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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook amends S-1 filing to note Yahoo patent suit, Ceglia updates

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 04:56 PM PDT

Facebook today made an update to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission to reflect the recent lawsuit Yahoo filed against the social network and the current status of proceedings with Paul Ceglia who claims partial ownership of Facebook.

Facebook says it intends to "vigorously defend" itself against Yahoo, which is claiming infringement on 10 patents related to advertising, social networking, privacy, customization and messaging. According to the filing, Facebook has not yet asserted any counterclaims or filed an answer to the suit.

The company did not make specific mention of the recent lawsuit from telecommunications company Mitel, which claims infringement of two patents. It did however add an update about the case with Paul Ceglia. Earlier this week, the company provided the court with more than 200 email exchanges between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Ceglia in 2003. According to the latest S-1, Facebook filed a motion to dismiss Ceglia's complaint and a motion for judgment on the pleadings on Monday. The company says, "We continue to believe that Mr. Ceglia is attempting to perpetrate a fraud on the court and we intend to continue to defend the case vigorously."

Facebook did not amend the document to note its most recent purchase of patents from IBM. We received confirmation from Facebook that a sale did occur, but a spokesperson would not provide further information about the number of patents or price Facebook paid. According to unnamed Bloomberg sources, the social network bought 750 patents from IBM to help in cases of intellectual property. The company also added corporate and patent counsel to its job listings last week.

 

Users spent more than 10.5B total minutes per day on Facebook in January, not including mobile use

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 03:52 PM PDT

Facebook users spent more than 10.5 billion total minutes per day on the site from personal computers in January, according to an updated S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

With 845 million monthly active users, that’s an average of 12.4 minutes per user per day. The number of minutes per user per day is important to Facebook’s display advertising business. The more time people spend on Facebook, the more likely advertisers are going to be to allocate budget to the platform. According to Facebook, aggregate minutes per day increased 57 percent year over year since January 2011. Since the social network simultaneously expanded its user base, the actual average minutes per user per day increased 14 percent during that period.

The filing does not include information about time spent on Facebook through mobile devices. The company previously noted that had 432 million mobile monthly active users as of Dec. 31, 2011, and that 58 million of these users accessed the social network exclusively through mobile devices. In today’s S-1 amendment, the company said the number of mobile-only users increased relative to the previous year. Facebook also indicated that users in the U.S., India, Brazil and Mexico were key sources of mobile growth in 2011.

In February, the social network announced it would display Sponsored Stories in the mobile News Feed, however we have still not seen a live example of this. A key point for investors will be whether Facebook can successfully monetize mobile activity as users spend more time on phones and tablets than personal computers.

New Facebook platform industry hires: Kontagent, TBG Digital, BranchOut

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 11:00 AM PDT

Social analytics company Kontagent hired an engineer, while TBG Digital and BranchOut hired marketing staff 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:

Kontagent

  • Dennis Chan, Software Engineer – former software engineer at Shmoop.

TBG Digital

  • Beatriz De Miguel, Marketing Specialist – former marketing manager at Newton Equipment.

BranchOut

  • Hyder M. Alikhan, Marketing Associate – former assistant to the head of digital marketing at ITP.
  • Kendall Wangman, University Marketing Associate – former stylist at Cusp.

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

Facebook reminds page owners of pages they haven’t posted to lately

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 10:32 AM PDT

Facebook is testing a new notification that seems meant to get page owners to re-engage with pages they have neglected.

The notification shows admins how many posts and views their page recently received. Previously, page owners did not see alerts for page views. This notification was also unique in that it appeared among other personal notifications. Typically users only see notifications about page activity when they choose "use Facebook as a page."

The prompt appears to be an effort to remind admins of pages they haven't posted to in a while. The page we got notification about hasn’t made a post since January. If page owners know how many people recently viewed their page, they might be more likely to make a new post, update information or respond to comments. With the mandatory switch to Timeline on Friday, it is especially important for page owners to review their presence on the social network.

According to Facebook, there were more than 37 million pages with 10 or more Likes as of December 2011. Many of these are updated only sporadically, if at all. But to truly encourage page owners to engage with their fans, Facebook will have to do more than let people know how many views they're getting. Many businesses and organizations create Facebook pages, but then don't know how to build an audience or what type of content to share. Facebook has done outreach and provided resources on how to use page tools and ad products, but many page owners would benefit from learning more about how to decide what to post, develop a voice and build relationships online.

