Inside Facebook
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- The Facebook Marketing Bible July 2011 Edition Is Now Available
- Zynga Doubled ARPU From Last Year Even as Facebook Platform Changes Slowed Growth
- Platform Update: JavaScript SDK with OAuth, Place Like Box, Removed Bookmarks Insights
- Facebook and LinkedIn Block Apps TOS-Violating Browser Extension and Apps
- New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Deal United, Votigo, Efficient Frontier and More
| The Facebook Marketing Bible July 2011 Edition Is Now Available Posted: 05 Jul 2011 11:00 PM PDT
The July 2011 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible: The Comprehensive Guide to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook is now available. The Facebook Marketing Bible has enabled thousands of marketers, social application developers, publishers, and entrepreneurs to navigate and get the most out of the increasingly sophisticated marketing opportunities on Facebook. The web edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible is comprised of detailed resource pages, comprehensive how-to guides, and case studies analyzing today’s most successful marketing and advertising campaigns on Facebook.
Now that Facebook is nearing the 700 million monthly active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience through marketing on Facebook. The July 2011 edition includes updated coverage of the following topics:
Learn more about the July 2011 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com. Table of Contents excerpted from the full July 2011 EditionRecent Featured Facebook Campaigns
Building Your Brand through Facebook Pages
Designing Your Facebook Page
Communicating Through Your Facebook Page
More Ways to Promote Your Facebook Page
Advanced Strategies for Facebook Pages
The Facebook Open Graph for Marketers and Content Publishers
More Ways to Market on Facebook: Questions, Places, and Deals
Advertising on Facebook
Ads Targeting on Facebook
Tools and How-Tos for Marketers
Policies, Privacy, and Guidelines to Watch
Join the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com | ||
| Zynga Doubled ARPU From Last Year Even as Facebook Platform Changes Slowed Growth Posted: 05 Jul 2011 09:28 PM PDT
With Zynga’s IPO filing on Friday, we finally got some numbers to bear out what had been common, but unproven, industry knowledge: that Zynga had been able to overcome handing 30 percent of its revenue to Facebook and weakening virality on the platform by monetizing its existing user base better. The company appears to have more than doubled average revenue per user across a number of metrics from the first quarter a year ago. So caveat to these figures first: they aren’t perfect estimates since Zynga broke out revenue on a quarterly basis, but showed uniques and actives on a monthly or daily basis. Nor do we have any ARPU figures for individual games, because Zynga did not break out revenue per title in its filing. But it looks like Zynga boosted monthly ARPU (or average revenue per user) to $0.33 in the first quarter of this year from $0.14 in the same time period a year earlier. We get this figure by dividing reported revenues for that quarter by the number of monthly actives, then dividing again by three for individual months in the quarter. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games. | ||
| Platform Update: JavaScript SDK with OAuth, Place Like Box, Removed Bookmarks Insights Posted: 05 Jul 2011 04:56 PM PDT In the latest Platform Update to the Developers Blog, Facebook announced that the new OAuth-ready version of the JavaScript SDK will become available on July 20th. The blog post also explained how websites can show the wall of a Places page in a Place Like Box, shared details about upgrades to the Comments Box social plugin, and noted that Applications Insights will no longer show data about users adding bookmarks. In May following some security issues, Facebook announced that by September 1st all apps must use OAuth 2.0 to improve security of user data, specifically User IDs and access tokens. Facebook planned to release updated OAuth 2.0-ready versions of the JavaScript and PHP SDKs on July 1st. However, the PHP SDK was released ahead of schedule, and now the JavaScript SDK has been delayed due to development snags.
Facebook has set the Developer Roadmap release date for the new version of the JavaScript SDK to July 20th, 2011. Once it’s released, developers should have about five weeks to implement OAuth 2.0 and support access token encyrption. The completion of this migration should prevent User IDs and access tokens from being revealed to unauthorized third-parties. Websites using the Like Box social plugin to offer an easy way for visitors to Like their Facebook Places page can now select to show the Place’s wall rather than a stream of checkins.
By setting the
Users no longer manually create bookmarks, however, data about how many users created a bookmark to an app still appeared in the Users tab of Application Insights. Facebook has now removed this data from Application Insights to tidy up the interface and reports. This past week, Facebook officially announced the release of two new features for the Comments Box plugin: Boost Comment, and sort preference. The Platform Update provides some additional details about these features. The “Social Ranking” sorting preference displays comments “from friends, friends of friends, and the most liked or active discussion threads.” Users that aren’t logged in will first see comments boosted by a site’s admin. If they are logged in, they’ll see comments by friends first, followed by boosted comments. In January, Facebook released a new access control module for applications, allowing developers to add people as administrators, developers, testers, or Insights users of their apps.
