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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Platform Update: Credits Insights, Platform Policies, App to User Request Messages

Posted: 15 Aug 2011 04:27 PM PDT

Amongst a flurry of announcements about changes to games on its platform, Facebook recently updated the Developers Blog regarding the addition of a new Insights analytics tab for Facebook Credits. The latest Platform Update also included announcements about how app-to-user request notifications will now show the notification’s message; new capabilities for the Graph API, activity and recommendation plugins, and the Graph API Explorer; as well as clarifications of two Facebook Platform Policies.

Developers of Facebook apps that use Facebook Credits will now or soon see a Credits tab in their Insights dashboard. Credits Insights graphs the information developers receive in their daily Credits reports, name spend, chargebacks, and refunds. Developers can select date ranges for these graphs, compare time periods, and export data in XLS or CSV format.

Credits Insights, accessible to those with the Administrator role on a given app, will help developers determine how effectively their apps and games are monetizing. The Insights graphs are more efficient for determining the impact of design changes or market forces on monetization than the more momentary Credits reports. With time, Facebook may add more data to Credits Insights that could help developers better understand who is spending within their apps, and what is convincing them to make purchases.

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Facebook quietly changed some important Platform Policies recently, banning promotion of apps on some types of competing social platforms and restricting how developers can reward their users. In the Platform Update, it announced two smaller deletions from its policy document:

FPP IV.4: You must provide users with an easily identifiable “skip” option whenever you present users with an option to use a Facebook social channel.

Apps no longer have to include a skip option because apps must always obtain user consent before posting on their behalf.

FPP IV.5: You must not provide users with the option to publish more than one Stream story at a time.

This deletion permits apps to let users publish to the walls of multiple friends simultaneously. Group communication, group buying, multi-player gaming, and other types of apps will now be able to let users choose multiple recipients for a wall post rather than put users through several redundant share steps.

The policy was likely put in place initially to reduce the potential for wall post spam. However, Facebook has been refining its app quality ranking system such that apps that publish posts that are frequently hidden or marked as spam will receive fewer impressions of their news feed content and risk suspension. Facebook apparently sees these repercussions as adequate to discourage spam.

App to user Request notifications that appear in the Apps and Games Dashboards now include the message originally included with the Request, making them a more effective method for developers to communicate with their users and ping them with calls to action. Before, these notifications didn’t include the message. The change could increase the conversion rate on app-to-user Requests. The counters for pending Requests will also appear in the new Games Ticker.

Developers using Facebook’s Activity or Recommendations plugins now have the option to prevent old or outdated content from appearing in the plugins. The  max_age field lets developers set the number of days within which a URL must have been created to be eligible for display within the plugin.

For example, ’0′ would make all stories show up regardless of URL creation date similar to how the plugin worked before, whereas ’14′ would require the URL to have been created in the last two weeks. The option will make the plugins more useful to developers of sites focused on breaking news or other real-time content.

The Graph API Explorer now permits developers to quickly generate access tokens for one of the apps they admin. This will make it easier to test APIs that require users to grant permissions to an app.

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Rather than using the legacy REST API, developers can now determine if a user Likes a Page using the Graph API call:

https://graph.facebook.com/me/likes/PAGE_ID &access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

This could help apps determine if a user is eligible to see fan-only content protected by a Like-gate.

Featured Facebook Campaigns: Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza, Super 8, Cost Plus and Clearasil

Posted: 15 Aug 2011 12:47 PM PDT

Brands used everything from coupons to nostalgia to recruit Likes on their Facebook Pages this week. Pizza Hut gave out coupons, while Domino's Pizza gave out free pizzas with a side of nostalgia, then there were sweepstakes for guitars, cars and vacations from Clearasil, Super8 and Cost Plus World Market.

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 over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Pizza Hut's Get Your P'Zone

Goal: Page Growth, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: A coupon application on the Page allowing users to receive a discount on the company's P'Zone product.

Method: Users who visited the Pizza Hut Page during the past week were able to use a branded application to make an order on the company's website and then receive $5 off that order. The Page was Like-gated for users who wanted to receive the discount on the pizza and the company also offered customers the chance to receive coupons via email or text message.

Impact: The Page shows good growth last week during the offer, jumping about 130,000 Likes, according to AppData.

Domino's Pizza Noid Shootout

Goal: Page Growth, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase, Engagement

Core Mechanic: An arcade-style game on the Page that promises free pizzas to the highest scores and then awards coupons, publishes feed stories and adds people to the company's email lists when the game is over.

Method: The arcade game's premise is that the company's old mascot stole 10,080 free pizzas and is set to award those pizzas to the users with the highest scores. The game is basically just shooting pizzas, easy to play in other words, and when it's over users who do not win are offered coupons for other free food. Then they are prompted to enter their email to receive those pizzas, being added to the company's email list in the process, and publish a feed story announcing their win.

