Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook provides reach data directly on Timeline posts
- Facebook hires team behind UX research and design firm Bolt Peters
- Facebook career postings: engineering, communications, data centers, more
- Facebook hires: engineering, communications, mobile, more
- Investing in Facebook: Rick Marini of BranchOut
- Facebook launches standalone camera app for iOS
- Facebook testing global/regional fan pages that share a single Like count
| Facebook provides reach data directly on Timeline posts Posted: 24 May 2012 03:35 PM PDT
Some Facebook page owners can now view certain post metrics directly from their Timeline, including the percentage of fans that saw a given post and the percentage of those who saw the post as a result of paid promotion. This gives page owners an at-a-glance understanding of how many fans they are reaching. Or, more likely, make them realize how many they aren't reaching. As users share more and connect with more Open Graph applications, there are more stories competing for placement in News Feed. Increasingly, page owners will have to support their content efforts on Facebook with paid media. In February, Facebook said that pages reach only 16 percent of their fans each week on average. By showing reach percentages on Timeline rather than requiring page owners to visit the insights dashboard to see them, the social network can subtly encourage page owners to consider spending money on Sponsored Stories or Reach Generator, a premium offering which guarantees that a page reaches at least 75 percent of fans within a month.
Facebook has provided other post metrics in-line with a page's content in the past. In 2010, it began displaying total impressions and feedback percentage for each post. This wasn't always helpful because impressions were not unique and feedback was calculated by adding Likes plus comments and dividing by the total number of impressions. Posts that generated fewer impressions often had higher feedback percentages, which made it difficult for page owners to determine their success. A year later, the social network tried expanding the number of metrics included below each post on a page's Wall. Page owners could see impressions, unique users, clicks, clickthrough rate and engagement percentage. However, the real-time insights were buggy and ultimately scrapped. Toward the end of 2011, Facebook changed its per post metrics from impressions to total people reached and from feedback to People Talking About This. When Timeline for pages rolled out in March, these counts were only visible from the insights tool. Our friends at All Facebook first wrote about this change to Timeline. |
| Facebook hires team behind UX research and design firm Bolt Peters Posted: 24 May 2012 02:02 PM PDT Facebook has hired the team behind the San Francisco-based user experience research and design firm, Bolt Peters.
As Facebook expands its reach throughout the world and designs experiences for multiple devices, the social network needs a strong grasp of how users interact with the platform. It is constantly testing variations in design and functionality, and the Bolt Peters team could provide a lot of value in pushing usability forward. In a blog post announcing the move, Bolt says, “We're stoked about Facebook's commitment to user experience, and the design team is a critical part of this.” Facebook did not provide comment or details beyond what Bolt included in his post. |
| Facebook career postings: engineering, communications, data centers, more Posted: 24 May 2012 02:00 PM 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, communications, mobile, more Posted: 24 May 2012 01:45 PM PDT
Facebook hired several engineers this week according to the company’s LinkedIn feed. Additionally, according to its Careers page, a removed job listing could mean a big hire in India: Corporate Communications Manager. Other positions now removed from its Careers page include positions in mobile, marketing and a few others. [Update 5/24/12 2:08 p.m. PT - Facebook also hired the team behind user experience research and design firm Bolt Peters, according to a blog post on Bolt Peters' blog.] 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. |
| Investing in Facebook: Rick Marini of BranchOut Posted: 24 May 2012 01:10 PM PDT
For Part 4 of our series, we spoke with Rick Marini, founder and CEO of professional networking service BranchOut. The Facebook app lets users organize their professional connections, see which friends have worked at companies their interested in and search for jobs. The company has raised more than $49 million in venture capital since it launched in 2010. Seeing the potential of Facebook Marini realized the potential of Facebook when the social network moved in on the turf of his own company. In 2009, Marini created Superfan.com, a social entertainment site that allowed users to express themselves by becoming a fan of everything they love in life. It soon became clear that Superfan couldn't compete with Facebook's own fan pages product. When Facebook changed "become a fan" to "Like" in 2010, the number of Facebook users joining fan pages quickly accelerated. "I realized the power of the network," Marini says. Superfan began to incorporate sharing features so that users could "fave" things on the site and then post that activity to Facebook. Around the same time, Marini and his team began to think about how Facebook could be applied to a number of different of industries. "We realized there were all these verticals that should be social, that should be done on Facebook," he says. Developing a business idea
