Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Asks Admins to Confirm Their Page Categories, Perhaps to Prep for Category Ad Targeting
- Following Problems with Profile to Business Page Migrations, Facebook Introduces Appeals Process
- Facebook Promotes Group Buying Feature Deals With Home Page Ads and Emails
- Highlights This Week From the Inside Network Job Board: Spooky Cool Labs, Buffalo Studios, Acquinity Interactive, & More
- The Facebook Like Button Placement Guide for Websites
- Buddy Media Report on Facebook Page Posts: Shorter Is Better, but Avoid URL Shorteners
- Badoo, Phrases, Video, Cars, Books and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
| Facebook Asks Admins to Confirm Their Page Categories, Perhaps to Prep for Category Ad Targeting Posted: 07 Apr 2011 07:44 AM PDT Some Facebook admins are seeing a prompt at the top of their Pages asking them to “Confirm Your Page Category”. The alert continues, explaining “Your Page’s category is now featured at the top of your page. Please check it for accuracy.” This is even though categories have been visible at the tops of Pages since Febraury. As well as helping Pages to properly identify themselves to users, the request could help generate the data necessary to roll out category targeting to Facebook’s ad tool.
Category labels help users quickly determine what a Page represents, even if they’ve never heard of the particular brand, person, idea, or activity the Page represents. This information can be important to making users feel comfortable enough to Like the Page. Still, there may be additional motives behind this forward method of communicating with Page admins. Earlier this month, Facebook ran a limited test of a new interest targeting interface for its self-serve ad tool. Rather than allowing advertisers to select specific Pages whose audiences they wanted to target, such as the Page of the Green Bay Packers football team, they could instead target broad categories and sub-categories, such as sports, or football. This could allow novice advertisers to easily create somewhat targeted ads, but disempowered experienced advertisers who were willing to handle the complexity of a more granular targeting system. Some advertisers who were forced to use the test interface complained, but if category targeting was added as an additional option rather than a replacement for specific interest targeting, it could prove useful to advertisers and earn Facebook money. For instance, shopping sites might pay more to target users who Like any Page in the shopping/retail category, because those users might be more likely to convert.
Asking Pages to provide more information about themselves to improve ad targeting would align with Facebook’s efforts to coax more biographical data out of users through the December 2010 profile redesign, and the “Which City Do You Live In?” sidebar module. While this data helps Pages represent themselves accurately, Facebook may have been more subtle about encouraging category accuracy if there wasn’t a more direct positive outcome for the site. [Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Following Problems with Profile to Business Page Migrations, Facebook Introduces Appeals Process Posted: 06 Apr 2011 04:59 PM PDT Last week, Facebook released a tool allowing users who had created a personal profile for a business venture to convert that profile into a Page and change their friends into fans. However, some users didn’t fully understand the consequences of conversion while others had their profile deleted but no new Page created due to a technical issue. To help repair the damages from these issues, Facebook has created a Profile to Business Page Migration Appeal that users can fill out to apply to have the conversion reversed and their profile restored.
This quick answer to complaints and horror stories should help Facebook mitigate the backlash stemming from its troubled attempt to provide the conversion tool users had requested for years. Text on the appeal page explains:
Though this says the appeals process is for accidental conversions, users whose conversions were interrupted and never finished, possibly due a severe strain on the Facebook API at the time, may also be eligible for a conversion reversal. Facebook temporarily disabled the feature over the weekend while the API issue was being fixed While Facebook clearly explained how the process worked in a warning on the tool and a series of Help Center article, we received reports of people assuming they could reverse the conversion themselves, or that their new business account would have the same capabilities as a standard profile. Some other unforseen issues, such as the inability to re-register with any email addresses or mobile phone numbers connected to a user’s old profile, may have led some users to wish they could reverse the conversion.
Facebook has been working to erase any perception that it doesn’t care about users — a sentiment that developed during several crises around changes to its privacy controls and before that Beacon, which syndicated user behavior offsite to the news feed. It has since become more receptive to concerns, adding a requested unmerge option to merged Pages/Places, returning the Most Recent reverse-chronological feed to Page walls, and suspending the ability of applications to request user phone numbers and home addresses. The Profile to Business Page Migration Appeal process is another example of Facebook’s efforts to keep users, and especially Page admins who buy ads purchases, happy with the social network. Rather than stifle innovation, Facebook has chosen a riskier but ultimately more progressive stance of iterating quickly and occasionally making mistakes, but hurrying to fix them when necessary. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Promotes Group Buying Feature Deals With Home Page Ads and Emails Posted: 06 Apr 2011 03:01 PM PDT Facebook stepped up its marketing efforts recently for its new group-buying feature Deals. Users have seen home page ads asking them to invite their friends to subscribe to news feed and email notifications about Deals. Meanwhile, Page admins have received location-customized emails from Facebook explaining that Deals could help them acquire more customers in their city. Facebook needs to build large subscriber and provider-bases to prime the service for an explosive formal launch.
On March 15th, Facebook soft-launched Deals, showing news feed stories asking users to sign up to hear about local pre-paid group experiences they could have with friends. The service, which lets users purchase packages such as a luxury winery tour for $50, uses the same name previously reserved for Facebook’s location-based Places checkin rewards system, now call Checkin Deals. By serving updates directly to the news feed, Facebook Deals has an advantage over Groupon, LivingSocial, and other daily deals providers who spend millions on Facebook ads in order to collect email sign ups and alert users to new offers. But Facebook is late to join the race and needs to build a subscriber-base from zero. In contrast, Groupon said it expected to have over 25 million subscribers by the end of 2010, and some sources say it has as many as 40 million worldwide.
Luckily, Facebook has a captive audience of over 500 million users to draw from, as well as control over the communication channels that reach them. Facebook can serve ads encouraging sign-ups, like the one shown above, in unused premium ad inventory on its home page. It can also manipulate its news feed algorithm EdgeRank to give stories about friends signing up for Deals high visibility in the feed in order to drive more subscriptions — something it appears to already be doing.
Meanwhile, Facebook needs to register as many local business as possible in the five launch cities so it can pick and choose which Deals to serve. If it can launch the service with highly compelling, valuable social Deals that users are eager to buy and share with friends, user signups and merchants will come flooding in and the service will be a success. However, if first the Deals are insignificant discounts on boring experiences, users and business alike could write off the service. The marketing emails Facebook sent out include localized information. For instance, since I’m an admin of Pages registered in San Francisco, the email I received stated “Try Deals and get more customers faster than ever. In San Francisco alone, you could reach 3,500,000 people on Facebook.” It also touted the service’s lack of upfront costs, its ability to build loyalty, and that Facebook will assist with marketing efforts.
Facebook is preemptively addressing the chicken-and-egg problem of whether subscribers or providers come first by aggressively recruiting both. There’s no official launch date for Deals, so Facebook can hold off until it has the critical mass necessary to seriously challenged the established players in the group buying market. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 06 Apr 2011 12:02 PM PDT The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem. Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Spooky Cool Labs, Buffalo Studios, Acquinity Interactive, Ubisoft, Daglow Entertainment, and Row Sham Bow Inc.
Daglow Entertainment Row Sham Bow, Inc. Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Facebook Like Button Placement Guide for Websites Posted: 06 Apr 2011 10:38 AM PDT
The following is an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, brand, or website using Facebook. The full version of this article, available through a Facebook Marketing Bible subscription, includes an explanation of which Like buttons have publishing capabilities, strategies for adding Like buttons to brand websites, social games, and web apps, and more content types that news, shopping, and review sites can add Like buttons to. Facebook’s Like button can help a variety of sites forge communication channels with their visitors and generate referral traffic from Facebook. We’ve previously published a Like button style guide for choosing between the various Like button formats, and a walk-through of how to pick the Open Graph meta tags that will maximize the lifetime value of your Like buttons. In the third installment of this series on using the Like button, we’ll look at examples of what kinds of content sites can add Like buttons to and what types of posts to publish to those who click these buttons. Where Websites Can Add Like ButtonsNews Sites and Blogs
Review Sites
Shopping Sites
Access the full Like button placement guide for websites containing strategies for more types a sites, a review of the functionalities of different Like buttons, and a walk-through of how to publish to Like buttons, as well as the other parts of our series on the Like button in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network's industry leading resource for marketing and advertising on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Buddy Media Report on Facebook Page Posts: Shorter Is Better, but Avoid URL Shorteners Posted: 06 Apr 2011 08:51 AM PDT Page management company Buddy Media has released a study based on 200 of its clients illustrating best practices for Facebook Pages looking to increase their fan base’s engagement — the volume of Likes and comments their posts receive. Key findings include: posts of 80 characters or less receive 27% more engagement, posts on Thursdays see the most engagement across industries, and posts including a full-length URL bring in three times as much engagement as posts using URL shorteners such as bit.ly.
