Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Discontinues Official Mp3 Music Player, Pushes Users to Streaming Partners
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Street King, Realtors, Gray Line, MassMutual and Farmers Insurance
- More Details on Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco
- Birthdays, Page Tabs, Band Apps, Scribd, Cupid and Skype on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Discontinues Official Mp3 Music Player, Pushes Users to Streaming Partners Posted: 31 Oct 2011 02:10 PM PDT Facebook has begun alerting Page admins that the official Music Player app it developed years ago will no longer be available after today. The app allowed Page admins to upload an MP3 and add track information, and the song would then be shared to the news feed where it could be streamed in-line. The same app seems to power the ability for users to post songs to the news feed by adding the URLs of MP3s to the publisher. Facebook says “The Facebook Music Player app is being replaced with better ways to incorporate music on your Page”, and a Help Center entry then encourages users and admins to post music videos instead of songs and use third-party apps. Facebook could be developing its own basic Page tab application to allow musicians to share music. Alternatively, it may be trying to avoid copyright issues and clear the way for third-party music sharing apps including Spotify and RootMusic’s BandPage.
The notice of the removal of the Music Player app starting October 31 is appearing at the top of Pages to their admins. It follows similar alerts about Facebook discontinuing the Discussions and Reviews Page tab apps. In those cases it also said new tools are coming but that for now Pages should use their wall as a forum and host for reviews. Promoting Third-Party Music Page Tab Apps Facebook does not currently offer its own Page tab app for permanently hosting streaming music, and rather allows third-party developers such as RootMusic, ReverbNation, and Bandcamp to provide musician profile apps. These apps have grown popular as bands flee the deteriorating Myspace Music for Facebook. While these services let artists share their songs for in-line news feed streaming, they are more complex and take more time to set up than Music Player. Facebook could introduce a lightweight tab app replacement for Music Player’s 5,000 monthly active users, or simply leave that problem for third-parties to solve.
Favoring Streaming Music Partners Over MP3sAt f8, Facebook announced partnerships with music services Spotify, Rdio, and more to allow listening activity of Facebook users to be published to their profiles and the news feeds of their friends. When users click links in these stories, the corresponding music app launches to play a song.
As part of these partnerships, Facebook may be trying to move users away from MP3 files that are commonly used to illegally share music. It could be seen as violating copyright by by hosting MP3 files uploaded to Music Player. By discontinuing Music Player, Facebook can push to find the song they wanted to share on Spotify or another service and share it that way. This could please partners, but also aid Facebook if it ever starts allowing users to buy subscriptions to paid streaming services with Facebook Credits from which it takes a 30% tax.
In the end, Facebook may have seen little need to continue supporting the Music Player app. There are better Page tab apps available from third-parties, it competed with Facebook’s music partners, and it presented copyright infringement risks. We’re awaiting a response from Facebook regarding whether it is developing its own music Page tab app and whether MP3 URLs will still be allowed to be shared to the news feed and streamed in-line. We’ll update this article with the company’s response. [Image Credit: Chris J Politzki] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Street King, Realtors, Gray Line, MassMutual and Farmers Insurance Posted: 31 Oct 2011 12:00 PM PDT Charity and contests characterized most of the campaigns on our list this week. An interesting combination of celebrity and charity pushed Street King's growth this week, then realtors in California are trying to promote the importance of their services in that depressed real estate market. A New York tourism company took advantage of Halloween to promote its tour services, MassMutual promotes life insurance with a video campaign and Farmers Insurance enters into its fourth partnership with Zynga. Below is an excerpt of this week’s full Featured Facebook Campaigns entry in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other Facebook marketing campaigns by top-performing brands and other organization on Facebook.
