Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook adds contact form to ad dashboard, aims to respond in 4 hours
- Mediabistro’s Facebook Marketing Boot Camp Happening This Week
- Facebook expands Sponsored Stories in News Feed with image, more social context
- ‘Offers’ on Facebook exclusive to premium advertisers for now, will be free for all pages later this year
- App aims to simplify Facebook ad offerings, lets advertisers visualize ‘premium’ units
- Draw Something, Rotten Tomatoes, Cities I’ve Visited, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU
- This week’s headlines from across Inside Network
| Facebook adds contact form to ad dashboard, aims to respond in 4 hours Posted: 26 Mar 2012 02:46 PM PDT Some advertisers are seeing a prominent new "contact us" button in Facebook's self-serve ad dashboard. According to the site, the global marketing solutions team will strive to respond to all questions within four hours. The button, which appears above campaign information, leads to a short form and includes a note about the team's business hours. This effort comes at a time when many small and mid-sized businesses feel Facebook is too focused on the interests of major brands and is ignoring their own. If Facebook becomes more responsive to these advertisers, even through email, it could improve perception and solve some of issues that prevent businesses from spending more on the platform.
It is unclear how many advertisers have the new contact option and whether ad spend has an effect on who sees it. The account we saw the prompt with has already spent thousands on the site, but nowhere near the hundreds of thousands required to be considered a “premium” advertiser. Another account, which spent less than $100, did not show the contact form. Facebook has expanded its sales and marketing staff considerably in the past year, and it has more than 100 open positions related to account management and client support. With more people on the team, the company will be better suited to handle the load of questions advertisers have and provide additional resources for businesses of all sizes — for example, creating an ad demo tool for non-premium ads. As advertisers come to better understand the platform and see evidence of Facebook serving their interests, they will be more likely to run paid campaigns on the site.
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| Mediabistro’s Facebook Marketing Boot Camp Happening This Week Posted: 26 Mar 2012 12:00 PM PDT Editor’s Note: Our sister company, Mediabistro, hosts innovative online workshops that teach social media strategy. The upcoming Facebook Marketing Boot Camp features Inside Network’s Brendan Irvine-Broque. Read on for details. Launch a Complete Facebook Marketing Campaign With Our HelpThe early bird deadline for Mediabistro’s Facebook Marketing Boot Camp is this Wednesday, March 28. You’ll get hands-on experience launching a complete Facebook marketing campaign in six-weeks. The innovative online conference and workshop, starting April 24, will show you how to maximize engagement on Facebook Pages, create strategies for Facebook Ads, and measure results with Facebook Insights. The program includes keynote speeches from Facebook experts, practical how-to sessions, and strategic assignments to help you get started. Speakers include:
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| Facebook expands Sponsored Stories in News Feed with image, more social context Posted: 26 Mar 2012 11:42 AM PDT
Previously, “Page Like” Sponsored Stories were very subtle in News Feed and many users were likely to skip over them. The new version is larger and shows additional context that might make users more likely to click the ad, such as a description of the business and more friends who Like the page. The social network also changed the wording on these posts from “Featured” to “Promoted” so that it is more explicit that companies are paying for this content to appear in the feed. This is a “Page Like” Sponsored Story from February:
Here is a full size image of the ”Page Like” Sponsored Story we saw today:
Even though Sponsored Stories are now eligible to be displayed on mobile devices, we did not see the Target ad on the mobile site or the iOS app. It is worth noting that the item was the top story in News Feed even though it was an hour old when we accessed the site. As of press time, dozens of stories appear above it, but we can scroll down and find it in the feed. This is different from traditional Facebook ads that change with each page load. The main image included in the story is the page’s profile photo. Advertisers cannot select another image to appear here. Interestingly, Facebook added a “Find More Pages” link to Sponsored Stories. This takes users to the page discovery browser, which presents other pages users might be interested in. It seems adding this link to the Sponsored Story is Facebook’s attempt to make the story more useful and less ad-like. Unpaid “Page Like” stories continue to appear in the feed, though perhaps less frequently than in past years as the number of other stories (check-ins, song listens, etc.) increases. See an example of an organic “Page Like” story below:
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| Posted: 26 Mar 2012 10:35 AM PDT After months of beta testing and an official announcement last month, Facebook still hasn't made its offers product available to pages unless they are major advertisers.
