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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Pick & Zip App Allows for Easy Bulk Download of Facebook Photos

Posted: 08 Feb 2011 12:06 AM PST

Pick & Zip is a Facebook application that works via Connect allowing users to quickly download photos from Facebook in either a PDF or Zip file, instead of having to use Facebook’s interface for one-off downloads. The app doesn't require installation, is free and allows for convenient selection of key photos.

After logging in via Facebook Connect, the user is taken to an interface which allows them to hit the "Find my Photos" button and then select from among photo albums and tagged photos, review your selection and then download your photos fairly quickly. There's a list of friends on the left-hand side of the application to facilitate quick identification of photos you want. The app is especially helpful for Facebook users who have a lightbox view of photos, since it complicates actually right-clicking to save.

What's more, for users who want to download many images at a time, if they are archiving, deleting or untagging photos for example, it's a much preferable alternative to individually saving each of two dozen photos. This is especially true because the downloaded photos end up being the same file size as right-clicking to save.

Ads API Profile: Clickable’s Facebook Advertising Suite Lacks Core Features

Posted: 07 Feb 2011 03:50 PM PST

As part of our ongoing series on companies offering Facebook's Ads API tools and services, today we profile Clickable’s Facebook Advertising Suite. While clients can also manage search advertising, Clickable Pro handles Facebook advertising in a separate interface so it can quickly iterate on frequent changes to the Ads API. This separation prevents a holistic view of online marketing or a fluid cross-channel budget allocation. The tool also lacks dynamic bid optimization and native data visualization, so clients can’t run Facebook ad campaigns as efficiently as with other Ads API tools.

For those less familiar, Facebook's performance advertising system offers powerful targeting, but the user interface is not designed for running big campaigns or conducting sophisticated A/B testing. Since the fall of 2009, Facebook has granted a limited number of developers access to an Ads API so they can build more powerful tools and services for designing, targeting, and managing ads.

Company Profile

Clickable was founded in 2006 to simplify search advertising by combining reporting and bid management into a single interface. The New York-based company has received $22.5 million in funding from Union Square Ventures, and FirstMark Capital, as well as Peter Thiel and Founders Fund — both of whom are also Facebook investors.

The company has since grown to 150 employees, opened an office in Gurgaon, India, and now offers self-serve and managed spend advertising on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and Facebook. Clients pay Clickable 10% of spend or less depending on their commitment, though there is no minimum spend, making the tool accessible to those with smaller budgets. Clients come from across different industries and include American Express, LexisNexis, New York Meida, and InfoGroup. To persuade more of its existing search clients to try its social product, Clickable is waiving their fees for trying the Facebook Advertising Suite.

The shared investors helped Clickable gain early access to the Ads API and form a close relationship with the social network so they are informed of upcoming changes. Clickable pledged to update its tool weekly in response to API changes, pleasing Facebook with whom i it now meets several times a month. This relationship ensures consistent service for clients even if Facebook makes major changes that might temporarily break other Ads API tools. On why Clickable separates Facebook from its other services, Senior Vice-President, Product & Operations David Fall says “integrating search and social in the same user interface muddies the waters and is a limiting factor in moving quickly.”

Product Demo

Within the Clickable Pro Dashboard, clients can choose the Social(beta) tab to open the Facebook Advertising Suite and view a recent cost and performance summary of their Facebook ad campaigns. Clients can use drop-down menus to customize special trend reports to see how certain metrics have faired over time.

Clickable’s ad builder uses an innovative non-linear flow, where clients can configure ad creative, targeting, and bidding in whatever order they choose. The campaigns tab shows performance data including the social clicks delivered through Facebook’s special social context ad unit. Clients can also use the bulk uploader tool to import existing data.

Ad Variant Creation and Targeting

The target builder copies the Facebook self-serve ad tool’s UI for a familiar feel, though tags can also appended to ads for better organization, filtering, and aggregated metrics. It also augments Facebook’s keyword suggester with even more possible matches to help clients find additional related targets for their ads. One shortcoming is that audience and bid estimates don’t update in real-time like on Facebook, so clients have to click the “Estimate” button after each change to see approximate reach.

The creative builder lets clients upload new images or use saved ones, and enter a destination URL or select from a list of Facebook entities like Pages they control. Currently, one of Clickable’s biggest problem is the low limit on the number of ad variants than can be simultaneously created. Other tools allow thousands of targeting and creative permutations to be instantly created, but Clickable only permits clients to design up to 32 at once.

Clickable says the choice was made because it is difficult to show thousands of variants in a graphical UI, and so it “felt comfortable with a manageable but somewhat arbitrary limit.” Unfortunately, this significantly hampers A/B testing that can be crucial to finding what targets produce the highest click-through-rates.

Bid Management and Analytics

Ad variants are pre-populated with a suggested bid that can be changed in bulk. They can be assigned to existing campaigns or a new campaign, and are submitted to Facebook for approval within ten minutes.

Clients, or Clickable’s solutions team must then manage bids by hands or using “if…then” rules, since the tool lacks a dynamic bidding engine that can instantly respond to small fluctuations in ad performance. An ad’s bid can only be changed once per hour. This system is highly inefficient, requires constant attention, and can’t scale to campaigns running thousands of ads at once.

