Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Pushes the Hybrid News Feed to its iPhone App, Android App, and Mobile Site
- Facebook Adds Per Post Impression Data to Page Insights Exports to Help Brands Track Their Performance
- New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: TinyCo, TBG Digital, King.com and More
- Viral Media Site BuzzFeed Launches Facebook App Edition to Gain Exposure
- Strategies to Optimize Facebook Ad Spend, Protect and Boost Brand Reputation, and More Recent Updates at the Facebook Marketing Bible
- Facebook Allows Users to Comment on Pages Without Liking Them, Adds Friend Activity Tab to Pages
- Luck, Love, Page Tabs, Birthdays, Mobile, iPad and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU
- Facebook Increases Character Limit on Posts to 5000, Rolls Out Floating Navigation Bar and More Amid Unrest
| Facebook Pushes the Hybrid News Feed to its iPhone App, Android App, and Mobile Site Posted: 22 Sep 2011 08:06 AM PDT Facebook has updated its mobile site m.facebook.com with the hybrid news feed launched for the web version of the site on Monday. Since the Facebook for iPhone and Android apps both pull the news feed from the mobile site, the 93 million daily active users of the two apps now also see a single feed with Top Stories followed by Recent Stories. Users of these mobile interfaces no longer have the option to view separate Top News and Most Recent feeds. For most users, there’s now no escaping the sweeping changes Facebook implemented this week. While those who never realized they could switch between relevancy-sorted and reverse-chronological feeds will now be more likely to see fresh, compelling updates, others who grew accustomed to bouncing between the feeds may be displeased that they need to alter their behavior.
At the top of their feed, mobile users will see now Top Stories, followed by Recent Stories, and finally “From Earlier Today” which includes older Top Stories and Recent Stories. Since the two popular smart phones apps pull the news feed from the mobile site, Facebook was able to make just a single code changes to update both the iPhone and Android app interfaces without requiring users to download a software update.
Facebook uses a variety of signals to determine what updates become Top Stories, denoted with a blue triangle in the top left corner. On the web version users can mark and unmark updates as Top Stories. Mobile users don’t have this option, and must accept the decisions of the EdgeRank news feed sorting algorithm. However, users can filter the news feed according to type of update, such as Status Updates, Events, or Photos. Facebook has also made its new Smart Lists available as mobile news feed filters in addition to all of a user’s manually built Friend Lists. These give users some options if they’re not content with what they’re seeing in the new default “All Stories” feed.
The hybrid news feed feels a bit more natural on mobile, where a quick, lightweight experience works better than having a ton of options like on the web. While many users are still complaining about the web interface changes and the introduction of the Ticker, we believe some of the announcements made later today at the f8 conference will illuminate the importance of the recent redesign. Users shouldn’t expect the mobile changes to stop, as we hear Facebook may release a major redesign of its popular smart phone apps. It might also launch the standalone mobile photos app that leaked in June. We’ll be providing deep analysis of what the announcements at f8 mean to users and developers, so check back later today. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Sep 2011 05:14 PM PDT Some Facebook Page admins are now seeing a new tab called “Per post” in the data exports from Page Insights. Data in the tab includes impressions per post and the total percentage of a Page’s fans that left feedback on the post. Previously, admins could only see daily impressions and feedback data in Insights. Per post data could only be found on a Page’s wall below the posts themselves, forcing admins to manually copy down impression and feedback data. If rolled out to all Page admins, the addition of per post data to Page Insights will make it easier for brands to track what kinds of posts and timing result in the higher exposure and engagement. For example, admins could determine what hour of the day is the best for publishing. The newly available could also encroach on the business of some Facebook Page analytics providers, though these companies also offer advanced analysis of the data.
Amit Lavi, Social Media Director at Abagada was the first to spot the new data. He tells us that “Now, everyone with knowledge of Excel will be able to find the right time of day and day of week to post content. Also, with a bit of manual categorization, admins will also be able to assess which content works better for their Page.” Facebook added per post data the admin view of Page walls of authenticated Pages with over 10,000 fans in January. Oddly, it didn’t simultaneously begin showing the same data in the Insights user interface or the .XLS or .CSV data exports. We’ve received information that the per post data in the exports doesn’t always go back as far as requested. This means there’s a chance that that Insights data on post impressions and feedback might not be totally reliable, at least at first.