Facebook tells us offers will, in fact, be available to pages of all sizes soon. "We are slowly rolling offers out over the course of the coming weeks, but eventually, any business with a page will be able to run an offer," a company spokesperson says. Judging from past Facebook statements, "coming weeks" could mean several months from now, so businesses should not count on running offer campaigns in the next quarter unless they work directly with a Facebook account manager. Perhaps the social network is taking its time to release offers to avoid the fate of its other deals services. The company launched check-in deals in November 2010, but these never quite took off among merchants. Finding the dashboard to create them was difficult, Facebook had to approve each deal and there were few ways for users to discover deals. A spokesperson told us in February that Facebook would discontinue check-in deals in favor of the new offers functionality. The social network also tried offering prepaid deals à la Groupon, but it scrapped the idea after a few months. The new offers have a lot of potential since they begin as page posts. Page owners will be able to create them with little trouble and they'll get distribution among a page's existing fan base. Claiming offers is simple — one click sends a coupon to a user's email account — and results in prominent News Feed stories that increase awareness of the promotion. Businesses can also buy Sponsored Stories to support the offer. How to create an offerFacebook could tweak the design and functionality of offers when it releases the feature widely, but here is the anticipated flow for creating an offer based on the site’s help center. The page publisher (seen below) will get a new “Offer” icon:  Clicking the icon will bring up a dialog to describe the offer in 100 characters and set an expiry date.  Then, page owners can upload a small photo for the offer and describe the terms and conditions. After that, the offer can be published to the page. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| App aims to simplify Facebook ad offerings, lets advertisers visualize ‘premium’ units Posted: 26 Mar 2012 08:24 AM PDT
The "Facebook Demo Tool" app is intended to help advertisers understand the complexities of the social network's new ad offerings. With Sponsored Stories and page-post ads, advertising on Facebook is becoming increasingly different from traditional search and display. To appeal to big brands and agencies, the company has to make its platform easy to understand. Last month, Facebook announced a number of changes to its premium ad products, which are those that are run through an insertion order instead of from the self-serve dashboard or through the Ads API. Premium ads are required to be in the form of page posts, and they can now appear in News Feed on desktop and mobile. There are 19 iterations of these homepage ads, many with names that are foreign to most advertisers: “Page Post Comment Sponsored Story,” “App Shared Sponsored Story” and “Domain Sponsored Story,” among others. With the demo tool app, advertisers can upload images to visualize their page's Timeline, posts and ads. They can also view a sample demo, which we've shared below. In the app, hovering over certain areas provides more information. The cost of premium homepage and News Feed ads — upward of $500,000 for a single day — make these units an unlikely option for any business besides major brand advertisers or entertainment companies. Resources like the demo tool are necessary to help sell to top tier clients, but it’s important for Facebook to continue to support small- to mid-size businesses that make up the long tail of the company’s ad revenue. These advertisers would benefit from a similar tool to explain Facebook self-serve ads.
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| Posted: 26 Mar 2012 08:17 AM PDT
Mobile game Draw Something continued to top our list of applications growing by monthly active users this week. The game is now owned by Zynga, whose Slingo and Scramble with Friends also made the list. Then there were a few news reader apps, some professional apps, a few travel apps and tab apps. Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 500,000 and 6.6 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
As mentioned, Draw Something by OMGPOP topped our list with a gain of 6.6 million MAU. Zynga Slingo wasn't far behind with 6.3 million MAU. Then there was a pair of news reader apps that were popular, Yahoo! Reader and WP Social Reader. A pair of apps for professional networking made the list, BranchOut and Identified. Both of these have Open Graph integration. Rotten Tomatoes' Timeline app grew by the millions and a pair of travel-related apps grew significantly, too. The Cities I’ve Visited Timeline app and TripAdvisor™ web integration each allow users to interact with friends over travel-related activities. Scribd, Photo Roll, Turkish Open Graph video app İzlesene and two tab apps rounded out the list. 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This week’s headlines from across Inside Network Posted: 25 Mar 2012 12:46 PM PDT A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you from Mar. 19 to Mar. 24
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Facebook has significantly expanded the prominence of Sponsored Stories in News Feed with a new “Page Like” unit that includes the page’s profile image and thumbnails of more friends who are connected to the page.
Facebook now offers a tool for potential premium advertisers to see mock-ups of how their ads will look and where they will appear.
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