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Inside Facebook

Facebook offers suicide prevention information for military, veterans, families

Posted: 09 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT

Facebook today announced it will offer military-specific suicide prevention information for veterans, active duty service members and their families as part of a partnership with Blue Star Families and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

The social network already allows users to report potentially suicidal content from friends. The person who posted the content will immediately receive an email from Facebook encouraging them to call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or click on a link to begin a confidential chat session with a crisis worker. Now, the system will identify military personnel and their families and direct their friends to information from the Veterans Crisis Line when they report content as harmful or suicidal.

As we suggested last week following the news of Facebook's organ donation initiative, there are increasing opportunities for non-profit organizations to work directly with the social network. The company has implemented a number of features over the years to promote safety, public health and activism among its now more than 900 million members.

Blue Star Families conducted its annual Military Lifestyle Survey and found that 10 percent of military family members have considered suicide and 9 percent of service members have. Since the survey also revealed that 86 percent of respondents used Facebook daily, the social network was uniquely positioned to help the organization.

The Facebook engineering team developed a customized solution to identify military personnel and their families. As a result, people who report these users' content as harmful or suicidal will receive specific information about crisis services for the military.

Users can report suicidal content here or through “Report” links directly from Timeline, Ticker or News Feed.

Facebook tries new prompts to encourage users to organize friends into lists

Posted: 08 May 2012 04:47 PM PDT

Facebook now displays sidebar modules that encourage users to add friends to a "close friends" list and prompts users to add to their "acquaintances" list after they mark News Feed items as spam.

These two new features suggest that Facebook wants to emphasize friend lists as a means for improving relevance in News Feed, not necessarily positioning them as a way to manage a user's privacy. The features are also examples of how the social network can encourage users to engage with aspects of the service they might not have used lately or ever tried.

In the past, Facebook included recommendations for who to add to a friend list on the list page itself, not elsewhere on the site. Now the social network is displaying sidebar modules — like the one seen right — to some users who haven’t added any friends to the “close friends” list yet. This list ensures that users see more of these friends’ posts in News Feed and sends them optional notifications about their friends’ activity.

Friends that are added to the "acquaintances" list will appear less frequently in News Feed. As such, now when users mark an item as spam, Facebook suggests, "Use Acquaintances to organize who you see in feed." Clicking the link directs users to the recently developed tool that recommends who to add to the list based on users' interactions on the site.

Last year Facebook rolled out "acquaintances," "close friends" and "Smart Lists" after the launch of Google+, which highlighted its Circles feature as a way to help users organize who they share with online. Facebook, which first made friend lists available in 2007, had found that only about 5 percent of users ever created lists, so for years it seemed to de-emphasize them. Then with Smart Lists, it began automatically creating lists for family, coworkers, classmates and people who live nearby. It also began using algorithms to suggest who to add to close friends, acquaintances or any custom list users create.

But for all the talk about privacy concerns, it is likely that a small percentage of users use lists to limit who they share with, even though Facebook has begun creating them for people. This might have been what prompted Facebook to begin focusing on lists as a way to improve News Feed relevance. If the social network can get users to indicate who they are close to and who's just an acquaintance, it can use that to improve their experience on the site. Users never even have to use the list on their own.

‘Custom user clusters’ feature appears and disappears from Facebook ad tool

Posted: 08 May 2012 01:49 PM PDT

Some Facebook users temporarily saw a link to a new feature called "custom user clusters" within the self-serve ad tool last week.

Facebook representatives won't comment on the feature, and the link is now gone, suggesting there was a bug that accidentally made it visible. Users who clicked the link were taken to a page that returned an message that they did not have permission to see the page's contents. From the URL structure, it seems like the page might be a terms of service page for the so-called "custom clusters." There is no other documentation about the feature anywhere on Facebook’s site.

We wonder whether Facebook is building a feature that will allow advertisers to save particular targeting parameters to use in later campaigns. The custom user clusters link shared an icon with the Creative Library and Power Editor, which are both advanced features for making ad creation more efficient. The Creative Library, for instance, includes all the combinations of images, headlines and body text an advertiser has previously used. It makes sense that Facebook might be looking to provide a catalogue of an advertiser's targeting history as well.

This type of feature would give more power to the self-serve advertiser and potentially give users the impression that they don't need to work with a third-party with Ads API access. In general, though, the social network seems to be working on making its self-serve ad tool more accessible to less experienced advertisers. There's the recent redesign of the tool that simplifies some of the language around creating new ads and introduces a more step-by-step flow. Facebook has also begun testing a "promote" button for page owners to create Sponsored Stories directly from the posts on their page. Advertisers who want to test hundreds or thousands of ad variations and targeting parameters, however, find that third-party providers make this simpler than Facebook does and they can better optimize their campaigns as a result.

