Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Platform Update: FQL Page_Admin Table Access, Uploading Videos, App Feedback Insights
- Without Proper Recruiter Search, Monster’s BeKnown Facebook Professional Networking App Lacks Value
- Facebook Disables Numerous Apps That Have Negative User Feedback, May Need to Improve Enforcement Communications
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Coca-Cola, Qatar Ariways, Clearasil and Esurance
- Quotes, Badoo, BranchOut, Photos, VEVO, Videos, Horoscopes and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
| Platform Update: FQL Page_Admin Table Access, Uploading Videos, App Feedback Insights Posted: 27 Jun 2011 05:40 PM PDT Facebook’s latest Platform Update to the Developers Blog announced that starting September 22nd, apps will require the manage_pages permission to access the FQL page_admin table and the accounts endpoint that list a user’s Pages and apps. Developers were given their final reminder about the July 1st mandatory migration to Facebook Credits, and informed that new data regarding user feedback to apps would soon appear in app Insights. Finally, in the previous Platform Update post, Facebook documented how videos can be uploaded to Pages, applications, Groups.
Starting 90 days from last Friday, both the FQL page_admin table and the As part of Facebook’s transition to the Graph API from the now deprecated REST API, videos can now be uploaded to Pages, applications, and Groups via the Graph API. Publishing to a Group requires the publish_stream permission, and developers must swap in a Group’s ID. Publishing to Pages or applications requires the corresponding access token attained through requesting the manage_pages permission. Facebook has provided code examples, and notes that videos may take a few minutes to finish uploading and become visible. Disabled App Appeals, Feedback InsightsLate last week Facebook changed its automatic application enforcement system to take negative user feedback more into account when choosing apps to disable. This led several developers that have received negative feedback to suddenly have their apps removed from the Platform. This has caused a stir in the developer community, with some saying they were treated unfairly because they weren’t given early warning, and aren’t provided with deep enough data about user feedback.
Developers can check the email address they’ve listed in the Developers app for a notice about whether their app was disabled or had features removed. If they believe they were disabled in error, they can use the Disabled App Appeal form to request their app be reinstated. If their appeal is granted, all their app’s content and users will come back. In response to the situation, Facebook has announced that more user feedback data will soon be included in application Insights. Developers will be able to see data including the quantity of posts marked as spam and stream story hides. This will allow them to better test new features and monitor to see their impact on feedback. If a new communication feature causes a spike in negative feedback, they’ll know to remove this feature before being shut down by Facebook’s automatic enforcement system. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Without Proper Recruiter Search, Monster’s BeKnown Facebook Professional Networking App Lacks Value Posted: 27 Jun 2011 04:36 PM PDT Late Saturday, employment website Monster.com launched a professional networking app on Facebook called BeKnown. Users can import work history details from Facebook, LinkedIn, and Monster.com, connect with contacts from these sites, Twitter, or their email, and browse jobs posted by these and their second degree connections. However, BeKnown does not let recruiters search for job candidates by parameters such as qualifications or work history unless they’re already connected to them. This significantly reduces the service’s value to recruiters, which in turn reduces the value of maintaining a profile on the app to users, as there’s little chance of being passively recruited. Users may therefore be better off joining a more populated professional network such as LinkedIn or BranchOut, or browsing job boards than having to rebuild their graph on BeKnown.
The social recruiting space has gotten some more attention lately with Facebook app BranchOut securing an $18 million Series B round of funding and briefly topping 200,000 daily active users. Monster is now hoping to offer exposure to Facebook users as part of its service offering to job posting clients by launching BeKnown with support for 35 countries and 19 languages.
