Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Tests Changing User Account Settings to Send Summary Email Notifications
- How to Use Facebook’s Hidden Wall and Other Page Moderation Tools to Protect Brand Reputation
- Join Us the Night Before f8 — Inside Network Happy Hour Is Next Wednesday in San Francisco
- SurveyMonkey’s Facebook Page Tab App Helps Businesses Gain Feedback From Fans
- Badgeville’s Social Fabric Gives Any Website a Facebook-Style News Feed
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Car Town & Car and Driver, Einstein Bros Bagels, Best Buy & CityVille
- Page Tabs, Phrases, Quizzes, Dating and Twitter on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Tests Changing User Account Settings to Send Summary Email Notifications Posted: 12 Sep 2011 10:04 PM PDT Facebook just posted to its official Page that is testing new summary emails for users “who are very active on Facebook and receive lots of email notifications”. Rather than sending individual emails, the notifications will be compiled into occasional digests. Those in the test will have their account settings automatically changed to turn off most of their email notifications, which might surprise and annoy some users, though they’ll be able turn them all back on by unchecking the new “Email Frequency” account setting. Summary emails could help reduce inbox clutter for Facebook power users — ones the site wants to keep happy because their actions drive reengagement for less active users. However, forcibly changing account settings could upset some users even if it they eventually find the summaries valuable.
Facebook defaults to sending users individual email notifications for over 70 different actions on the site. If users are admins of Pages, join noisy Groups, are frequently invited to Events, or play games, these notifications can quickly overrun their inboxes and lead them to ignore rather than read the alerts. While users will still see red counters on the site’s top navigation bar when they return, getting them to actually click through email notifications is important to the site maintaining its high daily active user count. Often the actions users take in response to notifications, such as replying to posts on their wall, generate notifications for other users and create a loop that helps Facebook attain its massive engagement rates.
Solving the problem of excessive email notification frequency therefore seems somewhat obvious, but Facebook’s solution may be too aggressive. Though the end result of a cleaner inbox may benefit users, some may object on principle to having their account settings changed without their permissions. Facebook should certainly look to address the issue, but its opt out test may do more harm than good. It should consider emailing those receiving too many email notifications with the choice to opt in to email summaries, or using a sidebar prompt to promote the feature. The perception that Facebook can change a user’s privacy or account settings at will already pushes potential users away from the service, and this change won’t help. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How to Use Facebook’s Hidden Wall and Other Page Moderation Tools to Protect Brand Reputation Posted: 12 Sep 2011 05:38 PM PDT
The following is an excerpt of entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains walk-throughs and strategies for hiding comments and banning users. As your Facebook Page grows in size and stature and begins to attract a healthy number of fans, so too will the level at which those same fans interact with your Page. Highly engaging Pages can quickly blossom into a valuable community, but the messages posted to your Wall by fans will not always be positive. Here we’ll provide walk-throughs of Facebook’s native Page moderation tools, and explain how to execute a moderation strategy that protects your brand but doesn’t silence discussion. Moderation StrategyPopular Pages can and should expect customer complaints and criticism, irrespective of the quality of product or service being provided. Examples of situations that could lead to customers submitting negative posts or comments to your Page's Wall include:
Overall, you need to remember that the medium is social: customers expect to be able to have an open and honest conversation about your company and the service they experience. Any action you take, from hiding comments, to replying in public, to banning users, is going to be judged as representative of your company. You must balance the natural desire to keep your Page as positive as possible with maintaining credibility among your fans. This can sometimes mean leaving negative comments public. Page Permissions Facebook allows Admins to change the permissions on their pages, giving them control over a number of different aspects such as country restriction, age restriction and the posting ability of users, plus word and profanity blocklists. To edit your Page's permissions, select Edit Page and then click on the Manage permissions tab on the left sidebar.
Admins managing very popular pages should consider the use of certain keywords in the Moderation blocklist – for example, the names of competitors or overly negative words. When users try to include blacklisted words in their posts these will automatically be marked as spam and moved to the Hidden part of your Page's wall (more on this in a moment). The Profanity blocklist works in the same way (although Facebook doesn't list which words it is looking for) and should also be adjusted accordingly. Hidden Posts – Your Page's Secret WallFacebook will analyze posts made to your Page's Wall and automatically filter out spam (or what it perceives to be spam), which you can view in the Hidden Posts link on the left sidebar of your Page.
Popular pages therefore can expect to manage two different Walls – the public and freely-readable main Wall, and the private and (mostly) Admin-only Hidden Wall. Posts can be moved freely between each wall. Hidden posts will no longer be visible to users reading your Page's Wall, and the original poster will not be aware that their post has been hidden so they don’t think to immediately repost. It also important to be aware that Facebook's spam filter is a little inconsistent, and will trigger a number of false positives that will need to be moved back to the main part of the Wall. It's good practice to regularly peruse your Hidden posts and unhide any posts that have been mistakenly labelled as spam by Facebook. The full version of this article, complete with walk-throughs of the comment hiding and user banning tools can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Join Us the Night Before f8 — Inside Network Happy Hour Is Next Wednesday in San Francisco Posted: 12 Sep 2011 03:21 PM PDT
Inside Network Happy Hours bring together app developers to connect and reconnect over drinks and casual conversation. All are welcome, and drinks are on us with your RSVP. Note: we’re expecting the event to be full, so please do RSVP to make sure that you can join, and come early if you can!
