Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- “View Shares” Link Shows Who Has Reposted Any Facebook News Feed Story
- Facebook’s Subscribe Button to Come With Personalized “Suggested User” Subscription Recommendations
- New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: JibJab, King.com, TBG Digital, TinyCo and More
- Facebook Social Ads Are Not a Test: They Appear on a Majority of the Site’s Page Views
- Facebook’s New Subscribe Button Allows Assymetrical Following of Non-Friends’ Public Updates
- Horoscopes, Spotify, Dating, Tabs, Videos, Bing and Yahoo on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
| “View Shares” Link Shows Who Has Reposted Any Facebook News Feed Story Posted: 14 Sep 2011 03:56 PM PDT Facebook users are seeing a new “View Shares” link beneath news feed stories by friends, Pages, and those they subscribe to. When clicked, it opens a popover window displaying who has reposted that story and any additional context they added. Users will only see shares visible to them, meaning any post published publicly or by one of their friends. View Shares constitutes the third news feed story feedback metric visible to users, joining Likes and comments. It indicates what news feed stories are most popular and that users might therefore want to read, click through, or repost themselves. The link’s presence could help alert users to the availability of the Share option and increase its usage. It will help Page admins who previously had no way of telling how frequently their updates were reposted. View Shares might also push content publishers to more directly encourage their readers to share their posts.
The feature now appears on posts by both users and Pages. In the popover revealed by the View Shares link, reposts where users added an optional description display that text, while those without additional context read “Name shared a page: [Page name]“. The feature respects privacy, as only users who could already view a repost will see it in the View Shares pop over. Users have long had the “Share” option to repost the news feed stories they see, but data about the quantity of reposts was never displayed on the original story. Likes and comments both benefit from having the volumes of these feedback types displayed on posts. Now the Share link has the same expanded presence, which may serve to remind users about the option.
Somewhat oddly, the volume of Shares of a Page’s posts is not included in a Page’s Insights. Admins can now find this data by viewing their Page’s own posts, and the data will also probably be added to Insights in the near future. While reposts previously helped publishers gain a burst of additional impressions, they didn’t provide a social recommendation for the original story to its viewers the way Likes and comments do. Those feedback types can help improve a post or publisher’s EdgeRank, or prominence in the news feed, but they usually don’t expose the post to a user’s own network. The View Shares feature means Shares will give posts both immediate exposure to a user’s friends and a permanent recommendation. Since there are more benefits to Shares for publishers, they may want to increase the frequency with which they ask users to Share their posts. Page admins might not be entirely happy about the change, though, as now when a user Shares one of their posts, it doesn’t include a “via [Page name] link back to the Page that originally posted the story. This means Shares no longer offer Pages an opportunity to gain new fans. [Thanks to Dan Birdwhistell, Jesse Ferrell, Brittany Darwell, and Amit Lavi for all sending in tips] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s Subscribe Button to Come With Personalized “Suggested User” Subscription Recommendations Posted: 14 Sep 2011 01:15 PM PDT Facebook will be adding a personalized recommendation feature to the Subscribe button that it launched earlier today, helping users find interesting non-friends to receive public updates from. Similar to friend suggestions that are based on who users have mutual friends with, Facebook Director of Product Naomi Gleit tells us the “People to Subscribe to” sidebar module will base subscription recommendations on who a user’s friends subscribe to. In addition to this forthcoming feature, Facebook has implemented several other ways for users to discover people to subscribe to. The news feed now displays stories about the new subscriptions of friends, the friendship panel on the right side of the profile displays friends who subscribe to someone, and Subscriber and Subscription tabs on profiles provide lists of people users might want receive updates from.