‘Hunger Games,’ LMFAO, Miracle-Gro, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 09:18 AM PDT

Popular films, musicians, sports figures, TV shows and more made our list of the top 20 growing Facebook pages by Likes this week.

Pages on our list this week grew from between 331,400 to 1 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.  My Name is Khan 1,070,091 4,189 +170,696 +1,056,132
2.  LMFAO 12,389,762 254,460 +403,284 +1,053,962
3.  Miracle-Gro 808,393 393,862 +130,802 +803,173
4.  Ricardo Kakà 15,400,069 107,898 +9,183 +775,131
5.  Historia de amor 1,793,256 849,586 +2,746 +642,957
6.  The Hunger Games 3,477,961 754,238 +59,643 +505,918
7.  Resident Evil 5 655,578 15,711 +177,775 +455,448
8.  Jeremy Lin 954,881 552,606 +34,979 +438,508
9.  Titanic 18,602,631 555,362 +48,538 +411,845
10.  Leo Messi 33,864,831 368,153 +40,007 +408,625
11.  The Simpsons 42,474,694 472,028 +58,098 +393,666
12.  Adele 24,472,313 533,271 +38,059 +391,139
13.  Futebol Clube do Porto 837,632 26,668 +17,304 +378,028
14.  Intel 8,055,829 439,321 +46,894 +364,147
15.  Will Smith 28,720,007 481,089 +11,451 +355,383
16.  The Twilight Saga 31,645,042 675,063 +25,326 +351,092
17.  K and K Take 454,208 320 +90,575 +350,189
18.  Skrillex 4,795,110 463,531 +13,087 +348,145
19.  Facebook 64,459,973 452,743 +37,591 +332,794
20.  Shrek 23,534,613 481,487 +16,761 +331,436

"My Name is Khan" is an Indian film that topped our our list, although it appeared to be the result of page consolidations. Then, several popular movies grew significantly, including "The Hunger Games," "Titanic" and "The Twilight Saga.” Several musicians that are currently on tour also grew on our list, LMFAO and Skrillex in particular.

Apropos to its name, Miracle-Gro seemed to grow in a one-day spurt, hinting at a consolidation. There was a humor page, Historia de amor, that grew significantly. There were a few popular sports figures, Ricardo Kakà, Jeremy Lin, Leo Messi, and Portuguese football team Futebol Clube do Porto. These pages grew mostly by updating based on activities surrounding the players or teams.

Popular TV shows "The Simpsons" and "K and K Take" closed out the list.

Clickable releases new dashboard tool to visualize Facebook, search campaign performance

Posted: 27 Mar 2012 08:03 AM PDT

Facebook Ads API partner Clickable today introduces a dashboard to its ad platform that allows users to track campaigns across Facebook, Google and Bing.

Clickable's widget-based reporting dashboard is customizable so account managers, clients and C-level executives can have different views of data that is most relevant to them. The tool is meant to reduce the amount of work marketers do in spreadsheets and over email. Reporting can be a tedious part of any campaign, so Clickable has the potential to save marketers some time once they organize and built the widgets they need.

Clickable was one of Facebook's earliest Ads API partners. It offers a software license for its Clickable Pro Tool and provides managed services for campaigns, similar to Adaptly, GraphEffect and AdParlor, for example. Clickable Vice President of Marketing Max Kalehoff says ad management has become commoditized and companies are mostly competing on price at this point. He says when Clickable realized its own strength was in reporting, the company got to work on the dashboard.

The dashboard is clean and easy to understand. Users can drag and drop widgets to monitor goal performance and budget, along with any custom graphs and data tables they  create with the widget builder. We like how one user can create a widget and share it with a client or other people on the team.

Kalehoff tells us Clickable will soon integrate the Facebook Insights API, as well as data from DART, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and Foursquare. Many ad platforms are incorporating Facebook page insights as Sponsored Stories and ads from page posts become more popular among advertisers. Brighter Option (now owned by Buddy Media), GraphEffect and TBG Digital have all done this in the past month.

Although the tool is behind in adding page insights, Clickable differentiates itself in how it puts search and social campaigns in a single dashboard. This gives marketers a more complete view of their efforts and allows them to compare budget and performance across platforms. Kalehoff says the company is working to develop algorithms that make recommendations for marketers based on the information in the dashboard.

In October 2011, Clickable raised a $12 million Series C round of funding led by distribution partner American Express. Amex white-labels Clickable software and offers it to its small business card members.

onsdag den 28. marts 2012 at 07.52