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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

New Facebook Feature Has Users Post Recommended Pages to Wall, News Feed

Posted: 24 May 2011 03:24 PM PDT

Users who find Pages and Places they like can decide to recommend them to friends, via a feature that Facebook appears to be in testing on a handful of accounts. In an example spotted by Kevin Evanetski of Social Yeah, the “Recommend This Place” feature appears in a right-hand module, and asks users to “Help your friends discover great places to visit by recommending this” (leaving a supporting comment in the module).

If users choose to make the recommendation, their comment will appear in the module, and post as a wall and news feed story.

Although the wording here is for “Place,” the box is appearing on what appears to be a merged Place/Page for a San Francisco Bay Area radio station, Sports Radio 95.7 FM. Given Facebook’s other efforts to unify Places and Pages, as well as the current feature similarity of the two types of pages, this feature could also be introduced for Pages that don’t have Places functionality.

Doing so would add on to the existing Page recommendation feature, which allows Page administrators to suggest their own Page to users. That feature was adjusted last month from showing recommendations in the friends requests page and the now-gone home page Requests panel, instead showing recommendations in a “Recommended Pages” module. Previous iterations of the feature have experimented with how to allow users and Page owners to share the Page recommendation, with a separate option for users to share Pages being removed earlier this year.

While it’s up to users to make use of this new feature, Page owners should consider ways of encouraging sharing without breaking Facebook’s terms against incentivizing social actions, such as creating special Places and Pages within a brand, that are especially likely to attract recommendations.

For deep analysis of Facebook’s organic distribution features, as well as weekly profiles of innovative marketing campaigns, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network's comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook.

Facebook Adds “Subscribe Via RSS” Option to Pages

Posted: 24 May 2011 11:12 AM PDT

Facebook appears to have added a “Subscribe via RSS” option to Pages. The link, found at the bottom left side of Pages beneath the profile picture, leads to an Atom feed of wall posts by the Page that can be auto-discovered by clients.

The RSS option will assist users that want to stay up to date with news distributed from specific Pages without constantly having to check Facebook. Some people that might find this especially useful include those tasked with industry or corporate communications policy compliance, researchers, or those whose access to Facebook is blocked by an employer, educator, or government.

This link joins RSS links on Notes as evidence that RSS is not dead on Facebook, despite the site more actively supporting JSON-based API feeds. In the past, Pages could sometimes be subscribed to via SMS, but now most Pages show both RSS and SMS options. Some clients have also had limited access to RSS feeds of Pages in the past, but there was no official option for this on Pages.

Before, some thought Twitter’s API and RSS options made it a better choice for producing content to be received by certain types of clients. Though Facebook’s Graph API still doesn’t support subscriptions, Page wall RSS subscriptions bring it closer to parity with Twitter. They will also permit some experimental users of Facebook, where certain types of posts can trigger actions in controlled by clients.

Facebook No Longer Blocking Comments for (Most) Pharmaceutical Pages

Posted: 24 May 2011 10:35 AM PDT

In a move that makes sense when you look at it big-picture — which Facebook does — the company has decided that Page owners can no longer apply to have commenting removed from Pages. It used to allow some Page owners, notably pharmaceutical and financial firms, to do so in order to more easily avoid regulatory issues. It’s not completely clear why the change is happening now.

Facebook sent out an email to select pharmaceutical Page owners last week, that first highlighted that Pages are intended to be a place for “authentic, engaging, two-way dialog,” before explaining the changes. From the email, republished by pharmaceutical marketing firm Intouch Solutions:

Previously, pharmaceutical brands could submit a request through their Facebook Sales Representative to disable commenting on their Facebook Page. Starting today, Facebook will no longer allow admins of new pharma Pages to disable commenting on the content their Page shares with people on Facebook. Pages that currently have commenting disabled will no longer have this entitlement after August 15th.

While the change won’t affect most Page owners, some pharmaceutical brands may decide to at least temporarily close their Pages — especially Pages with generic themes, like ADHD Allies, which is sponsored by McNeil Pediatrics, a Division of Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc. These advertorial, cause-themed Pages might convince people to think they’re supporting a cause, when they’re actually giving drug companies full control over what discussion happens on the Page.