See you there! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| SurveyMonkey’s Facebook Page Tab App Helps Businesses Gain Feedback From Fans Posted: 12 Sep 2011 12:15 PM PDT SurveyMonkey today launched a new Facebook Page tab application that helps admins collect surveys from their fans. Once the free app has been added to a Page, admins can select to display any of their pre-made SurveyMonkey along with a Facebook Share button for getting users to distribute a questionnaire to friends. Though its display to existing fans means those using the app will be collecting biased data, it can still be useful for attaining user feedback and market research.
Facebook’s own Questions product offers Pages the ability to query their fans. However, admins can only ask one question at a time, there are no advanced answer analysis tools like the those provided by SurveyMonkey. Businesses and marketers looking to identify the best and worst parts of their product or service, and those wanting a deep look at what attracts their fans to competitors may find significant value in the SurveyMonkey Page tab app. A basic, free plan gives Page admins access to survey templates, and distribution via weblink, Facebook, Twitter, email, and website embed. The are limits on the number of survey questions that can be asked, the number of responses that can be collected, and branding, though, which are waived with SurveyMonkey’s premium plans. The popular online survey platform helps clients collect responses from 25 million users a month. It has 8.5 million registered users who create roughly 280,000 surveys a month, and it is rumored to pull in $50 million a year in revenue. Helmed by CEO David Goldberg, husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, SurveyMonkey closed a $100 million round of senior debt financing last year to pay off old debt and fund acquisitions. With feedback crucial to business success, the space has heated up as Techlightenment launched a service for quickly attaining survey responses through Facebook ads in April. SurveyMonkey already offered an option to share a specially formatted news feed link to survey in order to solicit responses, but this directed users away from Facebook to SurveyMonkey’s website. Page admins may be able to use the new app to attain a higher completion rate on their surveys by keeping respondents within the social network’s chrome.
Oddly, the Facebook Share button within the Page tab app sends users to the SurveyMonkey website rather than back to the app itself. There’s also no easy way for admins to share the app the news feed, as copy and pasting its URL into the Facebook publisher creates an awkward feed story that doesn’t preview the survey or app.
SurveyMonkey needs to redirect the Share button to the app and add an app publishing function so admins can take advantage of the reduced friction of on-site response collection. If it does, it could use the app’s ability to turn fans into focus groups to sell businesses on premium plans. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Badgeville’s Social Fabric Gives Any Website a Facebook-Style News Feed Posted: 12 Sep 2011 10:25 AM PDT
Similar to Facebook’s news feed and notifications, the features show users relevant suggestions about what webpages to visit based on the behaviors of their friends and people similar to them, and alert them to actions such as other replying to their comments. To make these suggestions more compelling, Badgeville augments the activity stream entries with Facebook Open Graph protocol meta data that sites have added to their pages, and identifies a user’s friends and interests by piggybacking on Facebook registration. Through Social Fabric, Badgeville lets websites integrate of the most engaging mechanics used by Facebook to drive more page views, conversions, and time-on-site. With more flexibility for data collection and display, Badgeville is now a competitor as well a complement to some of Facebook’s social plugins.
In just a year since launching, Badgeville has found success in assisting web publishers with increasing traffic. It now has 85 customers including NBC, Universal Music Group, and Orange telecom, has done $5-10 million in sales. Its team numbers 35 and it raised a $12.2 million Series B round in July bringing it to $15 million in total funding. The company says it clients experience a 25% or greater increase in user behavior. Badgeville founder Kris Duggan tells us his company “isn’t walking from gamification” that formed the core of the product we reviewed last year. The Badgeville platform still allows sites to reward points, reputation, spots on leaderboards, and badges to loyal users. Instead, its layering the social graph over gamification such that users stay engaged not just because they’re formally rewarded, but because it’s easy to discover content vetted by their friends and people with similar behavior patterns to them while they earn these rewards. Duggan explains that currently, sites that integrate Facebook plugins are focusing too much on the interest graph and not enough on what he calls the “behavior graph” — what people are actually doing rather than what they say they’re interested in. Badgeville lets sites track and/or display what visitors read, review, or purchase, “not just that a friend Liked a site’s Page three years ago, not just that they shared something.” In this way, Badgeville is looking to replace Facebook’s Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins that only report explicit behaviors of users. With 2.5 million sites having already integrated Facebook’s free plugins, its logical to assume there’s a premium market waiting to be addressed. Now, sites who license Social Fabric can select which user behaviors they track for internal analysis, and which the surface through the activity stream and notifications. For example, it could show an activity story whenever a friend visits a URL on the site. That Page’s title or headline can be determined by crawling its Open Graph protocol meta data, which Duggan says 80% clients already have in place. Clients can also decide what actions trigger notifcations, such as comment replies or that a friend commented on the same page.
