gravatar

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook insights lag for some pages

Posted: 22 Feb 2012 06:00 AM PST

Insights for a number of pages haven't updated in days — a bug that Facebook has marked as as high priority.

According to a bug report filed on the Facebook Developers site Sunday, some page owners are only seeing insights data up until Feb. 12. Typically, page insights are two days behind. Facebook responded to the report with, "We are looking into this." The company has not made mention of the problem on its pages, marketing or "known issues" pages, and it has neglected its page about insights since June 2011.

Jeff Widman, co-founder of Facebook analytics platform PageLever, first informed us of the issue after creating WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotWorking.com to raise awareness about the bug affecting many businesses. Our own InsideFacebook.com page insights are stuck at Feb. 18.

Bugs are common on the platform — there are 73 open bugs tagged "insights" right now — but as more companies come to rely on Facebook, the social network will need to work to make its platform more reliable. It's also worth noting that bugs are sometimes an indication that the company is making changes to a product. With a marketing conference in New York City at the end of the month, Facebook could be preparing to offer new insights features.

Page owners can follow the progress of the latest insights bug fix here.

Facebook seeks to improve iOS app discovery

Posted: 21 Feb 2012 03:35 PM PST

Facebook added additional settings to help native iOS applications get traffic from the mobile News Feed, search and other avenues, the company announced today in a blog post.

Developers can optimize distribution by allowing single sign-on and deep linking. Apps that enable Facebook SSO can get distribution from the Facebook iOS app in News Feed, Timeline, requests, bookmarks and search. That's why Pinterest, for example, is discoverable through mobile search, but Yahoo's web-based social reader is not.

In October 2011, Facebook introduced social app discovery for mobile devices. With the platform, iOS users can be taken directly to a native app after tapping on a story from Facebook. Users who have not downloaded the app are directed to the Apple App Store. With deep linking, users can be directed to specific pages within an iOS app rather than a landing page.

Facebook reminds developers that users can click on links from a number of contexts — native apps, web and mobile browsers — so the link iOS apps provide should work for these users, too.

For details on how to integrate Facebook with iOS applications, see the developer tutorial here.

Affiliate program lets page owners earn commission on hotel, ski resort bookings

Posted: 21 Feb 2012 02:07 PM PST

Social commerce app company Columbus Internet partnered with Hotels.com and SkiHorizon to launch a first-of-its-kind Facebook affiliate program in Europe.

Page owners can add the Hotels WithMe app or the Ski WithMe app to their Facebook page and earn commission on bookings made through the apps. The program is meant for pages that provide a reason for people to want to travel: local attractions, concert venues, conventions, city fan pages and others.

Traffic to page tabs pales in comparison to News Feed and Wall views, but with these social booking apps hosted on multiple pages, they could see more conversions. Page owners have incentive to promote the feature since they receive 4 percent commission on hotel bookings and 7.5 percent on ski trips. It's an interesting model that could be applied to a number of industries if it finds success.

About 30 hotels have already added the Hotels WithMe app to their pages, according to Columbus Internet spokesperson Alex McKerrell. Other affiliate partners include travel agencies and tour companies in the UK, Italy, France, Sweden and Germany. McKerrell says the company hopes to have bands and sports teams add the app to their pages now that page managers can present the group's entire tour and let users search for hotels near each venue.

Hotels WithMe has about 1,000 monthly active users and 100 daily active users, according to our AppData tracking service. Launched in September 2010, the app peaked during the holiday travel season with 7,000 monthly active users. Ski WithMe is a newer app with only 300 monthly active users. Page owners in the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands can add the app and join the affiliate program.

New Facebook platform industry hires: Buddy Media, BranchOut, Involver

Posted: 21 Feb 2012 11:00 AM PST

Buddy Media, BranchOut and Involver made several new marketing hires this week. If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we'll get it into our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here's this week's list of hires:

Buddy Media

  • Kate Bodnar, senior designer / marketing & brand team – former production designer for the marketing and brand team.

BranchOut

  • Mike Slavin, university marketing associate – former student.
  • Elizabeth Magnuson, university marketing associate – former media planning intern at Starcom MediaVest Group.
  • Giovanni Javier, university marketing associate – former student.
  • Shigeru Konishi, marketing associate – former consulting club member.
  • Hyder M. Alikhan, marketing associate – former assistant to the head of digital marketing at ITP.

Involver

  • Rodrigo Santana, marketing intern – former supply coordinator at G-Inter Transportes Internacionais.

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Jesus, Whitney Houston, Jeremy Lin, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages

Posted: 21 Feb 2012 10:01 AM PST

Jesus Christ topped our list of the fastest growing Facebook pages by Likes this week, followed by number of musicians and other celebrities. Big brands, from McDonald's to Skittles to Intel, were also popular.

Pages on our list this week grew from between 438,500 to 1.6 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

Name Likes Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth
1.  Jesus Christ 1,845,534 781 +838,665 +1,681,680
2.  Adele 19,560,301 1,019,633 +229,030 +1,533,343
3.  Whitney Houston 2,649,813 767,554 +107,471 +745,591
4.  Angry Birds 16,068,633 790,991 +100,732 +718,438
5.  Titanic 16,540,105 795,527 +100,742 +619,199
6.  Facebook 62,079,450 763,848 +101,872 +618,317
7.  YouTube 53,143,726 0 +99,614 +594,461
8.  Bruno Mars 19,107,616 669,343 +86,177 +520,422
9.  Will Smith 27,252,694 627,798 +72,464 +514,927
10.  Skittles 20,806,625 0 +89,332 +514,570
11.  Jeremy Lin 893,075 354,911 +85,005 +496,944
12.  Harry Potter 41,780,051 626,304 +77,540 +493,143
13.  McDonald’s 16,184,271 632,914 +74,559 +483,644
14.  Mr. Bean 19,430,514 540,746 +73,507 +475,174
15.  Resident Evil 5 655,578 15,711 +177,775 +455,448
16.  Shakira 46,751,623 675,919 +71,045 +454,615
17.  Intel 6,326,028 1,028,397 +46,097 +447,923
18.  Leo Messi 31,930,289 654,402 +84,816 +444,682
19.  Tito El Bambino 487,683 0 +58,204 +439,523
20.  The Simpsons 40,376,809 608,391 +70,404 +438,494

Several artists’ pages grew partly because of recent awards ceremonies for musicians. Adele, for example, was second on the list and won big at the Grammys, where Whitney Houston was honored after her death. Shakira made the list, as did Tito El Bambino, both of whom were either honored or involved with Univision’s Premio Lo Nuestro awards.

The recently popular basketball player Jeremy Lin has had explosive growth on his fan page. He appears to be updating statuses from his phone and getting tens of thousands of likes, comments and shares. As a result of this growth and fan activity, Lin’s ratio of People Talking About This to total Likes is one of the highest we’ve seen — more than 60 percent.

onsdag den 22. februar 2012 at 07.53