Unfortunately, BeKnown is more of a Facebook portal to Monster.com than something truly effective for recruiters or job seekers. Its layout is almost identical to BranchOut’s, but less polished, with its home page displaying prompts to invite friends and endorse connections, a profile completion wizard, and updates from a user’s network. Both services let users can import their LinkedIn profile, though BeKnown also lets users pull profile info from Monster.com. BeKnown’s job listing database appears to be smaller than BranchOut’s as well. A search for “software engineer” in San Francisco and the nearby area returned 463 listings on BeKnown, but 95 official listings posted to BranchOut and another 1864 listings that BranchOut aggregates through job search service Indeed. BeKnown’s most useful feature, its “Social Referral Program” which isn’t live yet, will cause a company’s job listings to appear to the friends of every employee of that company. This means recruiters won’t have to direct employees how to repost listings themselves. However, since the referrals to the listings don’t actually come from a user’s friends, they’re less trusted. The service has a somewhat unique take on endorsements wherein user check boxes to declare a friend has a general skill such as “vision” rather than writing a custom text recommendation. Users can also earn badges, not just for in-app behavior, but for job milestones such as working at one company for five years. Building Trust, but Not ValueThe major missing functionality of BeKnown is actually a conscious choice by Monster. The company has decided not to currently allow recruiters to search the profiles of all the app’s users for people who meet the criteria for certain jobs. This is ability is both crucial to recruiters who need to find candidates outside their network, and to users who want to be eligible for discovery based on their skills by recruiters they’re not connected to. Without this feature, users may as well just browse Monster.com.
Matt Mund, the company’s global VP of product and Tom Chavallier, global product manager, told us the reason this feature was left out was because “we want to make sure we’re building up trust, and are engaging you on your owns terms. You have to treat a network differently than a database.” While this respect for the privacy of users is admirable in concept, it somewhat defeats the purpose of the app. With BranchOut launching its enterprise recruiting search solution on August 1st to compete with LinkedIn’s Recruiter, and Jobvite offering better options for distributing links to job listings on social networks, BeKnown’s position in the larger social recruiting space seems unclear. The 38.2 million Monster.com users with Facebook accounts may still find BeKnown useful to conduct searches of jobs posted by friends, but it’s the chance to stand out and be discovered for one’s competencies that makes a professional social network more valuable than a job listing site. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Jun 2011 12:15 PM PDT On Friday, Facebook increased user feedback’s weight in its automated Platform enforcement system. This caused it to automatically disable a number of app that had received a large volume of negative feedback. Now, some developers are upset that they weren’t given fair warning to correct their apps, and several claim they haven’t done anything wrong — and a few who were taken off have been reinstated already. So far, Facebook has provided an appeal process for developers of apps that have been disabled and has said that improved feedback monitoring in app Insights will launch soon. Still, the site’s effort to protect the user experience from spam apps has hurt its relationship with some in the developer community.
Reports in the Facebook Developer forums indicate the disabled were mostly small to mid-sized, with some in the 10,000 to 20,000 daily active user range including one called Game of Truth, which you can see above has dropped to zero DAU. Many of the affected developers are threatening to leave the Facebook Platform, while other are calling for better benchmarks for assessing how much negative feedback is too much. The company’s goal is to keep the user experience enjoyable for both applications users and non-users so developers have healthy Platform to work on long into the future. Facebook CTO Bret Taylor said that by improving its automatic enforcement systems, the site reduced spam by 95% in 2010 while also reducing enforcement actions. In a statement, Facebook said “we started getting a lot of user feedback, spiking significantly over the past week, on the amount of application spam people are seeing in their feeds and on their walls. As a result, we turned on a new enforcement system [Friday] that took user feedback much more heavily into account. This resulted in a number of applications with high negative user feedback being disabled or having certain features disabled.” This means that the apps which were disabled didn’t necessarily violate Platform policy, but somehow led users to mark their posts as spam or report them. The apps may not have made it clear to a user when they would post to their wall or send invites to friends. It’s also possible that users who received wall posts from apps their friends were using marked those posts as spam because they had never personally used the app.