Thank you to Dan Carter for the tip.

New Facebook platform industry hires: Unified, TBG Digital, Kontagent, more

Posted: 08 May 2012 12:00 PM PDT

Unified made a big hire bringing on Brian Murphy as VP of Sales this week. Other companies attained new creative, business and other staff.

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:

Unified

  • Brian Murphy, Vice President of Sales – formerly worked at Google, AdMob and DoubleClick.

TBG Digital

  • Kirk Mechen, Digital Creative Producer – former digital producer at MTV Networks.

Kontagent

  • Michael Duvall, Business Development – former inside sales representative at Autonomy.

Buddy Media

  • Avrom Bangiev, Revenue Recognition Analyst – former contracts manager at BTQ Financial.
  • Ann-Marie Flores, Facilities Manager – former small works project manager at Macquarie Bank.

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

Facebook asks some users ‘Which ad do you prefer?’

Posted: 08 May 2012 11:46 AM PDT

Facebook is collecting data on its latest ad units by asking for direct user feedback through the question, “Which of the above ads do you prefer?”

We saw Facebook conducting similar research in February 2011 among users in Israel. This was before the rise of Sponsored Stories and ads that come from page posts, as seen to the right. Now some U.S. users are seeing the survey, which presents three multiple choice options: neither, top ad or bottom ad. Previously, Facebook did not offer the “neither” option.

The social network has implemented a number of new ad units over the past year and a half, and advertisers are increasingly choosing these types over the traditional ads with a headline, body copy and image. There is plenty of quantitative data Facebook can collect by serving billions of ad impressions a day, but this type of research poll helps the company gather how users feel about different ads on the site. If Facebook finds trends — for instance, users prefer photo ads over question ads — it can reconsider whether it should redesign the ad unit or get rid of it all together.

There is also opportunity for Facebook to apply research poll data on an individual user basis so that ads are more personalized, similar to how the social network tailors News Feed to each user. For example, it might become clear that a user prefers ads for consumer products over enterprise software. This could help Facebook show users the ads they are more likely to click and take action on.

Mobile, Intel, ‘Titanic,’ Adele, FC Barcelona, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages

Posted: 08 May 2012 09:07 AM PDT

Facebook for Every Phone topped our list of growing Facebook pages this week, followed by movies, TV shows, music and sports pages. Pages on our list this week grew from between 306,200 to 2.8 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

# Name Total Likes People Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth
1   Facebook for Ever… 83,637,430 3,180,055 +367,086 +2,846,529
2   Titanic 22,892,031 881,644 +91,656 +708,414
3   Adele 27,669,596 705,398 +98,336 +644,644
4   LMFAO 16,697,537 775,245 +67,903 +534,030
5   avast! antivirus 1,446,737 456,587 +33,150 +508,753
6   R. Kelly 1,413,748 11,291 +1,519 +494,669
7   The Simpsons 49,837,267 627,957 +70,376 +477,883
8   Resident Evil 5 655,578 15,711 +177,775 +455,448
9   Jeremy Lin 954,881 552,606 +34,979 +438,508
10   Bruno Mars 22,943,294 483,290 +58,667 +418,369
11   Will Smith 30,644,431 483,394 +56,619 +407,946
12   Shrek 25,376,860 435,245 +55,910 +392,434
13   Pitbull 19,474,502 632,015 +48,650 +366,527
14   Harry Potter 45,517,914 697,066 +54,100 +364,686
15   FC Barcelona 30,490,655 1,112,574 +50,679 +363,069
16   [V] Music – Chann… 592,168 11,932 +805 +357,875
17   Cristiano Ronaldo 43,530,725 1,065,239 +43,141 +341,488
18   Intel 9,664,877 373,855 +43,722 +329,931
19   Real Madrid C.F. 27,754,247 2,129,163 +41,839 +328,538
20   Smiley 1,105,766 513,346 +20,085 +306,159

Facebook for Every Phone, the page for Facebook’s feature phone mobile app, grew significantly this week. This week’s growth could be related to the app’s new release of two filters for mobile photos. Intel‘s page grew, likely because of advertising and by fans sharing photos from the page. There also were a few pages, one for an antivirus software and another for an Australian music website, that appeared to grow as a result of page consolidations, after experiencing one-day jumps.

Movie pages were led by "Titanic." Shrek made the list, as did movie star Will Smith. Music pages included several artists that are touring and posting lots of photos, such as LMFAO, Pitbull and Adele.

Football (soccer) pages, including FC Barcelona, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Real Madrid C.F., have been posting photos and news items resulting in a lot of engagement. The pages also post in multiple languages, enabling more users to engage.

onsdag den 9. maj 2012 at 07.23