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Inside Facebook

500 Startups Demo Day: Top Facebook Integrations

Posted: 16 Aug 2011 05:25 PM PDT

Dave McClure’s early-stage startup accelerator, 500 Startups, today held a Summer Demo Day where its second batch of companies pitch to a room of investors in hopes of gaining funding. Dozens of startups presented today, but we’re taking a closer look at those with the strongest Facebook integrations and potential to succeed.

Appetizer

Appetizer makes it simple for small businesses to offer a branded mobile app from which they can distribute deals and drive sales. Rather than forcing the business to build the app themselves or take the time to submit content, Appetizer pulls as much information and media from a business’s Facebook Page as possible.

Appetizer has vertical-specific templates for retail, restaurants, bars, and other businesses. Owners can add Facebook sharing, location service checkin links, or functionality the facilitates their business, such as appointment booking for a hair salon. By scraping addresses, profile photos and more, Appetizer can pitch its service to businesses with a ready-to-show app. This lowers customer acquisition costs for its $20-a-month service.

The innovative use of public Facebook data to seed custom app design could be applied to other types of businesses as well. Appetizer is looking for $300,000 in seed funding to build out a sales team and app functionality.

ChirpMe

Most dating services require users to browse profiles of potential matches, message them, and hope they can sustain a conversation long enough to meet in person, which often means going on a boring coffee date. A successful dating service has high churn rate, leading to constant customer acquisition costs.

ChirpMe flips the user flow by presenting users with fun local date experiences. They can then post these to their profile and view them on the profiles of potential matches. Users can find people with similar ideas of what’s fun, start a conversation about the potential date experience, prepay for the date, and have fun with someone new. Additionally, because ChirpMe is centered around experiences rather than meeting people, users already in relationships can use the service as well. With lower customer acquisition cost and a strong monetization model, ChirpMe has the potential to disrupt the dating industry.

The specifics of the company’s Facebook integration is still under wraps, but it will be using the viral channels to gain users in ways its founders say are different than other personal networking and dating apps. Still, we expect that similar to question and answer apps such as Badoo and Friendly, ChirpMe will post a user’s preferences to their profile such as the date ideas they think sound fun. The company is trying to raise $500,000 to build out its team.

LaunchRock

LaunchRock helps startups and businesses gain users and customers. Through the LaunchRock platform, websites can set up a compelling landing page that drive signups, and another page that incentivizes sharing to Facebook and Twitter by rewarding users with gifts and early access to beta tests, new product lines, and more.

Clients can track which referrers are driving more signups through social media shares, and what are the personality types, or cohorts, of those who’ve signed up. There’s a button to instantly thank evangelists for sharing, and the company provides best practices for reengaging less active users and offering rewards.

With some many new web services, e-commerce stores, and brand presences launching all the time, services that assist businesses with securing fans are in high demand. The company is looking to raise $1 million in seed funding for new hires and product development.

Facebook’s New Zip Code Ad Targeting Nearly Doubles Click Through Rates Says Blinq Media

Posted: 16 Aug 2011 02:46 PM PDT

Last week, Facebook launched a new ad targeting option that allows advertisers to show their ads to users in specific zip codes. Blinq Media, a major Facebook Ads API tool provider for ad agencies, now tells us its early tests show that zip code targeted ads have nearly twice as high a click through rate than city-targeted ads, and have a higher frequency per use cap.

These findings indicate that zip code targeting could make Facebook Ads significantly more valuable to local advertisers, which could draw in more local and small businesses and drive Facebook’s revenues.

Previously, Facebook advertisers could only geotarget ads as specifically as the city where a user lives, leading them to pay for less relevant clicks. In many cities, and especially major metropolitan areas, advertisers might be trying to drive foot traffic from users who lived several miles from their business. Advertisers couldn’t target specific neighborhoods which house their customer demographics.

Zip code targeting is now available in the Facebook self-serve ads tool and the recently publicly launched Ads API. A Facebook spokesperson tells us that “Facebook uses a variety of information to help us determine a person’s zip code.” We believe this might include a user’s IP address and internet service provider as well as the current city and address information users list in their profiles.

Zip Code Targeting Performance and Strategies

Blinq Media received early alpha access to the zip code targeting option about two weeks ago and has been testing it since. Its CTO Luis Caballero tells us that “Zip code targeting allows you to be much more refined and exact with targeting, and  you can deliver a much more relevant message to a local audience.” This increased relevance led to a “click through rate that was nearly two times” that of ads targeted to a city.