Enforcement Warning Systems and Negative Feedback BenchmarksSome developers in the forum and who have emailed us directly claim they’ve lost development and marketing investments as well as the trust of their core user because their apps were removed from the Platform. They believe they were treated unfairly because they weren’t given advance notice or the opportunity to fix their apps. Facebook may need to reconsider the warning and communication protocols for its enforcement system. Leaving apps with negative feedback running for a few more days after warning developers may in fact be better for the Platform experience, as users may grow skeptical of spending time and money on games if they fear they may be suddenly disabled. Other developers are seeking a better way to gauge what level of negative feedback Facebook deems unacceptable. A Hong Kong developer posting on the forum under the alias ‘takwing’ explained [edited for clarity]:
Facebook should consider releasing some sort benchmark for an acceptable level of negative feedback. This would allow developers to test new features, but know to remove them if negative feedback exceeds the benchmark. A Facebook engineer named Eugene responded to the developers in the forums stating “Where we have failed is not providing enough feedback about negative engagement metrics to developers before needing to take this action. This is something we are working hard to fix with the new Application Insights that will be launching over the next few weeks – you will have detailed information about both positive and negative engagement of the content your application generates.” The planned improvements, which include the ability to see how quantities of posts marked as spam and stream story hides, should make it easier to monitor feedback fluctuations. Developers will need to either need to confer to establish benchmarks or Facebook will need to provide one to make this Insights data as useful as possible. Some developers have posted to the forum saying their apps have been re-enabled, and others have been allowed to recreate their apps with a new app IDs and have users re-grant permissions. Several others, though, report they’ve received automatic denials when they tried to appeal their decision. Even if Facebook is trying help users and preserve trust in the Platform so it can continue to make money for developers, the site will need to learn from this incident. It should consider being more cautious when changing its automatic enforcement systems, and look at how it can improve data and communication regarding Platform enforcement. Just a month ago, Facebook angered some in the developer community when several developers received notice that they had 48 hours to change fix authentication data leaks, even though they weren’t leaking data. Communication needs to improve if Facebook wants to entice developers to build on its Platform. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Coca-Cola, Qatar Ariways, Clearasil and Esurance Posted: 27 Jun 2011 11:12 AM PDT Brands in our weekly look at Facebook campaigns made some excellent use of Places integrations. Giving out free stuff (airline tickets) continued to be a popular Page growth method, and charity attracted thousands of Facebook Likes. 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.
Coca-Cola's Recycling, Places Campaign in IsraelGoal: Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty, Product PurchaseCore Mechanic: In Israel, Coca-Cola distributed 10,000 recycle bins across the country and assigned each one a Places page on Facebook. Method: The company encouraged users to check-in to the bins as they recycled, as well as upload photos of themselves interacting with the recycle bins, and eventually crowned a Recycling King for being the most active. Though it might be somewhat awkward to check in to a recycling bin, the campaign trades on users wanting to tell their friends that they are helping the environment. Impact: The campaign made good use of user-generated content and, since Coca-Cola is one of the biggest brands on Facebook, likely received exposure across networks in that country. The campaign will help improve Coca-Cola’s public perception as an environmentally conscious company, and make users feel that interacting with the brand on Facebook has a positive impact on the world. Qatar Airways' Be Where You Want To Be ContestGoal: Page Growth, Engagement, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase, Network Exposure Core Mechanic: The Like-gated promotion allows users to enter to win free airline tickets on the Page.
Method: In order to celebrate recently offering 100 worldwide destinations, the airline is giving users a chance to travel on Qatar Airways by answering questions on thePage, using clues from videos. By offering valuable prizes that connect directly to the brand’s identity, Qatar Airways can position its own services as something to be desired. Impact: Thus far the Page has grown to 162,300 Likes and the contest still has a week to go. 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 27 Jun 2011 08:15 AM PDT
The apps on our list gained the most MAU out of any app this past week, and grew from between 623,400 and 8 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
Quotes grew by 4.6 million MAU this week; the quiz app asks users questions about their friends, then posts the answers to their Walls. Then there were the dating and professional networking apps. Zoosk grew by 4.5 million MAU, continuing its growth in the United States, while Badoo grew by 3.9 million in countries other than the US. BranchOut, a professional networking app, grew by 865,200 MAU this week.
The Page tab apps saw some significant growth this week, too. Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by about 1.7 MAU, FBML Tab Maker grew by 1.1 million MAU and HTML + iframe + FBML = iwipa grew by 811,200 MAU. Some apps to watch this week were VEVO for Artists, an app that grew by 1 million MAU and allows users to upload VEVO videos to their Page, being used increasingly by popular artists to feature music videos on Facebook. Then Phrases, with more than 1 million MAU, but is not available in the US. Finally, Facebook for Every Phone from Snaptu grew by 941,000 MAU.
The rest of the apps included photos apps like 60 Photos with more than 4 million MAU; the app allows users to rate friends' photos, then publishes feed stories to their Walls. Amor grew mostly in Mexico by 1.1 million MAU. Video House grew by 967,100 MAU and is a Turkish video app. Pieces of Flair grew by 868,200 MAU and Daily Horoscope by 754,400 MAU. |
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