Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- The Facebook Marketing Bible October 2011 Edition Is Now Available
- Bing Powers New Facebook Page Post Translation Tool
- Facebook Reveals More Details About Timeline, Including an Approval Process for Open Graph Apps
- New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Acquinity Interactive, Warner Bros, Mindspark and More
- Yahoo, YouTube, Friends, Dogs, God, Mobile, Photos and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Pages by DAU
| The Facebook Marketing Bible October 2011 Edition Is Now Available Posted: 05 Oct 2011 08:00 PM PDT
The October 2011 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible: The Comprehensive Guide to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook is now available. The 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 nearing the 800 million monthly active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience through marketing on Facebook. The October 2011 edition includes updated coverage of the following topics:
Learn more about the October 2011 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible at FacebookMarketingBible.com. Table of Contents excerpted from the full October 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 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Bing Powers New Facebook Page Post Translation Tool Posted: 05 Oct 2011 03:33 PM PDT Facebook today announced the launch of a new translation tool powered by Microsoft Bing Translate that lets users select to view Page posts in their native language. Page admins can select to show only machine translated posts, or they can select to allow Facebook users to submit their own translations. If these community translations receive approvals from other users, they’ll replace the machine translation. Currently, all Pages have been automatically opted in to allowing both machine and community translations.
Many brands are building international fan bases for their Page, so the option to have their posts translated means they’ll be able to better engage these foreign audiences, driving more engagement and clicks to their content. While not always perfectly accurate, the free translation tool is much cheaper and faster than having a human translate, geo-target, and publish localized versions of their posts. Currently, the Translate button only appears to users with their language set to Korean, Japanese, Russian, Taiwanese and Chinese-Hong Kong. If Facebook and Bing roll the feature out to other popular languages or allowed it to be applied to ads as well, it could become an important driver of international growth and business for all Pages. One day Bing translation could also be applied to user posts to allow people to communicate across language barriers and form more international friendships.
The launch of this feature follows tests of a machine translation option for user comments on Page posts that we spotted last month. While comment translation is not part of the Bing tool’s rollout, it shows the potential for user content to receive translation in addition to Page posts. In the past, Facebook has worked with Microsoft to power its own internal search and to augment Bing.com search results with Like counts from a user’s friends and the Facebook population at large. More recently, Bing Maps was integrated into the new Timeline profile as well as Facebook Places. Facebook has been successful with translation in the past, originally crowdsourcing translation of the site’s interface in many languages, and later extending the crowdsourced translation tool to Facebook apps and Connect-integrated sites. All Pages Have Been Opted In to TranslationTo configure the Bing translation tool, admins can go to the Edit Page interface and select the Your Settings tab. They’ll then see a Translations From section where they can enable translations by machine; machine and community; machine, community, and admin, or they can disable the feature. By default, Pages are set to allow machine and community translation. In most cases, admins will at least want to allow machine translations. Community translations may be more accurate, but admins will have to remember to moderate the translation submissions. Once enabled, users with their Facebook language set to one of the feature’s current language will see a “Translate” button besides the Like, Comment, and Share buttons beneath that Page’s posts. When clicked, the text of the Page’s post will change from the language it was originally written in to the user’s selected language. According to the Help Center, Admins will also see a “Manage Translations” link underneath their Page posts. From here they can approve or delete community-submitted translations or add their own. If admins find someone trying to submit objectionable content or spam as a translation, they can quickly block them from their Page and from submitting translations to other Pages as well. Facebook already offers geographic and language targeting in the Page post publisher. This allowed Pages to manually translate their updates and publish them to the corresponding segment of their fans. This was a lot of work, though, especially since there is no way to hide a post from certain countries or languages. Some third-party Facebook Page management tools offer translation services, but now all Pages have access to a free, easy, and instantaneous translation tool.
