Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Scraps Little-Used App Directory, Simplifies App Submission to Search Index
- Facebook Testing Location-Based Check-In Deals API for Businesses With Many Locations
- New “Facebook for Every Phone” App Brings Photo Uploading and More to 2500 Different Feature Phones
- Report: Percentage of Companies Recruiting on Facebook Stagnates, Growing Just 0.7% This Year
- New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Buddy Media, Efficient Frontier, Wildfire and More
| Facebook Scraps Little-Used App Directory, Simplifies App Submission to Search Index Posted: 12 Jul 2011 03:37 PM PDT The primary means of app discovery on Facebook is sharing between friends, but the company is today announcing changes to the other options — search, and its Application Directory. “Many developers have been confused about what it means to submit to the App Directory and frustrated by the length of time it took to get approved,” Facebook product manager Carl Sjogreen writes on the company blog. “As we have looked into this issue, we found that the App Directory drove less than 0.5% of all app installs while a significant number of app installs came as a result of Facebook search.” Instead, developers will now be able to submit their apps directly to be indexed in search results, and Facebook is in the meantime “removing the App Directory (in its current form).”
Before, developers had to register through the App Directory in order to be visible in results. Meanwhile, Facebook gradually de-emphasized the directory over the years, and for more than a year has not linked to it from anywhere on the site that we know of. (The URL is still live as of publication, for those who are curious.) Developers who have more than 10 monthly actives can go to the Developer App and click on the “Submit to Search” link on the left sidebar in edit mode. Facebook will then place the app in the search index. Sjogreen says that changes to app settings will automatically be updated in the index, and that it can take up to 72 hours for search results to begin showing newly-added apps. He also notes that “as always, there is no approval process for launching an app on Platform.” Apple’s App Store, arguably the biggest rival platform today, both requires an application process and mainly drives growth through its official leaderboards, and now Facebook has neither. While Sjogreen might have hinted that there will be some new version of the App Directory one day, the main message seems to be that it’s doubling down on its strengths: being open and social. |
| Facebook Testing Location-Based Check-In Deals API for Businesses With Many Locations Posted: 12 Jul 2011 03:21 PM PDT Yesterday we confirmed that Facebook will soon begin limited private testing of a tool for corporations with local branches that allows corporate Page admins to manage the Places of their branches. As part of this parent-child limited private beta, corporations can also access a new Facebook Check-in Deals API. It lets them create different incentives, and run and manage them programmatically across any multiple Places. The Check-in Deals API will make the product much easier for businesses to use at scale. This could increase adoption of the foot traffic reward system, which to date has appeared to be low even in highly wired markets like San Francisco.
Facebook launched Check-in Deals in November to allow businesses to give users discounts and gifts for checking in to their physical location by themselves, with friends, or multiple times. It was initially a managed service for select partners, but Facebook later rolled it out as in a self-serve tool to Pages that list a street address. In March, Check-in Deals metrics were added to Page Insights.
To use the API, businesses must have already been set up with the parent-child Page structure by a Facebook representative. Once a Page admin has given manage_pages permission they can begin creating “prototype deals” that once approved can be copied to children Places. Admins can segment their total list of children Places and then run Check-in Deals at specific segments. For example, one Check-in Deal could be run at every branch with a certain speciality, within a geographic area, or that carries a certain product. Admins can also use segmentation to A/B test deals at a few similar stores to determine which type and reward performs best before copying that deal to other stores. Performance data will appear in Page Insights and Facebook plans to include metrics that aggregate performance across local instances of a prototype Check-in Deal. For details on Check-in Deal API calls, authorized users can consult this Scribd-hosted PDF. Ease of use for big corporations should induce experimentation, in turn increasing awareness of the Check-in Deals product amongst both users and smaller businesses. If Facebook shows that the product can increase foot traffic to some of the worlds most popular store chains, the Check-in Deals API could start a snowball of adoption for the check-in incentive system. |
| New “Facebook for Every Phone” App Brings Photo Uploading and More to 2500 Different Feature Phones Posted: 12 Jul 2011 12:49 PM PDT Today, Facebook officially launched “Facebook for Every Phone”, a downloadable native mobile app compatible with 2500 different feature phones. The app is a rebranding and improvement on the “Facebook for Feature Phones” app Facebook built with Snaptu before it acquired that company in March. The app brings a smartphone-like experience to less advanced handsets, and includes the ability to upload photos and pull a phone’s contacts into the Facebook Friend Finder. The app will help users of older phone models, including many in the developing world, gain access to more Facebook features. To make sure users get hooked on this deeper experience, Facebook has collaborated with 20 international carriers to offer 90 days of free data access to the app.
