Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: President Obama, Vitrue, Messages, Places, Photos, Events, Causes, Justin Bieber and More
- Facebook Adds New Relationship Status Types, but Not to the Ad Tool
- Facebook Tests Ad Surveys Asking Users Which Ads They Prefer
- Valentine’s, Turkey, Video and Games on this Week’s List of Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps
| Posted: 18 Feb 2011 05:00 PM PST
Vitrue Raises $17 million, Adds Murphy as Senior Advisor – Social media management services provider Vitrue announced a $17 million third round of funding from Scale Venture Partners, Advent Venture Partners, General Catalyst Partners and Dace Ventures. Facebook's former vice president of global sales, Mike Murphy, has also joined Vitrue to work as a "senior advisor" with CEO Reggie Bradford. Facebook Challenges Relationship Status Patent – Facebook has challenged three separate patents that pertain to relationship statuses as they function on a social graph. This comes as the company has broadened its relationship status options, adding "in a civil union" and "in a domestic partnership." Facebook Rolls Out New Messages to All Users – Facebook is expanding the new Messages rollout to everyone on Facebook over the new few weeks. We first wrote about Messages in November.
Brothers Samwer Sell Facebook Shares - Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, entrepreneurial German brothers who invested in Facebook in 2008 as part of the company's $15 billion valuation round with Microsoft, sold their shares recently, according to a local report. Given that Facebook recently raised funding at a reported $50 billion to $60 billion valuation, the brothers, may have made up to four times their investment back.
Facebook's Pixelcloud is Updated - Facebook's Engineering team wrote a blog about the redesign of the internal photo sharing service created by employees, Pixelcloud. Fun Facts About Facebook Photos - Pixable, along with Harvard University researchers, conducted some interesting research about Facebook's photos. Facebook will have 100 billion photos by this summer, women have twice as many looks/uploads/tags as men, men prefer photos with women they don't know, women prefer photos with women they know and everyone seems to prefer photos of women in general. Older users and younger users upload about the same amount, but older users are not tagged as often. Facebook Changes Events Format - Microformats leader Tantek Celik has announced that that Facebook has changed the way it marks up events to add an hCalendar microformat, marking up venues with an hCard, too. Microformats are a set of open data formats built on existing standards that make it easier for users (and machines) to share information across services; in this case, users will be able to more easily export Facebook events to other calendar programs.
Causes Used to Connect with Middle East Activists – Causes wrote a post detailing how its users were able to interact with issues related to Tunisia and Egypt.
Sharing on Facebook Most Lucrative for E-Commerce – ChompOn released data comparing Twitter and Facebook actions. Turns out Facebook Shares are worth more than Likes, which are worth more than tweets, which are worth more than follows on Twitter. Rosetta Stone Sees Facebook Traffic with Webtrends – Rosetta Stone partnered with Webtrends in order to fine tune its Facebook strategy, resulting in Rosetta Stone being able to cut marketing costs on the platform by $20 per fan with a 10-14% conversion rate. Rosetta Stone now counts a 60% conversion rate at a cost of less than $1.50 per fan, according to a company press release. Facebook, Justin Bieber, Team Up to End Cyberbullying – Facebook, teen pop star Justin Bieber and MTV's "A Thin Line" show are partnering to end "digital abuse." According to a press release, Bieber is asking his fans to post an action to stop such abuse on an MTV map, which will enter them into a sweepstakes. Facebook's Safety Page figures prominently in the campaign. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Adds New Relationship Status Types, but Not to the Ad Tool Posted: 18 Feb 2011 11:04 AM PST Facebook is rolling out the option for users to set their relationship status to “In a civil union” and “In a domestic partnership”. These types will allow gay couples to more accurately describe their relationship. However, advertisers don’t have the option to target users based on these types, or any other types than “Single”, “In a relationship”, “Engaged”, or “Married”.
Users can change the setting by going Edit Profile, then Featured People, and using the Relationship Status drop-down menu. Not all users have the new options yet, though. Facebook has been slowly increasing the number of relationship status types. “Widowed” became an option in September 2009, and Facebook has since added “Divorced” and “Separated”, though none of these are targetable through the ad tool. The site recently released statistics that showed that users who are “In a relationship”, “Married”, or “Engaged” are much happier according to the Gross National Happiness index than users with the status “In an open relationship”, “It’s complicated”, or “Widowed”. The added status types show Facebook’s continued support for the gay community. It released an “It Gets Better” video featuring employees encouraging gay adolescents not to harm themselves, worked with Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation to remove hateful content from a Page commemorating victims of anti-gay bullying, and reimburses taxes for gay employees who cover their spouses’ health care costs since the federal government doesn’t recognize their relationships. Several Facebook Pages and groups had previously been created calling for civil unions and domestic partnerships to be added as relationship status options. By recognizing these types and allowing users to more accurately express themselves, users will feel that their Facebook profile is a natural expression of their identity. As Facebook adds more relationship status options that aren’t in the ad tool, users will switch to them, decreasing the number of people in the targetable options. This can help advertisers because they won’t be accidentally showing ads to those who aren’t actually in the demographic they’re trying to reach. The new types will hurt advertisers, though, since less users will list targetable options like “Married” or “In a relationship” that may have been close enough to show them relevant ads.
Facebook should consider adding all the available relationship status types as targeting parameters to offer advertisers as much targeting granularity as possible, even if it might slightly complicate the ad tool. This would allow the site to continue providing more accurate options to users without impairing advertisers | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Tests Ad Surveys Asking Users Which Ads They Prefer Posted: 18 Feb 2011 09:04 AM PST
So far, we’ve only received reports of these ads appearing to users in Israel. Advertisers don’t seem to have any choice of whether to show the surveys, nor receive their results. Facebook has opened up several other new options to advertisers in the last few months, though. Sponsored Stories ads help Pages, apps, and Places convert user content that mentions them into ads. Facebook Ads for Applications and social context ads display which of a user’s friends have also installed or Liked an application or Page. Most recently, advertisers can select a specific landing tab of a Page as an ad’s destination. When advertisers apply targeting parameters to an ad, it may appear to anyone who falls within those parameters. Unless advertisers run their campaigns for a long period of time with a high budget, or only target a small number of users, not everyone with the parameters will see the ad. Since advertisers usually choose to pay per click, it’s in Facebook’s interest to show the ads to those within the parameters that will be most likely to click. Therefore, it’s important for Facebook to determine which targeting parameters make an ad the most relevant to users as a whole, as well as specific users. For instance, I live in San Francisco and have a college degree, but I may be more prefer to see ads that target me based on my location than on my education level. These surveys could determine this, informing Facebook that users as whole may find location-targeted ads more relevant than education-targeted ads. Facebook could also know that in the future it should show me ads that target me based on location instead of those that target me based on the education when it has a choice. This data could help advertisers receive more clicks for their ads, generating more revenue for Facebook. [Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip.] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Valentine’s, Turkey, Video and Games on this Week’s List of Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps Posted: 18 Feb 2011 07:45 AM PST
Top Gainers This Week
Valentine's Day-related apps xo Hearts xo and Angry Birds Seasons were on our list this week, pretty near the top, in second and fifth places, respectively. Hearts added 467,400 MAU, with a little under 1 million total. The app presents the user with all sorts of heart animations to share to your Facebook friends. Angry Bird Seasons grew by 252,000 MAU and the app lets the user select from several Valentine's Day cards to share with friends or to their Wall.
There were four apps in Turkish on the list this week, a country that has more than 25.4 million users, according to Inside Facebook Gold, our data and research service, which also includes the monthly Global Monitor Report with detailed data on ad rates by demographic for over 190 country markets. Okey Oyna, a video chat app, grew by 308,700 MAU, card game Okey Plus grew by 227,300, Videoloji is another video app which presents users with interesting videos they can share to their stream and grew by 208,100 MAU.
Other foreign language apps made our list, too. There was the Chinese 大腦分析, or Analysis of the Brain, which was third on the list with 411,800 MAU. Next came the Thai แฮปปี้ฟาร์ม, a virtual world game allowing the user to plan vegetables and tend to animals. The rest of the apps, with exception of the iPhone 4/iPad app for Facebook Touch HD which added 176,400 MAU, were all games. |
President Obama Meets with Zuckerberg - 
Places Beats Out Foursquare, Gowalla by Far – 
Cooliris Receives $9.6M Funding – Cooliris, which allows users to see photos and videos on the web in an easy format, 
Facebook is testing a new format for the sponsored ads section of the site’s right sidebar. Users experiencing the test are shown two ads, and then a survey question asking “which of the two ads above would you prefer to see more of in the future?” Facebook may be using the collected to data to weight its ad targeting parameters, for instance showing a user more ads that target them based on location than their Likes and Interests or level of education.
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