Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook’s Rumored Read, Listened, and Watched Buttons: A Money-Making Fit With Broad Category Ad Targeting
- Facebook Combining $50 Ad Credits and 3 Simpler Ad Tools to Attract Small Businesses
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Bonobos, Nitto Tires, Zazzle and Visiteurope.com
- Photos, Page Tabs, Phrases, Quizzes and Dating on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Posted: 19 Sep 2011 06:13 PM PDT Facebook will add new feedback buttons to stories in the news feed, according a TechCrunch source. Starting with “Read”, “Listened”, and “Watched” buttons, users will be able to indicate that they’ve already consumed a piece of content. This will allow them to provide more specific information about how they’re related to different types of content, which could help Facebook refine the news feed to show them more of similar types of content. The tip matches with the tagline “Read, Watch, Listen” which AllThingsD heard will be used for the f8 conference. The granular feedback could also power the quietly launched Broad Category Interest targeting available in Facebook Ads, which lets advertisers target anyone with interests related to a selected subject rather than targeting those with specific Likes. For example, advertisers could target the category “Literature/Reading”, and Facebook could show their ads to users who frequently click the “Read” button on posts about news articles or books.
Facebook uses the Like button on news feed stories to improve its EdgeRank algorithm for determining what stories are most relevant to a user. Since Facebook currently has relatively little information about the content of news feed posts that aren’t tagged related to Pages, Likes of a friend’s stories result in that friend’s content appearing in the feed more prominently. If Facebook knew if a post was about a news article, band, or movie, it could make similar posts appear more frequently regardless of which friend published them. The rumored “Read”, “Listened”, and “Watched” buttons fit with what we’ve heard about Facebook planning to provide developers of apps and websites the ability add more meta data or structure to news feed posts users publish about their content. A user could find a book on a review site, publish a post about it that is accompanied by meta data indicating they’re posting about a book, and Facebook could then show a “Read” button beside the story. Those who click the “Read” button would see more stories about books. With Broad Category Interest targeting, which Facebook rolled out over the last few months but never announced, all this data becomes monetizable. A user wouldn’t have to formally Like the Page of a book for Facebook to know they’re interested in reading, because they often click “Read” on news feed posts. Rather than having to add a long list of popular book to Facebook’s traditional Specific Interest keyword targeting, an advertiser could simply target the “Literature/Reading” category. Then any users who Liked Pages of book or have clicked “Read” on news feed posts might see their ads. For music and films, Facebook has Broad Category Interest sub-categories for different genres. The meta data provided by publishers might therefore include content genres, or at least titles that Facebook could cross-reference with a genre index. Then it would know to show more pop music news feed stories and ads to users who clicked “Listened” on a Lady Gaga post. Any posts that include content tied to Facebook’s rumored music, video, or news hubs would also receive the appropriate button.
Strengthening Broad Category Interest targeting could produce big revenue gains for Facebook. As we discussed earlier today, the Facebook Ads marketplace is inaccessible to many small businesses because they don’t have the know-how to effectively use the self-serve tool, or big enough budgets to use many of the tools and services built on the Ads API. As Broad Category Interest targeting is far easier to use than Specific Interest targeting, an improvement of the feature thanks to the “Read”, “Listened” and “Watched” buttons could help Facebook recruit this long-tail of advertisers. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Combining $50 Ad Credits and 3 Simpler Ad Tools to Attract Small Businesses Posted: 19 Sep 2011 01:47 PM PDT
Thanks to third-party Ads API tools and services, Facebook has gotten many of the world’s largest brands advertising on the site. However, the high minimum spend required to use these tools and services, and the complicated nature of the self-serve ad tool may have excluded small businesses. By luring SMBs in with ad credits and helping them execute successful campaigns, Facebook may be able to significantly increase revenues by turning the longtail of small businesses into heavy advertisers. Sandberg said about small businesses and Facebook, “We’re not going to stop until all of them are using it to grow their business.” As the majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, an influx of new small business advertisers hooked with the $10 million in ad credits could boost revenues. In those experimenting with the ad credit become longterm advertisers, Facebook might be able to lofty projections Goldman Sachs is said to have made when it contributed to a $1.5 billion funding round for the social network in January.
In the past, Facebook has given free advertising credit to those registering for new ad accounts as well as through promotions with Visa Business Network and American Express’ Small Business Saturday and Big Break for Small Businesses. American Express also recently began allowing businesses to buy Facebook ads with Membership Rewards points. New Tools Simplify Facebook Advertising for Small BusinessesThe ad credits won’t help if businesses can’t attain success with Facebook’s self-serve ad tool, though. Fortunately, the promotion comes soon after Facebook launched two enhancements to its ad marketplace. Last month Facebook added the ability to target ads to users in specific zip codes, which lets local businesses reach potential customers in their neighborhood. Previously, ads could only be geographically targeted as narrowly as by city, which may have been too broad for local businesses in big cities. Early tests by Ads API partner Blinq Media showed thats ads targeted by zip codes showed double the click-through rate of those targeted by city.
