Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Expands Credits Offers to Europe Via SupersonicAds and Deal United
- How Businesses Can Use Facebook’s “Recommend This Place” to Gain Exposure and Likes
- Facebook’s Unreleased Mobile Photos App: How We Think It Works
- Facebook Alerting Users to Facial Recognition Privacy Setting With Home Page Ads
- More Measurement Firms Show Stronger May US Facebook Growth, Following Slower Start to 2011
- New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Context Optional, Daglow Entertainment, Wild Needle, Voxer and More
- Facebook Appears to Be Finally Moving Away From Its All-in-One Mobile App Strategy
- Badoo, Friend Quizzes, Profile Statistics, Norton, Yahoo and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
- Facebook Hires Veteran Political Staffer Joe Lockhart as New VP of Global Communications
| Facebook Expands Credits Offers to Europe Via SupersonicAds and Deal United Posted: 16 Jun 2011 05:13 AM PDT
Facebook will only allow Credits to be distributed through offers by approved providers once the July 1st deadline passes and all games to switch to Credits as their payment method. Therefore, attaining approved offers coverage in Europe through these deals is important so developers can still monetize users in the region who won’t pay for Credits directly. Currently, game developers often work with offer providers like SupersonicAds and Deal United to give users their proprietary premium in-game currency in exchange for making purchases — sometimes known as completing hard offers. Direct response advertisers aggregated by the offer providers earn money from the purchases, and pay out to the game developers for bringing them customers and to cover the cost of the currency.
However, at the beginning of March, Facebook announced that after the migration to Credits, only approved offer providers can dispense hard Credits offers, and the only approved provider at the time was the Mountain View, CA-based TrialPay. Facebook promised more providers would be approved before the July 1st forced migration, and now it’s made good on that promise by blessing SupersonicAds and Deal United. A Facebook spokesperson tells us that “both of these companies will provide offers for Europe, extending the current offers product outside of the United States.” SupersonicAds co-founder Gil Shoham told us his company has more than 1000 advertisers lined up to work with developers and 5000 live offers that will become available to users through the Facebook Credits partnership. “We have the ability to tap into many offers per country, and provide full localization and translation of offers and landing pages. Our goal is to make sure all users across europe can find relevant offers.” Facebook tapped SupersonicAds as the only European launch partner for its Credits soft offers program, which allows users to earn Credits for watching video ads while playing games or browsing Facebook.com. Shoham says the program has been a success so far, and that the company has served commercials from Disney, Intel, Sony, Lionsgate, and Warner Bros to Facebook users. Having both launched on Facebook years ago, today’s move by Facebook is validation for both companies that has been a long time coming. It appears that TrialPay will still have a Credits hard offer monopoly in the lucrative American market, though, as competitors such as Tapjoy and Super Rewards have yet to be approved.
Facebook has been making other preparations to ease both developers and users onto Credits. Yesterday it announced alternative payout options for 13 countries, which will help international developers receive their money from Facebook for the Credits spent on their games. Facebook also began giving away small amounts of Credits to get users accustomed to keeping a balance and spending them, with 1 free Credit being distributed to Ravenswood Fair players. Approving enough providers for both the hard and soft offers programs will be crucial to injecting enough Facebook Credits into the ecosystem so that developers don’t take a big hit to monetization by migrating to Credits. If Facebook doesn’t establish robust enough Credits offer walls, users who previously spent proprietary virtual currency they earned through the multitude of independent offer providers won’t have adequate choices of ways to earn, and could cease to monetize if they don’t switch to buying currency (although as we’ve noted before, many do tend to start with offers and go direct anyway). While most virtual goods revenue comes from direct purchases, a dip in revenues for Facebook game developers could cause a backlash leading them to turn to other platforms such as iOS or Android, hurting Facebook’s Credits business. The company still has work to do, though, in adding more offers options in Asia, and additional competitors in North America. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How Businesses Can Use Facebook’s “Recommend This Place” to Gain Exposure and Likes Posted: 15 Jun 2011 09:00 PM PDT
Businesses with physical locations have a new way to gain exposure in the news feed and get more users to Like their Pages through a new feature on Facebook Pages called “Recommend This Place”. Those that list a street address in the Page can potentially use this new feature to build their fan bases for free. Recommend This Place appears in the right sidebar of Pages to users who live nearby that business. It allows users to write a short recommendation of the business which is then published to the news feed and shown to their friends when they visit the Page.
