Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: IPO, 3rd Party Apps, FTC, Passwords, Engineering, Skype, Legal and Minors
- Facebook to Disable “Send an Update” that Let Pages Reach Fans Directly Through Messages
- How to Get Users to Repost Your Facebook Page’s News Feed Posts Through the Share Button
- Ooyala Social: A Quality Customizable Platform for Selling, Renting, and Sharing Video Through Facebook
- Videos, Dating, Amazon, Friends, Tabs and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Roundup: IPO, 3rd Party Apps, FTC, Passwords, Engineering, Skype, Legal and Minors Posted: 16 Sep 2011 07:30 PM PDT Facebook IPO in Late 2012? – The Financial Times reported this week that Facebook's IPO is set for the end of next year, with a valuation of what would be at least $66 billion. But The New York Times said Facebook was on track to go public in the first half of next year. Facebook itself hasn’t made any official statements about FTC Proposes New Privacy Regs – The Federal Trade Commission proposed rules this week that may affect how children under 13 use the Internet. Mobile web apps are now included in the rules, for example, and so may require parental consent for use. Update on Case Sensitivity of Passwords – ZDnet wrote a piece this week in which Emil Protalinski found that Facebook passwords are not entirely case sensitive. Facebook responded noting that the site accepts three forms of your password: the original, the original with the first letter capitalized (to accommodate mobile devices) and the original password with cases reversed (to accommodate a caps lock being on).
Facebook's FBAR – Facebook's Engineering Team wrote a note this week detailing FBAR, or Facebook Automatic Remediation. These are scripts that detect errors or breakage in servers, automatically removing them from the system, determining the problem, alerting a technician to replace the drive, testing it and re-adding to Facebook's infrastructure. It now manages more than 50% of Facebook's infrastructure and is doing the work of about 200 system admins. [Image Via Facebook]
Custom URLs Available to Anyone – Facebook no longer requires users or Pages to need 25 friends to acquire a custom URL. Fake Facebook Name Not a Felony – Forbes reported this week that, despite an initial concern that a fake Facebook name could be considered a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an amendment added eliminated this possibility. App Allows Cross-Platform Posting – If This Then that allows users to cross-post to dozens of programs for content management purposes, such as instant messaging to your blog. 7.5M Facebook Users Under 13 Years Old – Consumer Reports estimated this week that 7.5 of the 20 million minors on Facebook are younger than 13, violating the site's terms of service; more than 5 million are 10 or younger. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook to Disable “Send an Update” that Let Pages Reach Fans Directly Through Messages Posted: 16 Sep 2011 03:18 PM PDT Facebook has begun notifying Page owners that on September 30th it will remove the “Send an Update” option that let Page admins send Messages to their fans. These Updates often went unseen since they were delivered to the rarely opened “Other” Facebook Messages inbox. Rather than have Page admins waste time using tool that didn’t perform well, Facebook decided it would be best to remove it. The site can already be overwhelming to marketer, so by stripping out ineffective or broken features, Facebook can get Page admins to focus on tools that build value for their brands. This will keep them from getting frustrated and moving their marketing and advertising dollars elsewhere.
Send an Update is accessible from the Resources tab of the Edit Page admin interface. It allows admins to bulk-message all their fans, or select specific location, gender, or age demographics of their fans as recipients. These Updates were once more visible, but when Facebook overhauled its Messages product in November 2010, it began relegating Updates to the Other inbox. This sub-tab of the primary inbox is essentially a spam folder of Messages sent by people users aren’t friends with and Events they’ve RSVP’d to. Facebook apparently saw that this Other inbox wasn’t frequently opened. This meant admins were fruitlessly expending effort composing these Updates and relying on them for communicating important information. Instead of promoting Page Updates to the primary inbox where they might be viewed as spam amongst Messages from friends, Facebook will remove the feature from its Page tools on September 30th. Facebook is communicating the change through headers on the Page Resources tab and the feature itself.
It recommends that “The best way to make sure your content is seen is to post it on your Wall so people see your updates in their news feed.” A Help Center entry about the feature removal adds ”Consider using targeted Facebook Ads or Sponsored Stories to help grow and highlight your message within the Facebook experience.” This change comes ahead of Facebook’s f8 developer conference, where we’ve heard the company plans to introduce new ways to help developers target users via the news feed. When Facebook changes so quickly that sometimes minor features are left broken or don’t work as originally desgined due to changes to core features such as Messages or the news feed. One example is Tell Your Fans, which is designed to let admins invite people to Like a Page. However, these invites are rarely surfaced in Facebook’s sidebar and many of our readers have reported errors or poor performance of the tool. If Facebook wants to be a mainstream marketing platform, it will need to continue making choice like removing Send an Update and streamline its tools to just those that are effective and reliable [Thanks to Kevin Evanetski and Jeff Strank for the tip] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How to Get Users to Repost Your Facebook Page’s News Feed Posts Through the Share Button Posted: 16 Sep 2011 12:05 PM PDT
The following is an excerpt of entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains a walk-through of the Share button and View Shares feature, strategies for encouraging shares using your Page’s info tab, and more examples of the best and worst types of updates to add calls to share to. Making the posts you publish stand out in the Facebook news feed is crucial to maximizing primary key performance metrics such as brand lift, clicks, impressions, Likes, comments, and reposts. Your updates are competing with highly compelling content published by the friends of your fans, so you need every advantage you can get. Facebook news feed updates by both users and Pages display a “Share” button that lets users repost that update to their friends. Updates that have been reposted at least once display a count of how many times they’ve been reposted next to a link labeled “View Shares”. This link helps posts stand out in the feed and indicates to your audience that other users thought the update was important and its therefore worth reading, clicking or reposting. Its important for you to solicit Shares of your updates so they receive this distinction. Here we’ll walk-through how the View Shares link works, and provide strategies for how you can attain Shares and the benefits they bring for your business.
