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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook establishes Preferred Marketing Developer program with 232 companies providing tools and services

Posted: 18 Apr 2012 05:57 PM PDT

Facebook today officially introduced its Preferred Marketing Developer program with 141 new partner companies.

The PMD program combines the Preferred Developer Consultant and Marketing API programs to create a unified certification process for companies that build marketing tools on top of the Facebook platform. Partners will receive badges based on their qualifications in page management tools, ad management tools, app development and insights products.

This change will help brands, agencies and others navigate the growing ecosystem of companies selling software and services related to Facebook marketing.

Facebook includes 232 companies based in 35 countries in its program. People looking for one of these tools or services can use an improved directory that includes new filters for type of business model and customers they serve. (See right.)

Companies in the PMD program get additional support from Facebook platform representatives, but generally do not get early access to features. Some PMDs are invited to participate in beta tests, but doing so requires developers to complete a number of tasks and provide required feedback. If they don't, they can be suspended from future beta tests for 90 days.

Facebook first announced that it would bring its preferred developers and Ads API partners under a single program in November 2011. Last month we learned details about the four categories Facebook would assign badges for. Before today, there were about 90 preferred developers and 50 Ads API partners providing managed services and software tools to help businesses create and optimize campaigns on the site. When the program launched in 2009, only 14 companies were included.

Developers can learn more about the program and apply here.

New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: Agency Sacks, W3i, SponsorPay and more

Posted: 18 Apr 2012 03:00 PM PDT

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at: Agency Sacks and The Affluence Collaborative, W3i, SponsorPay, Spruce Media, Rebel Entertainment, Kixeye, Machine Zone, King.com, GameHouse, SpeedDate.com, Kobojo, EA, PT Gaming, Circle of Moms, Warner Brothers, Nuukster, Bally Technologies and SoJo Studios.

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Facebook ad reporting change aims to help advertisers optimize campaigns for actions beyond Likes

Posted: 18 Apr 2012 12:00 PM PDT

Advertisers will soon be able to measure a wider range of actions that consumers take after seeing an ad on Facebook, including comments, shares, app use and Credits spent, according to a spokesperson from the social network.

Previously, it had been difficult for marketers to understand what sort of effect their ads had beyond building a fan base since Facebook did not provide information about what users did after they clicked on an ad. This change seems to be part of a continued push to de-emphasize Likes as a campaign goal, and instead encourage marketers to focus on engagement within the platform. Today’s announcement does not affect Facebook’s pricing model. Ads are still sold on a cost-per-click or cost-per-impression basis.

Based on mock-ups provided by Facebook, advertisers will see a new metric in the ad dashboard called "actions" in place of what had been called "connections." For example, with a page post ad — those derived from posts a brand made on its fan page — advertisers will now be able to see a breakdown of how many Likes, comments and shares the post received from users who saw the ad (see example below).

Under the old system advertisers could only get data about the number of people who Liked the page as a result of the ad. They could visit a separate page insights dashboard to see the total Likes, comments and shares for a post, but there was no way to distinguish which actions came organically versus through paid media. This latest change helps close that gap and could be particularly useful for Ads API partners that help advertisers optimize their campaigns.

Facebook also tells us that developers will be able to measure and optimize for actions within their apps, including making purchases or any other Open Graph action. Advertisers will define what actions they want to optimize for through the API, and this could later be added to the self-serve tool, similar to what we saw in a beta version that Facebook has been testing.

Dailymotion, Instagram, Viddy, Rotten Tomatoes, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by DAU

Posted: 18 Apr 2012 10:00 AM PDT

Dailymotion continued to top our fastest growing Facebook applications list with an additional 18 million daily active users. Social readers, games, photo and video sharing apps and more filled out the rest of the list of top growing apps by DAU.

The titles below grew between 1.1 million and 18.1 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.   Dailymotion 24,000,000 +18,100,000 + 307%
2.   Yahoo! Social Bar 40,100,000 +11,000,000 + 38%
3.   Scribd 27,000,000 +5,900,000 + 28%
4.   Instagram 12,600,000 +5,300,000 + 73%
5.   Pandora 16,100,000 +4,400,000 + 38%
6.   Viddy 5,300,000 +4,360,000 + 464%
7.   Bing 28,900,000 +3,500,000 + 14%
8.   Terra 4,100,000 +3,450,000 + 531%
9.   Zynga Slingo 17,300,000 +3,300,000 + 24%
10.   Draw Something by OMGPOP 36,400,000 +3,200,000 + 10%
11.   Rotten Tomatoes 18,800,000 +3,200,000 + 21%
12.   WP Social Reader 16,800,000 +2,800,000 + 20%
13.   Siz.net 3,100,000 +2,550,000 + 464%
14.   Flixster 4,000,000 +2,400,000 + 150%
15.   The Travel List Challenge 2,600,000 +2,370,000 + 1,030%
16.   Angry Birds 22,800,000 +2,000,000 + 10%
17.   İzlesene 8,700,000 +1,700,000 + 24%
18.   The Guardian 5,800,000 +1,600,000 + 38%
19.   Bubble Witch Saga 19,900,000 +1,400,000 + 8%
20.   Candy Crush Saga 1,200,000 +1,180,000 + 5,900%

Video website Dailymotion continued to see tremendous growth on our list of apps this week. There were a pair of Turkish video apps that made the list, too: Siz.net and  İzlesene.

Social news apps that made the list included Yahoo! Social Bar, Terra, WP Social Reader and The Guardian. As we reported earlier this week, Facebook now appears to be highlighting stories to users to promote these types of news apps.

Photo effect app, and new Facebook acquisition, Instagram made the list, as did its video counterpart, Viddy. Movie ratings apps Rotten Tomatoes and  Flixster were popular, as was Internet radio service Pandora.

Games were led by Zynga titles, both Zynga Slingo and Draw Something grew by over 3 million DAU, beating out other games by more than 1 million DAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

Facebook becomes No. 1 most visited site in Brazil, according to Experian Hitwise

Posted: 18 Apr 2012 09:39 AM PDT

For the first time, Facebook is getting more visits in Brazil than Google and all other sites on the Internet, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

Facebook initially surpassed Google Brazil on April 1, and has had the lead four other days since then. On Sunday, the social network accounted for 10.98 percent of visits across the Internet in Brazil. The search engine dipped to 10.55 percent that day. The stats represent major growth on Facebook’s part. In six months, the site has experienced a 5.3 percentage point increase in share of visits in Brazil — a nearly 87 percent relative increase, as shown in the graph below.

Facebook officially passed Orkut as the most popular social networking site in Brazil in January, according to Hitwise. Facebook says it had 37 million monthly active users in Brazil as of Dec. 31, 2011, an increase of 268 percent from the prior year, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Because of Brazil’s size — it is the fifth most populous country in the world– it remains a large source of future growth. Facebook estimates that it has only 20 to 30 percent penetration in the country.

torsdag den 19. april 2012 at 07.18