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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

New Facebook platform industry hires: HYFN, Nanigans, PageLever, Wildfire

Posted: 12 Jun 2012 05:37 PM PDT

Facebook ad company Nanigans hired a number of engineers and a VP of Sales – Americas. Social media management companies HYFN and Wildfire made a few different hires, and Facebook insights platform PageLever picked up an account executive.

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.

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, per LinkedIn and the companies themselves:

HYFN

  • John Raih, Director of Business Development – former sales executive at Vocus
  • Bree Blackman, Graphic/UX Designer – former student at The Art Institute
  • Spencer Carney, Developer – former developer at Fuhu

Nanigans

  • Andres Corrada-Emmanuel, Lead Optimization Engineer – former principal optimization software engineer at DataXu
  • Atul Joshi, Optimization Engineer – former statistical analyst at Avenue100 Media
  • Brandon Nohara, Ad Operations Manager - former user acquisition manager at CrowdStar
  • Amit Adur, Senior Software Engineer – former senior software engineer at GSN Digital
  • Loren Barcus, Senior Analyst - former business analyst at Communispace
  • Anne Tucci, Client Services Manager - former senior consultant at The Lucas Group
  • Jennie White, Marketing Associate – former marketing coordinator at Where/PayPal
  • Ken Mohring, VP Sales – Americas - former VP platform sales at Datalogic

PageLever

  • Nick Ross, Account Executive – former customer resource manager at Sysco.

Wildfire

  • Brianna McLeod, Social Media Strategist -formerly in business development at Social Rebel

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

Facebook uses random sampling to determine app ratings and avoid manipulation

Posted: 12 Jun 2012 04:14 PM PDT

With its new App Center, Facebook ranks applications by star ratings, but unlike Apple and Android's app platforms, the social network relies on random sampling to gather these ratings.

Currently there is no way for users to rate an app on demand. Instead, users are randomly prompted to provide star ratings through modules around the site. This unique approach discourages user or developer manipulation. Facebook product manager Matt Wyndowe tells us the company is considering options for allowing users to rate apps directly from an App Center page, but Facebook wants to do so in a way that maintains the integrity of its ratings.

Because high ratings can lead to better placement in the App Center, developers want to know how to get more positive ratings for their app. Although there is no particular link users can visit to rate a Facebook application, we'll go over the different ways that users are currently able to rate apps.

Commonly, users who visit Facebook canvas apps are prompted to rate another recently used app from an area below their bookmarks. See example above. We have not seen users given the option to rate the app they currently have open.

Some users have seen ratings modules in the right-hand sidebar on various Facebook pages they visit. Sometimes when a user provides a rating, the module will refresh with another app to rate. Most of the time the module features one or two apps, but we've seen as many as six apps at a time here.

Occasionally, users will be prompted to rate an app after they decide to remove it from their accounts. Several years ago, Facebook provided this option to all users who removed an app, which could skew results negatively. Now, this seems to be done randomly so as to collect more accurate ratings.

Ratings are listed on an app's App Center page and on hover cards in News Feed, but users cannot provide their own ratings through these features. As we mentioned, Facebook could bring the option to rate apps to the App Center soon, but it is likely the company will not allow users to rate an app unless they have added it already. Google Play and the Apple App Store also use this strategy to limit manipulation. Facebook will likely ban developers from incentivizing users to rate their apps positively, though this could be hard to police, as it is on iOS and Android.

We'd like to see Facebook keep its random sampling approach, and allow users to rate apps through modules that only sometimes appear in App Center. This seems to be a way to keep the platform fair for all developers and avoid issues of fraud that happened in the past when Facebook allowed ratings and reviews to be done directly from an app page at any time. Now that developers have more insights about the ratings they receive, including how ratings change over time and vary by demographic, they can try new things and track the results. Developers should also consider ways to get direct feedback from users through surveys or other in-app features so that they can provide a better experience for users and naturally lift their star ratings.