Street King's Viral Charity CampaignGoal: Page Growth, Charity, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty, Engagement, Product Purchase Method: Street King is an energy drink from rapper 50 Cent that is also involved in a campaign for the United Nations World Food Programme to provide meals to hungry children. With the purchase of every drink, the company donates a meal. Core Mechanic: The campaign tightly integrates a celebrity, product, and charity. Engagement has been very high, with news feed posts — that include vulgarity and appear to be written by 50 Cent himself — garners thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of Likes and hundreds of comments. The original goal was to award the United Nations World Food Programme one meal for every Page Like on Facebook to reach million; when the Page came short, 50 Cent donated the difference to feed a million children anyway. The goal of Street King is to feed a billion children in five years, and the company just launched in September. A star-studded commercial with a parody of "The Hangover" starring Mike Tyson, 50 Cent and boxer Floyd Mayweather was also released as part of the campaign. Whereas we've seen campaigns use Likes as a motivator for charity or product purchase, combining the two and then throwing in celebrity has managed to produce enviable Page growth and exposure for this new product. Impact: In the past month the Page has grown from tens of thousands to 454,400 Likes, according to PageData. The promotion also has fans talking, primarily because of the fun, celebrity-studded video one might suppose, as the Page recently showed that more than 200,000 people were talking about the product. Gray Line's Spooktacular Mystery ContestGoal: Engagement, Network Exposure Method: Gray Line New York is a double-decker bus and motorcoach tourism company that launched a Halloween-themed contest on its Facebook Page to give away four tickets to its New York Night Tour. Core Mechanic: The company posted the contest to its Facebook Page, but posted a link to its Tumblr account with the rules, then asked entrants to go back to the Facebook Page to post the trivia answers that count as an entry. Impact: The contest was not streamlined and required no Liking of the Page so there appeared to be only a handful of entrants. Entry was pretty complicated: users have to read the rules on a blog, then go back to the post to comment their answers. Ultimately, it would have been more successful if it were Like-gated and if made easier by being held entirely on the Facebook platform. The Page is at 1,300 Likes Want to learn how top brands are 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| More Details on Inside Social Apps 2012 – February 8th and 9th in San Francisco Posted: 31 Oct 2011 09:30 AM PDT
Inside Social Apps is coming back to San Francisco in 2012! We are proud to announce our third conference on the future of monetization on social and mobile platforms. On February 8-9, 2012, leaders will share their insights on the key uncertainties, and new opportunities, facing social and mobile apps and games in 2012. If you're considering attending Inside Social Apps 2012, take advantage of early registration pricing and sign up now. Space will be limited, and last year's conference sold out well before the event. A limited set of tickets are available at the Early Announcement price of $199. This price will be good through tomorrow, Tuesday November 1st only, so we encourage you to register now. Who's Speaking? We're honored to present the following 19 confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps 2012:
Keep an eye on InsideSocialApps.com for more information, as we’ll continue to announce additions to our 2012 speaker list in the weeks to come. Registration There is very limited $199 Early Registration pricing for the full 2-day conference pass for Inside Social Apps 2012, available until November 2 only. Previous Inside Social Apps conferences have sold out in advance of event day, so we strongly encourage you to register now.
About Inside Social Apps Inside Social Apps 2012 will explore new opportunities, as well as emerging risks, in the development, distribution and monetization of social and mobile applications. Inside Social Apps 2012 will span February 8 – 9, and will bring together the world’s leading social and mobile developers and investors for critical discussion and analysis. Social applications first made their splash in the US in 2007, and have now evolved into a global media ecosystem. Today’s social and mobile apps comprise a profitable multi-billion dollar industry, characterized by vibrant investment activity and newly emerging opportunities on mobile platforms. Inside Social Apps is Inside Network’s content-focused conference series that investigates the latest trends and challenges for social and mobile applications and the companies that bring them to market. Past Inside Social Apps events have seen sold out well before conference day, so we strongly encourage you to register early. A full agenda will be announced shortly. Keep an eye on Inside Social Apps for more information. Registration We have made available a limited number of tickets at special $199 Early Registration pricing, and we strongly encourage you to register now. From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on February 8 and 9 in San Francisco!
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 31 Oct 2011 08:29 AM PDT
A birthday application topped our list of the fastest growing by monthly active users this week, followed by a half dozen Page tab apps, a pair of band apps, Scribd, Cupid, Skype and a profile banner app were also on the list. The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 400,000 and 1.1 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
MyCalendar – Birthdays topped our list this week, growing 1.1 million MAU, and surpassing 20 million total. The app asks users to first invite their friends to use it before being able to add their birthdays to a customized calendar.
Then there were a half dozen Page tab apps on our list. Pagemodo Custom Welcome Tab grew 1 million MAU, Static Iframe Tab by 800,000 MAU, Wildfire’s iFrames for Pages by 700,000 MAU, Welcome tab app for Pages by 700,000 MAU, Welcome by 400,000 MAU and Iwipa Website: HTML + iframe + FBML by 400,000 MAU. Band apps on the list included BandPage by RootMusic, which grew by 600,000 MAU and Band Profile: Profile Pages for Musicians by 500,000 MAU. Finally there was Scribd with 1 million MAU, photo profile banner app Banner de perfil en espagnol by 600,000 MAU, dating app Cupid by 400,000 MAU and Skype by 400,000 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. |
If Facebook does prevent MP3 files from being shared and played through the news feed, users could comply with Facebook’s request to share videos instead, which don’t have the same copyright issues as they’re generally hosted on services such as YouTube that scan for unlicensed usage of songs. Still, it could disrupt behavior of independent musicians who hosted MP3s themselves and wanted to share them with their Facebook friends without setting up a Page or video service account.
| You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |