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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook roundup: Gowalla, Walmart, GLAAD, Menlo Park and more

Posted: 16 Mar 2012 06:05 PM PDT

Gowalla closes down – Gowalla officially shut down its location-based service this week. The company was acquired by Facebook for its talent in December.

Facebook honored by GLAAD – Facebook is set to receive a special recognition award at the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) media awards for its work in bullying prevention and inclusive options for users who identify as LGBT.

Walmart purchases Social Calendar - Walmart purchased Social Calendar, a Facebook app that sends birthday and holiday reminders via email and SMS, TechCrunch reported.

Facebook may expand beyond Menlo Park – Stalled in negotiations with the city of Menlo Park in California, Facebook may be set to expand its offices to Newark, Calif., according to a report from The San Jose Mercury News.

State laws move to make Facebook part of estates – Facebook and social network access may become part of a deceased person's digital estate if laws in Nebraska and Oregon pass, according to The Washington Post.

Facebook faces trial in India – Facebook and Google are set to be on trial in India for charges that the companies did not censor objectionable content on their sites, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Facebook proposes new site governance – The social network presented a draft of a new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities for users and requested feedback on its Facebook Site Governance page.

Friends, Solitaire Blitz, calendars, Amazon, greetings, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 16 Mar 2012 01:45 PM PDT

A trio of applications highlighting friend interactions, as well as a few games, calendars and greeting apps made up our list of emerging Facebook apps by monthly active users this week.

The apps grew from between 180,000 and 530,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.   Best Friends 910,000 +530,000 + 139%
2.   Solitaire Blitz 500,000 +460,000 + 1,150%
3.   Melhores Amigos 550,000 +320,000 + 139%
4.   내 캘린더 610,000 +300,000 + 97%
5.   مدينة الأهرامات 460,000 +290,000 + 171%
6.   Top Friends 10 อันดับเพื่อนในเฟสบุ๊ค 710,000 +280,000 + 65%
7.   New In Town 720,000 +270,000 + 60%
8.   МойКалендарь 840,000 +240,000 + 40%
9.   Greetings 970,000 +210,000 + 28%
10.   Greetings 970,000 +210,000 + 28%
11.   Greetings 970,000 +210,000 + 28%
12.   Greetings 970,000 +210,000 + 28%
13.   Greetings 980,000 +210,000 + 27%
14.   Meilleurs Amis 660,000 +210,000 + 47%
15.   RockMelt 580,000 +210,000 + 57%
16.   マイカレンダー 490,000 +210,000 + 75%
17.   Amazon Sweepstakes 350,000 +190,000 + 119%
18.   Pool World Champ 410,000 +190,000 + 86%
19.   我的忠實粉絲 380,000 +190,000 + 100%
20.   RaceTown 750,000 +180,000 + 32%

Best Friends led our list of apps this week; the app asks users to invite their friends before being able to see photos, statuses, birthdays and more in one interface. The Portuguese and French versions of this app also made the list, as did a Chinese friend app, 我的忠實粉絲.

Solitaire Blitz led the games on the list, which included a game in Arabic, مدينة الأهرامات.

The RockMelt browser made the list was the only off-site integration this week. Amazon Sweepstakes is a significant app on the list because brand promotions rarely make the charts. The sweepstakes is hosted on a tab on Amazon’s Facebook page, but it is not the default. The page drives traffic to the app through posts that reach users in News Feed.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Facebook reaches 10M in Japan, doubles users in 6 months

Posted: 16 Mar 2012 01:02 PM PDT

Facebook is 10 million monthly active users strong in Japan, the company announced today at a marketing conference in Tokyo.

This figure indicates Facebook has about 10 percent penetration among Japanese Internet users and is quickly gaining on Mixi, Japan's most popular social network. Mixi reported in February that it has 15.2 million monthly active users.

Japan is one of the few countries where Facebook has lower than 20 percent penetration. Russia and South Korea are others, as well as China where Facebook is banned. But Facebook is growing rapidly in Japan. The latest MAU figures are double the 5 million the social network reported in September 2011.

Facebook got serious about Japan in 2010, and developed a number of initiatives to increase usage there. The social network began to let users syndicate their Facebook posts on Mixi. It created a job search app for university students. And it prompted users to complete “missions” to fill out their profiles. Judging from a graph shown at fMC Tokyo, Facebook had about 1 million MAU at the start of 2010 and 2 million in 2011.

Also at the conference, Facebook introduced Timeline for pages and new premium ad products as it did in New York last month. The company has a final fMC planned for London at the end of March.

Image credit: TechCrunch Japan

Santorum sees post-primary gain; Romney switches to Timeline this week on our Inside Facebook Election Tracker

Posted: 16 Mar 2012 11:53 AM PDT

Rick Santorum gained more than 2,300 new Facebook fans following wins in the Alabama and Mississippi primaries on Tuesday, briefly surpassing Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, who typically gain more Likes each day. This is according to the Inside Facebook Election Tracker, which pulls information from our PageData product.

Romney won the Hawaii caucus on Tuesday, but it didn't translate into additional fans as it did for Santorum. Fans on Santorum's page were more active in Liking and commenting on posts after the election, leading to more News Feed impressions than Romney's page. Santorum's page has only about 180,000 Likes compared to Romney's 1.5 million, but Santorum's ratio of People Talking About This to total Likes is 24 percent and Romney's is only 5 percent.

Newt Gingrich has the slowest growing page among Republican presidential candidates, but he has the second highest ratio of People Talking About This to Likes: 13 percent. His page achieves this through shareworthy images like the popular one below, but his team posts less frequently than others.

Romney is the only candidate to have converted his page to the new Timeline format. With the switch, we can now get further details about his fans. Romney has the most fans from Salt Lake City, Utah, likely related to his Mormon beliefs. And 45 to 54 is the most popular age group for the page.

The other candidates have until March 30 to convert their pages voluntarily. After that date, all pages will automatically show up with the new design and features.

Conversocial adds Facebook pages’ direct messages to customer service tool

Posted: 16 Mar 2012 08:24 AM PDT

Social customer service software company Conversocial now integrates pages' direct messages, less than a day after Facebook released the API enabling the feature.

With Conversocial, companies can view and respond to incoming messages from users directly from the platform where they manage other Facebook and Twitter interactions. Conversocial users can also take advantage of features that Facebook doesn't offer like assigning tickets, adding category tags and marking sentiment.

The system helps companies keep track of which representatives are taking what actions on behalf of the page. On Facebook, there is no way to tell which admin made a post or responded to a direct message, but with Conversocial there is a log to keep track of these activities. The tool also provides analytics about average response time for each company representative so organizations can understand how their customer service agents are performing.

Another useful feature is that Conversocial displays all the previous interactions a user had with a page. This gives representatives context when they go to respond to the user's direct message and could help them provide better service.

Conversocial Co-founder and CEO Joshua March says the new option for users to send private messages to pages will force companies to provide better customer service than most have in the past.

"Many companies right now ignore the fact that they’re getting real customer service issues on the Wall — either just ignoring them or passing them off with replies asking them to email support," March says. "It will be impossible to ignore the thousands of long form, private customer service issues they’re about to start getting."

March tells us he expects companies to get more customer service queries via Facebook once messages are enabled. Conversocial found that 32 percent of all tweets received by their clients were customer service issues, compared with only 7 percent of Facebook comments and posts. Facebook brings in a greater volume of interactions overall, but with the addition of private messaging similar to Twitter's direct messages, the number of customer service requests brands receive on Facebook could reach the same ratio as on Twitter. March says this could cause up to a fivefold increase in the amount of direct customer service issues companies are getting through social media channels.

How it works

When a user sends a page a direct message, the message will appear in the Conversocial dashboard where page representatives can assign the message to another agent or reply themselves. They can also add tags, sentiment or a note to other admins.

When a page rep replies to the customer, that message shows up in the user’s inbox on Facebook. The message is marked as being from the page rather than an admin’s personal account. Conversocial keeps track of which representative responded, however. There is currently no way to do this with Facebook alone.

lørdag den 17. marts 2012 at 07.18