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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Q&A: BranchOut Founder Rick Marini on How It Raised $18M for a Facebook Professional Network With 6,000 Daily Users

Posted: 11 May 2011 04:19 PM PDT

Professional social networking Facebook app and site BranchOut has raised an $18 million second funding round to grow its engineering and sales teams. Previously only available as a destination app, the company is also launching a Jobs tab app for Facebook Pages of companies looking to hire.

We spoke with BranchOut founder Rick Marini about the company’s product roadmap, and why he think Redpoint Ventures, Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Floodgate made a wise investment despite the app’s currently low traffic numbers.

When we first profiled BranchOut in August 2010, a month after its launch, the app had a promising and relatively unexplored idea — offer a Facebook-based professional network that lets users discover where their friends work. While it was fun, the app wasn’t focused on helping users and companies find each other, and forming BranchOut connections with one’s existing friend base seemed redundant.

BranchOut’s founder Rick Marini had initially bootstrapped the company with money he made from the sale of his earlier venture Tickle.com to Monster, and revenues from his previous Facebook app, SuperFan. By September, BranchOut had raised $6 million from Accel Partners.

Since then, the professional network and hiring application spaces on Facebook have grown competitive. Simply Hired created a job-seeker Facebook Connect destination site, and Identified recently launched a professional social network based on Facebook data that properly concentrates on allowing users to be discovered by recruiters and approach companies. Work4 Labs has improved its Work For Us page tab app with impressive relevancy algorithms that suggest users jobs they’re qualified for and friends they should recommend openings to.

Q&A

Inside Facebook: This new tab app lets Pages post full descriptions of their openings with links to share the postings and a button to apply by email. The app’s current iteration is very basic compared to Work For Us by Work4 Labs, though, which sorts lists of job openings and friends to suggest jobs to by relevancy. Could you explain the impetus for releasing the Page tab app and how it compares to existing solutions?

Rick Marini, Founder and CEO of BranchOut: The Jobs tab is the second in our line of enterprise products. The first was job postings on [BranchOut's destination app]. We were focused on the consumer side, but now we’re shifting gears towards enterprise. Companies told us “I don’t only want the jobs on BranchOut, I also want them on my Page.” We didn’t want to have a hole in our product suite, and since its release we’ve signed up Levi’s Groupon, Kiva, and charity: water. They can either pay us directly to have the jobs tab product, or they can pay a $99 posting fee on BranchOut and we give them the app for free. For volume we give them a discount that depends on the number of jobs they post.

The features you mentioned in Work For Us — all those things are in the works and will be available in BranchOut’s app within the next 30 days. We don’t see the tab as a major breakthrough, but it’s an important part of our suite. Work For Us is a service provider, and we are going to have a very similar service, but we have a community of professional networking folks which goes much deeper.

The third enterprise product is a subscription-based product for recruiters. It offers advanced communication and granularity of search akin to LinkedIn’s competing Pro product.

IF: Speaking of your community, though there is a lot of opportunity for professional networking on Facebook, your app only has 6,000 DAU right now. Do you think that warrants the $18 million in funding?

RM: We turned up our viral features in January and got up to 250,000 monthly active users. We eventually grew to about 500,000 MAU, but people were feeling like we were sending a lot of invites and lot of wall posts – it was feeling a little spammy. We’re building for the long-term so we self-imposted limits on wall posts and notifications. We knew it would bring down the numbers but we didn’t want that stigma of being spammy. We reset our user acquisition method to be driven by our core features — recommendations and badges.

I don’t think the consideration was around the size of the user base. It’s around leveraging Facebook — the biggest distribution method. We’re by far the largest professional social network on Facebook, we have the right core team, first mover advantage, and a great relationship with Facebook. Investors are looking for a long-term play here.

LinkedIn is a great company, they built a foundation for professional networking online and gave recruiters experience paying for an enterprise service. But I think all networking, professional and social, will happen on Facebook. If recruiters pay on LinkedIn for a similar service, they’ll pay for it on BranchOut. Facebook has 700 million plus users — it’s 15 times larger than LinkedIn. It’s your true support network, the people who will really help because the strength of connection is really strong. This is why people would want to invest in a large series B.

IF: But won’t you need a larger user base to make that third enterprise product valuable?

