Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Wildfire, Vitrue, BranchOut, Brighter Option and More
- The Facebook Marketing Bible April 2011 Edition Is Now Available
- Platform Update: Event API Calls Improved, Publishing Video, Receiving Documentation Updates
- “Friends in [City]” Facebook Sidebar Module Engages Travelers With Local Friends
- Work For Us Page Apps Suggests Relevant Facebook Friends To Refer Job Openings To
- Facebook’s New iPhone App Adds Map View of Friends’ Locations, Check-Ins For Events
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Expedia, IKEA, The Weather Channel and J-Lo
- Fan Accelerator by PowerReviews Helps Ecommerce Sites Leverage the Like Button
- Badoo, LivingSocial, Phrases, Books and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
| New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Wildfire, Vitrue, BranchOut, Brighter Option and More Posted: 05 Apr 2011 07:42 AM PDT | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Facebook Marketing Bible April 2011 Edition Is Now Available Posted: 04 Apr 2011 09:00 PM PDT
The April 2011 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible: The Comprehensive Guide to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook is now available. The Facebook Marketing Bible has enabled thousands of marketers, social application developers, publishers, and entrepreneurs to navigate and get the most out of the increasingly sophisticated marketing opportunities on Facebook. The web edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible is comprised of detailed resource pages, comprehensive how-to guides, and case studies analyzing today’s most successful marketing and advertising campaigns on Facebook.
Now that Facebook has crossed the 600 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience through marketing on Facebook. The April 2011 edition includes updates on the following topics:
Learn more about the April 2011 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com. Table of Contents excerpted from the full April 2011 EditionBuilding Your Brand through Facebook Pages
Designing Your Facebook Page
Communicating Through Your Facebook Page
More Ways to Promote Your Facebook Page
Advanced Strategies for Facebook Pages
The Facebook Open Graph for Marketers and Content Publishers
More Ways to Market on Facebook: Questions, Places, and Deals
Advertising on Facebook
Ads Targeting on Facebook
Tools and How-Tos for Marketers
Policies, Privacy, and Guidelines to Watch
Join the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Platform Update: Event API Calls Improved, Publishing Video, Receiving Documentation Updates Posted: 04 Apr 2011 06:56 PM PDT The latest Platform Update to the Facebook Developer’s blog announced a change to how data about Facebook Events is accessed through the Graph API that should improve the performance of Event data-dependent apps. It also announced that domains no longer need to be on a whitelist in order to publish video to the news feed, and explained how developers can now use the Like button to receive updates about documentation changes. Currently, when developers query the event_member FQL table via the Graph API, all of a user’s Facebook Events are returned, taxing the API and causing apps that require this type of data to run slowly. To fix this issue, starting May 3rd, 2011, calls for a user’s events will only return those from the last two weeks. The change will also impact calls to https://graph.facebook.com/[USER ID]/events. The update should be especially helpful for developers of real-time Event recommendation apps, such as The Hotlist, as their users will be less likely bounce while enduring long loading times. For developers who want older Event data, or data in a specific range, Facebook will release a new SELECT eid from event_member where uid=260300016 and start_time > 1270098000 To retrieve all of a user’s Events, as was the default before, developers can specify start_time > 0
Previously, developers who wanted to publish video content to the news feed had to submit an application and wait for their domain to be added to Facebook’s video publishing whitelist. Facebook no longer requires this, opening video publishing to all domains. Developer now merely need to append the Open Graph tag
Developers looking to keep up-to-date with specific pieces of Facebook’s documentation can now click the Like button on those pages. They’ll then receive news feed updates whenever that documentation Page is significantly updated.
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| “Friends in [City]” Facebook Sidebar Module Engages Travelers With Local Friends Posted: 04 Apr 2011 05:27 PM PDT Facebook recently began showing a “Friends in [City]” sidebar module to users who are visiting a location other than the current city listed in their profile. It suggests friends to message who live near a user’s temporary location. The module may be designed to incite conversations or meetups between usually distant friends. By highlighting this value proposition of Facebook, the site can prove to users why its important to maintain a large friend network, helping Facebook to grow.
