Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Platform Update: Insights Shows App Load Times, Iframe Dialog Permission Changes
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: T.G.I. Friday’s, State Farm, Sprint, NASCAR, Honda
- Available Data Shows Facebook User Numbers Growing Quickly, or Slowly, or Falling
- New Facebook Places Features Could Give Local Business Pages a Viral Boost, Help Complete Listings
- BandPage, VEVO, Pages, Friends, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
| Platform Update: Insights Shows App Load Times, Iframe Dialog Permission Changes Posted: 13 Jun 2011 05:28 PM PDT In the Developer Blog’s latest Platform Update, Facebook announced that developers can now view the page load times for their applications in Insights. It also listed iframe dialog permissions that are no longer permitted, and noted that Open Graph page images must have a minimum width of 180 pixels to be displayed next to posts made by that page.
Now, if developers include the call FB.Canvas.setDoneLoading from the Javascript SDK in their Canvas iframe applications, their app Insights Dashboard’s Performance tab will show their page load times in milliseconds. Facebook’s documentation states that the load time is tracked “beginning from the time when the first bytes arrive on the client, and ending from the point at which you call this function.” Developers can also use the For security reasons, Facebook has disallowed the use of iframe dialogs for requesting certain kinds of sensitive permissions after the initial authorization and permissions prompt. Those using the Javscript SDK won’t have to do anything, but those using
The change will protect users from passing sensitive data or the ability to access their ad account, phone, inbox, Pages, Insights, and other important private content through a less secure channel. Websites using the Open Graph markup language to help Facebook better present their content must now only use the og:image tag on images with a minimum width of 180 pixels if they want them displayed next to news feed updates they publish.
This means sites using the Like button should ensure their og:image tags are appended to large enough images if they take advantage of the ability to publish news feed updates to those that Like them. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: T.G.I. Friday’s, State Farm, Sprint, NASCAR, Honda Posted: 13 Jun 2011 02:00 PM PDT Campaigns we featured this week used a few interesting and new ways of reaching out to Facebook users to grow their Pages, strengthen brand loyalty or align themselves with charitable causes. T.G.I. Friday’s let users buy each other beers with e-gift cards, State Farm Latino let users help Latin America by playing a game, Olympic Paint asked users to make their walls talk and Bergdorf Goodman takes fan engagement to a new level by asking its Facebook fans to become models for its latest campaign. 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.
T.G.I. Friday's Buy a BeerGoal: Page Growth, Product Purchase, Engagement, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty Core Mechanic: A Facebook tab and app that allows users to send their Facebook friends a virtual gift card for a beer at T.G.I. Friday's. Method: The Buy A Beer tab on the T.G.I. Friday's Page allows users to send an electronic gift card to their friends redeemable for an actual beer at the restaurant chain. The campaign is part of the chain's in-store "Summer of Beer" push; users can send up to five beers to their friends at $5 per beer, or send a non-alcoholic beverage or food item. Impact: The T.G.I. Friday's Page has over 583,000 Likes and affords users several opportunities to share this offer with their friends via Facebook or Twitter. The launch of the app on June 9th caused the rate of new Likes to the Page to increase by roughly 25% in the few days afterwards. State Farm Latino & Soccket's Juega Hoy. Ilumina el Mañana.Goal: Engagement, Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty, Network Exposure, Charity Core Mechanic: Sprint is sponsoring the NASCAR Pro Championship this summer which lasts until November 20. It is drawing attention to this through a free to play branded integration with Facebook game Car Town. The game gives Sprint a lot of exposure on the platform as users compete with their friends in races and other activities. Game: The NASCAR Pro Championship presented by Sprint allows users to compete against their friends in a sponsored race and complete challenges and activities that will earn them virtual rewards. Method: Sprint's sponsorship of the NASCAR Pro Championship social game in Car Town will run until November. The game’s race graphics, vehicles, race entrances, victory lanes and leaderboards are all branded. The game also allows users to share their virtual branded car on Facebook. During the Sprint Cup in November, Sprint will release codes for players to use to win prizes within the game. Impact: According to AppData, Car Town has more than 8 million monthly active users to which Sprint has an opportunity to promote itself via the game.
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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Available Data Shows Facebook User Numbers Growing Quickly, or Slowly, or Falling Posted: 13 Jun 2011 11:40 AM PDT Did Facebook have fewer monthly active users in the United States at the start of June than it did at the start of May? What about user counts in other early-adopter countries like Canada and the United Kingdom? Is the company continuing to gain as many new users around the world now as it has in recent years? As we covered yesterday, Facebook appears to have had fewer monthly active users at the start of June than at the start of May in the US and a few other countries — at least according to one data source — even as it has grown bigger than ever worldwide. Although today a person close to the company tells us that the site is “still growing in the US.”