Page management companies that offer analytics services and dedicated Page analytics providers could lose some of their more budget-conscious customers to Facebook Insights. However, to pull actionable lessons from the Insights data, admins will have to do some legwork in Excel. Professional analytics providers will likely be able to crunch the data more efficiently, derive more sophisticated best practices, and provide benchmark data aggregated from across their clients. For example PageLever used its own collection of per post impressions data to determine that the average Page receives only 7.49 news feed impressions per post per 100 fans. Buddy Media used per post data to figure out that shorter post receive more engagement and that Thursday is the best day to post when looking across industries. If Facebook makes per post data more easily accessible to all admins, it could also raise awareness of the need to analyze the data, which could in turn drive business for the providers of enterprise analytics tools and services. Either way, with time the data will help brands improve their Page post strategies. This could lead to more engaging branded content in the news feed, improving the Facebook experience for the average user. The next step will be for Facebook to provide data on clicks per post. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: TinyCo, TBG Digital, King.com and More Posted: 21 Sep 2011 04:00 PM 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 Arkadium, TinyCo, TBG Digital, Games Cafe Inc., King.com, Lolapps, Wild Needle Games, Majesco Entertainment Company 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Viral Media Site BuzzFeed Launches Facebook App Edition to Gain Exposure Posted: 21 Sep 2011 02:41 PM PDT Today, viral media hub BuzzFeed is launches a Facebook app that aims to recreate the experience of discovering content on its website. Through the app, users can browse humorous images, interesting articles, and shocking videos, leave reactions using “LOL”, “Cute”, “Fail” and other buttons, and share BuzzFeed posts with friends via Facebook’s social plugins. Along with yesterday’s release of the Wall Street Journal’s canvas app, the BuzzFeed app indicates a growing trend of publishers maximizing the exposure and referral traffic they gain from Facebook by creating standalone versions of their sites within the social network. BuzzFeed’s President Jon Steinberg tell us the company sees Facebook as “another type of news stand, and we want BuzzFeed to be available on every news feed stand people frequent.”
BuzzFeed was founded in 2006 by Jonah Peretti, who previously cofounded the Huffington Post. The New York City-based site populates itself by algorithmically determining what content is trending on the internet, taking user submissions, and publishing picks by its editors. It now reports 15 million monthly unique visitors, and offers mobile app versions. The company generates revenue in an innovative way. Rather than showing traditional display ads, it allows advertisers to sponsor BuzzFeed posts that mention them or relate to their business. BuzzFeed then dynamically selects the post related to a sponsor that is receiving the most engagement and shows it on the home page and as a “Partner” post amongst lists of organic content. In this way, BuzzFeed doesn’t actually show ads, just more content its visitors might have wanted to see anyway. BuzzFeed also has a program called Extensions that advertises for sponsored content on Twitter, Facebook via the Ads API, and other open inventory around the internet. The BuzzFeed site displays Facebook’s Like, Send, and Comments Box social plugins as well as sharing buttons for several other platforms. Steinberg tells us that “Facebook is one of our largest sources of referral traffic, accounting for millions of referral visits a month.” With Facebook users already reacting well to its content, BuzzFeed saw a big opportunity in creating a native version within the social network that made sharing with friends even more seamless. The BuzzFeed Facebook app streamlines its website to create a more laidback experience. Rather than bombarding users with choices of which post to view or channel to browse, users are immediately presented with a single post. They can choose to leave feedback or share it, or simply move on to the next post. This addictive, StumbleUpon-style flow keeps users constantly discovering new content they might want to share instead of navigating around the site. BuzzFeed drops barriers to usage by not showing the permissions request for a user’s data until it absolutely needs it. To drive app growth, when users who granted permissions click an “OMG” or “Win” button on a post, they’re shown one friend and prompted to send them the post including a link to the app.
Though users must return to the website to add their own posts, search posts, or see channels such as “Hot on Facebook”, the lightweight app works well for killing time while waiting for a friend to respond to a Chat message or more stories to be added to the news feed. If the BuzzFeed and Wall Street Journal apps succeed, expect more publishers to build native versions of their sites on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Sep 2011 01:21 PM PDT
The Facebook Marketing Bible, September 2011 edition, now includes even more strategies and updates for marketing your brand on Facebook. Recent Updates to the FMB
About the Facebook Marketing BibleThe Facebook Marketing Bible has enabled thousands of marketers, social application developers, publishers, and entrepreneurs to navigate and get the most out of the increasingly sophisticated marketing opportunities on Facebook. The web edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible is comprised of detailed resource pages, comprehensive how-to guides, and case studies analyzing today’s most successful marketing and advertising campaigns on Facebook. Now that Facebook is beyond the 700 million monthly active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience through marketing on Facebook. Learn more about the September 2011 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com. Table of Contents excerpted from the full September 2011 EditionRecent Featured Facebook Campaigns
Building Your Brand through Facebook Pages
Designing Your Facebook Page
Communicating Through Your Facebook Page
Growing Your Fan Base and More Ways to Promote Your Facebook Page
Advanced Strategies for Facebook Pages
The Facebook Open Graph for Marketers and Content Publishers
More Ways to Market on Facebook: Questions, Places, and Deals
Advertising on Facebook
Ads Targeting on Facebook
Tools and How-Tos for Marketers
Policies, Privacy, and Guidelines to Watch
Join the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Allows Users to Comment on Pages Without Liking Them, Adds Friend Activity Tab to Pages Posted: 21 Sep 2011 11:19 AM PDT Facebook has made two significant changes to how users interact with Pages. Now, users don’t need to have Liked a Page to be able to post on a Page’s wall or comment on its updates. This allows more users to join conversations, which could add more perspectives to discussions but also dilute them with unrelated comments, or drown them with complaints. Facebook also reached out to us today to announce that users will now see a Friend Activity tab on Pages. This shows users the Likes and comments on the Page’s posts and any mentions of the Page by friends, even if a mention is just text and not a tag. The tab creates a more personalized, relevant view of a Page that might be more engaging than seeing activity from strangers, especially for Pages that receive thousands of comments per post.
