Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook tests ‘trending articles’ feature to encourage users to try social reader apps
- New Facebook platform industry hires: TBG Digital, Spruce Media, Kontagent
- Facebook pages for artists now include ‘listen’ button
- Converse, ‘Titanic,’ LMFAO, ‘The Simpsons,’ Target, Samsung, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages
- How Facebook could monetize Instagram
| Facebook tests ‘trending articles’ feature to encourage users to try social reader apps Posted: 17 Apr 2012 03:14 PM PDT Facebook appears to be testing new feature to highlight social reader articles within users’ News Feeds. Some users now see a “trending articles” section of their feeds that includes headlines, thumbnail images and the first 130 characters of a story. This aggregation is larger and more disruptive than others Facebook has tested to drive users to Open Graph news applications. A thick grey bar separates the stories from others in users’ feeds, and surprisingly, the unit prominently features article thumbnails rather than photos of a user’s friends. Although links include the name of a friend who read the story, it’s unclear what actually makes an article qualify as “trending.” All in all, it feels out of place in the feed and might work better as part of a separate dashboard, similar to what the social network provides for music. The version of “trending articles” we saw did not include icons to suggest that clicking on an article might lead that activity to be shared on a user’s own Timeline. Facebook was testing that feature last week to make users aware of their privacy settings before they read an article through a social reader application. It would be useful in this new aggregation so that users don’t accidentally share activity they didn’t mean for their friends to see.
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| New Facebook platform industry hires: TBG Digital, Spruce Media, Kontagent Posted: 17 Apr 2012 01:00 PM PDT TBG Digital hired a marketing specialist, Spruce Media hired a media manager and Kontangent hired an engineering intern 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:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook pages for artists now include ‘listen’ button Posted: 17 Apr 2012 12:56 PM PDT
The button, which sits between options to Like and message the page below an artist’s cover photo, plays music using whichever Facebook-connected streaming service a person uses most frequently. Users can play and pause a song with the button, but they have to visit the streaming service to skip to the next song or fast forward through a track. The feature will help users sample music when they visit an artist page for the first time and could help make Facebook a go-to option for people looking for new music, similar to how many people used MySpace in its heyday. Streaming services will benefit from the traffic and artists will appreciate Facebook linking to legally licensed versions of their work. Page tab application companies like ReverbNation and BandPage could suffer, since one of the key features they offer is music players for artists’ Facebook pages. Some artists, who don’t offer their music through subscription streaming services or who haven’t been able to connect their streaming catalog to their Facebook page, will not have a listen button so they might still turn to third-party developers.
Currently, most users visit the site to see what friends are saying or to share something about themselves. They often discover news, photos, videos and music in the process, but they don’t tend to think of going to Facebook for learning about a particular topic. As users discover features like the listen button, they might be more likely to utilize the social network as a media hub or even a search engine. Facebook did not provide information about how artists who do not have the listen button on their site could have one implemented. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 17 Apr 2012 10:30 AM PDT
Converse shoe company topped our list of the fastest-growing Facebook pages this week. There were several movies, musicians, brands such a Target and Walmart, a few games, and a few sports–related pages comprised the rest of the list. Pages on our list this week grew from between 285,200 to 3.3 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.
Converse grew tremendously over the course of a few days, possibly as the result of a page post ad. The page shared a photo of a 1917 model of one of its shoes. The photo received 29,000 Likes and about 1,500 shares. Converse typically gets a few hundred or thousand Likes on its posts.
Nobel Prize winning author Gabriel García Marquez saw a new surge in Likes and engagement with photos that include quotes in English and Spanish. Movie pages on the list seemed to be the result of page consolidations, although the recent re-release of "Titanic" in 3-D has kept the page on our list for several weeks now. Popular artists LMFAO and Adele, as well as United Kingdom boy band One Direction and Turkish singer Halil Sezai also made the list.
As we mentioned, the rest of the list included a few sports pages — basketball player Jeremy Lin and football club FC Barcelona, which recently started writing its posts in multiple languages. "The Simpsons" continues to grow, especially after revealing the true location of the show's fictional hometown. Samsung, Target and Walmart have grown as the result of Sponsored Story campaigns.
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| How Facebook could monetize Instagram Posted: 17 Apr 2012 10:08 AM PDT
Mobile is an area where Facebook does not have a proven business model. In February, the company announced that it would included Sponsored Stories in the mobile feed, but these units are very small and the rollout has been slow. The Instagram app has a lot of potential to attract advertisers since it displays images larger than many of Facebook's desktop ad units do. But just because Instagram has the space for big ads, the social network is not likely to disrupt the user experience with traditional mobile display units. It would be out of character for the company and could hurt Instagram's growth. However, the photo app provides a number of potentially lucrative options that fit in line with the type of social advertising Facebook has favored in the past. We will explore some of those here. Sponsored Brand Photos
On the other hand, filters give Instagram photos a similar style that is not very ad-like. It would not be unreasonable for Facebook to allow companies to promote their photos directly within the Instagram feed, even if users don't have an existing connection to a brand. This would be similar to the premium homepage units on Facebook.com, which don't require social connections to be displayed but Facebook ensures that ads are in "page post" format so the ad feels more like a part of the service than an interruption. On Instagram, as on the social network, Facebook would likely prevent advertisers from using its units as traditional banners with large calls to action. Even with restrictions on the type of images brands can promote, Instagram offers large real estate that could be very attractive to advertisers. Sponsored User-Generated PhotosMany people use Instagram to share stylized photos of their favorite products. Unlike on Facebook or Twitter, where people often post complaints about companies, Instagram photos are mostly positive representations of brands. See examples below of what users are sharing for Starbucks and Converse. Facebook could allow advertisers to promote user-generated photos to their friends, for example including a Like or follow button to help companies build an audience.
Reach GeneratorFacebook could serve Sponsored Stories about Instagram within the mobile Facebook feed or on the desktop site. Brands could pay for this distribution as part of Reach Generator, which is a service that allows advertisers to pay Facebook a flat fee to sponsor one page post every day and guarantee a 75 percent reach of the page's fanbase over a month-long period. Users might see posts as ad units on the side of Facebook.com or within their News Feeds. By incorporating the Instagram feed into this service, the social network could likely guarantee even greater reach, particularly among users who are spending more time with the photo sharing app and less with Facebook. For example, MTV might share a photo through Instagram and also post that photo to its Facebook page. To ensure that a majority of MTV's more than 33 million fans see the image, the social network could serve the photo wherever a user is most likely to see it.
Instagram Partner ProgramSimilar to Google's model with YouTube, Facebook could let Instagram users opt in to become partners that support advertising along with their content. In return, these partners generate a portion of the revenue. Whereas YouTube ads appear as an overlay or pre-roll unit, Instagram could utilize image hotspots to drive awareness or sales of items related to what's seen in a photo. Luminate is a company that is already providing ways for publishers to make their photos more interactive and giving advertisers opportunities to sponsor apps within those images. Facebook could partner with the company, or buy it outright, to begin enhancing user-generated Instagram photos. For example, users might tap on a photo of a Starbucks cup and pull up results for Starbucks locations nearby. An image tagged at a particular concert venue might include a hotspot to display an upcoming show calendar. This model is more complicated than what Facebook does with Sponsored Stories, but it could be an interesting alternative. Advertisers are likely to pay a premium for consumers to take these sort of actions that bring people further down the conversion funnel than a Like or comment would. And as YouTube has shown, a partner program can be very lucrative. Some estimate YouTube generated more than $1 billion in revenue last year.
Image credit: Luminate |
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