Our data source was Inside Facebook Gold, our tracking service that shows country-by-country monthly active user counts, based exactly on the data that Facebook provides in its advertising tool. It showed Facebook falling from 155.2 million at the beginning of May to 149.4 million at the beginning of June, but growing by 11.8 million monthly actives around the world to reach 687.1 million over the same period. Because this data can be buggy, delayed, or otherwise unclear, we regularly compare it against what leading third party measurement services show. Here’s the latest data available from Compete, comScore, Google Ad Planner and Quantcast. A word of warning, though: Each of these other services has its own methodologies, and its own delays and bugs, so it’s important to look for trends that emerge from multiple sources over the months, not just what a given source says on a given month. Facebook, for example, self-reports its data in monthly active users, which isn’t exactly the same measure as the “monthly unique visitor” metric that third parties provide. As you can see from our past posts, as well as from the data below, each data source does not exactly match with the others (here are the three most recent editions, if you’re interested). Let’s get started. May stats are not yet available, but looking back to April, the firm shows Facebook falling from 140.7 million monthly unique visitors in March to 137.9 million in the US. In contrast to multiple other sources, Compete has shown Facebook gaining and losing users month-to-month over much of the past year. It also shows Facebook’s most direct social product rivals, Twitter and MySpace, also losing users in April.
While often more in line with the data in Facebook’s ad tool, comScore’s data tends to diverge a bit in the US and a lot internationally — or at least that’s what we’ve observed in the past (take a look at the top graph in this story for another divergent month: January of 2011). In May, Facebook grew by 3.16 million monthly unique visitors, according to the firm, to reach 157.2 million in the country. It’s not clear why comScore is showing growth while Facebook itself is showing a loss. Twitter, meanwhile, made back some losses from April, while Myspace lost some of its gains from that month.
ComScore doesn’t have May worldwide numbers available yet, so here’s a look at March and April. Facebook had a slow month, growing by around 5 million worldwide, while MySpace made some unexpected gains, and Twitter fell again after many months of growth.
In striking contrast to all other available stats, Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner tool shows Facebook with 890 million unique visitors. It’s not clear why. The graph you see below shows Google’s count of Facebook’s daily unique visitors, based on browser cookies. This usage measure appears to have declined slightly from a high at the start of April back to 300 million.
More similar to Compete than the others, the firm shows Facebook with 139 million uniques by the end of April, growing slowly from previous months. Twitter and MySpace, meanwhile, also have a relatively flat trajectory.
Conclusion As we say in every post we write about Facebook monthly user counts, a wide variety of issues cloud what is happening month to month. On the technical side, these can be philosophical differences in how each company measures usage — some are more reliant on buying data from internet service providers, or on gathering responses from user-installed toolbar trackers, to name two examples. Bugs can pop up for any of these services, including Facebook’s tool. But as we noted yesterday, there do appear to be some overriding trends here. Canada, the United Kingdom and a few other early adopting countries have alternately shown gains and losses starting in 2010. Up until then, growth had generally been much steadier. There’s an especially odd mix of data about the US. Most third parties showed Facebook with fewer monthly active users in January and February, but Facebook’s own data didn’t reflect that. Meanwhile, for May, the only third party to report numbers so far is showing growth, in contrast to the loss that Facebook is showing. For its part, Facebook has not typically commented on traffic numbers, except when it publishes official statistics — the last time was when it hit 500 million monthly active users, months ago. After we published our first post yesterday, Facebook is clarifying to media outlets that data from ad tool isn’t intended for measuring traffic. To be sure. We use it anyway because it seems to be the most specific, and directionally accurate, despite the questions. From time to time, we see stories about Facebook losing users in some regions. Some of these reports use data extracted from our advertising tool, which provides broad estimates on the reach of Facebook ads and isn't designed to be a source for tracking the overall growth of Facebook. We are very pleased with our growth and with the way people are engaged with Facebook. More than 50 per cent of our active users log on to Facebook in any given day. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New Facebook Places Features Could Give Local Business Pages a Viral Boost, Help Complete Listings Posted: 13 Jun 2011 11:21 AM PDT Facebook is trying to promote local business as well as complete the data of their listings with two new features on Places Pages: Recommend This Place and Community Edits. The Recommend This Place sidebar module on the Pages of local businesses lets users write a short recommendations which are published to the news feed and shown on the Page to friends. Meanwhile, Cities now display a native tab called Community Edits that asks users to fill information such as address and category of popular Places in that city. These new features open an important new viral channel for local businesses and franchises, and allow Facebook to crowdsource improvements to its Places database.
