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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

The Best and Worst Facebook Page Campaign Strategies for Politicians

Posted: 26 Oct 2011 02:07 PM PDT

Facebook Marketing Bible

The following is an excerpt of an entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains additional analysis on the sign up, user generated content, video, and landing tab apps of Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and Herman Cain, as well as suggestions for how they could improve their campaigns.

Politicians are gearing up for the 2012 elections and we’ve been tracking their campaign efforts on Facebook through the 2012 Inside Facebook Election Tracker. The web app charts the Like counts and compares candidates in the presidential primaries as well as the House, Senate, and Governor races.

Many candidates are using custom Facebook Page tab applications to drive awareness, gain fans, solicit donations, and spread their message. Here we’ll look at some of the best strategies and worst mistakes in how Page tab apps are being employed by four of the presidential primary candidates — Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, and Herman Cain. Our analysis can help political candidates, as well as any brand learn how to promote themselves through Facebook Pages.

Barack Obama’s “Are You In?” Invite App

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is using a Page tab app called “Are You In?” to get users to invite their friends to support his campaign. The app is installed on Obama’s main Page that has 23.7 million fans, as well as swing-state campaign Pages including Obama for America — Colorado, Ohio, and Iowa.

When users first visit the app and click the “I’m In” button, they’re given a chance to authorize the app. It then prompts them to publish a news feed story about supporting Obama that states “[User name} is in. Join the campaign”. Users are wall post entry fields for the profiles of several friends which they can use to tell them they’re “in” and invite them to the app. Users can also view all of their friends that are already “in” and a count of how many were inspired to join by their wall posts.

The campaign app is simple to use, employs both news feed and wall posts for virality, and uses a leaderboard-style gamification mechanic to encourage users to spread the word. Rather than cluttering the app and shared stories with specifics about policy or how to participate, its lightweight, concise approach makes it appealing to the widest possible audience — perfect for raising awareness of the campaign.

Obama also features a Donate tab to take in campaign contributions for his main Page. To keep his 23 million fans engaged, he frequently publishes links to campaign news, inspirational quotes, and descriptions of campaign merchandise available in his store.

Ron Paul’s Confusing Landing Tab

Republican presidential primary candidate Ron Paul has made a few mistakes with his Facebook Page that currently has 563,000 Likes. His Page features a “Support Ron Paul” landing tab app, though its not actually set as the Page’s default landing tab. It displays a fake Like button image in a banner next to the real Like button on his Page that could confuse potential supporters that click it and see nothing happen.

The Support Ron Paul tab is actually a Like-gated app that changes from the banner to showing links to donate or volunteer, but this is not clearly indicated to users. The app needs to explain that users gain access to special links or content in exchange for their Like, otherwise they might think they’re just looking at a static image.

The Ron Paul Facebook Promoter tab app hosted on the candidates Page has potential but is also confusing…

Access Facebook political campaign analysis and strategies, including reviews of more Page apps from Ron Paul, Mitt Romney and Herman Cain in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing, promotion, and advertising on Facebook.

Sociable Labs Launches Custom Ecommerce Facebook Social Plugin Software With $7 Million Second Round

Posted: 26 Oct 2011 01:31 PM PDT

Sociable Labs has just emerged from stealth and launched its hosted software service that provides large ecommerce websites with custom Facebook social plugins that increase conversions and referral traffic. Rather than implement standard Like buttons or develop their own Open Graph integration, Sociable Labs’ turn-key solution lets sites show their users the products that friends have bought or signed up for, who to ask for, recommendations, and relevant suggestions of friends to invite.

To fund product development and marketing of the “ROI-Guided Social Design” hosted software solution Sociable Labs has raised a $7 million Series B round led by Battery Ventures. The company’s product addresses the traffic and conversion needs of ecommerce sites by exploiting the full potential of Facebook’s social and interest graphs. The company reports that initial tests of the $50,000 a year product have generated a 20-times increase in sharing to Facebook.