He says he doesn’t see privacy flare-ups harming Badgeville’s reputation as “we’re just the infrastructure”. But if a client gets slammed for publishing to a user’s friends that they bought an embarrassing product or read a controversial article similar to Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon, you can expect some backlash and dropped contracts for Badgeville. Therefore, the ability to display privacy warnings should be a high priority for the company. Facebook is known for its massive time-on-site and reengagement metrics, which in part stem from the engrossing nature of the news feed and notifications, but the social plugins it currently offers can’t track or report as much data as sites might want. Using Badgeville’s flexible platform to inject the social graph alongside these mechanics into their own content-rich websites, clients may be able to inspire similar engagement by ensuring users always have relevant suggestions of where to click next. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Car Town & Car and Driver, Einstein Bros Bagels, Best Buy & CityVille Posted: 12 Sep 2011 08:51 AM PDT Several of the campaigns featured in our post this week incorporated games into the ways they highlighted products. Car and Driver magazine began a long-term partnership with the Facebook game Car Town that makes the magazine's content a central part of its print product and brings its print products directly into the game. Then Einstein Bros Bagels and Maybelline ran some interesting contests. Finally, Best Buy's CityVille integration seemed successful enough that the company is going to bring it back in November. 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.
Car and Driver's Car Town IntegrationGoal: Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase Core Mechanic: Car and Driver, a car magazine, will be featured in Car Town, a game about cars on Facebook. The partnership started last week and will continue into 2012. Game: Within the Car Town game, users will see new car releases, announcements and other information in the form of the magazine's cover. Plus, users who create virtual car and garage designs within the game will be awarded Car and Driver magazine's 10Best award. Every month winners will have a chance to be featured in the magazine, as well as in the magazine's website and social media channels. Then, Car Town news updates will be featured in the magazine with the latest tips from the game. Method: This partnership seems to be very extensive, leveraging both the game's and the magazine's audiences and their interests to intertwine in seemingly sensible and effective ways. It takes something that happens in real life— new cars being featured on the cover of Car and Driver magazine — and translates it into a social game. Brands should consider where their products would appropriately fit into social games and seek to partner with the developers of those games as Car and Driver has done here. Impact: The Car and Driver Page's Likes have seen an uptick by a few thousand in the past week, according to PageData; currently the total is 92,500. It's not clear if this comes directly from the game integration, though, especially since most of the Page's activity is related to cars and not the game. Einstein Bros Bagels' Darn Good Coffee Motto ContestGoal: Page Growth, Engagement, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty Core Mechanic: The contest invites users to Like the Page, then enter their choice motto that could end up on the company's coffee t-shirts. Method: Users who enter the contest are eligible to win free coffee and bagels for a year, in addition to smaller prizes of $100 gift cards. Impact: The Page currently stands at 678,600 Likes and PageData shows that, as the contest began on September 5, the Page experienced moderate growth during the past week. A longer contest entry period may have helped promote momentum for the contest. By publishing to the stream a fun feed story about a user's entry, the contest could have attracted more participants.
Inside Games’ AJ Glasser contributed to this report.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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Page Tabs, Phrases, Quizzes, Dating and Twitter on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 12 Sep 2011 08:09 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
Welcome Tab grew by 1.9 million MAU this week, other Page tab apps on the list included: Static Iframe Tab with 989,500 MAU, iwipa: HTML + iframe + FBML with 834,300 MAU and PM Custom Welcome Tab with 454,800 MAU.
A pair of Phrases apps on the list included: Phrases (new) with 1.3 million MAU and Phrases (new) with 434,900 MAU. These apps basically let users select from a series of quotes and share to the stream. The rest of the list included quiz app 21 questions with 1.3 million MAU; the app asks users questions about their friends, then publishes the answers to the stream. Are YOU Interested? the dating app grew by 681,400 MAU. Te Atrevez A Kontesta..! is another quiz app publishing answers about friends to the stream with 441,300 MAU this week. Finally the Twitter app grew by 430,300 MAU; the app allows users to stream Twitter content to Facebook. 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. |
Complaints beget complaints, with customers who might previously have said nothing now speaking up when they realize that other people are suffering the same problems. This behavioral cycle will quickly repeat itself, and a Page Wall can move from positive to negative in a matter of moments.
Admins can also move posts to the Hidden part of the Wall by selecting the Hide Post option from the drop-down menu accessible via the options cog on each post.
If you’re going to be in San Francisco for Facebook’s f8 developer conference next Thursday, then stop by the night before for the Inside Network Happy Hour at Mercury Lounge.
There are some privacy issues Badgeville will need to be careful with. Surfacing explicit actions such as shares or comments isn’t a big deal, but users might not want what they read or purchase shown to their friends or strangers. Duggan says that Badgeville advises clients, but doesn’t have an privacy messaging set up to accompany its widgets with disclaimers that inform users as to what will be published.
| You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |