Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- A Closer Look at Deals, Facebook’s News Feed-Based Answer to Groupon
- Facebook’s New Growth in the Middle East: Do More Users Mean More Protests?
- Facebook Careers Postings: Finance, Games, Latin America, Dublin, Singapore and More
- Facebook Hires and Departures: Marketing, IP, Singapore, Austin, Dublin and More
- Groupon Signs Exclusively with AdParlor for Facebook Ads
| A Closer Look at Deals, Facebook’s News Feed-Based Answer to Groupon Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:00 PM PDT On Tuesday, Facebook began signing up users for Deals, its answer to Groupon and other group-buying services. Subscribers will receive updates in their news feed and potentially by email about pre-paid coupons and experiences they can purchase. Businesses can work with Facebook’s Merchant Services team to arrange and promote Deals such as discounts on going out to a restaurant, the movies, or a wine-tasting tour. Instead of being distributed through Pages, stories about Deals will be injected directly into the news feed, allowing Facebook to give them as much visibility as it sees fit. This special ability to manipulate the news feed could give it a big advantage over Groupon, LivingSocial, and other third-party group deal providers. But there was some confusion when users first began seeing the option to subscribe to Facebook Deals in their news feed. The product was given the title previously reserved for Facebook’s location-based rewards system, now referred to as Checkin Deals, that lets local business offer users discounts for visiting their physical location and checking in.
Instead, the new Facebook Deals is indeed a competitor to Groupon, and doesn’t require users to share their location. Instead, they’ll be able to share the news of their purchase. Facebook can increase at will the EdgeRank, or news feed visibility, of both initial updates about Deals and these user shares about purchases. This means Deals stories might be seen by an unusually high percentage of users in Deals markets, driving signups and purchases. If Facebook sets the EdgeRank of Deals stories higher than normal Page updates and shares, it could have a major advantage over third-party deals providers who must either use less visible Page updates or buy ads from Facebook to reach the social network’s enormous user base.
Facebook says its initial tests of Deals will be free for businesses to offer, but we expect it to begin charging businesses a percentage of user spend in exchange for the distribution. Facebook could charge the same 30% fee it charges applications developers through its Facebook Credits virtual currency payment system, match Groupon’s 50% fee, or set a new rate. If it does begin charging business to offer deals, it will be the first time Facebook has directly monetized the news feed (aside from news feed ads that it tested years ago). Since it is selling news feed distribution through the Deal updates channel and earning money for each additional purchase, Facebook has a big short-term monetary incentive to make Deals as prominent in the news feed as possible.
However, users have grown to love the news feed because it shows them what they care about, not ways to spend money. Deals could be both, but Facebook must make sure not to place low quality offers above important updates from friends. Otherwise, it risks reducing the news feed’s perceived value to users, which could negatively impact the site’s long-term engagement rate. If Facebook can seamlessly blend Deals updates into the feed and make them valuable and social, it may have found an enormous new revenue stream, and third-party group buying services will have serious new competitor. |
| Facebook’s New Growth in the Middle East: Do More Users Mean More Protests? Posted: 17 Mar 2011 12:53 PM PDT
Why? Real-world friendships, and features like user profile walls, the news feed, Pages and of course Events provided a new way to first spread new ideas and then plan follow-up actions — or so anecdotal evidence suggests. See this New York Times article for some good examples. But, of course, Egyptian grievances against now-departed ruler Hosni Mubarak had been festering for decades and was spilling it into the open regardless of any particular piece of technology helping the organizers. And between print, television, mobile phones and other web sites, there were other ways of communicating. And, there is the whole angle of why the revolt was successful — was the Egyptian military making a bid to preserve its power against Mubarak, and using protestors as a vehicle? Zooming in from these larger questions, we can see that Facebook was at least one factor, and so more data is needed to show how it affects politics in the Middle East and elsewhere. And we have that data, in the form of our Inside Facebook Gold report, which includes historical number on the company’s traffic around the world. So, here’s a closer look at the Middle East, including North African and Central Asian countries. The table below shows traffic we tracked for each country on February 1st and March 1st, along with the numerical and percentage change over February, and the portion of each country’s population that is currently on Facebook.
