Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Offers beta extends to more local businesses in U.S.
- Facebook sets $28-35 price range for IPO, valuing company at up to $96B
- Facebook career postings: engineering, data center, diversity, more
- Facebook hires: engineering, recruiting, policy, more
- Instagram for feature phones? Facebook adds simple photo filter options to mobile app
- Facebook brings back ‘action links’ to give developers more ways to engage users directly from feed stories
- Zuum updates Facebook strategy tool to provide more insight on page content, competitor performance
- Involver introduces Engagement Optimization API to be used by any Facebook ad provider
- LifeStreet enters the mobile advertising fray with $66 million in new funding
| Facebook Offers beta extends to more local businesses in U.S. Posted: 03 May 2012 03:21 PM PDT Facebook says that it will roll out its new self-serve offers feature to all local business pages in the U.S. today. [Update 5/3/12 5:10 p.m. PT - Facebook tells us that offers are still not available to all business pages, but it has expanded the self-serve beta.] Previously, offers were only available to a small number of premium advertisers and beta partners. The company extended offers to some pages in New Zealand, Singapore, Australia, Japan, and Turkey last month, but most pages in the U.S. did not have access. Facebook will continue to expand the number of pages eligible to create offers, but for now the option only seems to appear for pages categorized as “local businesses.” Offers are a new story type for page owners to post coupons that users can collect from News Feed or ad units. Page owners can create offers directly from the page publisher on their Timelines. Unlike Facebook’s former check-in deal service, offers do not require approval from Facebook before going live. Here is the flow for creating offers from the publisher:
After creating an offer, a post will appear on a page’s Timeline and in some fans’ News Feeds. To expand an offer’s distribution, pages can buy Sponsored Stories targeting existing fans, their friends or anyone on Facebook. 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. Facebook has also made offers available through the API to some beta partners. This means developers can integrate the feature into their ads and page management platforms. We recently spoke to BuyBuddy founder and CEO Peter Goodman, who says his team plans to integrate offers into its ad platform as soon as possible. |
| Facebook sets $28-35 price range for IPO, valuing company at up to $96B Posted: 03 May 2012 02:47 PM PDT Facebook today set the price range for its initial public offering at $28 to $35 per share, which would lead the company to raise between $5 billion and $6.3 billion, at a valuation up to $96 billion, according to an updated S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. This would make Facebook’s the largest IPO of any tech company. Google was valued at $23 billion went it went public in 2004. Facebook estimates net proceeds of about $5.6 billion, assuming an initial public offering price of $31.50 per share, –the midpoint of the price range — and after deducting underwriting discounts, commissions and estimated offering expenses. Facebook says 180 million of the shares in its offering would come from the company itself. The remaining 157,415,352 shares being sold will come from founders, employees and investors. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will exercise stock options with respect to 60,000,000 shares of Class B common stock and will offer 30,200,000 of those shares as Class A common stock in the offering — worth about $1 billion before taxes. According to Fortune, it is unusual that Facebook set such a wide range for its filing. Most prospective issuers usually only use a $3 spread, it says. Still, the price is lower than some might have expected considering Facebook shares went for $44.10 on secondary exchange SharesPost in March. The social network could still adjust its price before the actual offering based on demand it sees during the investor roadshow. Facebook also released its retail roadshow video here. The company will begin its in-person roadshow next week, and without any delays, Facebook should begin trading on the Nasdaq under the symbol FB on May 18.
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| Facebook career postings: engineering, data center, diversity, more Posted: 03 May 2012 11:30 AM PDT
Posts added this week on Facebook's Careers Page:
Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Facebook hires: engineering, recruiting, policy, more Posted: 03 May 2012 11:00 AM PDT
Facebook either hired a lot of people recently or revamped its Careers page by removing redundant postings this week, as there were quite a lot of jobs removed from its employment page. Its LinkedIn feed only showed a few hires of software engineerings, recruiters and various other staff. Some of the positions removed from the Careers page included engineers, policy jobs and account management staff. New hires per LinkedIn and other sources:
Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Instagram for feature phones? Facebook adds simple photo filter options to mobile app Posted: 03 May 2012 10:30 AM PDT Feature phone users can now apply simple filters and borders to their mobile photos using the ”Facebook For Every Phone” app, according to a post by the company. Facebook offers the option to make photos sepia or black and white by clicking the “effects” button on the photo edit screen. This lets users without smartphones post photos similar to the popular Instagram style. Facebook acquired Instagram in April, but no one from the Instagram team was involved with the new Facebook For Every Phone feature. According to a spokesperson, it was made by one engineer during a Hackathon event.
The social network has released several updates for its Facebook For Every Phone app recently, striving to bring smartphone-like capabilities to more than 3,600 different Java-enabled feature phones. Last month, Facebook updated the app to allow users to interact with pages and check into locations. These are key features to increase engagement among feature phone users, particularly in growing markets like India and Africa, where many users never access the desktop version of the site. According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, about 83 million monthly active users accessed Facebook solely through mobile apps or m.facebook.com in March. Facebook has not provided usage numbers for its feature phone app, but the fan page for the app has more than 82 million Likes. Users are given the option to Like the Facebook For Every Phone page when they first log-in using the app, though other users can Like the page even if they don’t use the app. The page has quickly grown to become the most popular page on Facebook since the its launch on Jan. 20. According to our PageData service, the page has more than 16 million more Likes than the second most popular page on the site, which happens to be the general Facebook fan page.
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| Posted: 03 May 2012 10:00 AM PDT Facebook has re-introduced "action links" that allow users to take specific in-app actions directly from stories in the desktop News Feed, Timeline or Ticker. These customizable action links give developers a way for users to engage with their apps more easily, increasing the viral potential of each story. For example, Foursquare has added a "save this place" link to check-in stories, allowing users to instantly add a location to their to-do list when they see a friend's activity on Facebook. When a user clicks an action link, a subsequent story will be shared on his or her Timeline. Before today, users could Like or comment on the activity or click to visit the app, but there weren't app-specific calls to action that functioned this way.