After working at job search company Monster for three years, Marini and his team still had ideas about the jobs and networking space. "We realized no one had owned the professional side of Facebook," he says. This seemed to have greater potential than Superfan did. Marini and his team pivoted and became BranchOut in June 2010. They launched the app a month later. Confidence in Facebook Marini believes in Facebook because of its scale, the frequency with which people return to it, and the strength of connections people have there with friends and family. "Facebook has combined [these] three big things that I don't think anyone's ever done," Marini says. "That's incredibly powerful and they still have a lot of runway." Then there's BranchOut's own quick rise. The app, which runs on the Facebook canvas and the mobile web, has more than 10 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Last month when BranchOut raised $20 million in a series C round, the company announced it had more than 25 million total registered users. Much of the app's recent viral growth comes from Facebook's Open Graph publishing and single sign-on for mobile. Future of Facebook Marini sees Facebook's future not just in advertising but as a platform for developers. "They want companies like BranchOut to disrupt multibillion dollar businesses," Marini says. In order to do that, Marini says he'd like Facebook to invest more resources in the platform so there are more engineers focused on developer relations and fixing bugs sooner. "We want Facebook to be responsive and move as quickly as we can," he says. Though, Marini notes that in other areas Facebook already moves extremely fast and continues to innovate. He sees the company making big strides in mobile this year. "I think it's going to go from good to great," he says. "I think they have a lot of focus to really make an enhanced experience there." Marini says the IPO gives Facebook the financial flexibility to attract top talent and do more deals like the Instagram acquisition so that it can stay on top of trends. As far as monetization, he says Facebook seems to be paying the most attention to advertising, though they're looking at ways to monetize the platform better. For example, Facebook has said it might reduce the 30 percent fee it takes from developers using Credits for payments. "For companies like BranchOut, that 30 percent doesn't make sense," Marini says. "Facebook gets this." Overall, Marini believes Facebook will continue to operate with a long vision of the future, not for short-term gain. “They’ve made it clear they’re not going to manage the company quarter by quarter,” he says. “Mark [Zuckerberg] wants to focus on product innovation. Sheryl [Sandberg] will continue to focus on the business side.” – Read Part 1 with Clara Shih of Hearsay Social |
| Facebook launches standalone camera app for iOS Posted: 24 May 2012 10:44 AM PDT
The app, which sounds a lot like Instagram, was developed by Facebook alone since the Instagram acquisition has not yet closed. Camera is now available in the App Store, but there’s no word on a release for Android yet. A recent update to Facebook for Android included a shortcut to the camera within the main app, but it did not have all the features of the new iOS standalone app. [Update 5/24/12 11:57 a.m. PT - Previously this story said that Facebook for Android still included a camera shortcut. We have corrected it since a more recent version of the app removed the shortcut features.] On first impression, the most useful aspect of Camera could be the bulk upload feature. The main Facebook for iPhone app does let users add photo albums or attach multiple photos to a single post, but most users are unaware that this is possible. The process is also pretty slow. The standalone Camera app seems to have sought to improve this. The launch of a mobile photo-sharing application is a bit of a surprise considering Facebook’s recent $1-billion purchase of Instagram. Screenshots of a Facebook photo app leaked last summer, but when the app didn’t launch and the social network bought Instagram, we figured the company had moved on. Facebook says that it will continue to let Instagram operate under its own brand and allow sharing to networks like Twitter. If Camera takes off, Facebook could ultimately merge Instagram with the app. This is third standalone app from Facebook. In addition to the main iOS app, Facebook offers Messenger and Page Manager. We can imagine the company continuing to develop standalone apps to provide additional functionality without bogging down the main app, while also gradually taking over users’ home screens on iOS and Android devices. For example, Facebook could develop an events app that makes it easier for users to organize spontaneous meet-ups and find out what their friends are doing. This could be separate or combined with a location-based app that helps users find their friends and new people around them, similar to Glancee, which Facebook acquired last month. See screenshots of Camera below:
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| Facebook testing global/regional fan pages that share a single Like count Posted: 24 May 2012 10:10 AM PDT
Facebook appears to be testing a way for pages to customize their presence for different regions while maintaining a unified total Like count across all pages. It seems users who visit a page will be automatically directed to the version specific to their region, but they can access any regional or global page through a drop-down menu. Many pages have amassed large global fan bases, but any given post reaches a small subset of those people. Sharing region-specific content with the right audience can have a big impact on reach and engagement. This latest test allows each page to display the same total fan count, which could encourage brands and organizations to expand their regional efforts without worrying about the perception of having pages with a low number of Likes.
Earlier this year a study found that posts from local branches of a business generate reach five times the percentage of fans as a post from a corporate page. The study also found that local posts see engagement from eight times as many of the fans reached compared to corporate posts. NPR conducted an experiment that used Facebook's geotargeting feature to post local stories to a smaller, more relevant subset of its fan base, and found that local stories outperformed global stories six-to-one in terms of engagement rate. We do not yet have details on how regional pages might be created or managed through Facebook, but it seems that these pages can be completely customized with different cover photos, posts, about sections and apps. Although the total Likes will be the same across global and regional pages, each will have its own Talking About This count. We will share more information as it becomes available, but so far this test seems to be limited to Facebook's own marketing pages, based on what we can tell from our PageData tracking service. See some examples below.
Hat tip to AllFacebook.de, which first wrote about the feature. |
Facebook posted a few positions for engineers, developer advocates, client partners, account managers, communications staff and more this week, according to its 
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