Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook’s Expanded Premium Ad Unit Combines Page Post Content with Convincing Social Context
- Facebook Lets Brands Measure Earned Media With “People Talking About This” Page Metric
- Jobvite’s New Facebook Recruiting App Suggests Friends to Refer
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Pretzel Crisps, Farmers Insurance, Zynga, 7-Eleven and JVC
- Spotify, Photos, Profile Report cards, Page Tabs, Badoo and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook’s Expanded Premium Ad Unit Combines Page Post Content with Convincing Social Context Posted: 03 Oct 2011 06:17 PM PDT
Last night Facebook made two announcements just before the start of New York Ad Week, the launch of new earned media Insights which we discussed in-depth this morning, and a new “expanded Premium ad unit” that can appear larger than typical ads on the home page. Expanded Premium ads turn an update published by a Page to the news feed into an ad, and append social context about friends who Like that Page to the top of the unit. It thereby combines what were previously two separate ad types — Page Like Sponsored Stories and Sponsored Page Post ads — creating a taller, more compelling ad unit that includes the trusted recommendation of a friend that can be targeted to any Facebook user. Advertisers will no longer have to choose between promoting their Page with an ad that had little of its own content, and amplifying the reach of a compelling Page post without showing social context. These ads could become a powerful tool for Pages looking to gain fans, as Facebook’s studies show social context makes viewers 68% more likely to recall an ad, twice as likely to remember its message, and four times as likely to make a purchase. Page Like Sponsored Stories currently allow Pages to pay for more exposure for the news feed story triggered when someone Likes there Page. However, these ads are essentially just social content– they have no content of their own and sometimes seem boring. By allowing advertisers to include an important Page post along with the Page Like social context, expanded Premium ads are more compelling. Viewers will also get a taste of what they’ll see in their news if they follow the implicit recommendation of their friend and Like the Page.
Facebook launched Sponsored Stories to amplify the reach of user generated mentions of brands. However, there was one Sponsored Story type, the Page Post story, that didn’t require user action. Instead, it let Pages buy additional impressions from fans for news feed posts by their Page. Earlier this month, Facebook reclassified Page Post Sponsored Stories as “Sponsored Page Posts”, a new subcategory of traditional Facebook ads, and began letting advertisers target them to any Facebook user, not just existing fans. While compelling in their own right if the advertiser picks an interesting Page post to promote, they often include no implicit trusted recommendation from a friend that says “I Liked this Page, maybe you should too” via social context. Now with expanded Premium ads, these Sponsored Page Post ads are automatically augmented with Page Like social context if any of a viewer’s friends have Liked that advertised Page. This makes them a better driver of new Likes than either Page Like Sponsored Stories or Sponsored Page Post ads. Facebook has solved some the biggest problems of two of its most powerful ad products. For now expanded Premium ads will only be available to top advertisers through Facebook’s direct sales team. With time, though, Facebook may be able to improve the balance between content and social context in its self-serve ad products. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Lets Brands Measure Earned Media With “People Talking About This” Page Metric Posted: 03 Oct 2011 01:03 PM PDT On the eve of Advertising Week, Facebook last night announced that it will provide several new Page Insights metrics to marketers to help them gauge their reach on the social network. Along with total friends of fans and total weekly reach, “People Talking About This” will show the total number of stories published by Facebook users that mention a brand, including wall posts, comments, shares, and more. We’ve learned the new metrics will roll out on Wednesday. The metrics will help brands measure their earned media on Facebook in addition to their paid ads and owned Page posts. While the Insights tab will only be visible to admins, a simple count of People Talking About This will be publicly available on a brand’s Page beneath their total Like count. This will give businesses some ability to benchmark themselves against competitors. Users can expect more purposefully viral marketing and ad campaigns on Facebook now that brands can accurately track their reach.
The annual Advertising Week sees industry leaders gather in New York to discuss the latest developments in advertising. Facebook has a big opportunity to build its business by increasing the general understanding of its marketing solutions. As we’ve discussed, more businesses might adopt Facebook Ads and other marketing products if they felt confident in how to use them. Facebook is expanding education and outreach efforts through business lobbies to solve this problem. It has also launched a new “expanded premium ad unit” to attract Ad Week attention. Starting Wednesday, Pages will include an Insights tab in their navigation menu that is visible to admins only. It will show a graph of the Weekly Total Reach and quantity of People Talking About This with dots overlaid to show when the Page published updates. Above it will show these metrics and Friends of Fans numerically with percentage change for a time period. Below will be a list of a Page’s last 500 posts (or all published since mid-July) with reach, engagement, talking about this, and virality scores.
