudly displaying their map of previous travel destinations on the now deprecated profile box. Cities I’ve Visited already had over 1.8 million MAU by September of 2008, according to AppData. By default, the map shows destinations from all of a user’s friends, but the travel histories of individual friends can be viewed by clicking on the photos to the right. In addition to the home page integrations, when users click through search results for cities, hotels, and more they’ll see which of their friends have visited that city.
Facebook launched the Instant Personalization program at this year’s f8 conference, and has since been striving to educate users on how the program only uses publicly available information, albeit without a user’s prior consent. After pausing the roll out of the program for a few months, Facebook began adding more sites, with Microsoft search engine Bing and web TV recommendations site Clicker being the latest to receive the integration. Facebook maintains that it will only provide Instant Personalization on trusted, high-quality, inherently social sites. With the program now covering travel, food, TV, movies, music, reading, search, and collaboration, additional areas it could expand to include fashion or exercise, with fbFund winners Weardrobe and FriendFit as good candidates. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| MXP4′s Pump It Game: An Interactive Way for Musicians to Share Songs on Facebook Posted: 21 Dec 2010 08:00 AM PST French interactive music app developer MXP4 has released a new application called Pump It. Similar to Guitar Hero, users move their mouse to the beat of the music to earn points. Scores can posted to the news feed and users can invite friends to compete with. Branded versions of Pump It will appear on the Pages of several of the most popular musicians on Facebook over the coming weeks. The game is twitchy and fun, but sustained usage will be limited by a lack feedback mechanisms and social features. However, it could become an engaging way to launch new singles, and labels could promote their entire roster through mixes which feature multiple artists.
MXP4 released several Facebook Page tab applications earlier this year to help musicians share music with their fans and grow their Pages. The apps, including Mix It, which lets users turn on and off different instrumental tracks of a song, or Sing It, a karaoke app, require users to Like the musician’s Page before they can play. Despite having no scoring or competitive elements, these apps have gained traction. MXP4′s app for DJ David Guetta, one of the top 20 musicians on Facebook according to PageData and an early adopter of Page tab app marketing campaigns, gained over 300,000 users this month. Still, MXP4 sees potential in making full-fledged games. Users are directed to a branded Pump It standalone application from a tab on a musician’s Page. Once installed, they see a quick tutorial on how to maneuver their mouse to anticipate the music, select a difficulty level, and begin playing a song. Instead of having to click buttons or strum as with Guitar Hero, users merely hover their mouse over the quadrant of the game area which displays colored pulses representing the song’s rhythm.
Users don’t need the help of friends to succeed in the game, so it’s not inhererently social. However, they can still post their scores to Facebook and Twitter, invite friends, and see how their scores compare to those of friends or the entire user base. Users with the top scores for a song appear on a leaderboard, which will encourage some to play until they get this recognition. Most users will just play each track once, though, so the success of the apps will depend on artists adding new songs.
Pump It offers much more intimate engagement with a song than traditional streaming or downloading. Users have grown accustomed to listening to music while multi-tasking elsewhere on the internet, so other promotions which aren’t interactive don’t always make a strong enough impression for users to want to buy a song or hear it again. For this reason, Pump It could become a high conversion rate method for musicians to debut new singles online. The app could also be a good way to foster interest across a record label’s roster or catalog. London label Ministry of Sound’s Pump It app includes multi-song mixes of 80′s artists including Duran Duran, Billy Idol, and Human League who appear on their annual compilation albums. |
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