Typically, the frequency of Facebook ads — the number of times a single user sees an ad — only reaches one or two in an average campaign. Caballero tells us zip code targeting appears to allow advertisers to surpass this cap and reach a frequency of three or four. This could significantly increase recall for these advertisers, and drive both clicks and foot traffic.

Caballero recommends that advertisers target their ads broadly at first, determine what cities clicks are coming from, then test to hone in on the optimal zip codes. He tells us that if advertisers “go through that approach and be methodical and scientific, they’ll probably get a much higher performance” than targeting cities.

The option opens up many new advertising strategies. Local restaurants or bars could advertise to those in walking distance. Non-local businesses could customize their ad creative to be especially relevant to individual zip codes by noting local landmarks. Similar to education history targeting, businesses with especially high-end or low-end products could target neighborhoods with the right socio-economic profile.

Blinq Media has already integrated zip code targeting into its licensable tool, and expect other Ads API tool and service providers to move quickly to add the option as well. If Facebook can raise awareness of this new tool for local advertisers and its performance potential, it could secure grow one of its core revenue sources.

Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings Track Facebook User Demographics Across the Web

Posted: 16 Aug 2011 11:00 AM PDT

This week, Nielsen plans to launch its new “Online Campaign Ratings” system that tracks ad performance and audience demographics thanks to data from a partnership with Facebook. It will allow advertisers to pay for similar insights into their web campaigns as Nielsen provides for their television commercials, such as reach, frequency, and gross rating points, as well as anonymized biographical data such as age, gender, and location.

Reliable, granular, third-party campaign measurement could help advertisers improve ad targeting and gain the confidence about the impact of their ads necessary to shift spend online and away from television. The data could convince advertisers to choose Facebook because they can actually target based on this same audience demographic data.

Some users may be alarmed about being tracked through their Facebook data, but advertisers are only see the same data through OCR as they see when buying ads on Facebook, and GigaOm reports that users will be able to opt out.

Here’s how Nielsen’s Online Campaign Ratings system works:

  1. Advertisers tag their ad with a Nielsen code snippet
  2. Facebook records when logged in users view tagged ads on Facebook.com or other sites
  3. Nielsen tracks where an ad is being seen and how often
  4. Facebook’s anonymized, aggregate audience demographic data is combined with Nielsen’s impression data
  5. Advertisers receive reports within days about the performance of their ad campaign

Niether Nielsen or Facebook gain access to all the data at any point, protecting the privacy of those tracked. Users don’t volunteer or get paid for being tracked the way they do for contributing to Nielsen TV ratings, but they don’t have to take any action, just browse normally.

Nielsen first announced plans for OCR in September. It also pulls demographic data from other media companies and publishers, and has been testing OCR since March with over 20 brands including Proctor & Gamble and Publicis Groupe S.A.’s Starcom MediaVest.

Early tests showed that OCR could track 42% of impressions of a given ad, while traditional panel sample online ad tracking methodology typically only tracked 3%. OCR was also able to determine what percentage of an ad’s impressions were reaching the target audience.

By contributing its data, Facebook is betting on the high performance of it’s own advertising product. It may hope to show Facebook Ads more frequently reach their intended targets and are correlated with better downstream conversion rates. The site would also benefit from a general reallocation of advertising spend to online display from TV.

Nielsen and Facebook had previously partnered to run Nielsen-designed polling ads on the Facebook home page. These BrandLift poll ads helped advertisers determine whether an ad campaign had increased purchase intent.

New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: TBG Digital, Wildfire, Efficient Frontier and More

Posted: 16 Aug 2011 09:30 AM PDT

Companies focused on the Facebook platform seemed to have a pretty normal week of hiring, with Context Optional most notably bringing in a new engineering director.

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)

  • Nicholas Solter, Director of Engineering – was working as a Platform Genius at Conext Optional.

Wildfire

  • Jesse Lin, Senior Accountant – formerly a Financial Analyst II at NextG Networks.
  • Will Wallace, Account Executive – previously worked as Business Development Manager at Levi Strauss & Co.
  • Vincent Ng, Sales Associate Manager – was working as an Account Executive at Wildfire previously.