The report also includes insights about which hours of the day have the most engagement, which weekdays have the highest engagement rates for different industries such as retail or media, and what call-to-action keywords receive the most engagement. Strategies for Effective Facebook Wall Posts: A Statistical Review can help admins of any sized Page to increase the loyalty, brand affinity, and click through rates of their fans. Buddy Media is one of the largest Page management companies, hosting over 600 clients including seven of the top ten global advertisers, more than 150 employees, and $38.3 million in funding. This past year, the company improved multi-Page and team-based management through its system, and released a training program for its tools called Buddy Media University. The findings of this study were culled from Page posts made between January 30th and February 12th 2011 by 200 Buddy Media clients industries including finance, food and beverage, media, retail, automotive, sports, and travel. One finding that contradicts common sense is that engagement is highest at 4am, 7am, and 11pm, but that brands post the most during business hours. By posting early in the morning, late in the evening, or in the middle of the night, brands can take advantage of these odd usage trends.
While in aggregate, Thursday was the best day to post, there is a great deal of variance within different industries. For Pages of media publishers, engagement soars on Saturdays and Sundays, but plummets on Mondays. Instead of competing with the swell of media updates on Monday, media Pages will see higher engagement if they post on the weekends when users are primed to consume content.
Information about what weekdays have the highest engagement rates for industries including food and beverages, and entertainment, or what keywords lead to the most participation in contests can be found in the full report, which can be downloaded in exchange for an email address. Such high quality data should generate interest from brands looking for a Page management company that can help implement these strategies for them, drawing more clients to Buddy Media. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Badoo, Phrases, Video, Cars, Books and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU Posted: 06 Apr 2011 07:54 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
The Phrases apps were big on our list this week, but the ones in English are not currently available in the U.S. Frases Diarias (Daily Phrases) grew primarily in Mexico by 455,400 DAU to top our list this week. Phrases saw 214,400 DAU while Phrases (new) grew by 76,100 DAU this week; neither one is available in the U.S.
Two brain analysis apps were on the list. The Thai การวิเคราะห์สมอง grew by 398,500 DAU and the Chinese 大腦分析 by 382,400; the apps' virality appears due to photo tagging and feed story generation. Video apps were on the list, too, of course. Profiline Bakanlar ? saw 314,200 DAU this week, Video Galerisi added 149,400 DAU, Persian's Daily 98,700 DAU and Yeni Videolar 78,600. Most of these apps generate feed stories by allowing users to share, Like or view videos, generating stories upon viewing. Yeni Videolar publishes a feed story automatically every time you watch a video while Persian's Daily automatically takes a user to the invite page upon install. Then there was a mixed bag of other apps.
Windows Live Messenger, a Connect app, grew by 162,700 DAU. Friend Buzz, a Q&A quiz app with your Facebook friends, by 150,200. WhoIsNear? is an app that grew by 101,700 that is a combination of location and chat service. Badoo the dating app grew by 97,700 DAU, Book List Challenges — which allows users to rate themselves on different book lists — by 82,700 and Auto Club grew by 81,300 DAU mostly in India by allowing users to select the cars they like the most, generating a feed story, and also by automatically posting different cars to a user's Wall daily. HTC Sense, the Android app, grew by 79,700 DAU mostly in the U.S. Daily Horoscope grew almost entirely in Turkey with 77,500 DAU; the app includes daily Wall posts and prominent friend invites. Luck Daily! saw 75,700 DAU this week; the app gives a daily "luck score," posting to your Wall. |
As part of the 
When asking questions of fans, updates including the words “where”, “when” or “would” have much higher engagement than updates including “why” or “what”. This may be because the latter words may be perceived as challenging or intrusive, and users aren’t willing to take the time to respond. Posts including a question mark at the end had 15% higher engagement.
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