Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Secret Whitelist Protects Top Facebook Page Management Tools From Engagement-Reducing Post Consolidation
- Minimizing Your Facebook Ad CPC Bid Prices by Avoiding Bid Competition
- Facebook Hires and Departures: Legal, Interns, Engineering and More
- Facebook Careers Postings: Business, Mobile, Engineering, Sales and More
| Posted: 09 Sep 2011 05:00 AM PDT On Tuesday we published the results of a study indicating that Pages that sync or auto-post their content to Facebook from Twitter or blogs using tools like HootSuite, Twitter, and NetworkedBlogs receive significantly fewer Likes and comments per posts than those that post manually using Facebook’s web and mobile interfaces. This is partly because Facebook consolidates into a folded thread all posts from across Pages and friends in a user’s news feed that were published through the same tool, displaying a “Show x more posts from [publisher app] link”. We’ve now learned that Facebook maintains a secret whitelist of companies that are exempt from having content posted through their publishers consolidated across different Pages and clients. This protects them from a reduction in news feed impressions. The whitelist includes some top enterprise Page management tools from the Preferred Developer Consultant program including Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, Context Optional and Syncapse.
Since consolidation negatively impacts Page post engagement and other key performance indicators, brands have to consider using whitelisted publishing tools. If they aren’t already, they should out of necessity either ask their Page management solution provider about gaining admission to the whitelist, or switch to a tool protected from consolidation. Overall, the surfacing of the consolidation whitelist may anger developers not on it, and push Facebook to change its policy on whose posts are consolidated. Here’s some more context on what’s happening. In order to gain the maximum exposure, clicks, and other key performance metrics from publishing to the news feed, Facebook Pages need to optimize their EdgeRank, or prominence in the news feed. To do so, they need to consistently publish compelling and widely seen updates to draw Likes and comment that improve their EdgeRank. However, Facebook has an automated system in place originally designed to collapse flurries of posts published by users playing spammy social games. That system causes any posts present in a user’s news feed that were published by an API publishing tool with a same App ID, whether from one or many Pages or users, to be consolidated into threads that show one post but require users to click to unfold and view the rest of the posts. Since users don’t always unfold the threads, consolidation reduces the impressions of posts, giving them fewer opportunities to score feedback that helps their EdgeRank. The study by EdgeRank Checker and another by Momentus Media show reductions in post engagement rates by as much as 70% for Pages using third-party publishing tools that have posts consolidated across Pages. This engagement reduction cannot be entirely attributed to consolidation, as differences in content, Page size, and the types of companies that pay for third-party tools all impact engagement as well. Still, post consolidation does negatively impact impression rates, and therefore publishing apps that cause posts to be consolidated should not be used by brands.
To insulate some of the world’s biggest brands who are also heavy advertisers on Facebook, as well as some of the biggest third-party Page management companies from its Preferred Developer Consultant program, Facebook quietly offered admission to a post consolidation whitelist to a few Page management developers. Tools whose App IDs are whitelisted do not have their posts consolidated across Pages (though, in some cases, a single client’s Page may have its own posts consolidated together if it posts multiple times in rapid succession). Brands using tools on the whitelist have an advantage over their competitors, as they can attain more news feed exposure for their posts. Page management companies can use the higher engagement rates afforded them by the whitelist to attract clients. Page management companies left off this whitelist may feel the double standard is unfair, especially if brands using Twitter, HootSuite, TweetDeck, or NetworkedBlogs ditch them for whitelisted tools. Executives of Page management companies tell us they don’t believe Facebook was intending to penalize any publishing tool developers with the consolidation system, and rather it was a holdover from a spam prevention effort that Facebook has since handled by limiting how much game content appears in the news feed. We’ve reached out to Facebook for comment on the the whitelist, but have yet to hear back. Exempting trusted publishers from post consolidation may have intended as a temporary solution until a more sophisticated way to keep individual publishers from overrunning the news feed could be developed. But in the meantime, the whitelist has created an uneven playing field where certain publishers and the brands that use them receive much less visibility in the news feed than others. If Facebook wants to keep the long-tail of third-party developers happy and working on its Platform, it will need to provide more transparency around how the post consolidation system currently works. It will also need to quickly fix it so no publishing tools and their brand clients are penalized for legitimate promotion in an effort to control game spam. | ||
| Minimizing Your Facebook Ad CPC Bid Prices by Avoiding Bid Competition Posted: 08 Sep 2011 11:57 AM PDT
The following is an excerpt of entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains examples of how advertiser competition raises bid prices, and more strategies for when to pause or change the targeting of your campaigns to minimize your cost per click. When running ads on Facebook, advertisers need to think about more than just creative and targeting to achieve optimal performance at the lowest cost. By avoiding periods of high advertiser competition, the same performance can be achieved for lower bid prices. Since Facebook has a limited supply of users that can be advertised to, it uses a marketplace system where the advertisers who bid the highest for a click from a certain demographic have their ads shown. To reach targets for the lowest cost per click, advertisers should consider running ads when bidding competition from other advertisers is low. Here we’ll discuss strategies for maximizing advertising performance through strategic timing, and back up them up with data from AdParlor, a company that helps some of the largest brands and game developers buy ads through the Facebook Ads API.
Avoiding Bid CompetitionAll advertisers on Facebook compete with each other to reach users, whether they’re targeting wide sets of demographics or specific niches. When more advertisers are trying to reach the same audience, the bid price required to secure impressions rises. Facebook helps you gauge the overall supply and demand in the marketplace by providing “suggested bid” data. When suggested bid prices rise, that often means there’s more competition for the audience you’re targeting. Ads API service AdParlor, which manages over 15 billion Facebook ad impressions a month and has provided us with reliable data on cost per click rates in the past, tracked the suggested bids Facebook provided across thousands of ads it ran each day. It compiled the data into this graph which illustrates how fluctuations in supply and demand influence the bid price necessary to attain impressions. Near the end of the chart during early to mid August you can see a spike that’s likely due to advertisers running large “back-to-school” ad campaigns and therefore competing with each other for demographics such as teens, college students, and moms.
Minimizing Your CPC BidsYou can use an understanding of Facebook ad market dynamics to minimize the bids necessary for your ads to reach their intended audience. If your ad campaign isn’t urgent, consider pausing campaigns during seasons of peak advertising competitions such as just before the major winter gifting holidays, as well as back-to-school, Halloween, and Mother’s Day. By closely monitoring your suggested bid prices, determining when prices are low enough to achieve a positive ROI, and pausing or shifting the targeting of your campaigns when bid prices peak, you can protect yourself from having market forces waste your advertising budget. The full version of this article, complete with examples, and more strategies for reducing your CPC can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook. [Thanks to AdParlor for the data] | ||
| Facebook Hires and Departures: Legal, Interns, Engineering and More Posted: 08 Sep 2011 09:00 AM PDT
New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:
Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. | ||
| Facebook Careers Postings: Business, Mobile, Engineering, Sales and More Posted: 08 Sep 2011 08:40 AM PDT
Posts added this week on Facebook's Careers Page:
Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
Facebook appears to have hired interns, as well as sales and account staff this week, according to posts removed from the company's | You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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