For background, Facebook introduced Places and check-ins in August 2010, originally sourcing its local business database from Localeze. Changes to Localeze profiles are not necessarily synced with Places, though, leaving listings of new and evolving business out of date. After some scrapped attempts at allowing merges of Places and Pages for the same location, Facebook appears to have settled on adding Places functionality in the form of check-ins and maps to Pages listing a street address. Recommend This PlaceThe site recently changed the Suggest to Friends feature for Pages so that only a Page’s admins could use it, and so the recommendations would appear in a sidebar module instead of the more prominent Requests channel. While fighting Page spam, it may have reduced the virality of Pages. But now with the launch of Recommend This Place, Pages with Places functionality have been given powerful new viral channel. Appearing in the top right corner of Pages with a street address to users who live nearby, the module reads “Help your friends discover great places to visit by recommending [Page Name]” above a text field. Users can write a short recommendation, set its new feed visibility privacy setting, and submit it. The recommendation is then published to the news feed and displayed to friends browsing that Page in a “Recommendations From Friends” module in the right sidebar.
Recommend This Place will draw users to the Pages their friends prefer, and give users a social recommendation to Like the Page once they’re there. If Pages push their fans to complete the recommendations via Page updates and their info section, they could get viral exposure and grow their Like count for free. Community EditsIn March Facebook began showing a small link on Places allowing users to “Suggest Edits”, or fill out missing data fields and submit them for approval. Now Facebook is looking to ensure that the most frequently checked in to locations provide useful information and are properly categorized. To do this, it has added a Community Edits tab the the left navigation menu of Pages for cities. When clicked, the tab displays incomplete listing for five Places that receive a lot of check-ins in that city, and a header explains that “The Community Edits tab lets you share your knowledge about places in [city] and makes Facebook Places more useful. Add details about places, report duplicates, and more”. Users can then complete empty data fields such as ‘website’ and choose the proper category from a typeahead.
If users need help finding the data, a “Find on Bing” link beneath each entry brings up a Bing Maps search for the location, which sometimes includes the missing zip code or street address. It appears that Facebook’s maps deal with Bing does not cover automatically importing this data, so the social network is using this tab to task users with the chore. Unceremoniously, users are simply presented a new set of Places listings to complete when they finish a first, with no ‘thank you’ or ‘edits received’ message to inspire further assistance. Users who explore the Community Edits tab and feel a deep loyalty to their city or to Facebook may be willing to perform data entry on their behalf. However, the feature doesn’t offer a clear reward such as authorship for a user’s contribution, nor does it properly applaud them. Facebook could improve the design and messaging of the feature to increase the potential volume of user generated edits the tab could drive. Free Virality For NowRecommend This Place and Community Edits may be a sign that Facebook knows helping small businesses get their Pages off the ground is in its own interest. As it did with games developers, offering early free viral exposure for Places could make return on investment cheap enough to lure businesses to market on the social network. Then by weening them off free virality, it could earn money switching them onto Facebook Ads to grow their fan base.
Strategies for using Facebook Places to market your business can be found in the Facebook Marketing Blible. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| BandPage, VEVO, Pages, Friends, Zoosk and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 13 Jun 2011 08:09 AM PDT
Overall, the apps on our list grew from between 433,000 and 9 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
We cover the social gaming apps rankings over on Inside Social Games. Those excluded, first was BandPage by RootMusic with 1.2 million MAU, followed by VEVO for Artists with 467,300 MAU. When it came to Page admin apps, Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 770,700 MAU while HTML + iframe + FBML = iwipa grew by 772,500 MAU. 60 Photos grew by 2.3 million MAU; the app asks users to rate their friends' Facebook photos, generating feed stories with positive ratings. Your Luck [daily] grew by 762,400 MAU; the app publishes a daily luck percentage to a user's Wall every day. Pieces of Flair, which says it allows users to select from among different virtual gifts, grew by 632,100 MAU. Zoosk grew by about 490,000 MAU. Daily Horoscope grew by 480,200 MAU mostly in Turkey; the app publishes a daily horoscope to a user's Wall.
The remaining titles were the aforementioned friend apps. Friend Buzz grew by 2.6 million MAU. This app asks questions about a user's Facebook friends and posts the answer to their Walls. Who loves you the most? is an app that grew by 1.1 million MAU. Friend Matrix grew by more than 2 million MAU the app is a Connect integration that creates a collage of your Facebook friends and then you can publish to your stream.
Then there was e-Diagnostics with 3.2 million MAU, growing mostly in Indonesia. The app seems like an IQ test until the end when it asks you a bunch of questions about your friends, publishing feed stories like crazy. Your World Rank grew by 518,100 MAU mostly in India; the app publishes a set of stats, mostly about photos, to your Wall. Finally there was Tu Amoor with 490,700 MAU; the app asks romantic questions about your Facebook friends, publishing the answers to their Walls. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
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