Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Buddy Media’s Facebook Page Tool Update Includes Tab App and Hourly Analytics
- MXP4′s Boppler Games Opens Revenue Stream for Musicians By Letting Users Pay Facebook Credits to Play with Songs
- Facebook’s iPhone App Vaults to #1 on Suspected Ranking Algorithm Changes
- Facebook Adds “Friends Not on a List” View to the Friend Lists Editor
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Virgin Atlantic, Seattle’s Best Coffee, DreamWorks, Toyota and More
- Phrases, Dating, Pages, Video, Friends and Spanish on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
| Buddy Media’s Facebook Page Tool Update Includes Tab App and Hourly Analytics Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:23 PM PDT Today Buddy Media announced several improvements to the dashboard of its Page management tool called the Buddy Media Platform. Admins now have access to analytics on the average stream activity per hour, and links to Pages and tabs, more sorting options for tab applications, and comparisons of engagement between different date ranges. A new data storage architecture and navigation interface will allow clients to analyze and respond to performance changes more quickly. The additions indicate that Buddy Media’s clients, some of the world’s biggest brands, are looking to increasingly focus on a data-driven approach to content publishing.
The most innovative improvement is the ability to see average stream activity per post. This will help Buddy Media clients determine the optimal times to post updates. Buddy Media recently released a report with insights as to when different categories of Pages should post updates to receive the most Likes and comments. Now its clients will be able to draw their own conclusions. Clients can view the percentage growth of engagement on certain kinds of content types. Analytics on links to an admin’s Pages or Page tab apps are now aggregated into the home page dashboard. There also new display options for analytics on third-party tab applications, Facebook’s native tab apps such as the wall, and sapplets – Buddy Media’s own suite of tab apps. To assist admins who manage multiple Pages to see data from all clients side-by-side via the “all clients” drop-down menu. This will be especially useful for admins of brands that operate multiple local Pages for a single brand, or that have created Pages for each of their pieces of intellectual property. For those using a team to manage a Page or set of Pages, the new “Platform Activity” feature shows admins what other team members are working on. With brands seeking to show measurable return on their social media investment, Buddy Media is trying to position itself as the Page management tool with the deepest analytics. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 18 Apr 2011 04:20 PM PDT Social music app developer MXP4 is launching Boppler Games, a standalone Facebook canvas application in which users play a suite of games that revolve around licensed music. Boppler Games creates a new revenue stream for musicians by paying them royalties when users spend $1 in Facebook Credits to play with the full version of a song instead of a 60-second preview. If MXP4 can demonstrate that social games can be a significant money maker for musicians, it could convince major record labels to loosen their grip and become more willing to license their songs. Social game micropayments might then help save musicians and record labels that have been struggling to earn money off of recorded music since the widespread adoption of the MP3.
Previously, MXp4 only offered games that musicians could brand and install on their Pages as tab applications, but there were no in-game purchases. This meant that while useful for familiarizing fans with music and drawing users to a musician’s Page, MXP4′s games didn’t monetize directly, making musicians and labels weary to pay the developer or license their most popular songs to it. Licensed music has been available for listening in some games such as NightClub City, and developers such as CrowdStar have allowed musicians to sell digital downloads through their games. However, this appears to be the first time a prominent developer has allowed users to pay for music that can only be listened to in a game. This is important because these purchases are less likely to cannibalize download sales, and instead create a parallel revenue stream or even encourage download sales. Along with its existing game Pump It!, which focused on triggering sounds in a style of reminiscent of Guitar Hero and recently reach 1.3 million monthly active users, Mxp4 has added several new game types. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s iPhone App Vaults to #1 on Suspected Ranking Algorithm Changes Posted: 18 Apr 2011 01:53 PM PDT
While Apple hasn’t publicly confirmed the changes, the big beneficiary has been Facebook, which scaled the charts to number #1 after having mostly lingered between #10 and #20 for the last 16 months. Facebook’s iPhone app has been adding monthly active users at a clip of just over 600,000 users a week. It almost certainly has the largest daily active user base of any third-party app on the iOS platform with 39.5 million users opening it every day, according to AppData. Just for a frame of reference: if Apple is getting close to having cumulatively sold 200 million iOS devices as analysts estimate, the app gets opened on at least one out of every five iOS devices every day. Facebook for iPhone Statistics
While adding 600,000 users a week sounds like a lot, it’s actually small compared to what we’ve heard top-ranked free apps would pull in before the algorithm changes. The very top three places often represent more than 300,000 downloads a day while almost all of the top 10 slots usually do at least 100,000 a day, according to conversations we’ve had with developers who have held those ranks. All of this goes to suggest that Apple is favoring active usage more relative to downloads. There isn’t anything that Facebook appears to have done to independently boost its app; the company did release an update on April 4 — but that was about a week and half before its rise. Facebook is a remarkably sticky app with roughly 55 percent of its monthly active users opening up the app every day.