Facebook has been testing different sidebar modules for years, looking for ones that receive higher-than-average click through rates or that further specific goals of the social network. Most recently, its tested Discover New Games, Memorable Stories, and What City Do You Live In?, which allowed users to instantly update the current city field of their profile — information that is crucial to accurately targeting users with advertisements. This newly tested module appears to be targeted at users who’s current IP address located them somewhere far from their usual place of login. The module reads “Friends in [City]” where [City] is a nearby location where some of a user’s friends live. For instance, in the example above the module is titled “Friends in Vienna, Austria” and is followed by the profile pictures and names of two friends accompanied by the test “lives in Vienna, Austria” and “Send him/her a message”. If a user from California was traveling abroad in Austria, they might see the module, reminding them which of their friends live in the country, and making it easy to contact them. This could lead to a meet up and an introduction to more locals who could eventually become the user’s Facebook friends as well. With users developing social graphs that span across the globe, surfacing acquaintances who are nearby could be very useful. Some criticize Facebook for co-opting the word “friend” and repurposing it to mean anyone you’ve had a social interaction with. The Friends in [City] module could help demonstrate the worth of these weak ties, reminding travelers that someone with knowledge of the local scene is just a click away. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Work For Us Page Apps Suggests Relevant Facebook Friends To Refer Job Openings To Posted: 04 Apr 2011 04:09 PM PDT Today, Work4 Labs adds new features to “Work For Us”, its recruiting app that can be installed on Facebook Pages. Smart Share helps suggests friends to recommend jobs to based on their Facebook profiles, locations, work histories and Likes. Smart Sort ranks job openings by relevance based on the same signals of a viewer’s own profile. Work4Labs has also strengthened its integration with the Facebook Ads API, allowing recruiters to easily buy and track ads for their job listings. Jobs apps have yet to become a big business on Facebook, and the few that have emerged lately act as user-facing destinations and aggregators. However, the innovative uses of data and APIs and its Page tab app style make WorkForUs the best tool for brands and large companies looking to find job candidates through Facebook — and one worth paying for.
With one in three hires in US stemming from referrals, companies frequently urge, or even incentivize their employees to distribute job openings to their social networks. However, choosing what friends would find an opening relevant can be too tedious for employees to undertake consistently. The new Work For Us feature Smart Share streamlines and increases the accuracy of referrals. This could lead Work4 Labs’ clients to make Smart Share a regular duty of their employees. When users visit a job opening on a Facebook Page’s Work For Us tab application, a “Friends Matching this Job” panel will appear at the bottom. If the user has granted Work For Us extended permissions, they’ll see friends who live in the job’s city, have held similar jobs in the past, that have attained the pre-requisite level of education, or who have Likes that align with the job. They can click a “Share” button to quickly tell one of those friends about the opening.
The other new feature, Smart Sort, improves the Work For Us job browsing experience. Visitors who have granted the app permissions will see jobs ranked by relevance according to same signals used in Smart Share. For companies with dozens or even hundreds of job openings, Smart Sort points top candidates to attractive jobs before they tune out and reduces the volume of unqualified applications. Users can also connect their LinkedIn account to Work For Us, allowing the app to suggest contacts from the user’s professional network who they might want to refer, and provide more accurate job matches while browsing.
Work4 Labs has also improved its Ads API integration that allows recruiters to promote their listings with ads. The company has invested in the algorithms that automatically handle the ad Creative, targeting, and bid management. This lets recruiters run efficient, effective ad campaigns without being advertising experts in exchange for 10% markup on ad spend.
