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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook Roundup: 750M Users, Congress, Ads, Skype, Winklevoss and Real Estate

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 08:12 PM PDT

Facebook Reaches 750M Users – TechCrunch reported this week that Facebook has reached 750 million monthly active users according to a "source close to the company.” The data we recorded in Inside Facebook Gold as of June 1st showed 687 million worldwide. Facebook’s last official update was 500 million, last July.

Facebook Display Ads Pass $2B – A new report from eMarketer claims that this year Facebook will be the top online display advertiser with $2.19 billion in revenue, representing 81% growth over last year.

Skype Deepens Facebook Integration – Skype reported new Facebook features this week, including instant messaging, integrated contacts and the ability to Like or comment on statuses.

Facebook's IPO Rumors Spur Real Estate Inflation – In light of rumors of a Facebook IPO next year, Silicon Valley home prices are surging, prompting some residents who begin to sell off their homes.

Report: 1 Like is Worth 20 Pageviews – A new report from Hitwise found that 1 Facebook fan, or Like, is equal to 20 visits to a retailer website during the course of the year when it comes to ROI.

Announcements

Techlightenment Launches Social Attribution System —This week Techlightenment launched its Social Attribution System, which anonymizes user data, tracking their actions, and then identifies the viral nature of those actions.

ShortStack Launches Free Tab App for Small Biz – Reno, Nevada-based ShortStack launched a tab design app this week free of charge for small businesses with 2,000 Likes or less to run contests, sweepstakes, create landing tabs with videos or photos, and other features.

Facebook for Android v1.6 Adds Video Uploading and Page Browsing

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 06:11 PM PDT

The latest version of the popular native Android mobile app, Facebook for Android v1.6, lets users browse Page walls, upload videos to Facebook, and see more types of stories in the news feed. The app now matches Facebook for iPhone’s video capability, though it still has a much more limited interface for Pages.

Facebook for Android has seen strong growth in the past month, even compared to other fast-growing official clients. It gained three million more daily active users to reach 29.5 million DAU. This growth slightly outpaces that of Facebook for iPhone, which grew 2.4 million DAU in the same time period despite a larger existing base. The Android app is still lacking features including photo tagging, Facebook Checkin Deals, and the ability to search for Pages that the iPhone app has.

The deficiency in features could account for why the Facebook for Android’s DAU by monthly active users, or stickiness is declining as it grows in user count, while the iPhone’s stickyness is rising.

With this release, users can tap the names of Pages in the news feed to view that Page and read all of its updates. This shouldn’t significantly boost impressions of Facebook Pages as very few impressions occur on Page walls compared to the news feed where Android users could already see updates.

However, there’s still no way to search for Pages on the Android app. As of this week, users can open the mobile browser and search on m.facebook.com for Pages using a typeahead. It’s not clear how a possible Facebook HTML5-based mobile platform might be integrated in Android.

Users can click the camera options next to the news feed publisher to reveal the option to upload a video. This could lead to general increase in the presence of mobile video in the news feed. Videos are currently buried as a secondary tab of the Photos product, but Facebook may look to make them more prominent as more devices and interfaces allow them to be recorded and uploaded.

The news feed can now display a wider variety of rich feed stories, and open them within the app.

The v1.6 update’s video uploading capability is a step in the right direction, but its needs to keep ahead of m.facebook.com. Therefore, adding functionality that the mobile site has that it lacks might be more important than trying to match the iPhone app.

Empires & Allies on Growth Offensive for Zynga Ahead of Reported IPO

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 01:59 PM PDT

Empires & Allies is setting a strong pace in its fourth week after launch. While its monthly active user and daily active user growth numbers are so far coming in below where Zynga’s last big launch on Facebook was – CityVille, back in December — it is the clear leader in the strategy genre of social game.

By the traffic numbers in our AppData tracking service, it’s already the third-largest game on Facebook by MAU with 37.7 million, and with 6.73 million DAU about to pass Texas Hold’Em to reach third by that metric, and still growing. These users are in turn boosting Zynga’s undeduplicated Facebook traffic numbers to 54.8 million DAU and 269.2 million MAU.