The Facebook Marketing Bible: Updates for June 2012

Posted: 12 Jun 2012 01:30 PM PDT

Events have been a premier feature for Facebook even in its earliest iterations. A great tool for community organizing and brand promotion, Facebook Events can be utilized for both individual Facebook users and companies of all sizes. Optimize your Facebook Events with the June 2012 edition of the Facebook Marketing Bible: The Leading Resource for Marketing and Advertising on Facebook.

In the June 2012 edition, we cover topics for marketers and advertisers, including Pages vs Timeline + Subscribe, optimizing Facebook Events for individuals and pages, and Facebook's new promote button.

About the Facebook Marketing Bible

The Facebook Marketing Bible has enabled thousands of brands, app developers, content publishers and businesses of all sizes to do more with Facebook, from the basics of creating a successful fan page, to the complexities of social plugin integration on an off-Facebook website.

The Facebook Marketing Bible includes hundreds of pages of strategies, comprehensive how-to guides and case studies analyzing today's most successful marketing and advertising campaigns on Facebook. Take a tour of the Facebook Marketing Bible.

Recent Additions to the Facebook Marketing Bible

Ready to take your marketing and advertising campaigns to the next level? Subscribe to the Facebook Marketing Bible today.

ReverbNation helps artists target ads to users who have listened to similar artists

Posted: 12 Jun 2012 12:54 PM PDT

ReverbNation has added a new option to its Facebook ad tool to allow music artists to target users who have listened to similar artists on streaming services like Spotify.

ReverbNation's Promote It platform simplifies Facebook advertising by framing campaigns in a way that relates specifically to artists. For example, instead providing a number of complex targeting options, as Facebook's self-serve tool does, Promote It simply asks artists to "name five artists whose fans might like your music." Now in addition to targeting users who have listed those artists as Likes or interests, Promote It will target users who have recently listened to them on Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, Deezer or Myspace.

This is possible through Facebook's action spec targeting option, which is available in beta to Ads API partners. Advertisers can target users who have taken any action in an Open Graph application. In this case, the action is "listened to" and Promote It defines different artists as objects depending on the campaign. This type of targeting could be a powerful component of Facebook's ad platform in the future, but advertisers have been relatively slow to adopt it, citing low reach and confusion about how it works.

ReverbNation implemented the feature only a week ago, so it does not have results to share. However, another ad provider, Nanigans, recently found that action targeting can result in up to 2.25 times higher clickthrough rates. Nanigans CEO Ric Calvillo tells us his customers have found success by targeting "app use" actions and Pinterest "pin" and "repin" actions, among others.

ReverbNation President and Co-Founder Jed Carlson says the new targeting feature is available for all Promote It campaigns, whether users are promoting a song, a fan page or a live show. Artists do not need to pay extra or take any additional steps for this targeting to be enabled.

Facebook releases WordPress plugins to provide social features without coding

Posted: 12 Jun 2012 10:58 AM PDT

Facebook has developed a WordPress plugin and widgets that make it easier for publishers to add Facebook features to their site and share content to the social network, the company announced in a blog post today.

The Facebook for WordPress plugin lets users cross-post WordPress content to their Timeline and to Facebook pages they manage. Publishers can also mention the names of pages and friends in a post to further distribute that content. This could make the process of sharing new blog posts or articles on Facebook more efficient, while still providing opportunities for customization. Some sites publish through WordPress, but then manually copy-paste their links into Facebook or another social publishing platform. Others automate sharing to Facebook, but this eliminates the option to share a custom message along with the link.

The plugin, which was built by Facebook engineers and open source partners, will work on mobile and support internationalization. If users authorize the plugin to post to their personal Timelines, stories will appear as Open Graph actions, for example, “published an article.” See an example to the right. When a post tags other users or pages, those Facebook accounts are listed and linked to on the article page. A link to the article will also be posted to those users’ and pages’ Timelines.

The company also created WordPress widgets for its popular social plugins, including the Like button, comments and activity feed. These widgets allow site owners to implement Facebook sharing and personalization features without having to write or manage any code.

More details about the plugins and widgets are available on Facebook's developer site here.

onsdag den 13. juni 2012 at 07.34