RM: The size of the database matters. We are looking for other ways to grow the database such as working with companies to sign on all their employees and recruiters. Recruiters can then tap into the friends of employees and ask for warm introductions, because when you authorize BranchOut, it’s not only pulling your data but the data of your friends. The BranchOut database is quite large in this sense.

IF: How exactly will the funding be used?

RM: The funding is going to be focused first and foremost to build out a world-class team. Three areas to beef up are our engineering team, the product team, and now it’s the time to ramp up our sales. Over 40 clients say “we want to do the same recruiting search within Facebook as we can within LinkedIn.” We need to hire a sales team to ramp that up.

Conclusion

BranchOut’s destination app will still need to convince users that its safe to use a professional networking tool that lives within Facebook where sensitive personal and social data is held. It will also need to provide more value to job seekers rather than viral mechanics like the quiz shown above for it to grow to the size where it will become useful as an enterprise solution to recruiters. Now it has the money to get to this point, but with other companies encroaching on its turf BranchOut will have to truly excel to become a success for its investors.

New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: MocoSpace, Pop Cap Games, Lolapps & More

Posted: 11 May 2011 12:09 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.

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps 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.

Facebook Allows Users to Tag Pages in Photos, Could Bring in New Fans

Posted: 11 May 2011 11:00 AM PDT

Starting today, Facebook users will be able to tag Pages in their photos. Page tagged photos will adhere to a user’s privacy settings, and will only appear on a Page’s Photos tab if set to be visible to everyone. Initially, Facebook is only allowing Pages categorized as “Brands & Products” or “People” to be tagged, but it says it is “looking to expand this functionality to more Page categories over time.”

Since a tag will cause a link to that Page to be displayed on a user’s photo, the feature could become an important discovery and growth channel for Pages.

Previously, users could only tag their friends in photos, but now they can tag any Page with the proper category, whether they’ve Liked it or not. A tag of a brand or public figure represents a strong social recommendation of that Page, which will make a user’s friends curious to visit that Page and improve the chance that they’ll Like it themselves.

Photos is Facebook’s most popular native application, receiving huge numbers of Page views. Tags of Pages in Photos could gain many impressions from a user’s friends over a long period of time, offering many opportunities for that Page to gain new fans. Tagged photos also often appear in the news feed generating additional impressions for the Page’s link.

Brands, products, and people are some of the things represented by Pages that most frequently appear in user photos. Brands like soft drinks or clothing lines may incidentally be included in photos of friends, while users often upload photos of themselves with celebrities to the social network. The examples Facebook included in the information it sent us include brand/product Coca Cola, and musician Kanye West who is technically categorized as a musician/band, indicating that Pages with a wide range of categories that represent people may be able to tak advantage of the new feature.

Back in September 2009, Facebook began allowing users to tag Pages in status updates and comments. The delay before expanding Page tagging to photos indicates that Facebook understands the abuse and news feed dilution potential of the feature. It could overly incentivize Pages to ask users to tag them in photos, filling the news feeds of friends with photos that aren’t that compelling. Facebook will need to ensure that photos that only include tags of Pages but no friends aren’t given high visibility in the news feed.

If Facebook can minimize the impact of the few Pages and users that try to abuse Page photo tags, the feature will let users share the brands and celebrities that are important to them while simultaneously offering a new unpaid growth mechanism for Pages.

Facebook Surpasses 677 Million Users – More Traffic Trends and Data at Inside Facebook Gold, May 2011 Edition

Posted: 11 May 2011 09:59 AM PDT

Facebook hit 677 million users worldwide in the month of April, increasing its total monthly audience by just over 2%. Growth rates came in just below March numbers, with markets in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa contributing the greatest number of new users. Facebook saw slower growth – and even some losses – in Europe and North America.

The full breakdown of growth by country and demographic, including 12-month historicals and projections, is available in this month’s edition of Inside Facebook Gold.

Inside Facebook Gold is Inside Network's data service providing monthly data on Facebook's growth outlook through a comprehensive data feed service and growth report.

The May 2011 edition of Inside Facebook Gold includes:

  • Global Data Feed Service, a comprehensive data CSV supplying vital stats on Facebook's audience size, demographic distribution, advertising business, and global language distribution.
  • Facebook Global Monitor, 100 pages of leaderboards and charts covering audience change in 160 Facebook country markets.