For information on how View Shares works, see our article on the feature’s release. The full version of this Facebook Marketing Bible entry contains a walk-through of the feature written specifically for businesses. Strategies for Taking Advantage of View SharesShares have a two-fold benefit for publishers: they generate additional impressions, and they create a social recommendation for the original update that increases engagement via View Shares. Therefore, the more Shares that publishers can attain the better. As such, you should encourage users to Share your posts. Though you’ll have to lengthen your updates and avoid annoying your fans, appending calls to Share to some of your news feed updates can be a very effective method of attaining reposts.
Some examples of posts you might want to add a call to Share to include:
Uses there strategies and soon you’ll be getting plenty of Shares on all your posts, and everyone will know thanks to View Shares. The full version of this article, complete walk-throughs additional strategies, and tips for getting more Shares without annoying your fans can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 16 Sep 2011 10:13 AM PDT
Ooyala Social is the most engaging social video experience we’ve seen yet. With an inclusive set of payment options including Facebook Credits, PayPal, Credit Cards, and mobile, it could help video content owners turn their Facebook presences into new revenue streams.
We reviewed Miramax’s implementation of Ooyala Social last month. Its ability to let users choose from a variety of different films to rent made it more useful to TV and film studios then Milyoni’s Social Theater app. However, it lacked some important social and viral features found in Milyoni’s app. It turns out, though, that Miramax had simply opted for a more stripped down experience, and that the Ooyala platform it was built off of supports many more social features. With Ooyala Social, video content owners can allow users to:
Licensees are charged by Ooyala on a software-as-a-service reoccurring payment model. Clients can also pay extra for Ooyala’s client services group to do custom integrations and offer even more compelling experiences, such as the ability to share scenes that can be watched from the news feed. On top of in-app purchases, clients can earn money by serving in-app ad campaigns. Clients can also drive sharing of their app by only showing video once a certain threshold of users are present in what approximates a group buying model. Nick Edwards of Ooyala tells us he believe multi-title video distribution apps provide a better experience than single title apps because they offer users a higher chance of discovering and paying for content they didn’t know about before. He also thinks they could be a powerful way for television networks to “reach a whole new target demographic in a different geography where they don’t have the right to distribute through terrestrial television.” For example, a British network could reach ex-pats and other fans in the US through Ooyala Social. Facebook currently only requires game developers to use Facebook Credits that include a 30% tax. But as Facebook apps such as Ooyala Social begin processing significant volumes of purchases, Facebook may need to establish its virtual currency as the exclusive payment method for apps too so it can take a cut. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Videos, Dating, Amazon, Friends, Tabs and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 16 Sep 2011 08:00 AM PDT
The apps on our list grew from between 84,800 and 324,400 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define “emerging” applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. Top Gainers This Week
Turkish video apps on our list this week included Genç Video, topping our list with 324,400 MAU while another, VideoPro, grew by 105,000 MAU. Another video app, Veoh Videos, grew by 125,300 MAU. These apps allow users to view, share, Like and comment upon videos on the app, and sometimes auto-post videos to a user's Wall as well. Dating apps Fbp with 132,000 MAU and the raunchier ! Make Luv 2 me ! with 126,100 MAU were on the list, too.
In the middle of the list were apps that did a variety of things. 21個問題 with 121,800 MAU is an app that asks users questions of their friends then posts the answers to the Wall. Birthday Reminder grew by 108,100 MAU and promises to automatically post to friends' walls for birthdays with a customizable message. Amazon Sweepstakes grew by 105,000 MAU.
An app that replaces the older function on Facebook Pages to invite your friends made an appearance on the list, too. The Turkish version, Sayfalar için Arkadaş Davet Butonu, grew by 113,300 MAU and the English version, Invite Your Friends Button for Pages, by 101,700 MAU. Then a pair of tab apps, Static Tab – Welcome Tab for Pages with 101,300 MAU and Hike FREE Tab Builder for Pages: New Static FBML with 84,800 MAU, made the list, too. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
Skype, Facebook Integration 5.4 – Skype 
Online video technology developer Ooyala this week announced its new customizable platform for content owners that want to rent and sell video via Facebook applications. 
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