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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook roundup: platform updates, trading, IPO, Google, more

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 06:00 PM PDT

New platform policy more mindful of developer schedules – Facebook updated its policy to make any breaking changes to the API on the first Wednesday of every month. Previously, changes were pushed on the first of the month, which sometimes fell on a weekend. Now all changes will be made during the work week.

Facebook works to stop secondary market trading - Bloomberg reported that Facebook is working to curb trading of company shares on secondary market by early April, ahead of the company's initial public offering in early May. This means there will be no new trades and the IPO won't be until at least May 2.

Facebook to investors: Zuckerberg won't be overly involved in IPO – Reuters reported that Facebook representatives at a recent investor meeting told those in attendance not to expect much involvement from CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Specifically, the report said that "expectations should be set pretty low." [Image via Facebook]

Zuckerberg’s lawyers expedite disclosures – The Federal and Trade Commission agreed to eliminate the 30-day waiting period and expedite the approval of a filing for Zuckerberg. The CEO plans to exercise stock options worth about $5 billion in Facebook’s initial public offering, according to the New York Times.

Rumor: Facebook works on its search engine – According to anonymous Business Week sources, Facebook has hired a former Google engineer to work on the company’s search function to make it easier for users to access users, photos, videos and other Facebook information, possibly including elsewhere on the web.

Google launching commenting system – Google is set to launch a commenting system for third-party websites that is likely meant to rival Facebook's plug-in.

Facebook launches cover photo contest – Facebook Marketing Solutions is sponsoring a contest for businesses to get featured in the cover photo of the page. The photos are supposed to capture a business in a "different or new" way. The winning photo will become the cover photo for the page, which has nearly a million Likes.

Romney leads, Gingrich loses fans, plus new insights from Timeline this week on Inside Facebook’s Election Tracker

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 02:07 PM PDT

Apart from a few single-day dips this month, Mitt Romney leads the Republican presidential primary candidates in new Facebook Likes per day, according to our Inside Facebook Election Tracker.

This week Newt Gingrich had several days of negative fan growth, losing as many as 50 Likes in a day. Although Gingrich has scaled back on his campaign, he tells the press that he will stay in the race until Romney gets the 1,144 convention delegates he needs to win the nomination. Despite winning decisively in Louisiana on March 24, Rick Santorum saw his rate of new fans decline this week. Ron Paul has also lost momentum.

With today's mandatory conversion to Timeline for pages, we can see new insights about the demographics of each candidate's fans. Santorum's most popular city is Pittsburg, Pa. Santorum served as U.S. senator for Pennsylvania from 1995 to 2007. The majority of Santorum's fans are between 35 and 54 years old. Gingrich's fans are concentrated in the 45 to 54 age range and his most popular city is Atlanta, Ga. He grew up in Georgia and served in the House of Representatives for the state. Paul's most popular city is Houston, Texas. He serves in the U.S. House on behalf of Texas' 14th district. His fans skew younger than others, with most of them in the 25 to 35 range. Romney, as we noted two weeks ago when he switched to Timeline early, has the most fans in Salt Lake City, Utah, between the ages of 45 and 54.

Why Timeline engagement ‘studies’ should be ignored

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 11:50 AM PDT

In the lead-up to today's mandatory switch to Timeline for pages, a number of companies released so-called studies about how the new design affects fan engagement rate. However, these reports — and many news outlets that covered them — completely misinterpret cause and effect.

Timeline is primarily a design change and is unlikely to be directly responsible for any differences in fan engagement because most interaction occurs on posts within News Feed, not on pages themselves. Page owners should recognize the importance of Timeline as a first impression for visitors, but should not count on the redesign to change the way fans interact with their page.

Nonetheless, platform companies Wildfire, Vitrue and Simply Measured released statistics claiming to represent the impact of Timeline on engagement. Here's what they found:

Wildfire

  • Brands with less than 1 million fans had an average 60 percent increase in Likes per post and 40 percent increase in comments per post
  • Brands with 1 million to 10 million fans had an average 14 percent increase in Likes per post and a 17 percent decrease in comments per post
  • Brands with more than 10 million fans saw decreases across all measures

Vitrue

  • 52 percent of brands experienced a reduction in engagement rate
  • 27 percent of brands had a 20 percent lift in engagement rate
  • Some brands saw as much as 190 percent increase in engagement per fan

Simply Measured

  • Brands had an average 14 percent increase in fan engagement

The results are clearly inconclusive, and that's no surprise considering the approach of collecting data from a limited sample of Timeline launch partners and early adopters. Simply Measured, for instance, looked at only 15 pages, several of which have run Facebook ad campaigns in the last month or were featured by Facebook and blogs as examples of the new design. Wildfire looked at 43 pages — 20 of which were launch partners and the rest that also switched to Timeline on the first day it became available. Vitrue did not provide its methodology by press time.

Not only did some of these pages have an artificial increase in visitors, but it's possible that brands that switched to Timeline were more conscious of what they posted and ended up sharing items that fans responded to more. It's also important to note that Facebook has recently introduced a number of aesthetic and possibly algorithmic changes to News Feed that could be affecting page posts. In mid-February, Facebook expanded the size of stories about friends engaging with page posts. Now these stories include a thumbnail from the page and captions above photos rather than below the images. Other News Feed changes include the addition of interest lists and larger Sponsored Stories.

Regardless of the methods and interpretations of Wildfire, Vitrue and Simply Measured’s studies, each of these companies have produced products that assist page owners in many ways. In this case, however, it is important for page owners to understand that these reports are not necessarily representative of the actual relationship between Timeline and engagement.