These personalized recommendations contrast with Twitter’s original king-making “Suggested User” list that provided new registrants with recommendations of people to follow from a limited list. That feature was criticized for causing certain celebrities and friends of Twitter employees to rapidly gain tens of thousands of followers. Instead, Facebook’s subscription recommendations will promote authors who publish updates especially relevant to a user and their network. As the Subscribe feature just launched, most users currently have no subscriptions or subscribers. However, once some of a user’s friends have organically discovered authors to Subscribe to, Facebook will begin asking users if they also want to follow those authors.
Facebook does have some features in place to assist with subscription discovery. Activity stories are posted on a user’s wall and to the news feeds of their friends when they Subscribe to new people. This provides viral exposure for those receiving subscriptions.
When users visit the profile on a non-friend, they’ll see if any of their friends have subscribed to that person. This information appears in the friendship panel on the right side of the profile that usually displays mutual friends Likes.
Facebook is using the fact that assymetrical following isn’t its primary feature to help it improve on Twitter’s blunder. Most users will have forged friendships before they start subscribing to people, giving Facebook the data necessary to power a personalized subscription recommendation engine rather than blindly suggesting the same authors to everyone. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: JibJab, King.com, TBG Digital, TinyCo and More Posted: 14 Sep 2011 11:52 AM PDT The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at JibJab Media, King.com, Storm8, TBG Digital, Nubee, A Bit Lucky, TinyCo, Wild Needle Games, and 5th Planet Games.
Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Social Ads Are Not a Test: They Appear on a Majority of the Site’s Page Views Posted: 14 Sep 2011 10:48 AM PDT Facebook’s social ads are no longer a test for Facebook — a majority of Facebook page views display a social or Sponsored Story ad, said Gokul Rajaram, Facebook’s Product Director of Ads at today’s TechCrunch Disrupt conference. He also notes that including social information in Facebook ads leads to a 68% increase in ad recall and a four times higher likelihood of buying a product compared to traditional Facebook display ads.
Rajaram explains that “no one wants to receive a message from a brand” — instead, social ads let users “view a brand message through the prism of their friends”. In this way, users become customers not just because of a brand’s ads, but because people they trust support those brands. Rajaram also discussed how brands advertising for their Facebook Pages earn additional conversions on top of those they directly pay for thanks to the news feed. When users see an ad for a Page and Like it, it publishes a news feed story that their friends see. These friends take the story as an implicit social recommendation and go on to Like the Page themselves. He cited a brand that gained tens of thousands of unpaid Likes as a result of a paid campaign. Social ads are a core advantage of Facebook over other ad-supported websites. By leveraging the connections and actions of its users, it is able to provide advertisers a way of amplifying the word of mouth known to convince consumers. Without a dense social graph to build on, ads on other websites are less compelling. If Facebook brought this social ad experience out of the site’s chrome and let publishers embed it on their website through an Open Graph ad unit, it could create a significant new revenue stream. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s New Subscribe Button Allows Assymetrical Following of Non-Friends’ Public Updates Posted: 14 Sep 2011 10:00 AM PDT Facebook today launches the Subscribe button – an option for users to receive the publicly visible updates published by non-friends. Similar to Twitter, this assymetrical following (sometimes known as asynchronous) capability will expand the types of relationships users can have on Facebook beyond friendship, allowing users to conveniently view content in news feed from people they don’t know but are interested in.
The Subscribe button also appears on the profile of friends, and gives users options to control the volume and types of updates they see from someone in their news feed. This will allow users to select to only receive or hide from their news feed a friend’s major life events, status updates, photos and videos, and games content. This last option could help serious gamers hide all non-game content from people they met while playing but aren’t friends with. However, it will also allow users to shun games content published by friends, which could hurt growth rates for games and applications. Until today, there were only two types of relationships one could have on Facebook: symmetrical friendship where both users confirmed they wanted to see each other’s content in the news feed, and Liking of Pages where one user chose to see updates in the news feed from a public entity such as a business. Many thought Facebook would have already launched such a feature. However, the company appears to finally be ready to expand its scope after implementing an increase in the transparency and ease of publishing to specific audiences including the public. Assymetrical Following Through the Subscribe ButtonNow, users will have the ability to opt in allowing subscribers. This places a Subscribe button on their profile which non-friends can click to begin viewing the updates they publish with the privacy setting of public. The user being subscribed to doesn’t have to confirm each connection, and won’t see content of their subscribers in the news feed.
