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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook Connect Integration Best Practices From the Platform Showcase

Posted: 03 Feb 2011 04:19 PM PST

Facebook Marketing Bible

The following is an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, or brand using Facebook. The full version of this article includes detailed examples of Facebook integrations on three more websites including a group deals provider, a non-profit, and a job search utility. It teaches developers how to increase Facebook logins, on-board new users, and get the most referral traffic from the Like and Recommend buttons.

Facebook’s Developers site hosts the Facebook Platform Showcase, which displays examples of Facebook integrations on third-party websites. Many of these integrations demonstrate best practices that can be applied by developers, web publishers, and brand marketers to their own sites. Here we’ll look at four of the best integrations, detail the most valuable parts of their strategies, and explain how what they are doing can be generalized to other sites.

LIFE.com

Login Footer Bar

General interest entertainment magazine site LIFE.com features a myLIFE footer bar allowing users to connect with their Facebook account. The overlaid bar is persistently visible at the bottom of the site, regardless of where a user scrolls or navigates. This ensures users are always a single click away from a social experience.

A footer bar is good choice for sites that want to increase the likelihood of users logging in with Facebook, such as those who are collecting data to optimize their site design or run targeted ads.

Persistent Like and Share Buttons

The bar includes options to log in through Google, Twitter and Yahoo! as well as Facebook. When logged in with Facebook, the bar displays Like and Share buttons for the current page. The footer bar frees the site from cluttering every separate page with these buttons.

Sites that are already cramped or don’t want to add buttons to each page individually can benefit from such an integration.

Facebook Favorites

The Facebook Favorites button reveals the most shared pages from the site, helping users navigate directly to popular content instead of sifting through everything the site has to offer. Rather than only show Facebook’s Recommendations plugin on the home page, constantly taking up space, LIFE.com collapses the plugin and so users can view it upon request.

Media and news sites with large volumes of content should consider this type of integration of the Recommendations plugin, as it doesn’t require any site redesign, and helps users find the most compelling content that will lead them to return more frequently.

Misstep: No HTML Markup for Photo Likes

LIFE.com also uses a standard integration of the Facebook Comments plugin, and includes another instance of the Like button below photos to further encourage users to form a connection to the site.

One misstep in the integration is that no HTML markup is included to specify a image for Likes of photos. This markup allows a site to select an image to appear in the news feed story generated by the Like. In LIFE.com’s case, a standard logo appears, but a thumbnail of the Liked photo would be much more compelling and drive more referral traffic. Sites should use the HTML markup to ensure the primary image on any Liked page appears in the news feed story.

Continue reading and learn more about how to best integrate Facebook into third-party websites at the Facebook Marketing Bible.

ISA 2011: The Future of Social Gaming, Key Questions for 2011 & The Emerging Media Landscape

Posted: 03 Feb 2011 11:00 AM PST

Social gaming will be a mature billion-dollar industry in 2011, with more on offer for game players and more at stake for developers. What will social gaming’s continued growth mean for the future of relationships between platforms and developers? How do emerging market trends in 2011 affect media companies considering whether to build, buy, or license? Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 tackled these questions along with others that included the distribution landscape for games, the potential for continued consolidation among developers, and the importance of brands.

Kristian Segerstrale, CEO & Co-Founder, Playfish (now part of EA), Peter Relan, Executive Chairman, CrowdStar, Vish Makhijani, SVP Business Operations, Zynga, and Rick Thompson, Co-founder, Playdom (now part of Disney) joined Inside Network’s Justin Smith to discuss social gaming’s key challenges this year. View the full panel below.

ISA 2011: The Future of Social Gaming, Key Questions for 2011 & The Emerging Media Landscape from Inside Network on Vimeo. To download an mp3 version of this talk, please email us at info (at) insidesocialapps (dot) com.

Other videos currently available:

Photos of the event are viewable on our Facebook Page.

Facebook Career Postings and Jobs: Real Estate Counsel, Policy, Asia, Mobile, Strategy and More

Posted: 03 Feb 2011 09:41 AM PST

Some more clues about Facebook's plans for Facebook’s future plans appeared in job posts from the Facebook Careers Page, as well as in new postings from LinkedIn. Everything from Real Estate Counsel to Mobile engineers in Asia to more Washington, D.C. policy positions to Device Partnerships and Strategy jobs.

Facebook is seeking a Real Estate Counsel based in Palo Alto, Calif. to work on the company's global real estate and technical operations team, reporting to the Associate General Counsel – Global Infrastructure & Operations. The job is specifically looking for someone able to negotiate global real estate transactions, including leases, licenses, purchase, sale, design, construction, land use, especially someone who can work with "broad array of agreements necessary to complete greenfield data center development projects (conceptual engineering phases through commissioning)." This person will also work on managing Facebook's IP transit, transport, dark fiber, IRU, CDN, peering and telecom around the world.