Facebook first offered action links in 2008. Developers could add multiple calls to action for a single app story, which would deep link to the appropriate place within an app to take the action. In 2009, the company made action links the sole way developers could include calls to action within feed stories. This was to maintain structure and prevent developers from putting spammy messages in the body of a story or in images. Later that year, Facebook limited apps to only one action link per story, and ultimately eliminated the entire feature. Now Facebook says action links can be part of any Open Graph story, and developers can designate an action link for any action they define in their app. Similar to the Foursquare example, Rotten Tomatoes and Goodreads could add a "want to see" or "want to read" action link on stories about a friend rating a film or book. Words With Friends might want to include a "play with this friend" or "challenge" link in its stories. This would allow users to easily begin a new game with the friend whose activity they saw in their feed. According to Facebook's documentation, if a user has not already added an app, they can be directed to an auth dialog when they click on an action link. Action links are not currently supported on Facebook's mobile site or apps, and the company did not provide timing for when that might be available. It could be a while, considering Facebook hasn't even added its own native "Share" button to mobile posts yet.
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| Zuum updates Facebook strategy tool to provide more insight on page content, competitor performance Posted: 03 May 2012 09:30 AM PDT
With Zuum's subscription service, companies can monitor between five and 10 pages to follow the competition or see how other industries are using Facebook. Zuum collects and organizes all the pages' publicly available data, such as People Talking About This, the number of posts per day and engagement per post. Zuum then creates leaderboards, word clouds and and other views of what's being shared on a page and how it's performing. The updated dashboard section of the tool is more visual than the text- and data-heavy dashboard Zuum had previously. The dashboard now includes the following features:
 Zuum emails a daily, weekly or monthly PDF of the dashboard to subscribers and anyone they work with. Company co-founder and social content strategist Doug Schumacher says some subscribers have been sending the PDF to their whole team or printing it out for brainstorming sessions. Zuum is commonly used to track competitors but businesses can also monitor pages in order to see what works in different industries and get inspiration. The tool could be useful for marketers working on regular campaigns or preparing for pitches. Zuum offers some historical data going back to January 2010.
As marketers begin to focus more on content and engagement than building large fan bases, features like Zuum provides are increasingly valuable. Unmetric Inc., which offers a similar tool with the objective of letting brands benchmark their success against competitors, raised $3 million in Series A funding from Nexus Venture Partners earlier this month. As it happens, Inside Network has its own PageData service that we use for tracking growth and engagement across pages. With Facebook making more insights and demographic data public, these tools can aggregate information in ways that would be very time-consuming and less meaningful if viewed individually on the social network. |
| Involver introduces Engagement Optimization API to be used by any Facebook ad provider Posted: 03 May 2012 09:00 AM PDT Facebook marketing software company Involver today introduces a new application programming interface to allow marketers to optimize their Facebook ad campaigns based on post-click engagement.
With the Engagement Optimization API, Involver apps can pass optimization data to the customer's ad platform of choice. We've seen a number of ad providers and app management companies partner to create unified products that enable this type of optimization, but it often requires brands and agencies to change their software or service providers. Involver says it can provide the same optimization features while being agnostic to which ad provider a customer wants to use. Facebook ad partners Marin, Unified and SocialCode have already integrated the new API. "We want to change the way this market operates," Involver VP of Marketing Roland Smart says. "We believe things need to become more technology-driven and [social marketing tools] should interoperate with each other." When businesses develop applications using Involver's Social Markup Language, they can get parameterized URLs so each Facebook ad can include unique click tags. Involver assigns a score to every interaction within an app — watching a video, filling out a form or claiming a coupon, for example. Involver's system tallies that score and returns anonymized, aggregated data for each ad so that ad platforms can make decisions accordingly. "We're not telling ad platforms how to optimize," Smart says. Involver simply delivers the data in a way that is Facebook-compliant. Smart says the Engagement Optimization API can also be used beyond ads to provide insights for email marketing campaigns or posts across different social networks. Facebook Preferred Marketing Developers with access to the Ads API can enter into a referral agreement with Involver for access to the Engagement Optimization API. This move could serve Involver well if more ad providers sign on. Instead of investing in acquiring a single ad company as Buddy Media and others have, Involver can work with several at a time. However, it remains to be seen whether the market will continue to consolidate as it has been or if Involver’s API approach can disrupt that. |
| LifeStreet enters the mobile advertising fray with $66 million in new funding Posted: 03 May 2012 08:12 AM PDT After quietly entering the mobile advertising market, Facebook in-app advertising service LifeStreet Media is now looking to become a major player in the industry. The company announced today it has raised $66 million in new funding from Nautic Ventures in order to help it continue its mobile expansion plans. Founded in 2005, the San Carlos-based company is one of the biggest in-app advertising services on Facebook, counting Zynga, Big Fish Games and Classmates among its clients. The company and now reaches over 350 million unique users every month on Facebook, iOS and Android. According to LifeStreet's CEO and co-founder Mitchell Weisman, the mobile portion of those users is growing rapidly. Although already successful on Facebook, LifeStreet faces some stiff competition in the mobile advertising space. There are established players like Google's AdMob, Apple's iAd, ValueClick owned Greystripe and the newly public Millennial Media to contend with. There are also well-funded independents like InMobi, which is backed with $200 million from Japanese conglomerate Softbank, and JumpTap which has raised $94 million in total. The company will also been going head-to-head against more niche service companies like PlayHaven and Chartboost. |
Facebook added some engineering and data center positions to its 
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