The blog post includes a reminder that developers can add people that aren’t their Facebook friends by typing an email address into the inviter. This streamlines the role assignment process and relieves developers from having to add coworkers as friends. | ||
| Facebook and LinkedIn Block Apps TOS-Violating Browser Extension and Apps Posted: 05 Jul 2011 11:13 AM PDT Late last week, a Google Chrome browser extension called Facebook Friend Exporter received a flood of new interest as Google+ users looked for a way to import their Facebook friends into Google’s social network, Circles. However, since the app collects contact information from Facebook, it violate’s the site’s terms of service, and Facebook implemented a throttling mechanism that prevents it from scraping email addresses.
LinkedIn also blocked two Facebook professional networking apps: BranchOut for trying to profit from pulling in LinkedIn profile data into an enterprise recruiting search tool,and Monster’s BeKnown for sending promotional messages through LinkedIn’s messages API. These are the latest examples of long-running issues with platform owners and developers both trying to provide the same value to users and customers. Facebook Prohibits Data ScrapersThe Facebook Friend Exporter was originally released by open source software developer, Mohamed Mansour, in November 2010. Similar to some other Facebook-altering browser extensions such as Better Facebook that violate the terms of service, the extension was ignored by Facebook until it received too much attention and was perceived as a threat to the company’s efforts to control core value, this time in the form of its user growth and retention. Facebook Friend Exporter scrapes the email addresses and other contact info of a user’s friends, and allows them to be downloaded as a Google Contacts or .csv file that could then be imported into Gmail, allowing users to more easily recreate their Facebook social graph on Google Circles. This violates section 3.2 of the TOS that states “You will not collect users’ content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.”
In a past spat with Google over data portability, Facebook has claimed that users don’t own the email addresses of friends, and therefore may not export them .The social graphs it holds for users are Facebook’s most valuable asset and its core advantage over Google+, so allowing these graphs to be scraped and imported into Circles represented a clear threat to Facebook. Facebook Friend Exporter’s download site now says it has 22,414 users, with 22,092 installing the extension in the last week. This spike in usage and press about the extension alerted Facebook to it, leading it to alter its mobile site the email addresses of friends disappear from their profiles if a user’s account quickly views the profiles of more than five friends. This prevents the extension from scraping a user’s entire friend list. Mansour claims a new version that circumvents this protective measure is on the way. Users should install Facebook Friend Exporter at their own risk, as its usage could constitute a TOS violation that could lead a user’s account to be suspended. LinkedIn Moves Against Facebook-Based CompetitorsOver the past month, professional networking Facebook app BranchOut saw a spike in usage grow it to 250,000 daily active users, and job posting site Monster.com launched its own Facebook app for professional networking called BeKnown. Both apps allowed users to import their work history and other profile data from LinkedIn, and BeKnown let users send invites via the LinkedIn messages API.
BranchOut plans to release a premium enterprise recruiting search tool on August 1st that would allow the company to charge recruiters to search for job candidates by BranchOut profile information, including that pulled from LinkedIn. This violates LinkedIn’s terms of service, which prohibit the licensing or reselling of access to LinkedIn data. Therefore, LinkedIn has blocked BranchOut’s ability to import profile data. However, BranchOut has responded stating that “Changes to the LinkedIn API have little impact on the BranchOut experience, as it was only being used by a small fraction of our users.” BeKnown’s app also imported LinkedIn data, building the value of the product that Monster clients could have their job listings posted it. The app also sent promotional messages through the LinkedIn API, violating that site’s TOS. Both profile importation and messaging has now been blocked by LinkedIn. Monster has responded saying “We are surprised and disappointed by LinkedIn's decision, which we believe not only goes against the interests of LinkedIn users, but also contradicts what LinkedIn claims to stand for – openness and connectivity.” BeKnown is urging users to leave comments of support on a post it made to the LinkedIn developer forum asking access to be reinstated. BeKnown may be more vulnerable than BranchOut to the API block because the fledgling, 10,000 DAU app was using LinkedIn messages to grow. The blocking of apps by Facebook and LinkedIn is a sign of the growing pains of social platforms that with time have built valuable collections of user data. There’s a fine balance between promoting innovation and giving away competitive advantage. Developers should expect the platforms to protect themselves, and should know that just because they aren’t shut down immediately doesn’t mean their data usage has been approved. While there are monetary and philosophical rewards for operating in the gray area, there’s also great potential for loss of development resources. | ||
| New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Deal United, Votigo, Efficient Frontier and More Posted: 05 Jul 2011 09:36 AM PDT Companies in the Facebook advertising and marketing ecosystem added a few people to product teams, but it was generally an uneventful week. Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry. Here's the list of hires:
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