The context here is that some people have questioned Zynga’s ability to keep producing hits on Facebook as development and marketing costs go up. The company is occasionally lumped together with other newly successful technology startups as an example of an internet bubble, especially given reports that Zynga is looking to public in the next couple of the months.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

Headliner.FM’s News Feed Post Exchange Lets Musicians (and Soon App Devs) Cross-Promote on Facebook

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 11:55 AM PDT

Headliner.FM is a freemium web service that connects musicians, allowing them to publish promotional updates from each other’s Facebook Pages to gain news fans. When admins publish these cross-promotional posts, they earn a virtual currency that they can then spend to buy exposure to the fans of other artists.

Since money isn’t transferred between admins, incentivizing news feed mentions in this way is Facebook policy compliant. Headliner.FM’s model represents a new fan acquisition opportunity for all types of Pages, and the company is now planning to expand to serve more Page types, including those of social games and bloggers.

How Headliner.FM Works

  1. Page admins start with 10,000 of the exchange’s currency – “Band Bucks”
  2. Page admins write a post recommending themselves
  3. They’re matched with or can discover similar artists who they can request to publish their post
  4. If these artists accept, Headliner.FM publishes the post to their Pages or Twitter accounts
  5. These artists receive one BandBuck from the author of the post for each of their fans or followers a post is published to
  6. Artists can then buy exposure on the Pages and Twitter accounts of other artists with these BandBucks

Headliner.FM doesn’t collect any money or Band Bucks from the exchanges. However, admins can buy a $30 or $50 per month premium accounts to get enhanced tools for discovering artists to cross-promote them, deeper analytics of post performance, and 300,000 or 500,000 extra Band Bucks. The company tells us it is converting 3.4% of its users into paying customers.

The service supports posting to Twitter and MySpace in addition to Facebook, though users can select which services to promote. Admins can track the new fans reached, clicks, Page Likes and other connections made, news feed story feedback and more in a dashboard. Since only 15% of posting requests are accepted, and the recommendations come from artists whose music expertise their fans trust, the posts are relevant and compelling, driving Likes.

Facebook’s policies prohibit Pages from taking money to post the updates of others, leading them to shut down Ad.ly, a service that allowed advertisers to buy posts on the Pages of celebrities. Headliner.FM’s unpaid news feed publishing incentivization is compliant however. CEO and founder Mike More tells us “We talked to the people who run the Platform team when we built our API app to authenticate accounts. They said ‘as long as you don’t have an ad platform, you’re fine.’”

The 8-person Headliner.FM took $700,000 in funding from some music industry angel investors, and released its first beta in February 2010. It’s now signed up 70,000 musicians including Maroon 5, Matt & Kim, and T-Pain, and each day serves about 4,000 recommendations a day that reach seven million fans. The company has partnered with SoundCloud to power streaming music in the news feed posts. To help grow its own service, Headliner.FM lets bands earn Band Bucks for posting its own marketing messages.

The service could use a better rich content publisher, and frustration can arise from inability to rescind a request for another Page to post your invite, but overall the servie is relatively easy to use.

Fan Acquisition Opportunity for All Pages

Pages are eager to grow their fan bases, but most currently have to resort to buying ads, or Like-gated contest apps that don’t get much exposure compared to a Page’s news feed updates. Freemium cross-promotion, fan acquisition systems such as Headliner.FM work especially well for content creators because they’re “attention rich but cash poor” says More.

However, even cash rich companies like major brands and app developers could benefit a great deal from Headliner.FM’s model. Brands could augment their ad buys with cross-promotion of others under the same corporate umbrella or from a different vertical. News feed post exchanges could provide a free user acquisition alternative for game developers that currently use app bar display ads in their games to buy and sell promotion of non-competing games.

Media outlets, web services, celebrities, and TV shows are a few other types of Pages who could reduce their Page marketing spend through news feed post exchanges. With the model proving useful, Headliner.FM should move quickly to expand to these other verticals before someone else does. Still, with the company estimating that there are between two and three million bands out there, and RootMusic’s Facebook musician profile app having signed 150,000 bands’ Pages, there’s still plenty of runway in its existing space.