The core reason these companies say they want to cut off comments is that the US Food and Drug Administration requires them to report any “adverse events” relating to their products — a way for the agency to educate itself and the public about issues with approved drugs. However, the reporting requirement has not yet been modified for social media, as it’s still under discussion at the FDA. In the meantime, companies don’t know what types of comments they’ll need to report to the FDA from Facebook users. All comments? Only specific, negative ones? This unknown could be why, up until this point, Facebook gave them a pass on the issue by allowing them to disable comments.

But why did Facebook make the change now? That’s not entirely clear. Maybe Facebook felt that too many drug companies were creating and controlling Pages about generic themes — that’s not unlikely, considering previous reports of that issue, as well as Facebook’s overall tone towards the industry. While a given company might benefit from Astroturfing its product into the market, Facebook as a whole suffers due to the resulting mistrust among users.

Or, maybe Facebook doesn’t want to try to enforce others’ rules — which is a direction it has gone with other terms recently. It just removed a blanket ban on promotions for a variety of content categories, including prescription drugs, and instead told marketers to follow its other guidelines and all other laws on their own.

Another possibility is that Facebook has some idea of what might be coming from the FDA on the matter.

Or, perhaps it feels that there are a satisfactory number of other options for these companies at present, regardless of this particular restriction.

Also, in the email, Facebook says that “Subject to [its] approval, branded Pages solely dedicated to a prescription drug may (continue to) have commenting functionality removed.” So, some Pages can still run without comments. It’s just really obvious in these cases that users are there to discuss a specific drug, and not a disease or a company.

Pharmaceutical companies have been trying to use Facebook for years, but their concern around the requirement has made them especially cautious, and many of their campaigns over the years have come across as canned or stilted, or otherwise unsocial. But as the Intouch blog points out, they can still take approaches with their Pages that allow them to reach users without running afoul of Facebook or the FDA. They can still block users from posting to their Page’s Wall or otherwise creating and adding their own content (it’s just comments on Page-created content that can no longer be blocked). Companies can also install a third-party application that provides forum-style functionality, that separately provides an interface for moderating user comments. Or they can provide a full-time monitoring team to handle Pages with comments enabled.

We’ll be covering this issue as Facebook and the government continue to evolve their policies.

For deep analysis of Facebook's terms, as well as weekly profiles of innovative marketing campaigns, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network's comprehensive guide to marketing through Facebook.

New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Efficient Frontier, Involver, Vitrue, Wildfire and More

Posted: 24 May 2011 10:30 AM PDT

A variety of Facebook platform companies hired everything from interns to sales to operations to engineers this week. If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we'll get it into next week's post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here's this week's list of hires:

Efficient Frontier

  • Charlene Fernandez, Sales Executive – previously a student at London Metropolitan University.
  • Guanghong Yang, Senior Software Engineer – formerly worked as a Software Engineer at The Fanfare Group.

Involver

  • Yagnik Khanna, Web Developer/Programmer Intern – studied at University of Waterloo.

Kontagent

  • Cindy Lee, Lead UI/Visual Designer – formerly worked a similar position at Cisco.

Nanigans

  • Robin Botto, Ad Ops Manager – formerly the Director of Account Management at Avenue100 Media Solutions.

Spruce Media

  • Kelsey Elliott, Ad Delivery Manager – formerly a freelance writer at The Chefs Director and a Director of Marketing at A Daily Apple.

Syncapse

  • Andrew McGrath, Senior Program Manager - formerly performed a simliar job at Hostopia.

TBG Digital

  • Wladyslaw Mettler, Python Developer at TBG Digital - formerly performed a similar job at Jamkit.
  • Kenny Skelton, Client Service Director - formerly worked as Direct Channel Sales and Marketing Manager at Vodafone.

Vitrue

  • Kevin Race, Senior Client Delivery Manager – formerly worked as a Project Manager at Trivantis.
  • Sarah Vabulas, Strategic Services Analyst - formerly a Social Media and Public Relations Coordinator at The Maximus Group.

Wildfire

  • Robert Williams, Inside Sales – formerly performed similar work at Confluence Media, Inc.