Ripe For InvestmentFounded in early 2010, Work4 Lab began with the mission of helping companies take advantage of their efforts to grow their Facebook Page Like count to gather applications from high-quality candidates. The app has come a long way since its first iterations that basically added Like buttons buttons to job listings. The 10-employee San Francisco-headquartered company has since grown to serve 6000 clients including multinationals such as Accenture, L’Oreal, and Citigroup. Companies such as Pursuit (recently acquired by Facebook), BranchOut, and Simply Hired have made standalone apps where some recruiting companies may be willing to pay for a presence. But by creating company-specific Page apps that tap into the Ads API and live where companies are already pushing traffic, Work4 Labs has built the most monetizable Facebook recruiting solution yet. Founder Stéphane Le Viet tells us that the December 2010 Facebook profile redesign has led users to add much more biographical data to their profiles (just as we predicted). This data powers the new Work For Us recommendation engines that could redefine how companies solicit referrals. Work4 Labs hasn’t taken any funding to date, but Le Viet tells us it is looking to close “a big round soon”. With today’s updates tackling some of the most pressing needs of recruiters, finding investors shouldn’t be difficult. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s New iPhone App Adds Map View of Friends’ Locations, Check-Ins For Events Posted: 04 Apr 2011 02:40 PM PDT
Facebook also changed the user interface for notifications, putting bigger profile pictures in, and added the ability to unfriend people from the iPhone app. Overall, the changes are pretty modest. The map view will also help people better visualize how close their friends are, which might help if they’re in unfamiliar or new cities (see right). By allowing users to check-in to Events, Facebook may be able to cross-promote the two features, inspiring users to RSVP and check in more often. As you can see below, users can not only see Nearby Places, but they can also browse Nearby Events. This means users will probably need to exercise a bit more care around making their events private. > Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Expedia, IKEA, The Weather Channel and J-Lo Posted: 04 Apr 2011 11:30 AM PDT Our featured Facebook campaigns this week employed a variety of tactics to draw Likes, customers and generate news feed items. Expedia created a detailed vacation contest application to draw in users, IKEA in the United Kingdom is uses a battle of the sexes voting system in its new campaign, The Weather Channel is offering a vacation in exchange for photo submissions, and Jennifer Lopez is asking for Likes to release her songs on iTunes ahead of schedule. We've excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week's coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of dozens of other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.
Expedia's FriendTripsGoal: Engagement, Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Page Growth Core Mechanic: An interactive application allowing users to enter to win one of 13 paid vacations around the world. Game: The game consists of users selecting from thirteen "FriendTrips" once they’ve Liked the Expedia Page. Users have to enter their contact information and then may invite 5 friends to join them on the trip. The app publishes feed stories to each friend invited, and also publishes a story when you finish inviting your friends on the trip. Method: The app encourages virality by incentivizing people to invite Facebook friends or get their friends to participate somehow in the app, as well as by giving out 4 $250 cash prizes a day for users who interact with the app, either by rating/adding photos or stories. Impact: Since since up to six feed stories are generated per user, and the promotion is Like-gated, the Expedia Page has grown significantly in recent days. A New York Times story from March 31 showed the Page's Likes at just under 130,000; today that number was at 153,300 and growing. IKEA UK's Peace, Love and StorageGoal: Product Purchase, Engagement, Page Growth, Network Exposure Core Mechanic: Through a Facebook-centric campaign, IKEA in the UK is trying to get consumers to talk about whether men or women are "messier," and then suggest which of their products can help these consumers remedy that problem. Method: A Facebook application asks users to vote whether men or women are messier. After giving permission, the app publishes the vote to the user’s wall, shows an interactive media interface displaying what other Facebook users are saying about who is messier, and a gallery of IKEA products to help alleviate that messiness. According to a company press release, the campaign allows users to join a debate on Facebook or Mumsnet, and the TV ad for IKEA points back to the Facebook application. Impact: The IKEA UK Page currently has just under 1,000 Likes, so there's potential for lots of growth. Because the "battle of the sexes" topic is a fun one that people are likely to talk about anyway — especially when it comes to domestic cleanliness — the campaign effectively draws engagement.
