Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Announcing Inside Social Apps 2012 – Coming February 8th and 9th in San Francisco
- RoomSync Leverages Facebook Data to Help Colleges Match Roommates
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Orbitz, Coca-Cola, Kia, Sears and American Express
- ReverbNation Launches the First Vertical-Specific Self-Serve Facebook Ads API Tool
- Friend Quizzes, Tab Apps, Skype, Calendar, Are You Interested? and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Announcing Inside Social Apps 2012 – Coming February 8th and 9th in San Francisco Posted: 29 Aug 2011 01:08 PM PDT
Inside Social Apps is coming back to San Francisco! We are proud to announce our third conference on the future of monetization on social and mobile platforms, and we hope to see you there. Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis. Social applications first made their splash in 2007, and have now evolved into a global media ecosystem. Today’s social and mobile apps comprise a profitable multi-billion dollar industry, characterized by vibrant investment activity and newly emerging opportunities on mobile platforms. Inside Social Apps is Inside Network’s content-focused conference series that investigates the latest trends and challenges for social and mobile applications and the companies that bring them to market. Past Inside Social Apps events have seen sold out well before conference day, so we strongly encourage you to register early. Sign up here to be notified when registration opens. Speakers Our 2012 speaker list will be announced in the weeks to come. Past Inside Social Apps agendas have seen a roster of leading developers, including:
A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information. Registration We will be announcing limited tickets at special early pricing, and we strongly encourage you to register early and so your company doesn’t miss the event! Join our registration notification list here. From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| RoomSync Leverages Facebook Data to Help Colleges Match Roommates Posted: 29 Aug 2011 01:03 PM PDT RoomSync has been quietly building a business around helping college students find the right roommate, through a service that integrates Facebook profile data. Enabled by a growing number of universities for on-campus housing, it accesses very particular portions of a user's profile information, then allows students to enter their own information into the app, and lets them browse and locate their own roommate matches.
Robert J. Castellucci, one of four co-founders of RoomSync, tells us the idea for the company started when he was tasked with roommate matching in a previous job. This type of work is always tedious, he said, largely because it's done by third parties. What RoomSync does is allows students to determine their own types of preferences for roommates, throwing Facebook profile information into the mix, something the company currently does for 21 institutions across the United States. Thus far the company has a total of 27,000 users, with many coming in just the last few months. RoomSync offers as a subscription to which institutions subscribe, which includes an initial setup fee and an annual fee, but is free to students, the users.
Castellucci adds that RoomSync has managed not only to match roommates, but to build community and help students make friends before they start school at some of the company’s participating institutions. One school's reported roommate conflicts went down, as did the severity of the conflicts, and that diversity was unaffected between roommates by use of the app.
First, students receive an email from the institution with an access code. On Facebook, the app culls Likes, such as music and TV and books, and then places students into matching networks. Users can share their use of the app to the stream as a feed story, too. There are five default questions asked by the app and the institution may add up to five more for matching purposes; these questions include their smoking preference or to describe their ideal roommate, for example. There's a box where they can fill in additional information (that's moderated for inappropriate content), too.
Then users search the app via academic majors, residence halls where they would like to live, they can view suggested roommates (based on Likes) and then communicate with them over Facebook before selecting their roommates via the Request Roommate option. The recipient of this invitation must confirm, and all dual confirmations are sent to the university for final assignations; once these are made, the app closes for users. [Courtesy Images] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Orbitz, Coca-Cola, Kia, Sears and American Express Posted: 29 Aug 2011 12:09 PM PDT Free vacations, playing with your food, the chance at a free car and helping others were the methods used by brands this week to recruit Likes and brand loyalty. While sweepstakes are always popular, in a twist this week we saw a few volunteer/charity integrations. 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.
Orbit's 50 FavesGoal: Page Growth, Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Engagement Core Mechanic: An app on the Page that asks users to invite their friends to the app, place a bid on their coveted vacation spot, and wait for a chance to win. Method: The Like-gated app is really good at giving users the incentive to keep on playing and inviting more friends. Initially users get 5 bids, with each new friend that plays, users get one more chance to win. Users simply place "bids" on their favorite vacation spot, enter their information, and wait. Impact: Because this game allows users to be continually engaged by placing as many bids as they can get friends to play, the Page seems to have grown significantly since last week, growing about 55,000 Likes since last week according to PageData. What's more, there are lots of opportunities to publish to the stream, increasing the chances others will see or play. Virtual Coca-Cola FreestyleGoal: Engagement, Brand Loyalty, Network Exposure Core Mechanic: An app on the Page that is a game allowing users to create and name their own unique mixes of Coca-Cola branded drinks. Method: Users play the Like-gated app by selecting a cup on a virtual soda machine, then selecting what brands of drinks they want to mix into the cup, and in what quantities. Then they have a chance to name their drink, save it, publish to the stream and name their location; so far more than 1,000 locations have played the game. Impact: The best part of the campaign is that it drives familiarity with a physical product before users see it in real life — there are quite a few of Coca-Cola's products featured in this game — this soda machine is set to hit stores in the near future. The campaign was built in partnership with 360i and has grown about 6,000 Likes since last week, according to PageData.