Bruno Mars, Subway, Turkey, Disney, Vin Diesel and Converse on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages

Posted: 24 May 2011 07:47 AM PDT

Facebook's top Pages continued to be dominated mostly by musicians, but food, celebrity, Turkish apps and various media companies made an appearance this week, too. Musicians like Rihanna and Lady Gaga are regulars on the list, but musician Bruno Mars made an appearance this week, as did Aerosmith. Food was on the list, too, with Subway and Pringles, in addition to several media companies like Disney and the Converse shoe company. The Pages on our list grew from between 535,700 and 2.6 million Likes, we measure the growth of Pages with our PageData tool.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Likes Gain Gain,%
1. Bruno Mars 7,747,981 +2,632,468 +51%
2. Subway 6,648,846 +2,263,418 +52%
3. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 846,784 +846,784 +0.0%
4. Amerikan Bayrağının 1 Milyon Hayranı Varsa Türk Bayrağının 70 Milyonu Geçer 828,763 +828,763 +0.0%
5. Rihanna 33,505,211 +774,561 +2%
6. Lady Gaga 34,806,862 +722,452 +2%
7. Disney 23,669,451 +721,226 +3%
8. Facebook 41,135,533 +708,511 +2%
9. Shakira 29,799,147 +690,219 +2%
10. Eminem 36,632,305 +670,077 +2%
11. Will Smith 18,541,930 +629,465 +4%
12. Bob Marley 25,049,857 +627,602 +3%
13. Harry Potter 23,932,167 +618,590 +3%
14. Vin Diesel 24,177,900 +616,947 +3%
15. YouTube 33,897,860 +601,891 +2%
16. Aerosmith 3,577,593 +567,733 +19%
17. Converse 16,993,691 +551,524 +3%
18. Nhật ký 548,752 +548,752 +0.0%
19. Cristiano Ronaldo 26,393,273 +537,902 +2%
20. Pringles 13,876,929 +535,693 +4%

Bruno Mars topped the list with 2.6 million new Likes to his 7.7 million total; the landing tab for his Page features tour and music video information and the Wall contains news of recent awards and charity work. Rihanna, with 774,600 new Likes to add to her 33.5 million, also won some awards. Lady Gaga drew 722,500 new Likes to her 34.8 million this week with the launch of her new album.

Shakira's 690,200 Likes pushed her Page's total to 29.8 million, she's been posting videos to her Wall. Eminem's Page features music videos on the landing tab, drawing 670,100 Likes to his 36.6 million total. Bob Marley's Page grew by 627,600 Likes to pass 25 million by featuring music, story and video posts. Finally, Aerosmith's Page grew by 567,800 Likes to reach 3.5 million; the Page also promoted a recent appearance on the TV show "The Simpsons."

Food featured this week included Subway with 2.2 million Likes to grow the Page to 6.6 million, partly due to a Commit to Fit sweepstakes featuring up to $25,000 in prizes. Also, Pringles with 535,700 Likes grew the Page to 13.8 million, featured a Share Your Way Sweepstakes with 181 prizes.

Two Turkish Pages were as usual big on the list this week. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk grew to 846,800 Likes this week; he was the first president of Turkey and a prominent historical figure. Secondly, another Turkish flag Page, Amerikan Bayrağının 1 Milyon Hayranı Varsa Türk Bayrağının 70 Milyonu Geçer, grew this week to 828,800 Likes.

There were media properties on the list. Disney with 721,200 Likes to grew to just about 23.7 million by posting photos and animated film stills. Facebook with 708,500 Likes to pass 41.4 million. YouTube with 601,900 Likes to almost make it to 34 million. Then, "Harry Potter," which added 618,600 Likes to almost make 24 million by promoting the final installment of the series.

Celebrities made an appearance, too. Will Smith with 629,500 Likes to his 18.5 million updated with a visit to Oprah. Vin Diesel with 617,000 Likes to grow the Page to 24.1 million added a landing tab that asks users to invite friends to his Page. Finally, Cristiano Ronaldo's Page grew by 537,900 Likes to its 26.3 million with updates about his professional matches. The remaining Pages, Converse with 551,500 Likes and a 16.9 million total and Nhật ký (Diary in Vietnamese) added 548,800 Likes this week.

onsdag den 25. maj 2011 at 07.28