Here we’ll discuss how “Recommend This Place” works, why it’s beneficial to businesses and other organizations, and provide four strategies for securing recommendations through this feature of Facebook Pages. The following is an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, brand, or website using Facebook. The full version includes a deeper discussion of benefits and functionality, as well as three more strategies for securing recommendations that can drive Likes and news feed exposure. Why It’s Important to Your BusinessRecommendations made through this feature provide two core benefits to Pages:
Typically, the only free way to get news feed exposure to non-fans is by getting them to mention or link to your Page in one of their updates, photo tags, or comments, which is not very common. With Recommend This Place, you can gain free, compelling news feed exposure from an easy to publish, pre-populated stories generated through the feature.
Once users are on your Page, you typically must rely on the content of your default landing tab, be it your wall or a third-party application, to convince them to Like your Page. Depending on what the latest photos your Page was tagged in or the latest posts your or your fans have published to your wall, you might not be giving users the best impression. Recommendations appear on the Page, providing an endorsement to Like. How It WorksRecommend This Place appears near the top of a Page’s right sidebar. Only users who list themselves as living in the same city or otherwise within roughly 12 miles of your business will see the Recommend This Place panel. It displays the instructions “Help you friends discover great places to visit by recommending [the name of your Page]” above an open text field. Users can then write a recommendation of your location, similar to a short Yelp review. After being submitted, the recommendation appears as a rich feed story on the author’s wall and in the news feeds of their friends where others can Like or comment on it. It will also appear to the author of a recommendation’s friends when they visit the Facebook Page of the location in a section of the right sidebar called “Recommendations from Friends”. Strategies for Attaining RecommendationsGeotargeted Page UpdatesThe best way to secure recommendations is by requesting them from users that live nearby via geotargeted Page updates.
To do this:
The more local cities you target with the update, the more respondents you’re likely to get. However, you risk confusing your fans if they receive the update but don’t have access to Recommend This Place on your Page. Your call to action must be short and easy to read but explain where to find the feature. Depending on what voice best represents your business, you can also try:
The full version of this article including more strategies for getting users to recommend your Page can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s Unreleased Mobile Photos App: How We Think It Works Posted: 15 Jun 2011 05:49 PM PDT A large set of documents and images of an as yet unreleased Facebook mobile photos app was leaked yesterday to TechCrunch. Many details remain unclear, including whether the app will be part of the traditional mobile apps, a standalone app, or both.
The app cherry picks some of the best design and functionality from existing photo apps Instagram, PicPlz, Path, With, and Color, and combines them with new features and a low-friction sharing process. Facebook didn’t directly acknowledge the app’s existence, except to say, “We’re constantly working on new features and enhancements to our products but have nothing new to announce at this time.” We’ve dug through all the available images leaked and here’s how we think the new mobile photos app will work, though nothing is for certain until the app actually launches — if it does. Single and Multi-Shot Sharing
The photo shooting and sharing experience appears to go like this. Users take a photo through the app or select one from their device’s library. They can then tap faces to tag friends. A “What’s Happening?” button allows them to tag the photos by Facebook Places or a Facebook Event they’ve RSVP’d to. They can then add a description to be published alongside the photo, set privacy restrictions on the photo to a certain bucket or list of friends, and then post it to Facebook. When users select photos from their existing shots, Facebook appears to group them by timeframe, such as today or last week, as well as by geolocation. A grouping of recently taken but unshared photos reminds users of saved up content. There are also more unique features, like the ability to take multiple photos and share them in a set. As each additional photo in the series is taken, a counter on the share button increases. Users can then location tag and describe them all at once.