This campaign has another angle, however, since it incorporate Domino's Pizza's older mascot, Noid. The arcade-style game and old mascot trigger nostalgia, and users win free food just for taking the trip down memory lane, even if they don't win the game. Plus, users can return to play multiple times, increasing engagement.

Impact: The Page grew by about 109,000 Likes in the past week according to PageData. That means probably more than 100,000 users Liked the Page as a result of the game, and the many news feed stories published by game reached even more users.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Buddy Media Raises $54 Million Fourth Round That Could Further Fuel Facebook Marketing Consolidation

Posted: 15 Aug 2011 11:46 AM PDT

In a move that could accelerate the consolidation of ecommerce, marketing games, and Facebook Ads API companies into Page management giants, Buddy Media has raised a $54 million Series D round of funding. The funding comes from late-stage investors GGV Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, Bay Partners and Insight Venture Partners. GGV, Institutional Venture Partners and Bay Partners and values the company at $500 million.

Buddy Media now has capital to acquire developers that can help its brand clients produce a direct return on social media investment, engage their fans, and efficiently run high-performing ad campaigns. The funding will also go towards building out its sales, support, and product teams,  and opening more  international offices.

Buddy Media has grown to become the largest of the Facebook Page management companies, helping brands run and promote their presence on the social network. The company succeeded by raising funding and scoring big name clients early, and now boasts hundreds of high profile clients, a team of over 200 employees, and European headquarters in London. Buddy Media raised a $23 million round in October 2010, part of which likely went to acquiring social ecommerce and analytics developer SpinBack in May.

An IPO could be in Buddy Media’s future as it recently hired Dennis Morgan as its chief financial officer, who helped led corporate finance for Yahoo! as it completed over $5 billion in acquisitions. GGV partner Jeff Richards will join the company’s board of directors, alongside Facebook’s first sales executive Kevin Colleran, who joined last month. The CEO of consulting firm MediaLink, Michael Kassan, will become Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow’s special advisor.

With time, Facebook has incorporated more native Page management functionality, and free tools have proliferated. Low and middle-tier Page management companies may face commodification of their services. However, Buddy Media’s focus on enterprise-level solutions is proving lucrative as the world’s biggest brands require advanced tools to apply the marketing spend they’re shifting shift to social.

Capital for Acquisitions in Ecommerce, Games, and Ads API

With plenty of cash on hand, Buddy Media could hire new product teams or acquire developers so it can widen and strengthen its service offering in verticals that emerging as important to Facebook brand presence.

It already acquired SpinBack, whose technology lets brands encourage sharing of ecommerce products and purchases, and track additional sales generated by these shares. Still, it could look to purchase a full-fledged ecommerce store, or the developer of apps that let users pay for purchases with Facebook Credits so clients can process sales from their Page a make a direct ROI. Potential targets include Beetailer, Zibaba, and Moontoast. Page management competitor and prevalent consolidation force Vitrue recently partnered with ecommerce developer Milyoni to gain access to these types of technology.

Marketing-focused game development is becoming more important to Page management as brands look to drive sustained engagement, exposure, and sharing. There are plenty of small game design houses ripe for acquisition that could bring their suite of games as well as their team to Buddy Media. GamesThatGive, which makes games that trigger charity donations when played, was acquired by Vitrue last month, and we believe this type of consolidation will become more common in the next year.

Perhaps the most important decision Buddy Media will have to make with its new funding is how to integrate with the Facebook Ads API, which lets tool and service providers programmatically access Facebook’s ads system to create, buy, manage, and track large scale advertising campaigns. Facebook ads help brands gain fans for the Pages, and the new Sponsored Stories ad unit is triggered by Page content and fan interactions, so having a combined Page management and Ads API solution is optimal for clients. Ads API tool and service providers can earn millions of dollars by taking a percentage of a brand’s total spend.

With the Ads API out of beta and now publicly available, Buddy Media could build its own team and develop an Ads API tool. Alternatively it could acquire one of the smaller brand-focused Ads API developers such as Brighter Option, GraphEffect, or XA.net. This would follow the trend of consolidation between social marketing and Ads API, as Experian acquired Techlightenment in January and Efficient Frontier acquired Context Optional in May.

One day, Facebook’s native tools may be good enough and brand marketing departments may become sophisticated enough to reduce the need for third-party Page management solutions. But for now, by buying or building out tools critical to a brand’s Facebook presence, Buddy Media can continue to sign  big clients as they wake up to social media and redirect marketing spend their from TV and search.

tirsdag den 16. august 2011 at 07.31