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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook adds new duplicate page finder tool for admins to report unofficial pages

Posted: 16 Jul 2012 03:44 PM PDT

Some Facebook page owners are seeing a new “Report Duplicates” module that allows them to search for pages related to their own and report those that are unofficial. Facebook will review the duplicates and then recategorize them as community pages that link back to the official fan page.

This feature, which appears in the “Edit Page/Update Info” dashboard of some Facebook pages, will help page owners address the common problem of fan-created pages being confused with official pages. The screenshot below is from All Facebook, which first wrote about the change.

When a page is designated as a community page, it will say so beneath the page name and include a link to the main fan page. Community pages are similarly distinguished in search results, though many users might not notice the difference. Unlike Twitter, which offers verified accounts, Facebook doesn’t give official pages any designation. Typically users look at the number of Likes as a gauge.

Page owners who do not have the new duplicate page finder tool in their dashboard can use Facebook’s main search bar to look for related pages. If they find duplicate pages that are not properly designated as community pages, they can report them directly by clicking the gear icon beneath the page’s cover photo and clicking “report page.” This leads to a dialog where users can indicate which official page it is a duplicate of.

We’d like to see Facebook create a crowdsourcing tool to allow users to easily report duplicate or miscategorized pages. Last year the social network added a Places Editor app for anyone in the community to contribute details to place page listings and identify duplicates. A similar app for fan pages would help clean up Facebook’s database, which would improve search and lead more users to a brand or public figure’s official page.

New mobile ‘action links’ allow users to take specific actions in other apps without leaving Facebook

Posted: 16 Jul 2012 12:08 PM PDT

Facebook appears to be testing its “action links” feature on mobile, making it easy for users to engage with third-party apps without leaving Facebook.

For example, when a user sees a friend’s story about checking into a location on Foursquare, they have a prominent option to “save this place.” If the user is logged into Foursquare, they can click the button to add the location to their Foursquare “to-do list” without ever leaving the Facebook mobile app. That action also generates a story on the user’s own Timeline.

Any developer can create custom action links to increase the viral potential of each story about their app that appears in News Feed. These sort of integrations promote discovery and re-engagement for mobile and web apps connected with the social network. If a user has not already added an app, they can be directed to add the app when they click on an action link.

Developers can designate an action link for any action they define in their app. Similar to the Foursquare example, Spotify could add a "add to playlist" action link on stories about a song or artist. Pinterest could allow users to repin items directly from the Facebook feed. 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.

[Update 7/16/12 12:30 p.m. PT - Spotify has already integrated action links to allow users to star songs as a favorite via the Facebook mobile site, Adweek's Tim Peterson found.]

Facebook introduced action links to the desktop News Feed in May. Before then, users could Like or comment on app activity or click to visit an app, but there weren't app-specific calls to action that functioned the way action links now do. Facebook’s documentation on the feature still says this is unavailable on mobile, but we saw the Foursquare action link live on Sunday night. Facebook has not yet offered us details on whether this is available to everyone or in limited beta for now.

Here is how the Foursquare example works:

User sees action link in Facebook News Feed when a friend checks in on Foursquare.

User clicks “save this place” and location is saved in Foursquare without the user having to leave the Facebook app.

Story is pushed to a user’s “recent activity” section of Timeline.

Next time user visits the Foursquare app, the saved location will be included on the user’s to-do list.

 

Facebook hires team behind mobile bookmarking service Spool

Posted: 16 Jul 2012 10:49 AM PDT

Facebook has hired the small team behind Spool, a social bookmarking service that makes web content available for offline viewing on mobile devices, the company confirmed this weekend.

According to All Things D, this was not a traditional acquisition but a so-called “acqui-hire” of about five employees. This means Facebook bought the company for its talent rather than its technology, though what Spool was doing was quite useful. With a browser extension, users could save content to read, watch or listen to later. Spool would find the most relevant parts of a website to save, eliminating ads, headers and other aspects of a page that weren’t necessary for mobile viewing. It also converted Flash video into formats that would play on any device. All of the content users saved could be viewed on a phone or tablet, even without an Internet connection. Recently, the app added an option for users to send content to their friends.

Spool announced the Facebook news on its blog, along with an explanation that the service would shut down and instructions on how to import Spool bookmarks into another service. Facebook shared the following statement with the press:

"The Spool team has deep expertise in mobile software development and a passion for making content easy to consume. We're excited for the team to join and accelerate their vision at Facebook."

Spool, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in September, raised $1 million in January. It is led by Avichal Garg, who previously co-founded PrepMe, a web-based adaptive learning and testing engine that was acquired in 2011. Garg also worked as a product manager at Google between 2005 and 2007.

Most recently, Facebook acquired Face.com for its facial recognition technology. Also last month, the social networking company hired the team from Pieceable Software in a similar acqui-hire deal.

Less than 10 percent of traffic to Facebook pages comes from outside Facebook.com

Posted: 16 Jul 2012 09:32 AM PDT

About 5 to 10 percent of traffic to Facebook pages comes from external sources rather than from within Facebook, according to data from PageLever.

The Facebook analytics company looked at 500 Facebook pages each with more than 100,000 fans and found that the average of 7.56 percent of traffic to pages came from external referrals between March 2011 and February 2012.

This information can help page owners understand that a relatively small percentage of their audience is arriving from other sites besides Facebook. It also gives page owners a benchmark for their own performance and some perspective if they are actively trying to optimize their page's search engine rankings.

If a page is getting a greater amount of traffic from external referrals, PageLever cofounder Jeff Widman recommends that pages tailor their cover photo and pinned posts toward these new visitors. Many of these people could be visitors from a company website or users who found the page via a search engine, so Widman says this is an opportunity for a brand to convince a potential new customer that it is actively engaging with fans and other consumers.

Facebook no longer provides page owners with a breakdown their traffic from within Facebook.com, but admins can view their top external referrers from the insights dashboard, under the tab called "Reach." This referral data can also be exported so that page owners can track which sites are bringing the most users to their Facebook page over time. However, it's unclear whether this is a complete list of traffic sources or just a sample of the top referrers.

Regarding the few large spikes in external traffic in the graph above, Widman says these were anomalies in the data and did not appear to be trends across all pages.

tirsdag den 17. juli 2012 at 07.39