Here are some additional growth charts, showing a steady, linear trajectory for the app. Like we said above, we can’t identify any growth spikes on Facebook’s side, so it does appear to be a change on Apple’s side. Overall, the extra visibility will likely help convince users who haven’t already downloaded the app to install it. We’ll be watching AppData to see if the changes produce any measurable bump in the number of monthly actives the app is adding.
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| Facebook Adds “Friends Not on a List” View to the Friend Lists Editor Posted: 18 Apr 2011 10:56 AM PDT Some users can now select to see all of their “Friends Not on a List” as part of Facebook’s Friend Lists interface. The new addition helps users ensure that all their friends have been assigned to a list to which content can be hidden from or made visible. For instance, it allows users to see if all of their sensitive family or professional contacts have been added to a list from which they hide their photos or status updates. However, it’s not clear how many people might make use of the feature. Facebook has stated in the past that only 5% of users take advantage of Friend Lists, and it’s likely that an even smaller fraction of people list enough of their friends for this to be useful. The Friends Lists feature has been steadily hidden away from the home page — you used to be able to sort by all of your lists on the home page, for example — so now with this latest change Facebook has chosen to facilitate the power user experience rather than alter Friend Lists to be more appealing or readily available to a wider audience.
Users part of this test or who are first in this gradual rollout will see the “Friends Not on a List” option below their other lists in the Friend List editor’s left sidebar. Users cannot use it as a friend list though — it can’t be selected as a privacy distribution parameter for their shared content or profile. Despite their importance to allowing users to share a wider range of content by restricting its visibility to a subset of friends, most users have never made any friend lists. The feature is relatively buried, forcing users to click the somewhat awkwardly named “Edit Friends” option in the Account drop-down menu. Also, systematically categorizing hundreds of friends is an unnatural and laborious chore. Facebook tried to make this easier by providing suggestions of friends to add to existing lists by displaying one-click add buttons on friends who share characteristics with those already on the list. It also let users sort by characteristics such as school or workplace during the Friend List creation process. However, Facebook hasn’t announced any significant increase in the feature’s popularity since these additions were made. As an alternate option of restricting content visibility, Facebook released its Groups feature, but this notifies a user’s friends when they’re added, preventing it from being used to secretly hide sensitive information from a specific type of friend. “Friends Not on a List” is the first noteworthy change to the Friend Lists editor in six months, though Facebook did begin to allow users to display “Featured Friends” as part of the redesigned profile. It may be a signal of Facebook’s dedication to getting the feature right, even if only through incremental change. Otherwise, it may just be a token to the feature’s few users in advance of a major overhaul or removal of Friend Lists. Since those who have created Friend Lists may have invested a lot of time crafting them, Facebook may be wary of making bigger changes until it’s sure it has a solution to privacy. How to best empower users to efficiently manage different privacy settings for different friends is a complicated problem. But if Facebook can solve it, users will be able to share more content of varying sensitivity levels, such a emotional confessions, racy photos, or their location, but with fewer friends, and thereby mimic the way we share in real life more accurately. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Virgin Atlantic, Seattle’s Best Coffee, DreamWorks, Toyota and More Posted: 18 Apr 2011 08:56 AM PDT Celebrities, videos, check-ins, free food, cartoons and games were used in our featured Facebook campaigns this week, with varying results. The DNA Foundation incorporated celebrities, videos and pulling in a user's photo to be a part of the campaign. Virgin America compiled check-ins to promote a new airport terminal while Aveda used check-ins to raise money for Japan disaster relif. Seattle's Best Coffee gives out free coffee and laughs, Pretzel Crisps also gave out free food, and a Toyota vehicle became an in-game virtual good in Monopoly Millionaires. 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.