Page Walls Now Open to the PublicBy previously reserving the right to comment to those who had Liked a Page, participation in a conversation was a value exchange. Users got to share their opinions, and Pages got to reach those users through the news feed and appear on their profile. This made it easier for Page admins to predict the volume of user posts they’d receive and need to moderate. Now, any user can post or comment on a Page. This may be related to Facebook’s change to privacy around public posts and the new Subscribe feature. Users can Like and comment any public post, and all Page posts are public. This means if a user discovers a conversation or wants to post on the wall of brand’s Page they discovered through a friend or heard about in the news, they don’t have endorse the Page with a Like to join the conversation.
This could help Page’s get more people talking about them, but it could also lead them to have to moderate more negative feedback. A brand experiencing a public relations crisis could see thousands or even millions of users descend on its Page to leave complaints or insults without gaining any new fans. Friend Activity TabFacebook has been showing a Friend Activity tab on Places Pages for a while, allowing users to see the check-ins to that Place by friends. Now Facebook has expanded the Friend Activity tab to all Pages. The tab’s name shows a counter of new activity from friends. Once clicked in a Page’s navigation menu, users see a list of all the Page’s posts that have been engaged with by friends, and all posts by friends that mention or tag the Page.
Popular Pages can often receive thousands of comments on their posts, or wall posts every few minutes — too much for most users to wade through to find posts or comments that interest them such as those by friends. The Friend Activity tab filters out strangers, providing a personalized view of how a user’s network has been interacting with the Page. This could help them find discussions to join, or inspire them to leave their own post because friends are more likely to see it. By altering the way the site works, Facebook is inviting users to develop new behavior patterns. Similar to how the increase of the post character limit from 500 to 5,000 encourages deeper discussion, opening Page walls and the Friend Activity tab could make interacting with Pages more accessible and inviting. At the same time, changes to the social norms of Facebook could force users to reassess why the site is valuable to them. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Sep 2011 09:30 AM PDT
Page tab applications, as well as those that publish stories to the stream, birthday apps, YouTube, Bing, ICQ, iPad and mobile apps were also on the list of the apps that grew the most by daily active users this week. The titles on our list below grew from between 94,900 and 4.4 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
First, the apps that published to the stream to grow their numbers included Luck Daily!, which publishes a luck "score" to the stream, growing by 1.3 million DAU this week. How Attractive Are You? is an app that grew by 187,800 DAU and publishes a percentage of attractiveness to the stream. TopFace with 175,100 DAU publishes your ratings of friends' photos to the stream and Love Quotes grew by 109,500 DAU in the United States and Philippines by inviting users to share love-related quotes to the stream and inviting their friends to the app.
Page tab apps included Static HTML: iframe tabs with 503,500 DAU, Static HTML… [Second Tab] with 217,100 DAU and Static IFRAME Tab : ThumbsUp Icon with 116,500 DAU. There were calendar apps, too, which basically ask users to invite their friends to the app so you can keep track of their birthdays. MyCalendar – Birthdays grew by 454,100 DAU, MeinKalender – Geburtstag with 424,000 DAU and MonCalendrier – Anniversaires with 139,100 DAU.
