Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Celebrates the Like Button’s 1st Birthday By Showing Off Its Footprint
- Facebook’s iPhone and Android Apps Let You Find Friends From Your Phone Book, Grow the Site
- Facebook Climbs Toward 700 Million Users Worldwide, With Steady Growth in the US
- Facebook Careers Postings: Communications, Data Analyst, Recruiting, Communications and More
- Facebook Hires and Departures: Engineer, Recruiting, Mobile, Singapore, Dublin and More
| Facebook Celebrates the Like Button’s 1st Birthday By Showing Off Its Footprint Posted: 21 Apr 2011 03:10 PM PDT One year ago today at the f8 conference, Facebook released the Like button, its Open Graph social plugin for showing affinity for content on third-party websites. The company has now tells us that the site, and most frequently the Like button, have been added to many of the world’s largest sites according to comScore Media. These include all of the top 10 sports properties, 9 of the top 10 news/information properties, 9 of the top 10 entertainment properties, and 18 of the top 25 Comscore U.S. retail sites. Other stats about the button’s performance that Facebook has shared in the past include:
The plugin’s widespread integration helps Facebook in many ways. The Like button helps users share their affinity for things in the most streamlined way possible. Rather than have to click through a third-party designed Facebook sharing panel, such as the popular Add This, and manually assemble a story to share, Facebook’s Like button lets users share with one-click. If they choose, they can add a comment afterwords for more context. This streamlined flow seems to have performed better than Facebook’s old Share button which did much of the same but slower, leading Facebook to phase out the Share button. Most visibly, the Like button gets Facebook’s name and logo in front a huge audience, encouraging those without accounts to join. When clicked it produces content for the site and news feed, leading to increased engagement. The referral traffic generated by the buttons demonstrates the value of the site to brands, leading them to spend more to advertise their Pages. The Like Box, which allows sites to display a Like button for their Facebook Page, creates more connections to Pages that advertisers can target. This granular interest targeting allows Facebook to charge more and draw more spend. The plugin also entrenches Facebook, putting up barriers to entry for other social networks. In an effort to gain some of same advantages, Google recently introduced its similar +1 button. There’s also speculation about how the Like button is a beachhead that lays the groundwork for Facebook to one day launch an as-yet-unconfirmed Open Graph ad unit — one that would allow sites to target ads at their visitors the same way they can target users on Facebook.com. By priming sites for this Facebook ad network-style integration, it could ensure an explosive launch that could steal attention and business from Google’s AdSense. By indexing user preferences across the web, Facebook could also potentially use the button to power an expansion of its search capabilities.
Austin Haugen, a product manager for the Like button, tells us his team’s goal for the coming year is to continue experimenting with different designs of the buttons and the stories they publish to see which generate the most clicks and referral traffic. For example, earlier this month Facebook tested showing users previews of the stories a button would publish to increase transparency. Few could have foreseen Facebook’s rapid colonization of the internet via the Like button, but now it seems hard to imagine a time before it. The Like button and Facebook’s other social plugins have forced websites to radically rethink their social strategy. If sites want access to Facebook’s enormous user base, they need to think of social as a key part of design and functionality, rather than something grafted onto a finished product. For access to our series on how to best implement the Like button on your website or social game, including the full versions of our Like Button Style Guide, walk-through of Open Graph meta tags, and Like Button Placement Guide, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s industry leading resource for marketing and advertising on Facebook. |
| Facebook’s iPhone and Android Apps Let You Find Friends From Your Phone Book, Grow the Site Posted: 21 Apr 2011 01:38 PM PDT Facebook for iPhone 3.4.1 released yesterday and Facebook for Android 1.5.3 released Monday both now allows users to “Find Friends” from their device’s contacts list and send them friend requests or invites to the site. This will help Facebook gain more users and create more connections between its existing users, increasing their loyalty and engagement. The updates also prompts users to add their phone number to their profile if they haven’t already, and Facebook for Android users can now tag friends in status updates. The iPhone update builds on the recently released version 3.4 which added Event checkins, a Places map, and started pulling the news feed from m.facebook.com. The Android update follows 1.5.2, which added photo uploading to Groups and walls, and better landscape mode viewing.
Facebook’s Find Friends feature has been a staple of the website’s home page for years. When users import their contacts from their email provider, they’re shown a list of non-friends they can send requests or invites to join Facebook to. Facebook also uses the data to power friend suggestions for both the person who uploaded the contacts and the contacts on the list. While a fundamental part of to site’s growth and loyalty strategy, Facebook has also had to respond to German privacy concerns about the feature with changes. Users can access Find Friends in Facebook for iPhone by clicking the Friends icon on the home screen, and then the arrow button in the top right corner. The app will then scan the device’s contacts list for phone numbers and email addresses that match other Facebook users who can be sent friend requests “Add” buttons next to each and an “Add All” button at the top. Then the flow reveals the device’s contacts that aren’t associated with a Facebook account that can similarly be sent invites to the site individually or all at once.
The Find Friends interface states that Facebook stores contacts, uses them for friend suggestions, and explains how to manage uploaded contacts in Account -> Edit Friends – > Invite Friends -> Manage Invites and Contacts. However, contacts from a user’s phone don’t seem to appear here after using the mobile Find Friends feature, so it’s unclear how they’re being used and whether users can remove them, which could stir more privacy concerns. While relatively buried in the apps compared to its prominence on Facebook.com, Find Friends for iPhone lets Facebook tap into extraordinarily valuable data — a user’s list of phone numbers. Having stored someone’s number may be a better indicator of friendship than having emailed them, so these mobile iterations of Find Friends might help Facebook make more accurate friend suggestions than the web version. These Facebook native mobile apps don’t allow users to edit their profiles, but the new updates can generate a special prompt asking users to add their phone number to their profile. The prompt appears to those who haven’t added their number via the web interface. The prompt explains “When your number is on your profile, friends can use Facebook to call you. Only friends will see it.”
By encouraging users to add their phone numbers, Facebook is looking to become a sort of cloud-phonebook. Being able to look up a Facebook friend’s number online or use the instant call or sms functions on the mobile apps significantly increases Facebook’s utility, and therefore engagement. The prompt’s language is designed to calm fears about privacy and make it seem natural and helpful to add one’s number. Rather than just translate features from the web interface to the native apps, these Facebook for iPhone and Android update take advantage of the unique data users store on their phones. The addition of Find Friends to the smartphone apps will help augment Facebook’s mobile-centric developing world growth strategy. With daily active user counts of 39.5 million on Facebook for iPhone, and 23.7 million on Facebook for Android, the updates will draw new users in its core markets where these smartphones are popular, and make sure these users have plenty of friends to interact with. |
| Facebook Climbs Toward 700 Million Users Worldwide, With Steady Growth in the US Posted: 21 Apr 2011 10:05 AM PDT Discrepancies among third party measurement services partially obscure what still looks like a steady growth rate for Facebook in the US and around the world. According to the data we track in our Inside Facebook Gold service, Facebook grew by 21.5 million new users in March to reach 661.5 million monthly active users worldwide. That’s somewhat more than what comScore shows, rather less than what Google’s Ad Planner tool seems to show. We expect Facebook to reach 700 million monthly active users within a month or two, based on most measures. More data is available on the US. Here, we tracked Facebook growing by 2.78 million people to reach nearly 155 million monthly actives, the typical monthly amount we’ve been seeing lately, and which comScore mostly closely matches. The other services are all over the place. You can find last month’s version of this article here, which we reference below. The other trend to note from below is that Twitter had a healthy March in the US and around the world.
Facebook’s most direct current competitors in the US are Twitter and MySpace. After a slight loss in February, Twitter grew by nearly 4 million users to reach 31 million uniques. Apparently reversing many months of falls, MySpace grew a couple million to reach 39.4 million uniques. In contrast to those last numbers, Facebook fell from 153 million unique visitors in January to less than 151 million in February then rose back by nearly 3 million to almost reach 153 million according to comScore. Meanwhile, MySpace fell by around one and a half million to end at 36.1 million and Twitter rose by almost 2.5 million to 25.6 million uniques.
The stats company also provides us with worldwide numbers. After staying almost flat in February, Facebook continued what has been pretty typical growth of 15 million or so new worldwide users every month, gaining 16.2 million in March to reach 693 million. MySpace stopped falling, at 62.3 million. Twitter recovered from a slight February drop by growing more than Facebook — 17.2 million more monthly unique visitors worldwide. It now has almost 130 million total.
The graph showing daily active users climbing above 300 million today is the same as what we saw more than a month ago. However, Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner service shows Facebook with an extremely high 860 million monthly active users, fully 270 million above what we previously recorded. We’re not sure what accounted for the difference.
Finally, we have Quantcast’s US rankings for February available. Facebook fell from 137 million to 136 million, MySpace continued dropping — by around 3.5 million to 24.2 million uniques — and Twitter continued a healthy climb, by 2 million up to a shockingly high 90 million uniques.
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| Facebook Careers Postings: Communications, Data Analyst, Recruiting, Communications and More Posted: 21 Apr 2011 08:31 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: Engineer, Recruiting, Mobile, Singapore, Dublin and More Posted: 21 Apr 2011 08:05 AM PDT
New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:
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. |
Facebook gained nearly 7 million new users in the US in March, following an almost imperceptible increase in February. It now has nearly 141 million monthly unique visitors. Compete also appears to have made some revisions to its numbers from recent months, as well — roughly a 6 million increase for each recent month. For example, the last time we looked at a cross-section of third-party data about Facebook traffic, we see tracked 127.5 million in January — today, January is showing 133.7 million in Compete’s graphing tool.
Facebook added a few job listings for its recruiting team to the 
Facebook seems as though it filled several recruiting positions this week, as the job listing disappeared from the | You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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