This, of course, comes as the company is looking to move into a large new headquarters in Menlo Park, California.

Two policy jobs also opened up this week. A Manager of Policy Communications will work specifically on privacy, safety and security, work with public/private groups, doing proactive and reactive work and be based in Palo Alto. Facebook's looking for a seasoned pro with 12-15 years of professional, preferably political, communications experience. In D.C. the company is seeking a Manager of Public Policy to monitor legislative and regulatory issues at the state level, as well as participate in federal policy conversations via writing papers and researching for the company. This public policy employee will help develop Facebook's policy goals, too, work with domestic/international NGOs and should have an advanced degree in a related field.

Two mobile-related jobs in Asia indicate the company’s growth in the region. A Partner Engineer of Mobile in Hong Kong and one in Singapore were posted this week. Facebook's Careers Page notes that both positions would require candidates to help mobile partners implement Facebook products, troubleshoot them, manage the company's relationship with partners and write material for the Facebook developer community. Both positions require a very specific skill set: At least 3 years of experience in a software engineering-type job, understanding of web technology, a degree in computer science, skills to develop software, Unix/Linux, the ability to travel, mobile platform experience and "Mandarin language skills are a major plus."

There were two exciting hires who announced their employment with Facebook on LinkedIn. One was Lenn Pryor, who left a job as VP of Product Music at Nokia to work as Facebook Mobile's Device Partnerships in January. Pryor previously worked as Director of Mobile at eBay and Director of Platforms, Developer Program at Skype and Director of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft. Next was Ranwa Sarkis who is now employed as Head of Strategy & Planning of EMEA at Facebook and was Manager of Global Sales Strategy & Operations at Google before she started her new Facebook job last month.

Facebook posted several jobs this week for its overseas offices on the Careers Page. Sales and User Operations jobs in Dublin, Ireland, Global Sales Development in London, UK, Human Resources and User Operations in India, Account Executive positions in Hong Kong and Singapore and a DSO Account Manager in Toronto. A few other interesting new posts were: MBA Intern, Platform Operations, Trust and Safety Manager, Security Manager-Incident Response and a Palo Alto-based Head of Marketing.

Jobs that disappeared from Facebook's Careers Page this week include a handful of jobs in the Dublin office related to recruiting, law enforcement response and a Lead Qualifier position. The Corporate Communications Manager position was not on the list, neither were the Policy & Privacy Manager position in Brussels or the Manager of Privacy and Policy in Hamburg or Berlin. A Manager of Partner Insights position, Manager of Developer Advocacy and California-based Data Center Technician job also disappeared.

LinkedIn's feed of Facebook-related news is back up and includes some interesting professional movement. Kati More, who was previously a manager at Ernst & Young, is now a Recruiter for Facebook. Jessica Cihon is working in Account Management after working as a Communications Assistant at Ithaka. Kyle Murray is now employed as a Data Center Technician after working at Microsoft as a Network Engineer.

Analysts also shared their new Facebook employment status on LinkedIn. Carlow Roque is working as an Analyst, leaving his job at The brpr Group, Susan Montes is an Analyst – UO Latin America, having worked as a production manager at Media X at Stanford University and Syveda Khan is an Analyst of User Operations, just leaving a position as an AdWords Specialist at Google India.

New Facebook engineers also announced their job changes on LinkedIn. Eugene Zarakhovsky left iLike at MySpace, Rob Wultsch left GoDaddy.com to work as an MySQL Database Engineer, former Google Systems Administrator Nick Burrett is now also a MySQL Database Engineer, Judy Chang is a new Software Applications Developer and just left a job as a Project Manager at Bell Laboratories, Chao Qin is an engineer, leaving a job at Develop Contractor at TopCoder, Inc. New Software Engineer interns Olesksandr Kuvshynov and Mark Greve also announced their jobs on LinkedIn.

And as always, you can check out job openings in the industry on our Inside Network Job Board.

Another Way of Slicing the Android, iOS, RIM Horserace: Facebook Monthly Actives

Posted: 03 Feb 2011 09:07 AM PST

For mobile developers, there are more than plenty of statistics abound to gauge relative market size for different smartphone platforms.

Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin said last month that the OS is seeing more than 300,000 activations a day while Apple said in its most recent earnings call that the company has cumulatively sold 160 million iOS devices. Nielsen said today that Android, iOS and RIM are in a three-way tie among smartphone owners in the U.S.

However, a more relevant number to gauge potential market size for mobile app developers may be the number of Facebook users worldwide on each platform. Facebook is likely a decent proxy for smartphone users willing to download and engage with applications (outside of markets like Japan, China and South Korea where the company has a weak presence). Unlike the statistics that Apple has released, it also takes out users who may have more than one iOS device.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.

fredag den 4. februar 2011 at 07.26