How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of dozens of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Fan Accelerator by PowerReviews Helps Ecommerce Sites Leverage the Like Button Posted: 04 Apr 2011 10:46 AM PDT
Ecommerce solutions provider PowerReviews today releases a new feature of its OnSite Suite that allows users submitting product reviews through the websites of its clients’ to easily Like the site’s Facebook Page. By adding a Like Button to the product review flow, ecommerce merchants can capture their most engaged customers as fans. The PowerReviews OnSite Suite lets ecommerce sites set up a Facebook integration for registration, login, user profiles, commenting, and news feed distribution. Founded in 2006, the San Francisco-based company has 90 employees, has received $27 million in funding, and currently serves over 30 clients with the OnSite Suite including Callaway Golf, Diapers.com, ECCO, UGGs, and Advanced Auto Parts.
While many buzzed-about new services such as Payvment, ShopTab, Beetailer and Zibaba focus on helping merchants bring their storefront within the Facebook canvas, fewer are designed to bring Facebook functionality back to established merchant websites. PowerReviews has to compete with BigCommerce, which offers a wide breadth of services, including some PowerReviews lacks including store design, hosting and security, shipping, and product syndication to marketplaces such as eBay. When users go to add a review to an ecommerce websites using the OnSite Suite, users are given the option to register via Facebook. Once they’ve granted the extended permissions, they can add information to their auto-populated site profile, submit reviews or comments using their authenticated identity, and publish these reviews and comments to Facebook. Fan Accelerator adds a Like button for the merchant’s site to the bottom of the review flow. Since these users have already taken the time to write a review, they’re probably willing to Like a Page as well, making it a high-conversion spot to place a Like button. The integration is a bit dry, though, and could benefit from allowing merchants to add copy or images explaining why the user should Like their Page. With so many options for implementing Like buttons, as we’ve detailed in our Like button style guide and walk-through of Open Graph meta tags, there may be a healthy market for turn-key Facebook integration solutions. If PowerReviews can produce data showing the significant positive impact on user generated content production and Facebook referral traffic from its OnSite Suite, a wide range of merchants might consider it as a conservative alternative, or a complement, to ecommerce within Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Badoo, LivingSocial, Phrases, Books and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 04 Apr 2011 07:57 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
Badoo grew by an impressive 4.6 million MAU this week, mostly in Mexico, France and Italy. The app has a fun and interactive Q&A interface that prompts users to answer fun questions of their Facebook friends, publishing a feed story with every answer. Are YOU Interested?, another dating app, grew by 995,000 MAU and Cupid saw 798,000MAU this week from the U.S., UK and India. Interesting to note that these dating apps are growing increasingly in non-U.S. markets.
Phrases, which is not available to U.S. users, grew by a huge 1 million MAU primarily in the Philippines, Italy, France and Mexico. Then there were a few other quiz apps. Quiz Taco, with 720,000 MAU this week, that incorporates a 25-question Q&A about your Facebook friends, promising a bonus to unlock answers about yourself. Quiz Taco also posts to the feed each time you answer a question, so virality potential is tremendous. Two Asian Analysis of Brain apps in Chinese and Thai were on the list. 大腦分析 with 526,000 MAU week and การวิเคราะห์สมอง with 375,900. These apps publish feed stories and create photo albums that tag users' friends.
Rock You's Birthday Cards saw 99,000 MAU this week, mostly in the U.S. The app allows users to send and share a card at the same time, lists all a users' friends with upcoming birthdays and allows them to send dozens of cards at once, generating a feed story each time. VidyoTV Video added 695,000 this week, generating news feed items upon install and allowing users to Like or share videos. Daily Horoscope grew by 676,000 MAU mostly in Turkey by generating daily horoscope Wall posts, and allowing 1-click sharing with your Facebook friends of your same astrological sign.
Friend.ly's Connect app grew by 639,000 MAU. LivingSocial 1-Day Deals saw 445,000 MAU this week and provides users with a free downloadable app and a chance at a $5 coupon. Finally, Book List Challenges, an app that encourages virality by posting books a user has read with encouraging language such as "Say something about this" and "How many have you read?" saw 392,000 MAU. |
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