While a few countries got on Facebook years ago, almost every country in the region has seen its traffic to the site grow by at least 50%, and some have grown by 100% in the past 12 months. Those levels of growth are not unique to the region as it’s what we’ve seen most other places as well. Let’s look at specific countries to see if more unusual trends emerge. CountriesTunisia, where the first wave of protests began in December, has a relatively high 21.1% of the population on Facebook, or about 2.20 million out of the 10.4 million people in the country. Facebook growth had been in the double-digit thousands during across the later months of last year, only growing by more than a hundred thousand a month once the revolution was under way. For the last twelve months, it grew by 73.9%. Moving over to the next location of a revolution, Egypt grew the most out of any Middle Eastern country in February, adding more than 455,000 new users to reach 5.65 million, or about 6.8% of the total population. Given that the revolution started in late January, most of this growth could be due to interest around Facebook as the revolution was happening. However, it grew by 562,000 new users in January, and for most of the past year it has grown by at least 250,00 people, for a total annual growth rate of 104.4%. While Facebook’s presence in the country could have aided organizers, its relatively low penetration rate and generally steady growth rate suggest it played a relatively small role — perhaps it propelled smaller groups of revolutionaries forward, but the majority of the population was not directly involved. Looking down the list of the countries that gained the most new users in February, one can see that those near the top tend to have larger populations and lower Facebook penetration rates. That’s a worldwide trend we see. However, beyond Egypt, countries that have been experiencing unrest also show up near the top. Saudi Arabia gained the second most, with 419,000 new users in February — that’s a big 13.8% growth rate in a single month. Today it has 3.46 million users, or 13.6% of the 25.4 million population, and a 90.8% annual growth rate. Coincidentally or not, Saudi Arabia is ruled by an autocratic government that is facing new rounds of protests, like Egypt was last month. If Facebook is indeed an important factor in promoting revolutionary ideas, Saudi Arabia is in position to provide more evidence of that. And growing the third-most out of any country in the region? Pakistan, which gained nearly 234,000 new users to 3.89 million, or a still-tiny 2.3% of the country. Growth has been humming along at almost exactly a 100% annual rate. Given the low Facebook penetration rate, however, we doubt the site itself is a major factor in anything today (besides being a target for theocratic judgements, of course). Looking down the list, you can also see a number of other countries with major discontent appearing. Bahrain and Yemen are both smaller countries, but also grew by 10% and 16% by March 1st. ConclusionGiven that Facebook is used for widely varying purposes, from gaming to event planning to link sharing to much else, traffic levels on their own do not indicate that a country’s citizens are more likely to march in the streets. People may just want to stay home and play FarmVille all day, or share funny cat photos, or whatever. Meanwhile, protests are typically organized by a smaller group of leaders, often from universities or other intellectual circles. A few people could use Facebook to organize a country, without having much of the country on the site — as what appears to have happened in Egypt. And of course the diversity of governments and their relationships with their citizens further complicates how Facebook impacts each country. All in all there is no simple formula visible, where we could say if X number of users join Facebook then they are Y% more likely to revolt. However, given the current protests in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Yemen among other countries, more data is coming in and perhaps clear indicators will emerge. We’ll be covering this topic as events unfold. |
| Facebook Careers Postings: Finance, Games, Latin America, Dublin, Singapore and More Posted: 17 Mar 2011 10:30 AM PDT
Posts added this week on Facebook's Careers Page:
Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Facebook Hires and Departures: Marketing, IP, Singapore, Austin, Dublin and More Posted: 17 Mar 2011 09:25 AM PDT
New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:
Recent departures, per LinkedIn:
Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Groupon Signs Exclusively with AdParlor for Facebook Ads Posted: 17 Mar 2011 08:11 AM PDT
However, Facebook’s own upcoming local group buying coupon service Deals will have placement in the news feed, so Groupon’s ads will soon have to compete with a more centrally visible competitor. This could drive up the cost per acquisition for Groupon, which could lead it either advertise less or have to spend more with AdParlor to achieve the same conversion volume. Groupon has been advertising on Facebook and using Facebook Connect for over a year. Now, Groupon’s API will be connected to AdParlor’s Facebook Ads API tool, which allows the company to A/B test tens of thousands of ad variants and dynamically shift budgets and optimize bids for maximum return on investment. AdParlor has one of the most efficient and sophisticated tools for attaining conversions via Facebook ads.
By relying on AdParlor, Groupon can increase efficiency and concentrate on other parts of its business. Facebook’s location, interest, and demographic targeting is crucial to Groupon’s advertising strategy, so it needs to continue advertising there even as Facebook prepares to launch a competing daily deals coupon service. With Groupon and other daily deals providers relegated to the sidebar ad units and Facebook’s own Deals product front and center in the news feed. Therefore, the Facebook user base’s coupon needs might be met before users can notice Groupon’s ads. Finally, the deal with AdParlor could lead other advertisers to assess their own Facebook advertising efficiency, and consider signing with AdParlor or another Facebook Ads API service provider. |
When pressure from protesters helped bring down the Egyptian and Tunisian governments in recent months, Facebook was credited by many organizers and outside observers as being a key tool for the revolution.
Facebook added some interesting positions to its 
Facebook hired some positions in Palo Alto, Calif. and Austin, Texas this week, and also seems to have hired people in their Singapore and Dublin offices. Some of the more interesting positions now gone from Facebook’s Careers Page include a Global Product Marketing Manager of Facebook Platform job, a New York-based Partner Engineer, and an Austin-based Intellectual Property Principal of User Operations, indicating that those positions have been filled.
Groupon has signed an agreement to allow full service advertising services provider 
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