Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Platform update: ‘read’ action, pay dialog, best practices, more
- Facebook prompts page owners to invite email contacts
- Facebook tests read/watch/listen Sponsored Stories — too soon?
- Facebook runs promo to convert game players into paying customers
- Hidden Chronicles, Tetris, birthdays, tabs, WashPo, Pinterest, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU
| Platform update: ‘read’ action, pay dialog, best practices, more Posted: 13 Feb 2012 02:25 PM PST Facebook announced a number of platform changes in blog posts on Friday. Open Graph 'Read' action now available – Facebook enabled its built-in "read" action in the Open Graph Tool. Developers can use this function for news or blog apps, but they will still need to submit the action for review before going live. “Read” joins “watch” as one of the built-in Open Graph actions available from the DevApp.
Pay dialog updates – Facebook introduced a new pay dialog property to allow developers to specify the dialog's purpose. Developers can use the "action" property to indicate whether the dialog is being invoked for users to buy an item, buy Credits or earn Credits. This is not a breaking change and the previous pay dialog property continues to be supported. Open Graph best practices – Facebook published its first product guide to help developers and product managers better understand how to integrate with the platform. The guide explains how to drive discovery and distribution through Open Graph. Auth dialog migration postponed – As Facebook optimizes the performance of its new permissions dialog, it will delay the migration to March 1. Previously, the company said all apps would switch to the new auth dialog on Wednesday. For more details on these items and other breaking changes, see Facebook's Developer Blog. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook prompts page owners to invite email contacts Posted: 13 Feb 2012 01:16 PM PST Some page owners are seeing new prompts to invite email contacts to Like their pages.
Facebook first introduced the ability to invite email contacts to pages in December 2010. Up until a few days ago, the feature was called "Tell your fans." This wording did not convey the feature's function and might have been confusing for page owners who use the word “fan” to describe people who already Like their pages. "Invite Email Contacts" is much more direct and could lead more people to take advantage of the option when they create new pages. Admins can use the feature to invite up to 5,000 email contacts.
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| Facebook tests read/watch/listen Sponsored Stories — too soon? Posted: 13 Feb 2012 10:15 AM PST Facebook is testing new types of Sponsored Stories based on Open Graph actions, a spokesperson from the company confirms. In the test, advertisers can pay to promote stories about a user listening to a particular artist, watching a particular video or reading an article, even if the advertiser does not own the app in which the action was taken.
This type of advertising seems to be part of a very long-term vision for the company. In fact, it is surprising that Facebook is testing it at all this early in the development of Open Graph. In its current state, there are few instances in which advertisers might find this sort of advertising worthwhile — both because of limited scale and unclear return on investment. However, the test shows the company continuing to think several years ahead. As brands' content marketing efforts mature, these Open Graph Sponsored Stories could provide more value to advertisers and become a large source of revenue for Facebook.
Will advertisers see the value?Another reason this test seems premature is that advertisers traditionally want to have more control and understand the outcome of their campaigns in ways that Sponsored Stories do not yet offer. We might abstractly see a benefit to this type of indirect promotion, but to rights holders like music labels, television networks and film studios, pushing consumers to streaming options is still not ideal. It makes little sense for labels to pay per click to promote Spotify listens when they cannot get any data from Facebook about whether users listened to the whole song or then listened to another song by the same artist. Worse, there's nothing to drive people to buy the whole album, concert tickets or other merchandise. Similarly, networks have little incentive to pay Facebook to drive people to watch their shows on Hulu instead of on live TV where they can better monetize viewers. As social reading applications grow in popularity, there could be an opportunity for brands to buy Sponsored Stories that relate to a positive article about them. But for this to become common, brands need to have more flexible budgets and be able to move more quickly. Even still, most advertisers are not likely to put much money toward ads they cannot customize or use to track conversions. Facebook is developing a very interesting advertising model — one that could benefit retail companies, local businesses, consumer goods and other industries — but it could be years before the social network can convince companies of the value of these ads compared to more traditional ones. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook runs promo to convert game players into paying customers Posted: 13 Feb 2012 09:23 AM PST Facebook is running a promotion designed to entice game players to purchase Facebook Credits with a buy $1, get $4 free offer. The promotion is aimed primarily at players that have never made in-game purchases with Credits. By offering 50 Credits for the price of 10, Facebook can lure users into inputting their credit card information and getting accustomed to using the social network's virtual currency. Once users add billing information to their accounts and experience the in-game advantages that come from spending Credits, they are more likely to buy virtual and digital goods within applications. This helps developers monetize and increases revenue for Facebook.
