Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Page Admins Can Offer Pre-Paid Deals Directly With ThruSocial and FaceItPages
- With 44 of the Top 100 Pages Promoting Music, Relaunched “Music on Facebook” Page Shows Site’s Renewed Focus
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Frito-Lay, Snickers, American Express, Carnival Cruises and More
- Music, Page Tools, Photos, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Page Admins Can Offer Pre-Paid Deals Directly With ThruSocial and FaceItPages Posted: 02 May 2011 03:30 PM PDT Facebook Page administrators can offer their own pre-paid coupons without using Facebook Deals or centralized deal distributors such as Groupon thanks to new services from two companies: thruSocial, and FaceItPages. thrusocial boasts easy distribution to Facebook and Twitter, along with drag-and-drop Page tab app creation. FaceItPages’ ecommerce storefront app allows businesses to sell traditional merchandise as well as deals right from their Page, but has fewer distribution options. These tools types of tools, several of which exist already, allow businesses to avoid paying out up to 50% of the revenue they make off their deals to providers like Groupon, LivingSocial, and syndication partners for Facebook Deals such as Home Run. However, businesses lose the massive distribution power these third-parties provide, making tools like thruSocial and FaceItPages less helpful to Pages without a large existing fan base.
Social ecommerce has been heating up this year, with signs of great potential despite some contradictory reports. Facebook just launched its own pre-paid coupon service that competes with established players thanks to its preferred access to the site’s news feed and sidebar. Some third-party Page management tool and Ads API companies are now offering deals apps, including WildFire, North Social, and TBG Digital. Meanwhile, ecommerce storefront apps are rapidly proliferating, with the most prominent ones coming from Payvment and 8thBridge. ThruSocial and FaceItPages now join this pack, but hope to differentiate their tools by concentrating on assisting with distribution and presentation respectively. When businesses offer deals through popular deal distributors with big ad budgets and email lists, their coupons can reach millions. Using a tool means they have to handle distribution by themselves, usually meaning fewer sales. To offset this, thruSocial provides a Message and Promotion Center. Here, businesses can automatically create promotion campaigns with landing pages that live on Thrupons.com which are then automatically promoted in updates published by the app to the business’ Facebook Page and Twitter account. This isuseful for small businesses that don’t want to continually promote their deals manually.
In addition to deals, Page admins can use thruSocial’s suite of pre-made widgets for integrating things like PayPal, surveys, a contact form, and Facebook sharing. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create apps with a custom look and feel without any coding experience. The service’s free plan offers one thruSocial-branded custom tab and three widgets but no access to the promotion center. Premium plans ranging from $199 to $1100 a year allow additional capabilities including the Promotion Center, unlimited white-labeled tabs and widgets, and design consultation. FaceItPages’ Coupon app is delivered through a special ecommerce storefront template. Coupons can be installed as modules on custom Page tab apps created through the service’s app creator. There’s no drag-and-drop interface, though, so it’s harder to control presentation. There’s also no assistance with distributing the coupons past adding them as tabs, so FaceItPages clients will need to design and schedule their own promotional campaigns. The free tier of the service includes one FaceItPages-branded Page with limited functionality and up to five tabs. Premium tiers ranging from $96 to $1500 a year provide additional functionality, up to 50 Pages, and a white-labeled solution, but still only five tabs per Page.
Overall, FaceItPages is less flexible and has much worse distribution, but doesn’t require businesses to send users off-site to redeem deals. ThruSocial appears to be the better option for most businesses even if deals don’t live on their Pages, because its design flexibility and promotion options solve the main issue with forgoing an established deal distributor. Still, both of these tools will be of little use if a business doesn’t have a large, engaged following. It really depends on a business’ goal. If it is trying to make money, tools like these can help businesses keep all of a coupon’s revenues, but if the goal to raise awareness and jumpstart long-term business, the reach of a distributor like Groupon is essential. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 02 May 2011 11:51 AM PDT This morning Facebook revived its “Music on Facebook” Page that educates fans, musicians, and industry professionals on how to derive value from the social network. Facebook is posting updates to the Page after a gap in activity since its launch at the 2008 South By Southwest music festival. The relaunch indicates Facebook’s understanding of the artform’s importance to the site, evident from 44 of the 100 most popular Pages on Facebook being related to music, concerts driving usage of Places and photos, and the music industry spending more on Facebook advertising. It could also foreshadow an upcoming a deeper integration with Spotify to improve music sharing, and possibly streaming, through Facebook ahead of the service’s US launch.
Music has been a core part of Facebook since the site started. Many users listed several favorite bands as static interests in their profile. When Facebook transitioned these interests into Likes, musicians gained control of Pages with thousands or million of fans whom they could engage. Now, 6 of the 10 largest Pages belong to musicians, and the top 100 contains several music services, consumption channels and devices including iTunes, MTV, and the iPod. The value of the Facebook Platform was also proven early by music, with streaming and band profile app iLike becoming one of the most popular on the site reaching 1o million monthly active users before eventually being bought and allowed to stagnate by MySpace. Now, services such as RootMusic’s BandPage (now with over 100,000 bands and 22 million MAU), ReverbNation’s Band Profile, and FanBridge’s DamnTheRadio compete to provide musicians with Page tab applications that help them stream their music and sell concert tickets to fans. Music’s presence in social games is growing as well, with musicians appearing in prominent games, receiving their own branded games, and music becoming a virtual good to purchase. Despite music being a core way people connect, Facebook has never provided native music streaming tools the way MySpace does, though MP3s can be posted to and played through the news feed. With the relaunched Page, Facebook is looking to strengthen the connections between fans, musicians, and industry players such as venues and ticketing companies. It pushes fans to Like music-related Pages, write on their walls, tag them in status updates, and RSVP to Facebook Events for concerts. It explains how musicians and venues can promote themselves with Pages, Questions, Places, and ads and provides a walk-through of how musicians can connect their Facebook account with Twitter, which is also a popular fan engagement tool. The resources will encourage musicians to invest in their Facebook presence, helping to create value for users, increase engagement, and power Facebook ads by generating targetable connections.
Spotify has been struggling to secure deals with record labels that allow it to launch in the US. Though this speculation was not specifically prompted by the revived Page, if Spotify can reach these deals there the possibility that a partnership with Facebook could give it improved visibility, placement in the publisher, or even native functionality on musician Pages or the user profile. This would help Facebook fend off efforts to control music sharing by Amazon, Google (which has also considered a Spotify partnership), and Apple, keeping the fundamental avenue of sharing on Facebook where it can earn the site money and improve the user experience. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Frito-Lay, Snickers, American Express, Carnival Cruises and More Posted: 02 May 2011 10:14 AM PDT Campaigns used a variety of methods to engage fans and grow their Facebook Pages. PepsiCo's Frito-Lay combined a world record bid with free food, Snickers made a play on the popular Like button to promote its new candy bar, American Express Canada is asking fans to dream big about travel and there's more this week on our roundup of featured Facebook campaigns. 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.
PepsiCo's Frito-Lay Sets Guinness World Record on Facebook Goal: Page Growth, Engagement, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase Core Mechanic: Frito-Lay announced on Facebook its intention to vie for the "Most Fans on Facebook in 24 Hours" title in the book of Guinness World Records. Method: Frio-Lay promoted, then implemented a Guinness World Record attempt to gain the most Facebook fans in 24 hours on April 11. After adding 1,571,161 new Likes during that 24-hour period, and thus gaining the world record, the company wanted to thank its fans. Therefore, the company gave away 24,000 bags of chips (retail value $3.99 USD) starting on April 29 to fans who either already Liked the Page, or new fans who wanted to do so, and who also registered on a tab on the Page. This allowed the company to again capitalize on its Guinness record, gaining new fans and also appearing in the streams of 24,000 of its fans. Impact: The Page added more than 1.5 million Likes in 24 hours, then gave away 24,000 bags of Frito-Lay chips. To think of it another way, Frito-Lay appeared in the news feeds of 1.5 million people in a 24-hour period.
American Express Canada's Dream Travel ContestGoal: Page Growth, Engagement, Network Exposure, Product Purchase Core Mechanic: A sweepstakes app that asks users to submit photos of their travels in order to qualify to win a travel prize. Method: The sweepstakes is Like-gated, and users who want to participate must enter their information on the app, then submit a photo and description talking about their favorite travel moment, finally, they describe their dream travel experience. Users then get their networks to vote and share the image, and getting the most votes helps users to be eligible to win. Every time you vote, a story pops-up to be published to the stream, comment on the photos, and users can share photos to Twitter or the Facebook stream. The prize is $10,000 towards a user's "travel dream." Impact: Thus far the Votigo-powered sweepstakes has garnered about 500 entries, and the Page is up to 28,300 Likes. Yet, considering the contest has been going since April 6 and is wrapping up this week, you'd almost expect for there to be more entries, considering the number of fans of the Page. 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Music, Page Tools, Photos, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 02 May 2011 08:08 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
BandPage by RootMusic is growing by leaps and bounds, seeing a boost of 1.9 million MAU this week. It is similar to another music app, Band Profile: Profile Pages for Musicians, which grew by 533,100 MAU in that both apps allow bands to share their information on Facebook, and for fans to retrieve it.
Page administrator tools were on the list, too, three to be precise. iframe + Static FBML + Welcome Tab = iwipa grew by 1.1 million MAU, Welcome Tab for Pages by 568,600 MAU and Static HTML for Pages by 419,300 MAU. The apps allow for users to create welcome and landing tabs using different languages, such as HTML, iframe, javascript, Flash or also to display their social media content on these tabs.
A few photo apps were also on the list. 60 Photos grew by 1 million MAU and allows a user to click "nice" or "pass" on their friends' Facebook photos, posting a story to your friend's Wall with each answer. Then there was Top Friends Of Mine (Enhanced) which grew by 460,200 MAU, creating a photo ranking your friends based on comments/Likes, publishing a photo album and photo to your stream with a link to the app, also inviting you to tag your friends in the photo.
Finally there was Send Gift, with 1.8 million MAU; the app sends heart-shaped goods to your friends' Walls. The friend.ly Connect app grew by about 652,000 MAU. Finally, the Zoosk dating app grew by 630,100 MAU. The app is currently changing it up a bit, first creating a pop-up for users to Like the Zoosk Page, aggressively asking users to enter their full information into their profiles, also promoting Zoosk messenger and mobile apps. Check in later this week for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
Though Facebook hasn’t offered a structured native sharing system specifically for music, there are rumors that a deeper integration with European subscription-based music sharing service 
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