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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ReverbNation Launches the First Vertical-Specific Self-Serve Facebook Ads API Tool Posted: 29 Aug 2011 09:28 AM PDT Music marketing software suite developer ReverbNation yesterday launched Promote It, a self-serve Ads API tool that lets musicians create automatically optimized Facebook advertising campaigns and landing pages for as little as $25. Musicians simply choose their spend, enter some similar artists, and pick a song or Facebook Page to promote, then ReverbNation targets, buys, and manages the campaign, optimizing for gaining fans and news feed shares. Promote It appears to be the first vertical-specific self-serve Ads API tool targeting the long tail of advertisers. It could inspire similar tools aimed at retailers, local businesses, small game developers, and other advertisers who have too little spend and expertise to qualify for most Ads API tools and services aimed at bigger brands.
ReverbNation offers a comprehensive suite of email marketing, CRM, analytics and other business solutions for musicians. It includes Band Profile, the second most popular Facebook Page tab application for musicians looking to promote themselves and stream their music behind RootMusic’s BandPage. It also recently released Venue Profile which offers similar services to concert halls and bars. Without Promote It, most musicians have had to manually buy Facebook ads to attract new fans for their Pages. At any scale, Facebook’s manual advertising interface doesn’t provide sophisticated enough A/B testing or bid management features to allow users to maximize the performance of their campaigns. Even if it did, most musicians and their teams wouldn’t have the know-how to optimize their campaigns or build compelling landing pages that convert clicks into fans and shares. Promote It takes care of all these problems, asking musician simple questions and converting their answers into ad campaigns and landing pages. To attain the same outcome, musicians would have previously needed to spend many thousands of dollars a month with a managed spend Ads API service and thousands more for development of landing pages.
To use Promote It, musicians choose Here’s how Promote It works:
ReverbNation converts this data into targeting criteria, ad creative, bids optimized for attaining new fans and shares, and slick landing pages that stream or let fans download the musician’s music and encourage sharing and Liking of their Page through Facebook’s social plugins.  Since the ads and landing pages are integrated, artists can view analytics on the performance of their campaign including a funnel showing impressions, clicks, fan interactions, and shares.  One drawback of Promote It is the lack of transparency in ReverbNation’s margins on ad spend. Rather than using a traditional cost per acquisition or percentage of total spend model, musicians don’t any goals for their campaign’s budget, and ReverbNation doesn’t cite how much it spends some on ads and how much it keeps. The company’s COO Jed Carlson tells us that this is because the “quality of an artist’s music and photo is highly deterministic of what we pay for conversions”. Early tests of Promote It showed artists end up paying around $1 per new fan, though a catchy song and ad creative can significantly reduce this. Still, some musicians might not be comfortable allowing ReverbNation to decide how many new fans they deserve for their spend, even if the service is a big improvement over running the ads manually. ReverbNation currently has 1.7 million total clients, and 250,000 more use its competitor RootMusic’s Facebook service. Promote It could therefore turn into a huge revenue stream for ReverbNation, as well as a key selling point for attracting musicians seeking to score new fans for their Facebook Pages. Perhaps even more significant are the implications for the Facebook Ads API and advertising world as a whole. If similar tools for other verticals proliferate, smaller advertisers could gain access to the same performance-enhancing capabilities that major brands use to get the most for their spend. With Facebook recently opening the Ads API after years of private beta testing, developers could help level the playing field for advertisers in specific industries while taking healthy cuts of spend for themselves. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 29 Aug 2011 08:19 AM PDT
Note, as well, that all apps show a five-day reporting lag due to a bug last week. However, no data is missing and everything is back to normal now. Top Gainers This Week
When it came to Page tab apps; Welcome Tab grew by 3.3 million MAU, Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 1.8 million MAU, iwipa: HTML + iframe + FBML by 1.1 million MAU and PM Custom Welcome Tab by 708,300 MAU.
Then there were friend quiz apps. 21 questions grew by 3.2 million MAU, Truth Game by over 1 million MAU, Between You and Me by 998,700 MAU and Truths About You by 817,600 MAU. These apps ask you questions about your friends, then publish feed stories when you answer. Friend Report Card grew by 721,500 MAU and is an app that allows users to publish a report card of their friends (based on Likes and comments) to the stream, tagging them in the process.
The rest of the list included Bold Text, with 2.2 million MAU, an app that publishes a blessing to a user's profile. MyCalendar with 2.2 million MAU; the app asks users to invite friends to use the app. Are YOU Interested? with 1.7 million MAU. Skype had 974,700 MAU, with half the growth in the US. Then apps not growing in the US included Phrases (new) with 854,900 MAU and Phrases with 749,500 MAU. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
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