Support for VideoSimilar to Path’s apps, it appears that the new Facebook mobile photos app will allow users to shoot and share video. Similar to Facebook.com, users will likely just tag the whole video as including a friend, rather than selecting a certain segment the way users tag a specific part of a photo as including a friend. The current official Facebook for iPhone and Android mobile apps do not support video uploads, so interface aside, this would be significant new functionality. It could lead to a big increase in the number of videos posted to Facebook. Activity StreamUser can view photos shared by friends through an activity feed that looks like a cross between Path and With. Photos are condensed into horizontal tiles or shown as thumbnails for easy browsing. But they are expandable for larger viewing. Each space in the feed can show a single photo, such as one a friend was tagged in, or a set of several photos from the same location. If users click into a location or Event, it looks like they’ll be able to see all photos taken by friends or that are visible to the public, and all the people who are there. This incorporates the best parts of Color — knowing who’s where, and seeing a single place from the perspective of several people. It could become powerful way to get real-time information about an event, such as a concert in the example below, while it happens.
When enlarged, a photo’s description, tags, and feedback are translucently overlaid on the bottom of the photo, permitting full screen viewing. Feedback icons can be tapped to slide up the full-text of comments or Likes and the option to add one’s own, but the photo still remains visible in the background.
No Lenses or Additional SharingJudging by their absence in the leaked documentation, several features common to other photo sharing apps may not be present in Facebook’s. There don’t appear to be any lenses or other ways to manipulate photos, indicating Facebook is going for a more functional experience. Because Facebook monetizes its user base via advertising, it doesn’t necessarily need lenses to draw in would-be artists like Instagram, or to sell in-app content as Path does. There’s no trace of additional social sharing options in the Facebook app. Unlike PicPlz and Instagram, which offer syndication of photos to Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, Foursquare and more, Facebook’s app only publishes to Facebook. This could be its biggest weakness. If users really want to share a photo with their Twitter followers or blog readers, they might opt for one of the more inclusive apps such as Instagram, which now has more than five million users. However, with friend and location tagging, multi-photo uploads, video support, and a sleek interface, Facebook’s new mobile photos app might convince users those extra views aren’t worth using something else. And while the leaked images depict an iPhone app, the documentation points to the app working off HTML5, which would make it usable on other platforms such as Android. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Alerting Users to Facial Recognition Privacy Setting With Home Page Ads Posted: 15 Jun 2011 01:26 PM PDT Facebook is now showing in-house ads on users’ home pages promoting its “Suggest photos of me to friends” facial recognition feature and linking users to the privacy setting that controls it. The in-house ads seem designed to counter criticism Facebook receives about a lack of transparency around the quiet worldwide rollout of the tag suggest feature worldwide last week. By adding a new privacy setting that defaulted to enable facial recognition, Facebook has drawn probes and complaints of some European privacy authorities and US advocacy groups. The ads will help inform users and could be seen as a form of apology for the rollout of the controversial though rather benign feature, though they could also spark more backlash from users.
The ad doesn’t explain that the feature is based on facial recognition, though, which is the main reason that some users are concerned with it. Facebook typically uses in-house ads to promote its own products such as Facebook Credits or its mobile apps, and doesn’t usually use them to draw attention to privacy settings. Facebook initially launched the opt out facial recognition feature in North America in December with a Facebook blog post, and there wasn’t much of a reaction. However, last week Facebook rolled out the feature to the rest of the world, including privacy-sensitive countries in Europe, without a formal announcement. This led security software developer Sophos to attack Facebook, and many publications followed suit.
An update to the original Facebook Blog post and updates to some of Facebook’s official Pages were published shortly afterwards, but they were too late to stop the negative press. The next day, the European Union’s privacy authority and Ireland’s data protection authority both launched investigations into the feature, and America’s Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission. In reality, the feature is not as dangerous as some make it out to be. It simply streamlines the process of a user tagging their closest friends in photos they’ve uploaded, and it doesn’t identify people you don’t know or allow users to search for someone across Facebook’s huge photo set. It can help users by increasing the likihood they’ll be tagged in photos in which they’re depicted so they know the photos exist and can request the uploader delete them if necessary. Still, Facebook could have been more transparent regarding the rollout, especially considering the public scrutiny it receives on such issues.
A more complex question is whether Facebook should add new default-enabled privacy settings without giving users the opportunity to opt out before they launch. Since many users rarely check their privacy settings, adding features as opt in would probably lead few new features to benefit from them. Therefore, the best option might to be for the site to launch features as opt out, but alert users prior to the launch and offer a preemptive opt out. These ads, if run alongside the worldwide rollout or even prior to it could have saved Facebook from what turned out to be a PR problem. In the future, similar ads could help Facebook continue to launch new features and opt out privacy settings while appearing forthcoming rather than sneaky. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| More Measurement Firms Show Stronger May US Facebook Growth, Following Slower Start to 2011 Posted: 15 Jun 2011 12:38 PM PDT Three third-party measurement services agreed on United States Facebook traffic in May, at least directionally. They each showed the company making a net gain in monthly unique visitors to help make up for what has been a slower year by each of their accounts. Beyond this initial point of agreement, the data diverges, as you can see in the chart below — that is, except for a few main points. Facebook is still posting overall user gains in the US if you look past month-to-month changes, but it is doing so more slowly than it has in previous years as it nears saturation in the market.
Nielsen published monthly numbers yesterday showing that Facebook added 6.28 million monthly unique visitors in May to reach 140.3 million, following a loss of 1.64 million in April, a gain of 4.92 million March, and a loss of 4.84 million in February. Compete showed growth of 4.75 million unique visitors in May for a total of 142.7 million unique visitors, following a loss of 2.82 million in April, a gain of 6.66 million in March, and a gain of 351,000 in February. ComScore, meanwhile, had indicated net growth of 3.16 million to 157.2 million uniques, following a gain of 1.10 million in April, another gain of 2.30 million in March, and a loss of 2.34 million in February. In contrast to most of the past four months shown by the others, our Inside Facebook Gold service, which tracks Facebook traffic via its ad tool, showed a loss of 5.88 million in May to end at 149.3 million, following a gain of 260,000 in April, another gain of 2.78 million in March, and an additional gain of 3.32 million in February. See our previous two posts on the matter here and here. If you look further back (see above graph), you can observe what looks like a general deceleration since last fall, with each service reporting losses in at least two months — except for Inside Facebook Gold, which only showed a loss in May. Zooming out, there are 307 million people in the US, and nearly 240 million of them use the internet, at least by the official numbers. Going by comScore’s totals, Facebook is currently reaching 72.3% of the 216 million unique visitors for May. You could say that Facebook has 60-plus million users to go if it’s going to reach complete saturation (depending on whose numbers you look at). But going even close to there would be a first for the internet. The reason is that Facebook is already the second-largest internet brand in the country, behind Google’s 155 million monthly uniques, according to the latest Nielsen data. In looking at Facebook’s efforts to continue innovating its core product — adding more features like Places and Deals, taking away the friction of page-loads to access parts of the site like Photos, going further into mobile with new apps, and generally trying to make itself easier to access and more available anywhere — one can see how it is working to get there. The result has been 50% of of users returning every day, according to Facebook, with third parties generally showing similar engagement numbers. It’s especially notable that the company has been self-reporting this percentage since its early days, suggesting that the site doesn’t seem to have gotten less popular with most existing users as it has grown. So with that in mind, it’s not surprising to see some months come in lower than others, or even dip into negative territory this year. We expect these rises and falls to be much more common going forward versus the breakneck growth in 2008, 2009 and the first part of 2010. Which brings us back to how to interpret month-to-month data from these various sources. It is obvious that they all contradict each other. They have varying methodologies (and bugs, as we noted about the ad tool in previous posts), and there are also seasonal factors like college graduations that affect each piece of data. No two sources has ever exactly agreed on growth or total numbers, although comScore and Inside Facebook Gold tend to match up more often, with the others tending towards each other as well. Therefore, as we say in the posts we write every month about all this data, do not jump to conclusions either about increases or decreases in Facebook user numbers in the short-term, because it is its long-term trajectory that shows its current health and future potential. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 15 Jun 2011 12:12 PM PDT The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Daglow Entertainment, Context Optional, Wild Needle, Voxer, Peak Games, Xtranormal Inc. and Atari.
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 Appears to Be Finally Moving Away From Its All-in-One Mobile App Strategy Posted: 15 Jun 2011 08:40 AM PDT
But it looks like that may be about to change with leaked photos of a forthcoming photo-sharing app obtained by TechCrunch, which would push the social network into a competitive, but nascent field of apps like Instagram, PicPlz, Path and Color. Designing apps around a feature or single behavior represents a sea change in thinking for the company. It’s a recognition that making users do two clicks into the app to access messages, chat or photos introduces too much friction and that apps built around a pared-down set of actions done in 30 seconds or less perform the best. This contrasts with what the company has done in the last few years in trying to put as much of the website’s functionality into its mobile apps as possible. >> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 15 Jun 2011 08:28 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
Daily Horoscope grew mostly in Turkey by 1.7 million DAU while Astrology grew by 177,600 DAU. The first app automatically posts daily to a user's Wall while the second includes a pop-up asking users if they would like to receive daily Wall posts of their horoscopes. Dating apps on the list included Badoo with 851,300 DAU mostly out of Mexico, Italy and France and Zoosk with 311,200 DAU mostly from the United States.
Our miscellaneous apps included BandPage by RootMusic with about 250,00 DAU, Samsung Mobile with 229,200 DAU, Norton Safe Web with 215,500 DAU, perhaps helped in part because the app, which scans for dangerous links in a user's feed, prompts users to enable "auto scan." Then there was Static HTML: iframe tabs with 204,100 DAU and Yahoo's app with 178,200 DAU.
Then there were a few applications that used different viral methods to exploit a user's friends and profile statistics on Facebook. Questions grew by 745,500 DAU, Tag Friends grew by 328,400 DAU and Amor grew by 233,200 DAU. Each of these utilized some form of quiz wherein a user is asked questions about their friends, then the answers are published directly to their Walls. 60 Photos is an app that grew by 514,000 DAU that allows users to rate friends' photos, generating feed stories. Then Social Statistics grew by 436,500 DAU publishes a feed story with a user's top friends. Finally, WhoIsNear? grew by 271,200 DAU; the combination of check-in and social app publishes feed stories when you "check-in" on Facebook. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Hires Veteran Political Staffer Joe Lockhart as New VP of Global Communications Posted: 15 Jun 2011 08:27 AM PDT
He’ll also be working alongside another former White House staffer, Marne Levine, who recently joined to lead Facebook’s worldwide lobbying efforts. Both will report to Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s long-time vice president of global communications, marketing and public policy. Schrage will in turn increase his focus on technology and policy issues going forward; his official comment on Lockhart’s hire, below. Joe's arrival brings new skills and greater depth to our incredibly busy team. His experience building and running a press office at the White House gives him particular appreciation for the demands of a global 24-hour news cycle and the challenges of responding effectively to intense scrutiny. His experience launching and scaling a communications firm will help us as we seek to build our team and continue to offer great opportunities for growth and professional development. Lockhart is set to move to California following his daughter graduates from high school in Washington, D.C., according to the report. After leaving the White House, he founded and worked as managing director of the Glover Park Group, a well-respected consulting firm in the capitol. |
Facebook users in Europe will soon have the opportunity to earn Facebook Credits by completing hard offers through the offer walls of social games. Facebook today announced partnerships with 
Users browsing the home page may see an in-house ad in the right sidebar beneath the Upcoming Events section with the headline “Photos are better with Friends” and copy that reads “Tag suggest helps you tag your friends and find out when photos of you are posted. See your privacy settings.”
Facebook has hired second-term Clinton administration press secretary Joe Lockhart, | 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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