Until now some brands have opted to create different Pages for each country, and assigned a team to translate the brand’s primary Page’s updates and publish them locally. This required a complicated management hierarchy that Facebook and third-parties are only beginning to support through corporate/local Page management tools. The Bing Translation feature will reduce the need to set up localized Pages because a central Page’s updates can be read by audiences that speak a different language. Translation Could Further Facebook’s MissionWith international fans now able to read the updates of Pages the Like in a language they better understand, Pages should see their posts receiving more Likes, comments, and clicks from these audience segments. This could help brands boost the return on investment on their Facebook marketing spend. Facebook could also get brands spending more on international advertising if it offered automatic translation of ads into the native languages of the users they target. Still, the most potentially meaningful prospect of the Bing translation tool is how it could facilitate international friendships. If Facebook’s goal is to make the world more open and connected, what better way than allowing users to share with the whole world regardless of the language they speak. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Reveals More Details About Timeline, Including an Approval Process for Open Graph Apps Posted: 05 Oct 2011 12:19 PM PDT “We’ve tried to be mindful about the lessons we’ve learned” Facebook Product Manger Manager Carl Sjogreen told me this morning when we sat down to discuss Timeline, the redesigned version of the user profile that debuted at f8 last month. He says that as the product rolls out over the next few weeks, Facebook will be manually reviewing and approving new Open Graph apps to prevent the spammy experience that emerged when temporarily gave third-party applications a place on the profile years ago. This approach is much more similar to how Apple must approve apps before they enter the App Store than the way Facebook allows canvas apps to launch on its Platform without pre-approval. Sjogreen also revealed more details about Timeline, including that users will be given a curation period to manicure the content displayed in their new profile before it becomes visible to friends. Facebook believes that through social content curation and new lifestyle apps, users will be able to express themselves in more nuanced ways than ever before.
Timeline’s Impact on PrivacyFacebook launched Timeline to allow users to tell their story not just through their most recent activity as the old profile wall did, but through all of the most important moments of their life. Users can also authorize Open Graph apps to automatically publish activity such as song listens to their Timeline. Sjogreen says “All the feedback is pretty positive. People have complimented the design aesthetic”, which includes a place for a big banner image and provides users the flexibility to feature or hide different content. Since a user’s friends can easily navigate all the way back to their first Facebook posts through Timeline, a lot of content that was previously difficult to access will become readily visible. This content might include major life events, but also objectionable or inappropriate posts users might have forgotten about but wouldn’t want family or professional colleagues to see. No privacy settings have been changed and all Timeline content could previously be found by scrolling far enough down a user’s profile, but Timeline does allow historic content to be accessed with one or two clicks rather than dozens or hundreds.
To address this, when users receive the rollout of Timeline, Sjogreen says they’ll be given a curation period in which only they will be abe to see their Timeline so they can go back and hide content or adjust its privacy controls. They can then publish the Timeline and make it visible when they’re ready. Developers were given a similar curation period when they first received access to Timeline at f8. Still, Facebook will need to carefully inform users of the importance of this curation period or they might skip it and make content visible that they might later regret. Sjogreen said he wasn’t aware of plans for this kind of messaging, though. Regarding less appropriate content becoming visible, Sjogreen reflected Facebook’s goals of people becoming more open as well as cultural norm changes (privacy relaxing over time). “Timeline will be seen in a broader context. I think people understand that everyone went to college, everyone has a photo they posted to Facebook from college.” Everyone’s employers might not be so keen on seeing such racy party pictures or controversial status updates, though. Timeline Apps Will Be Reviewed by FacebookFrom 2008 to 2010, Facebook allowed users to install applications on their profile. While some conveyed important information such as where a user had travelled, Sjogreen told me that users would install “clowny apps” that they’d soon stop using, that would retain a prominent place on the profile with the intention of spreading virally. Facebook gradually hid then finally removed all profile apps in 2010. It is now applying the lessons it learned from its first attempt at profile apps to create a less spammy experience this time around. Timeline is designed to show more recent activity, but increasingly weed out less important content as users scroll backwards. Sjogreen says “apps don’t have a permanent place in the Timeline” meaning if a user installs an app but stops using it, it will quickly become less visible. Along the same lines, Sjogreen tells me Facebook will not reward apps that publish more frequently than others. For example, say a user listens to 100 songs on Spotify and tracks one run using Nike’s running app in a single week. Timeline might give the two apps equal real estate by only showing a report of a user’s most listened to songs but still showing news of the one workout.