The social network earned $557 million from payments last year — 15 percent of its total revenue in 2011. About 50 percent of Facebook's 845 million monthly active users play games, and between 2 and 6 percent of those players end up paying for virtual currency, according to sister blog Inside Social Games. Facebook takes a 30 percent cut of transactions using Credits. For now only games are required to use Credits, but the company could impose the system on other apps, as it noted in its filing for an initial public offering. By getting credit cards on file now, Facebook can make it easier for users to make more purchases in the future. The company offered some users 80 percent discounts on Credits last year and at the start of 2012. In its blog post to developers, Facebook said it will continue to evolve promotions "to better grow our ecosystem." At our Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco last week, some top game developers said Credits were converting at a lower rate than they had hoped. Funzio Co-founder Anil Dharni said that after introducing Credits, his company saw an increased the conversion rate but a gradual decrease in average revenue per paying user. If Facebook cannot improve at converting more paying users, it risks losing developer talent to competing platforms like Apple's iOS and Google's Android and Google+. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 13 Feb 2012 08:21 AM PST
Games were a big hit on our list of growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this week. There were also birthday calendars, page tabs, Yahoo, Washington Post's Social Reader, Pinterest and BandRx. Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 700,000 and 5.4 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
This week’s list features a set of three birthday calendar apps — in English, Spanish and French — which purport to allow users to create a customized birthday calendar with friends' birthdays, but require users to invite all their friends to use the app. There were also seven customizable page tab apps, some of which grew by more than 1 million 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. |
The feature, which was previously buried under the Resources section of the "Edit Page" dashboard, is now included in the admin module on pages (see image right). This option seems to be available only for pages with a limited number of Likes. We have seen it on pages with fewer than 5,000 Likes but not on pages with more than 20,000.
It is important to note that this is a limited test with a small number of marketers. Facebook has not even involved its Ads API partners. There is no timetable for when these Sponsored Stories might be available to the public. The image to the right is the type of activity an advertiser could pay to promote, but we do not have a live example of the ads being tested.
Sponsored Stories are uniquely structured ads in that an advertiser does not have control over the creative and an advertiser cannot pay to show the unit to whomever they want. In order for a user to see a Sponsored Story, one of the user's friends has to have taken a particular action. For example, if a user does not have a single friend that plays a particular social game, that user will never see a Sponsored Story from that game, even if the user otherwise fits the demographic a developer wants to reach. Facebook believes advertisements that include friend activity are more effective and less likely to be seen as a nuisance. Advertisers who want to reach consumers at scale and ensure their message is conveyed cannot yet depend on Sponsored Stories to do so.
Users who have not bought Credits before will be notified of the promotion through in-app offers and modules around the site, both of which are pictured here. If an app has implemented TrialPay's Offerwall or DealSpot products, the $4 free value will be redeemed as the app's native currency — for example, City Cash in CityVille. If a developer has not implemented in-app currency offers, the user will redeem the offer as Facebook Credits. If a user accesses the offer through a promotional unit elsewhere on the site, the purchase will again be in Credits. The company will pay developers their full revenue share, despite the 80 percent discount for users.
The games on our list this week came from developers ranging from Zynga to Wooga to King.com and Social Point. Usually with these types of games, feed stories appear and users send invites to their friends to play. Facebook has also been testing a 
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