Inside Facebook Gold is a data service designed for analysts seeking to understand and maximize opportunities in the Facebook ecosystem, and presents data on key indicators ranging from the site’s traffic growth to its advertising business and its robust applications platform.

Download the May 2011 data suite at Inside Facebook Gold.

Badoo, Videos, Cards, Photos, Yahoo and Mobile on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 11 May 2011 08:38 AM PDT

We have quite an eclectic and new batch of applications on our list of the top growing apps by daily active users on our list this week. There were several horoscope, dating, video and virtual gift/greeting card apps, as well as a location-social network app, an iPad app, a photo app and a mobile app. The apps overall grew from between 77,100 and 2.4 million DAU this week.

Our list is compiled using AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook, and covers those that gained the most users in the past seven days.

Top Gainers This Week

Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1. Daily Horoscope 3,332,033 +2,428,251 +269%
2. Badoo 2,155,109 +422,750 +24%
3. Gardens of Time 1,902,345 +401,542 +27%
4. Today’s Video 391,282 +390,315 +40,364%
5. WhoIsNear? 303,043 +228,528 +307%
6. Kral Video ! 220,430 +210,644 +2,153%
7. Yahoo! 7,824,909 +185,536 +2%
8. flipboard 329,581 +174,117 +112%
9. Are YOU Interested? 1,098,569 +163,015 +17%
10. Günlük Burç Yorumları 266,957 +149,796 +128%
11. Tarjetitas 243,431 +143,753 +144%
12. Bubble Saga 719,682 +140,529 +24%
13. Diamond Dash 1,213,519 +130,048 +12%
14. Pixable 254,328 +128,921 +103%
15. PowerVideo 100,036 +97,604 +4,013%
16. Videolar 2011 118,159 +91,960 +351%
17. VideoGezegeni 102,069 +90,557 +787%
18. Videoloji 89,236 +81,563 +1,063%
19. Especially for You 103,514 +78,174 +309%
20. HTC Sense 5,544,613 +77,086 +1%

Daily Horoscope grew by 2.4 million DAU, the version in Turkish, Günlük Burç Yorumları, grew by 149,800 DAU. Both apps allow users to select their horoscope, share the app with friends who are of their same astrological sign, and receive daily horoscope updates on their Walls. The apps grew primarily in Turkey.

Badoo was huge on our list, too, growing mostly in Mexico, France and Italy by 422,800 DAU; the app has a Q&A format where users answer questions about their friends, with subsequent feed stories published to the stream. The Are YOU Interested? app with 163,000 DAU grew in the United States, United Kingdom and India; the app allows users to rate other users' photos.

Turkish video apps were all over this list, making up a full one-fourth of our list! Today's Video with 390,300 DAU, Kral Video! with 210,600 DAU, PowerVideo with 97,600 DAU, Videolar 2011 with about 92,000 DAU, VideoGezegeni with 90,600 DAU and Videoloji with 81,600 DAU. The apps all allow users to view, Share, Like and post videos to the stream. The only exceptions were Videoloji, which automatically posts daily videos to your stream and Kral Video, which included a pop-up for daily video posts with each click on the app.

A pair of apps for greeting cards were interesting. Tarjetittas (little cards) grew by 143,800 DAU in the US and Mexico, almost split down the middle. The app allows users to publish Spanish language greeting cards to their friends' Walls. It's interesting to note that an app in Spanish is being used almost equally between two countries, perhaps pointing to the ways in which Facebook helps united friends and family across borders. Especially For You grew by 78,200 DAU and basically does the same thing, allowing users to send a card in a message to their friend, then publish the card to your own Wall; thus, there are two viral features at work.

WhoIsNear? with 228,500 DAU is an interesting app that works like a location app — but on Facebook. Users create an account, check in where they are geographically and what they are doing, then are offered to find new friends using the app, finally publishing a story to the feed. Pixable's app with 128,900 DAU allows users to discover their friends' photos; we reviewed the app previously. The rest of the list included Yahoo's app with 185,500 DAU. Flipboard with 174,100 DAU, an iPad app allowing users to read news and social media in a magazine-style layout on their iPads. And, HTC Sense the Android mobile app with 77,100 DAU.

Check in Friday to see the top emerging Facebook apps growing by 100,000 to 1 million  MAU.

torsdag den 12. maj 2011 at 07.18