There are a few aspects of Timeline that could lead to more fan interaction, but again these are related to News Feed. For instance, when pages change their cover photo, some fans will see a story in their feeds about the activity. There’s also an option to add milestones to past points on Timeline. These posts might be more heavily weighted by EdgeRank and appear to a larger percentage of fans. If pages decide to use Timeline a bit more cleverly — for example, Spotify turned its page into a history of music dating back to the year 1000 — they will need to make posts that remind fans to visit the page. Most people do not return to fan pages after clicking Like unless they are prompted with a link in News Feed or ads. Similarly, pinning posts is likely to only have an effect if there is something leading new users to a page.

[Update 3/30/12 2:40 p.m. PT - Vitrue VP of Marketing Erika Brookes tells us, "It's very early and our data represents a small and specific sample, to provide insights early on. We'll continue to monitor, of course. Timeline is new so it's clearly getting attention and has a novelty effect going on [...] Bottom line, really, is the newsfeed is where consumers spend the majority of their time. So the key focus for marketers should be about creating engaging, interactive and valuable content that appeals to their users and will surface in feeds. That’s what garners engagement.”]

We look forward to analyzing future data from more representative samples over a longer period of time.

 

Price Is Right, Pose, Change.org, Amex, hi5, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Games were popular on our list of emerging Facebook applications this week, led by The Price Is Right Slots. Other types of apps that made our list included mobile fashion app Pose, a few video apps, Change.org, RockMelt social browser, American Express' app and more.

The apps grew from between 110,000 and 750,000 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.   The Price Is Right Slots 800,000 +750,000 + 1,500%
2.   Siz.net 330,000 +320,000 + 3,200%
3.   Facebook Chat by mSonar 970,000 +230,000 + 31%
4.   Download Your Information 520,000 +220,000 + 73%
5.   Pose 210,000 +190,000 + 950%
6.   Flying Kingdoms 410,000 +180,000 + 78%
7.   Social Video 360,000 +180,000 + 100%
8.   ปฏิทินของฉัน 660,000 +180,000 + 38%
9.   Lucky Gem Casino 990,000 +160,000 + 19%
10.   Township 400,000 +160,000 + 67%
11.   Change.org 990,000 +150,000 + 18%
12.   RockMelt 950,000 +150,000 + 19%
13.   Amex: Link, Like, Love 210,000 +130,000 + 163%
14.   HeyTell 350,000 +130,000 + 59%
15.   Rollercoaster Mania 580,000 +130,000 + 35%
16.   Soul Crash 560,000 +130,000 + 30%
17.   Aviator 680,000 +120,000 + 21%
18.   Meilleurs Amis 970,000 +120,000 + 14%
19.   Pet City 820,000 +120,000 + 17%
20.   hi5 430,000 +110,000 + 34%

The Price Is Right Slots, which was released on Feb. 29, grew the most on our list this week. (Read our review on sister site, Inside Social Games.) Turkish video website Siz.net has seen more users connect with Facebook lately, as did Social Video, a canvas app that allows users to see different videos.

Pose, a mobile app for sharing and tagging photos of fashion items, saw its Timeline app grow. Celebrities like Rachel Zoe and Coco Rocha have given the app a boost by sharing their “poses” with subscribers on Facebook.

Change.org's web integration made the list, as did social web browser RockMelt.

American Express’s popular promotion Amex: Link, Like, Love got a new surge in users, possibly from advertising. The promotion gives cardmembers deals based on their likes, interests and social connections on Facebook.

Mobile voice messaging app HeyTell launched Facebook login a few weeks ago and has seen steady growth since then. Closing out the list was hi5, a social network that lets people sign in with their Facebook account and find new friends.

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.

Local Facebook pages outperform corporate pages in terms of reach, engagement percentage, study finds

Posted: 30 Mar 2012 08:30 AM PDT

Facebook pages for local branches of a business generate greater reach and engagement than their corporate counterparts, according to a study by Mainstay Salire in collaboration with Hearsay Social.

On average, a Facebook post from a local division reaches five times the percentage of fans as a post from a corporate page. The study also found local posts see engagement from eight times as many of the fans reached compared to corporate posts. These results suggest that companies should consider maintaining Facebook pages for local stores or branches in addition to a main corporate page.

"Conventional wisdom is that personalized and targeted communications win out," Hearsay Social CEO Clara Shih tells us. "But we were blown away by the numbers."

Shih attributes the difference in reach and engagement on local pages to be the result of content that speaks more directly to fans and the amount of interaction that occurs on mobile devices when customers visit brick and mortar locations.

"Marketing is about serving the right message at the right time, and that's best done at the local level," she says, noting how local pages know the best hours to post and they can be more relevant by referencing the weather or a local sports team.

"It feels like you're hearing from a human being," Shih says.

Hearsay Social is an enterprise platform that allows financial services, insurance, retail and other organizations to manage their online presence — on the local and corporate levels — and maintain regulatory compliance as they engage on social media sites. Shih says some of her company's clients initially want to shut down local pages, worrying about maintaining a unified brand message and the amount of time or personnel required to manage multiple accounts.

"But it's not up to them," she says, noting that many local pages are created by customers who use Facebook's check-in feature. "You have to engage where the customer wants to engage."

Shih tells us a number of clients, including 24 Hour Fitness and Farmers Insurance, have seen positive returns by allowing local employees and agents to manage their own pages. With Hearsay Social, parent companies can provide affiliates with marketing assets like Timeline cover photos, tab apps or potential copy for posts.

The study, conducted by independent research company Mainstay Salire, looked at 14 million interactions on Hearsay Social clients' Facebook pages in the insurance, financial services and retail verticals during December 2011. The full report can be found here.

Infographic credit: Hearsay Social

lørdag den 31. marts 2012 at 07.24