Without these new metrics, it was tricky or impossible for a brand to determine its total reach and how frequently it was being posted about by Facebook users. They could see separate counts for post impressions and feedback, media consumption, Page views, wall posts, and mentions, but there was no way to eliminate duplicates or count all types of interactions to calculate total reach. Brands could watch their own Page wall or use third-party social media monitoring software to track public posts that mentioned them, but they couldn’t count private posts or activity stories generated by Likes and other actions to determine their volume of earned media. Weekly Total Reach will add up all of the users who’ve been exposed to a brand’s owned, earned, and paid media, including those who’ve interacted with a Page’s content or seen its ads. This gives marketers a metric to compare to the reach of other mediums such as television or print. If marketers determine the cost to reach an audience on Facebook is lower than through tv commercials, the metric could help accelerate the shift of ad dollars from television to Facebook. The Friends of Fans metric can help marketers assess the potential audience of a viral marketing campaign, the audience of Sponsored Stories, and how many users are primed to become fans because their friends already are. Studies by comScore cite that the top 100 brand Pages have 34 times as many friends of fans as fans, and the top 1000 Pages have 81 times more friends of fans. This audience segment may be valuable to brands, as Bing friends of fans conduct 27% more searches than the average searcher, and Starbucks friends of fans spend more and transact more frequently. Facebook’s Native Social Media Monitoring ToolPeople Talking About This will give brands an accurate, albeit basic assessment of how much word-of-mouth marketing they are inspiring. The metric will count the total number published stories when users take the following types of actions:
The new Page Insights won’t reveal exactly what is being said about a brand though. Luckily, Facebook has made an API for the new metrics available, and several Page management companies including Context Optional, Wildfire, and Webtrends have already integrated it into their tools. Eventually, these or other companies could augment People Talking About This data with the actual text of public mentions of a brand, giving them an idea of the sentiment of the word of mouth. Big brands will still want to use sophisticated third-party social media monitoring software to track feedback on other social platforms such as Twitter as well as the content of Facebook mentions. Smaller brands that don’t need to know exactly what people are saying about them will now be able to get proof of the earned media potential of Facebook easily and for free. All brands will be able to track how marketing and ad campaigns influence the volume of mentions of their Page and their reach, which is crucial to justifying increased spend on Facebook. Still, the company has not announced any plans to offer its own downstream conversion tracking system that would allow marketers to calculate return on investment on the Facebook spend. The site does allow marketers to attach third-party tracking tags to Sponsored Stories and Facebook Ads, though. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Jobvite’s New Facebook Recruiting App Suggests Friends to Refer Posted: 03 Oct 2011 10:30 AM PDT Jobvite today launches a new Facebook application that notifies users of suggestions of friends to refer to job openings. Users can view friends the app has determined are a good fit based on their profile information, then send them a personalized invite to submit their resume. Companies that license the Jobvite app and get their employees to install and use it may be able to reduce recruitment costs and find top talent by making it easier for employees to recommend openings to friends. This can increase the volume of employee-referred applicants, which recruiters generally find to be the applicants with the highest potential.
Job seekers can also apply for jobs through the Jobvite app and check back to see if a potential employer has reviewed them. This can improve the experience for applicants, encouraging them to tell more friends about openings at a given company. Facebook has become a powerful tool for recruiters over the last few years. 53.3% of recruiters use it partly because its an effective method of soliciting employee referrals. These types of applicants are ten times more likely to be hired than an average applicants, according to a Jobvite study released in July. When we looked at Jobvite’s Facebook integration a few months ago, it already had several powerful components. Recruiters can compose messages announcing new job openings that can be left pending for their fellow employees to send out, or those employees can configure the Jobvite system to automatically publish the messages to their friends. Employers can also install a tab app on their Page to solicit job applicants. Previously, employees could visit the Jobvite website to see recommendations of friends to refer to job openings. Now, that process is much better integrated into their daily lives. Once installed, employees see a notification jewel next to the bookmark for the Jobvite app on their Facebook home page if they have friends with work and education histories that fit new job openings.
Employees can then enter the app, select from matched friends, and send them Jobvites which are delivered as Facebook notifications. When a friend clicks through a Jobvite notification, they can see the full job description and apply all from within the app. They can then check back to see the status of their request for a job.