The problem is compounded by the absence of custom data visualization that would give clients a better understanding of ad performance. Using filtering options, a client could determine what ads are being clicked least frequently, but without graphs it would be nearly impossible to deduce subtle slips in CTR that signal the need to rotate ad creative.

Clickable Needs Time to Mature

Clickable has a lot of features planned on its roadmap, including upping the ad variant creation limit and offering image hashing to speed up the process of approving ad images with Facebook. Still it doesn’t have plans to address some major functionality gaps.

Fall believes that search and social advertising interfaces shouldn’t pull from the same budget. “Hopefully more Facebook data will be available in the future and social will be more differentiated from search.” However, for now, advertisers have to make tough choices between channels, and many want an advertising platform that can show them when to shift spend from Google to Facebook and back in order to maximize returns.

Despite its rapid release cycle, Clickable Pro’s Facebook Advertising Suite lacks too many core features to compete with better developed Ads API tools. With enough time it could implement dynamic bid management and auto-optimization, and allow clients to view charts and graphs of ad performance. Until then, only Clickable’s existing search clients who can get the social advertising services for free and advertisers looking to experiment on Facebook without a minimum spend should use the Facebook Advertising Suite.

Facebook Rolls Out Real-Time Commenting to All Users

Posted: 07 Feb 2011 11:20 AM PST

Facebook quietly implemented real-time commenting for wall and news feed posts in late January, allowing users to see new comments by others appear in-line without having to refresh the page. Now it has confirmed that live commenting has been rolled out to all users, and has explained the “write locally, read globally” system on which it’s engineered.

Real-time commenting promotes engaging, rapid-fire conversation and prevents mishaps like one user asking a question that another has already answered.

Facebook can now better approximate a real-life or an instant message conversation within a comment reel. Instead of having to check to see if a friend has answered a question or added details to a post by refreshing, users can simply wait and watch as new comments accumulate.

Real-time commenting will decrease the frequency of unnecessary or redundant comments stemming from update latency. Unnecessary comments can lead Facebook to send notifications leading to irrelevant content to others participating in the comment thread, reducing the likelihood that those users will click through future notifications. In this way, real-time commenting preserves Facebook ability to draw users back to the site.

Facebook’s engineering team considered a polling system for determining when to update a comment thread before settling on a push framework that could reduce latency well below five seconds. Unlike many of the site’s systems that write a new piece of content locally and then asynchronously replicates the data across other regions, Facebook used a new “write locally, read globally” system. It determines which users are currently viewing the active thread and pushes them updates.

Facebook says that the system “saves us from having to replicate a high volume of writes across data centers, saving expensive, long-distance bandwidth.” Like drag-and-drop photo reordering, real-time commenting began as a Facebook Hackathon project where employees voluntarily tackle engineering challenges.

ISA 2011: Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms [Video]

Posted: 07 Feb 2011 11:06 AM PST

With the growth of the Apple iOS and Android ecosystems over the last year, is 2011 the year that mobile social platforms finally take off in US? At Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011, we looked at what 2011 will hold for social application developers with executives from leading platforms and publishers pioneering social and monetization on mobile.

Jason Oberfest, VP Social Applications at ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA), Anil Dharni, Co-Founder at Funzio and Founder of Storm8, Asokan Thiyagarajan, Director of Platforms and Technology Strategy at Samsung and Martin Essl, Strategic Software Partner Management at Sony Ericsson joined Xyologic founder Matthaeus Krzykowski to discuss opportunities, risks, and timelines associated with emerging platforms. View the full talk below.

ISA 2011: Growth and Monetization on Mobile Social Platforms from Inside Network on Vimeo. To download an mp3 version of this talk, please email us at info (at) insidesocialapps (dot) com.

All videos currently available:

Photos of the event are viewable on our Facebook Page.

MySpace, Connect, Groupon, LivingSocial, Badoo on This Week’s List of Facebook Gainers by MAU

Posted: 07 Feb 2011 09:00 AM PST

Badoo, the dating app, continues to top our list of growth in terms of monthly active users this week, adding more than 5.4 million users to come out with more than a total of 37.6 million — exceeding any other growing app by far. The app has been criticized by a number of other developers for using aggressive viral tactics that may violate Facebook’s platform policies; we’re checking in with Facebook about that and we’ll update when we have more.

We compile this data by way of our AppData tool. A brief rundown of the rest of the list includes several Connect app, LivingSocial and Groupon apps, as well as MySpace-related apps, sports and Causes (note that Facebook appears to be reporting more data than it has before on Connect applications).