Customized Social Plugins Beat One-Size-Fits-All

Facebook’s current social plugins are designed to be generally applicable. The Like button fits most websites, but asking users to Like an action they’ve taken such as buying a product or registering for an event is a bit awkward. The Recommendations and Activity Feed plugins show what friends or the general Facebook populace have Liked, but don’t can’t tell users what friends have bought or browsed.

Sociable Labs’ product lets sites create social plugins designed specifically to encourage sharing of the types of actions that occur on their site. For example, custom plugins can be configured to ask users to “Tell friends what you just bought/signed up for” after they make a purchase or registration. The product leverage a site’s clickstream data and Facebook’s interest graph. That way it can show a customer viewing ecommerce search results which product their friends purchased, which brands their friends browsed most, or which friends have Facebook interests related to the results and might have recommendations.

For example, if I’m browsing skis on a sporting goods website powered by Sociable Labs, I might see a plugin that shows that three friends browsed the Rossignol brand. Then while deciding which pair to buy it could show me friends who Like “Skiing” or “Northstar Ski Resort” on Facebook who I could ask for recommendations. Once I purchase, I’d be shown a Facebook sharing button asking “Josh, show off the new skis you bought to friends”.

Other powerful social plugins Sociable Labs offers include targeted referrals that recommends friends with relevant Likes to invite to a site or send an email promotion to, with the referrer getting a discount when friends sign up. Group promotions let users recruit friends to reduce the price of an item, and an activity stream shows all the recent browsing, shares, and purchases of friends.

Beta client Active.com used Sociable Labs’ product to increase the rate of Facebook sharing by its users from 0.2% to 8% and increase conversion rates from Facebook traffic by 33%. Other clients also saw sharing increase by more than 20-fold. These shares generate significant referral traffic and sales for site. In fact, a Sociable Labs study showed that traffic coming from authentic social shares by friends converts 300% better than traffic from news feed updates published by Facebook Pages and 67% better than traffic from email marketing.

Sociable Labs See Sharing as the Key to ROI, Not Page Updates

Founded as part of fbFund in June 2009, the San Francisco-based Sociable Labs has since taken a total of $8.8 million in funding and grown to 25 employees. It is targeting the top 500 internet retailers who may see much more traffic to their website than their Facebook Pages, and therefore want to focus on bridging their sites with the social network. Sociable Labs now has 12 clients paying $50,000 a year subscriptions to its product and more for custom design work to skin the plugins.

The social plugin software is hosted by Sociable Labs so it’s easy to embed into websites. It stores all of a site’s clickstream data, even if the site doesn’t already do that itself. The company found that 40% of visitors to ecommerce sites were currently logged in to Facebook, allowing it to tie clickstream and conversion data to identity and show personalized social plugins to a significant portions of a client’s visitors. Also included in the product are a suite of tools for clients to A/B test and optimize the plugins.

The company’s CEO Nisan Gabbay tells me that “to date, brands have focused on monitoring mentions, gaining fans for their Facebook Pages, and pumping messages to fans. However, the right way to get a return on investment from social is getting more consumer to consumer viral marketing.” This is similar to the approach of BadgeVille, which is using gamification and personalized activity streams to increase loyalty and get users spending more time on content sites.

There are opportunities for ecommerce sites to utilize Facebook’s new Open Graph app system revealed at f8 to drive qualified referral traffic. Gabbay believes “Open Graph is very key to enabling social commerce, but its overwhelming for marketers.” Also, while automatic, implicit Open Graph activity sharing to the Ticker can generate traffic, Sociable Labs encourages explicit shares that are more likely to reach the main news feed, and on-site recommendation plugins that are more advanced than Facebook’s official plugins.

Until now, most Facebook marketing platforms center around Page management, with giants like Buddy Media and Vitrue consolidating the industry by acquiring or partnering with ecommerce, Ads API, and games companies. Buddy Media did acquire and integrate social plugin company Spinback, but otherwise there hasn’t been much activity in the third-party site Facebook integration space.