We’ve been tracking Snaptu’s Facebook feature phone app since June 2009, and have watched it climb to 1.76 million daily active users, just down from its peak of 1.89 million DAU last month. In an effort to improve its offering for feature phones, Facebook partnered with Israeli Snaptu in January 2011 and offered 90 days of free access to Facebook for Feature Phones from several East Asian and Central European carriers. Seeing international mobile usage as key to continued growth, Facebook acquired Snaptu in March. Some estimated the purchase price between $40 and $70 million, which may have made it Facebook’s largest acquisition to date. Now Facebook has renamed the app Facebook for Every Phone, added new features, and made deals for temporary free access from 20 more carriers including several from countries with fast-growing Facebook populations such as India, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The app was specially designed to require less data transfer than mobile sites or Java apps, so low costs should encourage users to pay for access after the free trial expires. Users can download the app by visiting m.facebook.com, scrolling all the way to the bottom of the news feed, and following the download link. Facebook for Every Phone is also available in popular feature phone app stores such as GetJar, Appia, and Mobile Weaver. Users can also download it directly from d.facebook.com/install. Even before the formal launch, users were already actively downloading it, with Facebook for Every Phone already hosting 744,000 DAU as of yesterday.
Facebook will also be able boost user growth and interconnection thanks to Facebook for Every Phone’s ability to import a user’s phone’s contacts into its Friend Finder. This will allow Facebook to suggest friends for users, and get them to send site invites to their contacts that don’t have accounts yet. When users except these invites, Facebook can provide them with recommendations of people to friend. This guides these users get over the initial on-boarding hump and fills their news feed with compelling content that helps Facebook retain them. Along with Facebook’s permanently free mobile site 0.facebook.com, Facebook for Every Phone will bring the social network closer to ubiquity on mobile devices. Though Facebook doesn’t currently monetize its mobile users directly, they create content that drive time-on-site and therefore ad impressions on the web interface. By getting users outside the first-world invested in the site by helping them upload photos and find friends, Facebook can convert to them to monetizable web users once computers and web access become more widely available and affordable. |
| Report: Percentage of Companies Recruiting on Facebook Stagnates, Growing Just 0.7% This Year Posted: 12 Jul 2011 11:52 AM PDT The 2011 Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey released today showed that 55.3% of companies now use Facebook for recruiting, up just 0.7% since 2010. This indicates that the recent proliferation of social recruiting tools has not changed perceptions of the purpose of Facebook or led to a significant increase in recruiting there — or, at least not yet. 86.6% of businesses now say they recruit on LinkedIn, up 8.3 points, while 46.6% use Twitter, up only 1.8% since 2010. The June survey of over 800 US-based human resources and recruitment professionals suggests that interest in recruitment on general interest social networks has been lagging the growth of the networks themselves. It’s not exactly clear how these professionals were chosen though, so there could be some bias.
The data contradicts the swell in social recruiting products that were launched or enhanced this year. Professional networking Facebook app BranchOut began to gain traction, spiking to 250,000 daily active users. The app will launch a premium enterprise recruiting solution on August 1st. Job referral networking app Pursuit launched, and its founder were promptly hired away by Facebook. Identified has begun work acquiring users to build a recruiter searchable database, and Monster.com launched a professional networking app where recruiters can post job openings. Jobvite itself has continued refining its social distribution system for job listings. It also offers a tab app that companies can host on their Pages to solicit applications, similar to the Work For Us app from Work4 Labs. Despite all these options, interest in recruiting on Facebook has been unable to surpass 59% that Jobvite’s survey showed in 2009. That peak came after a massive 23% jump up from 36% in 2008, which may have been caused by Facebook’s own massive growth that year leading companies to overestimate it’s effectiveness. However, given time to build a user base and become more attractive to recruiters, professional networking Facebook apps could boost interest in Facebook recruiting over the next year. Only 55% of companies plan to increase their spending on social recruiting this year, though that’s much higher than the just 16% that plan on increasing spending on job boards. Increased interest in LinkedIn pushed the percentage of companies that have hired from social network recruiting up 6 points to 64% this year. LinkedIn also helped grow the total percentage of companies surveyed that plan on using social media for recruitment this year to 88.9%.
Some other key stats from Jobvite’s survey include:
The social recruiting applications we’ve profiled this year have great potential to increase recruiting efficiency and help companies find qualified and passionate employees. Jobvite Source makes it easy for recruiters to distribute trackable job opening links to the networks of their employees. Work For Us converts a Facebook Page’s fan into potential hires by showing them opening that match their profession and location. These companies have value to provide, so they may need to step up their marketing efforts to court the huge percentage of companies that aren’t recruiting on Facebook yet. |
| New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Buddy Media, Efficient Frontier, Wildfire and More Posted: 12 Jul 2011 08:53 AM PDT Companies on our list of hires this week brought on project and community managers, sales associates, interns and engineers. If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we'll get it into next week's post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn. Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry. Here's this week's list of hires:
Context Optional (part of Efficient Frontier)
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Before the Check-in Deals API, the product was best suited for small businesses with just one location, as manually administrating the rewards across multiple Places was difficult. Soon, test partner businesses with thousands of locations will be able to efficiently use Check-in Deals, which could significantly increase the volume of Check-in Deals available for users to redeem with their mobile devices.
Some features that appear to be new include the ability to upload photos from one’s hand set. This will drive use of the Photos product in developing countries where users may not have separate digital cameras or web connection to upload photos from. With more photos from friends available for browsing, usage of Facebook in these areas should also increase.
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