“We’ve learned a lot in hindsight, and built a lot of technologies to make sure we’re targeting users with info they find relevant” says Sjogreen. By using its new Open Graph app activity sorting algorithm Graph Rank and other systems, Sjogreen tells me Facebook has reduced Platform spam by 99%, up from the 95% reduction in spam Facebook CTO Bret Taylor cited at our Inside Social Apps conference in January. Developers are helping with this process by structuring the data about user activity that the send to Facebook. They can select from official verbs and nouns such as “listened” and “song” to let Facebook know what kind of content they’re submitting. Facebook can then determine that each song listen might be less important to display in Timeline than actions that occur less frequently such as meals cooked or movies watched. Custom actions and objects can also be configured by developers. However, to ”make sure the initial experience with Timeline is really great” Facebook is now manually reviewing the submission of new Open Graph apps to check out their nouns, verbs, and what triggers an activity to be published.
This approval process differs significantly from its Games Platform, where developers publicly launch an app without needing permission from Facebook; apps only get reviewed by the company if they receive negative feedback from users. Sjogreen tell me that “something publishing every minute will get shut down quickly or never be approved in the first place. We’re trying not to get in the business of making value judgements like that knitting app is good and this joke app is bad, but we’re making sure apps are only publishing legitimate activity.” Such an approach might make it harder for developers, but it should work well to protect the user experience from spam apps that constantly publish low quality stories to the Timeline and home page Ticker. Regarding whether this approach would scale when more and more developers begin submitting apps, Sjogreen says “this level of approval is different than us playing every game on the Platform and making sure it meets some quality bar.” Facebook is preparing to make a major change to how users express themselves with the rollout of Timeline. It will need to clearly communicate the privacy implications of ready access to old content in order to avoid backlash. It will also need to strike a proper balance between a clean user experience and an attractive Open Graph application development Platform. If Facebook can navigate these two pitfalls, Timeline could become the richest way to represent one’s identity online. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 05 Oct 2011 12:13 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 Acquinity Interactive, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Mindspark Interactive, Entertainment Games, Jelli, Lolapps, CrowdStar, TinyCo and Wild Needle 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 05 Oct 2011 08:23 AM PDT
Yahoo and YouTube topped our list of the top growing Facebook applications by daily active users this week. There was also a variety of friend quiz, dog matching, religious message apps, along with the usual birthday and horoscope, photo, and dating apps. The titles on our list below grew from between 70,900 and 3.1 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
Yahoo grew by 3.1 million MAU and YouTube by 960,300 MAU. Text Page was right behind these two, but appears to be inactive; it grew by 536,700 MAU. Friend Buzz is a friend quiz app that grew by 205,300 MAU; it asks users questions about their friends and publishes answers to the feed. Dog-A-Like is an app from Australia for dog food brand Pedigree. It grew by 157,500 MAU and allows users to upload a photo to find their perfect dog match either for adoption, to donate to the adoption program, or share the photo to the stream. Other photo or friend apps included MyCalendar – Birthdays with 110,100 MAU, it asks users to add their friends to the app before use, photo app Pixable with 93,500 MAU and Horóscopo Diário grew by 83,000 MAU providing daily Wall posts of your horoscope and prompting the sharing of your horoscope to the stream.
Facebook Messenger for Android grew by 109,400 MAU. Religious message app God wants You to Know grew by 103,100 MAU; it publishes these messages to the stream. Dating app Niik grew by 94,500 MAU. Messaging app Voxer Walkie Talkie grew by 73,000 MAU. Finally, what appears to be a Spanish website login Taringa grew by 72,800 MAU. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday. |
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