Virgin America's Terminal 2 Takeover LeaderboardGoal: Network Exposure, Engagement, Product Purchase Core Mechanic: A Facebook or Foursquare check-in leaderboard, Terminal 2 Takeover, at San Francisco International Airport's Terminal 2. Method: Essentially, the Context Optional app aggregates mobile check-ins on the T2 Takeover tab of Virgin America's Facebook Page. The leaderboard launched on April 9 and so far there are 101 check-ins on the tab. Users can check-in at several spots around Terminal 2 to win points, move up on the leaderboard and receive badges such as: Ground Crew, Flight Crew, Navigator, Co-Pilot and Captain. Impact: So far the check-ins number 101; the Page's total Likes passed 90,000.
DreamWorks Animation's "Kung Fu Panda 2" Fan ParadeGoal: Engagement, Network Exposure, Product Purchase, Page Growth Core Mechanic: A Facebook Connect application that pulls a users' photo and allows them to select an avatar in keeping with the "Kung Fu Panda 2" movie to participate in the "parade" to celebrate the movie's May 26 release. Method: The Connect application for “The Awesomest Parade Ever” pulls the users' photo, but also the photos of that user's friends. When the user's avatar starts the "parade" with other "Kung Fu Panda 2," their avatar leads and eventually avatars with the profile photos of a user's friends begin the parade as well. When a user spots a friend they want to bring into the app, they can click on their avatar and publish a "snapshot" to their friend's Wall, as though they were in a real parade. Impact: Overall this is a strong, innovative, intuitive viral mechanic in keeping with the theme of the "Kung Fu Panda 2" movie. 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Phrases, Dating, Pages, Video, Friends and Spanish on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 18 Apr 2011 07:47 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
Phrases was on the list in three of its incarnations this week. Phrases grew by 938,600 MAU, Frases Diarias by 433,200 MAU and Phrases (new) by 290,900 MAU. The apps are growing outside of the United States, such as in Mexico and Philippines, because neither Phrases nor Phrases (new) are available in the U.S. Frases Diarias is an app that allows users to select famous quotes to share to their stream.
Three dating apps were on the list, too. Cupid grew in the US, United Kingdom and India by 482,700 MAU. Are YOU Interested? grew in the same countries by 293,000 MAU. Zoosk grew mostly in the U.S. by 354,800 MAU. Cupid has incorporated some Q&A quiz questions generating feed stories to grow, Are YOU Interested? incorporates a yes/no rating functionality of other users' photos that publishes to the stream and Zoosk is among the most successful dating apps on Facebook. Facebook Page administrator tools were on our list, too. The iframe + Static FBML + Welcome Tab = iwipa app grew by 750,800 MAU and Welcome Tab for Pages grew by 305,700 MAU. Both apps allows Page admins to gather their social media content into a tab or welcome tab. Three Turkish apps were on our list, too. Videoloji grew by 316,300 MAU and Harika Videolar grew by 294,500 MAU; both allow users to Like, share and view videos. Send Gift is an app that users can use to send heart-shaped virtual goods to their friends' Walls, growing by 502,200 MAU this week.
Apps encouraging interaction with Facebook friends rounded out the list. There was Friend Buzz, which grew by 793,700 MAU by asking users raunchy questions about their friends and publishing feed stories with each answer. Then the friend.ly app, which grew by about 696,800 MAU. The newest app on our list, Mis buenos amigos, grew by about 298,000 MAU this month. The app grew mostly in Mexico and has three separate functions. First users can make photo montages with their friends' profile photos; afterwards users can publish a photo album with the photo, tagging their friends, as well as publishing it to their friends' Wall and also publishing a general feed story about using the app. The app also allows users to meet other app users and has a Q&A with simple questions about a user's friends, publishing stories to their Wall with each answer. |
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