Finally there was a mixed bag of other apps. Samsung Mobile grew mostly in India and Indonesia by 579,400 DAU. Text Page is an app that grew by 535,500 DAU but is currently disabled. MyPad for iPad is an app that grew by 267,600 DAU and says it's a way to use Facebook and Twitter on iPad. YouTube grew by 266,800 DAU and Bing by 113,800 DAU. Lastly, ICQ Feeds grew by 104,100 DAU and appears to be some sort of Connect app; it notes that the app could be used to connect Facebook to your ICQ feed. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 21 Sep 2011 08:30 AM PDT Users part of the initial roll out of the news feed redesign announced yesterday are also receiving several other unannounced changes to Facebook’s interface. These include an expansion of the character limit on posts from 500 to 5,000, a rollout of the floating navigation bar we saw tested last week, the ability to edit bookmarks in the home page’s left navigation bar, and a more convenient way to leave birthday greetings. Over the last few days Facebook has also buried the poke button within a drop down menu, and removed the ability to accompany a friend request with a message. By launching these interface alterations now rather than amongst other sweeping updates at the f8 developer conference on Thursday, Facebook may be able to reduce the shock to users. The timing will also help the site keep attention focused on Platform-related updates that directly impact developers. Unfortunately, the combination of so many changes with the prompts necessary to explain them gives the home page a foreign look that may turn off some users.
Any update to the core features of the site produces some backlash, and changing the news feed means changing a lot of people’s ingrained behaviors. Still, the merger of the Top News and Most Recent feeds and the addition of the Ticker may be inspiring more complaints than Facebook has seen since it abruptly changed user privacy controls in 2009. Our commenters were highly critical of the Ticker’s design as Facebook tested it over the last few months, and AllFacebook reports that large volumes of complaints are now being publicly published by the site’s users. Facebook’s strategy over the years has been to gradually test and roll out changes, but between the last week and f8 the service will have changed dramatically in a short period of time. Newer users already feeling overwhelmed with the site, such as older age groups, may give up if too many features suddenly change. Facebook might consider delaying any changes not directly tied into the major Platform announcements until users adjust. Today, Facebook shows no signs of slowing down, though, as it has begun rollout of the following additional changes alongside the news feed redesign: 5,000 Character Limit on PostsPreviously, the maximum length for Facebook posts was 500 characters, which was appropriate for most social updates. However, it may have been limiting for those trying to use Facebook as a lightweight blogging platform — something encouraged by the Subscribe asymmetrical follow feature launched last week. Now Facebook posts can be as long as 5,000 characters and comments have a maximum of 8,000 characters. This will allow deep discussions about complicated topics to take place within the site. If users reach the character limit while posting, Facebook allows them to instantly convert the update into a Note. In the news feed, long posts show just their first 1,200 or so characters.
The change takes another talking point away from Google+, which places no character limit on posts. Long posts could make the news feed look too dense or even boring, especially compared to Twitter’s stream of 140 character updates. Facebook may need to reduce the number of characters shown above the fold in news feed posts to keep the news feed easy to digest. Floating Navigation BarThe top navigation bar now floats and remains visible as users scroll down pages, as we saw tested last week. This gives users access to their notifications, Messages, requests, account and privacy settings, search bar, and a home page link at all times. We believe this will increase the average Facebook session time by making it easier for users to return to the news feed or check new notifications when they reach the bottom of a page and might have otherwise left the site. Facebook has also slightly altered the appearance of the bar, replacing the “Profile” link with a user’s profile picture, and the “Account” link with a small arrow that opens the settings drop-down. This gives the top navigation bar a more minimalist design.
Edit Home Page Bookmarks
These changes will make it easier to unhide someone from the news feed, remove unwanted apps, and silence noisy Groups. Streamlined Birthday GeetingsWhen users click on the birthdays section of the home page’s right sidebar, a popover is revealed with wall post entry fields for the profiles of all friends with birthdays that day. This allows users to quickly post “Happy Birthday” or a more personal greeting to each friend since they don’t have to visit their profiles individually.
Hidden Poke ButtonAs first spotted by AllFacebook, the Poke button on the profile is no longer visible by default. Instead, it has been buried in a drop-down menu in the top right of the profile along with options to video call, report/block, and suggest friends. The poke is a relic of the earliest versions of Facebook, when users had few other means of communicating with friends or strangers. Since then, “poke wars” have become running jokes between friends. However, the feature is also often used by men to try to flirt with women they don’t know, which can create an offensive atmosphere for some women. Rather than suddenly removing the option, which could anger some users, Facebook appears to have chosen to make it less prominent in hopes of weening users off it.
No More Friend Request MessagesPreviously, users could include some text when sending a friend request to greet a potential new friend and explain how they know each other. This option is no longer available, forcing users to send a separate Message. This might reduce the likelihood users will send an accompanying Message, which could increase the volume of rejected friend requests. [Thanks to Dian Rosanti for the tip on birthdays] |
Hovering over a bookmark in the home page’s left sidebar now reveals a pencil icon that lets users edit that bookmark or the settings for the thing it represents. Here are the options users receive when clicking the edit icon on different types of bookmarks:
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