TBG Digital

  • Vesela Pehlivanova, Social Media Analyst - previously at New Media Account Manager at 77Agency.
  • Marine Lenoir, Social Media Analyst – formerly a Business Development Executive at Criteo.
  • Sean Bone, Creative Intern.

Efficient Frontier

  • Jaime So, Account Manager – formerly an Associate Account Manager at Efficient Frontier.

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

 

Music, More Music, TV and Movies on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages

Posted: 16 Aug 2011 08:46 AM PDT

Our list of growing Facebook Pages this week was made up overwhelmingly of musicians' Pages, several of which seem to have been affected by Page consolidations. Then there was Facebook's Page, which recently passed 50 million Likes, a few film Pages, a soccer video game and an Arabic TV station Page. Pages on our list this week required 489,100 and 1.6 million Likes to make the top 20 this week. We compile these lists with our PageData tool, which tracks Page growth across Facebook.

Name Likes Daily Growth Weekly Growth
1.  P!nk 10,111,869 +5,749 +1,663,151
2.  Pro Evolution Soccer 4,183,089 +538,455 +1,364,034
3.  Rihanna 43,341,608 +81,204 +1,092,378
4.  Rick Ross 1,585,158 +4,247 +968,548
5.  Nicki Minaj 13,289,542 +20,264 +932,953
6.  Skillet Music 2,302,926 +1,533 +877,730
7.  Camila México 2,692,710 +2,695 +821,478
8.  AC/DC 15,716,175 +16,358 +709,639
9.  قناة العربية 801,674 +1,594 +698,558
10.  slank 1,895,964 +1,846 +694,197
11.  The Smurfs 1,963,865 +85,749 +687,456
12.  Justin Bieber 34,725,075 +48,657 +624,708
13.  Harry Potter 32,527,416 +76,027 +618,261
14.  Red Hot Chili Peppers 12,389,051 +19,636 +598,556
15.  Tercer Cielo 2,654,369 +4,215 +593,817
16.  Michael Jackson 39,600,692 +43,325 +578,256
17.  Green Day 18,237,823 +15,237 +510,062
18.  CHAYANNE 1,931,721 +2,168 +506,310
19.  Facebook 50,542,792 +87,106 +502,481
20.  Eminem 45,309,934 +68,040 +489,139

P!nk's Page grew by 1.6 million Likes this week to 10.1 million, although since the Page hasn't been updated, it would seem this was a consolidation. The ever popular Rihanna grew by more than 1 million Likes to 43.3 million Likes; she's been promoting charity, the products for which she is a spokeswoman, contests and videos. Rick Ross' Page grew by 968,500 Likes, but there were no updates in the past week, it now totals 1.5 million Likes.

Nicki Minaj's Page grew by about 933,000 Likes as she's been winning and nominated for awards; her Page is now at 13.3 million Likes. Skillet Music grew by 877,700 Likes to 2.3 million, Camila México by 821,500 Likes to 2.6 million, AC/DC by 709,600 Likes to 15.7 million, slank by 694,200 Likes to 1.8 million and Tercer Cielo by 598,800 to 2.6 million; these Pages seem to be a result of consolidation, as they all experienced huge jumps in the span of the same few days.

Justin Bieber's Page grew by 624,700 Likes to 34.7 million as the teenage singer seems to be on tour. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are promoting their new album, and so the Page grew by 598,600 Likes to 12.3 million. Michael Jackson's Page grew by 578,300 Likes to pass 39.6 million; the Page has been promoting charity and a Cirque du Soleil show with his songs. Green Day's Page grew by 510,100 Likes to 18.2 million as the band played a show recently. Eminem's Page grew by 489,100 Likes to 45.3 million as he promoted a charity and his new music. Then CHAYANNE's Page grew by 506,300 Likes after he launched a tour to 1.9 million.

The video game Pro Evolution Soccer grew by 538,500 Likes to 4.1 million and seems to be a Page consolidation.  قناة العربية, or Al Arabiya, is a TV news channel based in Dubai. The Page seems to have been consolidated a bit, now standing at 80,700 with a 698,600 boost this week, and posts frequent news updates. The rest of the list included movies — "The Smurfs" with 687,500 Likes to grow to 1.9 million and "Harry Potter" with 76,000 Likes to 32.5 million. Finally, Facebook's Page grew by 502,500 likes to 50.5 million.

onsdag den 17. august 2011 at 07.47