Jobvite CEO Dan Finnigan tells me that “up until now when companies wanted to increase the number of employee referrals, they sent emails to employees asking them to send on opening to friends, but it’s a pain [to think of who would be a good match]“. By automating the matching process and reminding employees through Facebook — which they frequently visit — to send on openings, the referral process is more efficient. Finnigan says the automated matching has been made possible because Facebook’s profile redesign last year got users to share more education, employment, and location information. He believes the new profile Timeline will draw more data from users that will fuel referral matching because “professional history is made up of big milestones that people are clearly going to put on their profile.” Jobvite is also excited to make use of the new home page Ticker of real-time app and social activity. It will display when a user suggests a job to a friend. To protect privacy, though, Finnigan says “Nothing would go in the Ticker about anything people wouldn’t want revealed” — such as applying for jobs. By taking the work out employees recommending jobs to friends, Jobvite can help companies turn recruitment into a seamless part of their employees days. While other companies such as Work For Us provide referral suggestions, Jobvite pushes these recommendations to employees rather than making them go find them. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Pretzel Crisps, Farmers Insurance, Zynga, 7-Eleven and JVC Posted: 03 Oct 2011 09:32 AM PDT Some companies tried new methods, and others relied on tried and true ones in their campaigns on Facebook over the last week. Pretzel Crisps engaged customers over their new product flavors, also giving away copious amounts of it for free, and 7-11 gave away free coffee this week. Farmers Insurance teamed up with Zynga to promote its services while JVC is set to create a network of local Facebook Pages to target its customers. 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 other organization on Facebook.
Pretzel Crisps' Spice Up Your Life SweepstakesGoal: Page Growth, Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty, Network Exposure, Engagement Core Mechanic: A week-long sweepstakes from Pretzel Crisps that both awarded free product to users and asked them to engage with the brand via Facebook app. Method: The sweepstakes began Monday, September 26, and ran through Friday, September 30 in order to promote the new Pretzel crisps flavors in the Bold & Spicy flavors, specifically Jalapeño Jack and Chipotle Cheddar. Users could enter once an hour to win a case of the new flavors; all told the company would be giving away a case (36 bags) of the new product every hour for 100 hours. Additionally, the grand prize sweepstakes is $5,000 and winners were to be announced on the Sweepstakes tab on the Page. Once users entered, a feed story was generated. Users could customize each branded entry by selecting a phrase about the product that also described themselves.
We spoke to Pretzel Crisps' Director of Interactive and Field Marketing Jason Harty, who noted that the two primary goals of the campaign were to build the size of the Page and to engage with customers about the new products. Plus, "I looked at it as a really unique way to seed product to new people in random parts of the country," he said in reference to the delivery of cases of new product to winners. Harty said he hoped winners would share the new flavors with their family and friends and share their feedback with the company online. Harty described the role of social media in Pretzel Crisps' marketing as "very important," mostly because it's a two-way dialogue with customers. The company prides itself on its Facebook content that includes more than simply "buy more or eat more," but suggests different ways for customers to use the product, a dip recipe for example.
Impact: Pretzel Crisps used this campaign, Harty told us, with the goal of reaching the 100,000 Likes milestonefrom 62,000. Ambitious though it may have been, the Page did almost hit this mark, currently standing at 98,700 Likes. The company shared some preliminary results with us, noting that during the sweepstakes the Page received a 57% increase in fans and more than 8,000 Wall posts. PageData showed the Page received about 36,000 new fans during the span of one week. What Harty highlighted, however, was that the engagement that accompanied the tens of thousands of entries was very high. About 25% of those who entered also posted a branded news story about the product and their entry, which Harty considered high, noting "I view that as genuine, earned media." 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 03 Oct 2011 09:04 AM PDT
The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 547,200 and 5 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 4.1 million MAU and Static HTML Iframe Tab : Custom Icons by 609,900 MAU. Spotify grew by 1.4 million MAU mostly in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Photo apps that grew on our list included 60photos with 2.7 million MAU; this app allows users to rate their friends' photos, then publishes feed stories. TopFace grew by 1.7 million MAU and Badoo's Friends Photos grew by 787,700 MAU involve rating friends' photos and publishing feed stories. Write Your Name In Fire Alphabet grew by 714,400 MAU and publishes a feed story when you use it, then a photo with your name written in fire.
A group of apps that basically does the same thing, "rating" your profile friends then publishing a photo, sometimes tagging your friends in the process. Profile Report Card by 841,700 MAU, Report Card with 669,900 MAU, Friend Report Card with 632,600 MAU, Friend Report Card with 583,800 MAU, My Report Card with 583,700 MAU and Top Ten Friends with 547,500 MAU.
The rest of the list included MyCalendar – Birthdays with 1.2 million MAU, the app asks users to invite friends before use. Text Page which grew by 1.2 million MAU, yet is an inactive app. 21 Perguntas grew by 716,800 MAU and also asks users to invite friends before use. 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. |
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