Technically, the Subscribe button just makes consumption of public updates more convenient and its opt in, so there aren’t any serious privacy concerns. Someone could already visit the profile of a non-friend and see their public updates, but now they’ll be sent them through the news feed. Those opting into subscriptions can select to allow or disallow comments by subscribers, and activate notifications about gaining new subscribers.
Assymetrical following will create a middle ground between personal profiles for private updating and Facebook Pages that are totally public. If a user has opted in to allowing subscriptions and they reject a friend request from someone, that person will automatically become a subscriber. The option should be especially helpful to self-promoters who’ve hit Facebook’s 5,000 friend limit. If users amass a subscriber base and later want to become a Page with update targeting, applications, and analytics, Facebook has confirmed that they’ll be able to convert their subscribers into Likes. The Subscribe button puts Facebook in direct competition with Twitter, as well as Google+, which are both built around assymetrical following. Journalists, thought leaders, celebrities, or anyone who chooses to publish publicly will be able to amass a subscriber base, gain more impressions for their posted content, and engage with strangers by tapping into Facebook’s enormous user base and familiar discussion tools. Facebook’s Director of Product Naomi Gleit tells us “We want you to be able to broaden your conversations — comment and interact with people who are outside of your friend circle.” Refining the News Feed Presence of FriendsIf users are already friends with someone, they’ll see a Subscribe button on their profile with a drop-down allowing them to receive all, most, or only important updates by that person in the news feed, as well as select the types of stories they see. Previously, the only way users could influence the presence of a friend in the news feed was to completely hide all their updates. Now they can see more or less of them using the new Close Friends and Acquaintances Friend Lists, or by using the Subscribe button.
These new options will add user preference to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm for determining what’s relevant to surface in the news feed. Users will no longer have to suffer the annoying stories about high scores or new items earned by their little brother in social games. Another example Gleit cited was that if a user has an acquaintance who is a great photographer, they can select to just see their photo updates, not status updates about their daily lives. Users will no longer have to use multiple services in order to handle different relationships such as those based on real-life friendship, interests, or acquaintanceship. Twitter may have already built up a graph of 100 million people based on connections, but Facebook could bring the knowledge accessible through assymetrical following to the mainstream while improving the quality of the news feed. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 14 Sep 2011 08:17 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
Daily Horoscope grew by 4.4 million DAU in the United States, Mexico and Italy while the Arabic version, الأبراج اليومية, grew by 512,000 DAU this week. These apps usually grow by asking users to invite their friends, as well as posting to the feed regularly. Then the music service Spotify grew by 2.2 million DAU this week mostly in the US and the United Kingdom. Dating apps also made our list this week, although not the typically popular ones. Onedate grew in Italy and France by 520,900 DAU, TopFace grew by 342,700 DAU and Niik by 232,300 MAU in the US. these apps seemed to use photos to leverage peoples' interest in each other. Page tab apps on our list this week included Welcome Tab with 176,800 DAU, Static Iframe Tab with 99,600 DAU and My Tab with 94,900 DAU.
Video apps on our list this week included werevertumorro, which grew almost entirely in Mexico by 145,300 DAU, and is basically a video network. Then Divx Video grew by 134,500 DAU and is a Turkish video app. Picplz is an app that helps users share photos via Connect and grew by 119,000 DAU. Then Bing grew by 116,000 DAU and Yahoo grew by 96,000 DAU. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday. |
Gleit explains that the recommendations will be “fairly algorithmic. The Subscribe recommendations engine will mainly show people your friends are subscribing to.” Facebook’s 
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