Facebook’s Kevin Colleran Joins Buddy Media’s Board of Advisors

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 09:59 AM PDT

One of Facebook's earliest employees, advertising sales executive Kevin Colleran is leaving next month after six and a half years. But he’s staying active in the industry, joining social marketing company Buddy Media's board of advisors.

Colleran's contributions over the years ranged from Facebook's first significant advertising deal, the creation of sponsored Facebook groups, and other creative ad strategies on the Facebook platform.

"My journey at Facebook has been incredible and I am very grateful for Mark, Sheryl [Sandberg], and the rest of the team for giving me such an amazing opportunity," Colleran said in an email quoted by AllThingsD. "I take a lot of pride in having been Facebook's most tenured employee (after Mark) as well as the first member of Facebook's advertising sales team."

He added that he’s looking at doing some angel investing and consulting work in the industry in the future. On Buddy Media's board of advisors, he’ll be joining Shiv Singh, Head of Digital, PepsiCo Beverages America; Gary Vaynerchuk, WineLibraryTV.com; Sandy Climan, President, Entertainment Media Ventures; Roger Ehrenberg, Managing Partner, IA Ventures and Seth Meyers, Head Writer, "Saturday Night Live."

[Image via Facebook]

Facebook, TripAdvisor, Pages and Friends on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU

Posted: 24 Jun 2011 08:05 AM PDT

Applications on our list for the top 20 emerging Facebook apps by monthly active users this week were mostly games, then the apps that weren’t games, varied from a mobile Facebook app, a photo integration with TripAdvisor, a Page app and a few friend quizzes.

The apps on our list grew from between 137,900 and 556,100 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. All in all, it was a pretty typical week for the emerging category, which we define as apps that grew between 100,000 and 1 million in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1. Facebook for Every Phone 850,361 +556,148 +189%
2. 小小海盜 613,586 +302,839 +97%
3. Akvaryum 486,806 +298,752 +159%
4. inFAMOUS Anarchy 484,198 +293,445 +154%
5. My Country 306,830 +259,947 +554%
6. The Sims Social 430,032 +243,268 +130%
7. Sayfa Önerme 736,345 +193,147 +36%
8. City Wars 810,940 +192,712 +31%
9. ลูกมดสู้ๆ 813,064 +192,691 +31%
10. Planet Domo 838,590 +180,538 +27%
11. Chatterbox 657,024 +164,214 +33%
12. HotShot 778,708 +162,212 +26%
13. Welcome 806,755 +161,631 +25%
14. Pet Tales 269,320 +149,874 +125%
15. Mad Games 254,279 +147,719 +139%
16. Revienta el teclado 827,155 +142,505 +21%
17. Tavla 818,172 +142,473 +21%
18. TripAdvisor TripWow 500,031 +141,756 +40%
19. Seçim Anketi 844,233 +141,698 +20%
20. Samurai Dynasty 416,461 +137,850 +49%

Facebook for Every Phone is an app from Snaptu that is a mobile Facebook app, growing by 556,100 MAU this week. Sayfa Önerme grew by 193,100 MAU; the app is for a non-profit, is in Turkish, and takes the user to a tab with embedded videos to view, and also invites the user to Like the Page. Welcome is an app that grew by 161,600 MAU and helps Page administrators add a welcome tab to their Page.

Chatterbox with 164,200 MAU and Seçim Anketi 141,700 MAU. are apps that allow users to answer questions about their friends, publish the answers to the Wall and thus grow virally. The one difference is that Seçim Anketi, called Yes or No in its English version, asks the user to post to your Wall daily.

Finally, TripAdvisor TripWow is a really interactive and interesting app that takes a user's photos, turns them into a 3-minute video, accompanied by music and animations. The main point of the app, which grew by 141,800 MAU, is to be such a cool video that users share it to their stream — not hard to do given how engaging the video is.

lørdag den 25. juni 2011 at 07.14