Broad interest category targeting became available in the self-serve ad tool in April. It allows advertisers to target users who Like anything related to a broad topic, such as food & dining or fashion retail. This is much simpler for novice advertisers than selecting individual keywords to target.
Facebook also tasked WildFire Interactive, a third-party Page management Preferred Developer Consultant, with building an app to simplify use of its social ad unit Sponsored Stories. The ad unit amplifies the reach of news feed stories published by users that mention a business by turning them advertisements in the site’s sidebar. However, businesses have to get users mentioning them first before they can buy the more compelling types of Sponsored Stories, which can be difficult for those without experience building or using applications. Wildfire’s Storyteller Facebook Page tab app solicits these mentions by allowing businesses to ask questions to their fans. The answers published to the friends of respondents can also be turned into Sponsored Stories. To ensure only positive mentions are promoted, businesses can enter a blacklist of negative words and names of competitors and answers containing these words won’t be published or amplified. Storyteller comes as part of Wildfire’s licensable Page management tool.
The one part missing from the equation is education for small businesses. Facebook’s can’t expect businesses to find and take advantage of these tools on their own, so it will need to pair the ad credits with resources designed specifically for onboarding small businesses to the self-serve ad tool. With the tools, ad credit to experiment with, and knowledge to run campaigns that bring them new customers, small businesses could be walked through a positive first experience with Facebook ads. Soon they could be spending their own money on the ads, and Sheryl Sandberg could achieve her dream of bringing small businesses onto Facebook as she told USA Today, just as she brought them on to AdSense and AdWords when she worked at Google. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Bonobos, Nitto Tires, Zazzle and Visiteurope.com Posted: 19 Sep 2011 10:11 AM PDT Facebook contests used everything from discounts to cars to photos this week in our featured campaigns. We spoke to the VP of Marketing for Bonobos, looked at Nitto Tires' car design sweepstakes, Zazzle’s giveaway and visiteurope.com's photo entry contest. 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.
Bonobos' 50 for 50 Facebook CampaignGoal: Page Growth, Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty Core Mechanic: A Facebook campaign that gives users a higher discount on Bonobos merchandise as more users Like the Page. Method: Bonobos bills itself as a web-driven men's apparel brand and e-tailer, that uses heavy Facebook integration. We spoke to the company's VP of Marketing Richard Mumby, who told us that Facebook ads and its Page were responsible for 50% of the company's new customers. This particular campaign, like most of the company's campaigns, was developed in-house and takes a concept we've seen primarily with charities — pegging monetary amounts to the number of Likes a Page receives — and changes it up for retail. Essentially this campaign will provide users with 50% off purchases up to $500 on October 3 from the Bonobos website if the Page reaches 50,000 Likes by September 30. The campaign started at 23% to represent the 23,000 Facebook Likes it had. Mumby said the Facebook ads originally paired with the campaign became irrelevant because the virality of the campaign was taking care of itself. Currently the Page stands at 46,100 Likes. Bonobos views Facebook as a way to engage customers with the brand, taking customers on a journey using the language and products that are already familiar to them. Facebook helps Bonobos bring the brand to life, as the tone the company uses to engage customers is "the way guys talk," and then make the transition from knowing the brand to becoming a customer. "The language we use and the syntax, the style of talking and engagement, is very much guy-to-guy, and so Facebook works very well for us," he told us. "What we understand is that the more people that become a part of our Facebook community, the easier it will be for us to grow our business." Impact: The 50 for 50 campaign began on Sept. 12 and runs until Sept. 30 and already the campaign has already grown the Page to over 46,000 Likes. PageData highlights that in the days after the campaign launched the Page's growth grew steeply.
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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Photos, Page Tabs, Phrases, Quizzes and Dating on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 19 Sep 2011 08:32 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
TopFace grew by 3.2 million MAU this week, asking users to rate photos of their friends, then publishing the ratings to their Walls. 60photos with 1.3 million MAU seemed to operate similarly and Friends Photos with 787,700 MAU did as well. Page tab apps were popular this week on our list. Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 2.8 million MAU, Welcome Tab by 1.9 million MAU, Static Iframe Tab by 1.5 million MAU, iwipa: HTML + iframe + FBML by just over 1 million MAU and Static HTML… [Third Tab] by 808,800 MAU. Then there was Phrases (new) with 815,100 MAU, quiz app 21 questions with 746,500 MAU which publishes answers to quiz apps to the stream and dating app Are YOU Interested? with 627,700 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. |
Facebook will this week announce a new push to get small businesses using the site for marketing, according to 
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