This is going to change. As brands increase their focus on ROI, they will pay for social plugins that drive more traffic and conversions than Facebook’s. Gabbay agrees, saying “It’s a little early, but I’m sure you’ll see a lot of consolidation” as the bigger players move to add social plugins to their service offering. For now, though, Sociable Labs is a step ahead, offering a product that can drastically improve sharing and conversion rates for ecommerce sites.

New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: LiveWorld, King.com, Jelli and More

Posted: 26 Oct 2011 11:53 AM 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, LiveWorld, King.com, ngmoco :), Checkpoint Studios, Lolapps, Jelli, Natural Motion Games and CrowdStar.

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.

Horoscopes, Formspring, Grooveshark, Scribd, Skype and Spotify on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 26 Oct 2011 08:09 AM PDT

Horoscopes, as well as a slew of friend incorporating apps, Page tool apps and apps that leverage other data on Facebook, such as YouTube, Skype, Spotify and Grooveshark made the list of our fastest growing apps by daily active users this week.

The titles below grew from between 110,000 and 2.6 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1.  Daily Horoscope 7,800,000 +2,600,000 +50%
2.  Zynga Game Bar 1,800,000 +1,790,000 +17,900%
3.  Mafia Wars 2 2,700,000 +359,959 +877,949%
4.  الأبراج اليومية 1,100,000 +350,000 +47%
5.  Ravenskye City 1,300,000 +326,811 +1,409%
6.  Formspring 380,000 +310,000 +443%
7.  Static HTML: iframe tabs 3,400,000 +300,000 +10%
8.  開心水族箱 1,700,000 +300,000 +21%
9.  YouTube 1,600,000 +300,000 +23%
10.  Texas HoldEm Poker 6,700,000 +300,000 +5%
11.  Grooveshark 450,000 +270,000 +150%
12.  Bubble Witch Saga 1,800,000 +265,150 +28%
13.  Toolbar Widget 810,000 +240,000 +42%
14.  Scribd 750,000 +230,000 +44%
15.  Skype 1,900,000 +200,000 +12%
16.  Spotify 2,100,000 +200,000 +11%
17.  Social Statistics 440,000 +190,000 +76%
18.  WhoIsNear? 400,000 +140,000 +54%
19.  Greeting Cards 520,000 +140,000 +37%
20.  Social Empires 730,000 +110,000 +18%

Daily Horoscope topped our list with 2.6 million DAU and the Arabic version, الأبراج اليومية, grew by 350,000 DAU. The app has a pop-up asking users to share with their friends, then is interactive by inviting you to share your horoscope with your friends of the same astrological sign.

A group of apps to interact with your friends was on the list, too. Formspring, the question-and-answer site, saw its Facebook integration grow by 310,000 DAU; the app publishes to the stream each time there's a post. The friend analyzer Social Statistics, which publishes a top 10 list to your feed, grew by 190,000 DAU. WhoIsNear? grew by 140,000 DAU; the app, a location app on the Facebook platform, allows users to check in geographically with what they're doing, find new friends, publish their whereabouts to the stream. Finally, Greeting Cards with 140,000 DAU this week is a Connect integration that presents users with a list of friends' upcoming birthdays then offers to send greeting cards to them.

Page tools on the list this week were Static HTML: iframe tabs with 300,000 DAU and Toolbar Widget with 240,000 DAU.

Then there were services that had off-platform perks. YouTube grew by 300,000 DAU. Then Grooveshark by 270,000 DAU; this app uses Facebook Connect to essentially allow users to utilize a separate website as a music player with which they can search and share music. Document sharing service Scribd grew by 230,000 DAU, Skype by 200,000 DAU and Spotify BY 200,000 DAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

torsdag den 27. oktober 2011 at 07.36