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1. Badoo 37,625,994 +5,453,782 +17%
2. Myspace 4,073,115 +3,467,142 +572%
3. Photobucket 4,761,218 +3,414,340 +254%
4. Huffington Post 3,400,208 +2,981,978 +713%
5. Wikia 2,791,859 +2,712,039 +3,398%
6. Ravenwood Fair 8,363,133 +1,365,714 +20%
7. Groupon 2,077,831 +1,298,921 +167%
8. Sanal Video 5,951,901 +1,267,668 +27%
9. Hulu 1,146,351 +1,117,396 +3,859%
10. Profile Banner 2,099,114 +1,088,212 +108%
11. AddictingGames 1,133,497 +943,693 +497%
12. Foursquare 2,533,585 +932,205 +58%
13. Yahoo! 9,975,986 +840,261 +9%
14. PicBadges 1,830,998 +737,637 +67%
15. BandPage by RootMusic 16,789,568 +733,756 +5%
16. Bleacher Report 825,557 +727,143 +739%
17. 廣告讚! 716,429 +711,221 +13,656%
18. LivingSocial 4,702,955 +700,490 +18%
19. Your statistics 2,175,191 +683,748 +46%
20. Causes 25,795,843 +647,001 +3%

MySpace's Facebook app rolled in second on our list this week, adding 3.4 million users to surpass a total of 4 million — that amounted to a 572% increase in MAUs. This was coupled by an increase of more than 3.4 million users and a 254% increase in MAUs for the affiliated photo hosting site Photobucket. The reason: MySpace users may now share their MySpace and Photobucket photos to Facebook quite easily.

Other Connect apps were on our list, including The Huffington Post which saw a 2.9 million gain, Wikia which counted 2.7 million MAUs, Hulu with just over 1 million, Yahoo with 840,000 and Bleacher Report, a sports website which saw growth of 727,100 MAUs in the days leading up to the Super Bowl. Groupon at number 7 with a 167% gain of 1.2 million MAUs beat out competitor LivingSocial with 700,500 new users.

There were a few foreign language apps that made the list and show some interesting growth.

Sanal Video is in Turkish, added 1.2 million MAUs, growing by 27% and topping out at almost 6 million users. The app rounds up different videos for a user to play; once a video is selected it plays and allows you to share the video to your stream. My Ad Market is an app in Chinese that did most of its growing in the past week, adding 711,200 MAUs. BandPage by RootMusic added 733,800 new users, continuing the growth we've seen on the musician tab app in recent months.

Finally, Causes made the list with a MAU jump of 647,000 to bring the app to 25.8 total monthly active users. Part of its recent promotions have coordinated with Valentine's Day, urging users to donate $10 on behalf of a loved one to a favorite charity, including Egyptian and Tunisian causes.

Featured Facebook Campaigns: JetBlue, Coffee-Mate, Zynga, Kia, CBS and Ubisoft

Posted: 07 Feb 2011 07:57 AM PST

There’s a truly diverse spread of Facebook campaigns on our roundup this week. JetBlue uses Facebook’s Places in combination with its frequent flyer program, Coffee-Mate gives away product and coupons, Zynga partners with Kia and SocialVibe in a new branded game and CBS and Ubisoft work together to pair-up the CSI TV show and game during sweeps.

Zynga, SocialVibe and Kia's Big Game Tournament

Goal: Engagement, Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Game Interaction

Core Mechanic: Kia is partnering with SocialVibe to sponsor Zynga's new Big Game Tournament by placing content about its new Kia Optima car model in several of Zynga's games.

Game: Zynga's Big Game Tournament has partnered with Kia Motors America and SocialVibe from Jan. 24 through March 5 to allow players of Zynga's games — Farmville, Petville, Mafia Wars, and Café World — to gain access to exclusive Kia content and receive Zynga cash in return.

Method: By clicking on the Kia icon at the bottom of the game page for the aforementioned Zynga games, players will be directed to a virtual football game featuring teams of characters from their favorite Zynga games. During this virtual football game players will be greeted with interactive Kia Optima content, have the chance to share this experience on Facebook or Twitter, and finally receive Zynga cash. Specifically: 4 Pet Cash for PetVille; 2 Farm Cash for Farmville; 1 Café Cash for Café World and 2 Reward Points for Mafia Wars.

Impact: Kia's Facebook Page is rather small, but the landing tab also promotes the Optima. Gaining access to Zynga's 200 million monthly active users via its most popular social games is sure to give a boost to Kia, which has actively promoted its models on Facebook with video ads in the past.

[Courtesy Image]

Coffee-Mate's Free Flavor Friday

Goal: Network Exposure, Engagement, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: Offering fans a free $1 off coupon for a Coffee-Mate purchase on the Facebook Page via app after an email address is requested.

Method: The Free Flavor Friday started out as a one-time offering of 100,000 free bottles of Coffee-mate, but due to the success of the campaign, the company added another 20,000 bottles. When the demand continued, the company decided to offer more coupons to its Facebook fans for $1 off a bottle of the coffee creamer. Getting a coupon is as simple as entering your email address, users do not have to Like the Page and coupons are printed directly off the Facebook Page.

Impact: The Page currently counts more than 254,200 Likes and at least 120,000 people have used the Facebook Page to receive a free bottle of product. What's more, the Page's Wall posts frequent updates of technical difficulties, so it seems there was a lot of enthusiasm from consumers. Thus, the simple campaigns seems to have been rather effective.

To see the rest of campaigns, check the Cases section of Inside Network’s Facebook Marketing Bible.

tirsdag den 8. februar 2011 at 07.08