Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- New Facebook platform industry hires: Blinq, HYFN, Shoutlet, Thismoment, Wildfire
- Report shows key differences in what Facebook users do after they click ads on mobile versus desktop
- Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen leaving company
- Facebook mobile game users play longer, spend more than users not connected with the social network
- BandPage Everywhere looks to help artists make websites more social after tab apps lose traction
- Facebook tests subscribe button for pages to make it easier for users to receive updates without clicking Like
- The Weather Channel integrates Facebook to alert website visitors about severe weather that may affect friends
| New Facebook platform industry hires: Blinq, HYFN, Shoutlet, Thismoment, Wildfire Posted: 24 Jul 2012 05:39 PM PDT 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:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Report shows key differences in what Facebook users do after they click ads on mobile versus desktop Posted: 24 Jul 2012 03:55 PM PDT
Specifically, users coming from mobile ads comment 22 percent more and Like posts 63 percent more than users who come from desktop ads. Users who clicked on desktop ads, however, generate 6 to 8 times as much engagement when it comes to making Wall posts, clicking links, playing videos and viewing photos.The ease of taking these different actions on desktop versus mobile is likely the main reason for the differences. Loading photos, videos and webpages is particularly slow within the Facebook app. Liking and commenting is relatively quick. Wall posts are likely more common on desktop than mobile since making a post on mobile requires an extra click to pull up the publisher. This post-click engagement is now possible to track since Facebook changed its ad reporting in April to include a wider set of actions beyond Likes and app installs. The new conversion spec tracking through the Ads API could change the way advertisers optimize their ads and judge the value of their campaigns, but this is the first public report we’ve seen that explores what users do after they click Facebook ads. AdParlor also looked at the difference in costs and clickthroughs on mobile versus desktop ads, as well as differences among business verticals. The full report is available here.
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| Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen leaving company Posted: 24 Jul 2012 03:06 PM PDT
Sjogreen, who led Facebook’s efforts to create the Open Graph app platform, is another key employee to step down following the company’s initial public offering in May. Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor announced his departure last month, also with entrepreneurial plans. Director of Corporate Communications Barry Schnitt recently left Facebook for Pinterest. It is common for long-time employees to leave a company after it goes public, though for Facebook, it will be especially important to retain leaders who believe in the social network’s mission and vision of the future. Sjogreen came to Facebook in 2010, through the company’s acquisition of travel startup Nextstop, of which he was a co-founder. Sjogreen soon took on many of Taylor’s product management responsibilities after Taylor was promoted to CTO. Before Facebook, Sjogreen led Google Calendar and helped Google build up its presence in Australia and New Zealand. In a Facebook post shared with friends and published on TechCrunch, Sjogreen says of his departure, “I've always been an entrepreneur at heart and I'm excited to be starting something on my own again, but I will miss all of you at Facebook tremendously.” We sat down with Sjogreen earlier this year for a fireside chat about the Facebook platform at our Inside Social Apps conference. He told the audience, “What you've seen from Open Graph so far is a small part of the vision.” |
| Facebook mobile game users play longer, spend more than users not connected with the social network Posted: 24 Jul 2012 02:00 PM PDT
The session, titled “Unlock New Frontiers of Growth with Facebook,” primarily covered the expansion of Facebook-based social games into both established casual game genres and into international territories. At the end of the presentation, however, Brooks shared interesting statistics reported by mobile game developers that feature Facebook-enabled logins and viral sharing tools. According to Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader developer Ludia, mobile users logged in through Facebook generate 70 percent of the game’s revenue for the platform. Roughly 50 percent of its total mobile player base is logged in via Facebook. Bingo Bash developer BitRhymes Inc. reported that its Facebook mobile players engage in 65 percent more sessions, play 30 percent longer and spend up to 80 percent more than non-logged in players. These stats are no doubt meant to convince game developers that Facebook still represents opportunity, particularly on mobile devices. Many developers are disillusioned with the platform given Zynga’s dominance, issues with discoverability prior to the launch of App Center and rising user acquisition costs. Even with all those marks against it, however, Facebook still boasts some of the highest average revenue per user rates among games platforms. App Center could even increase ARPU on Facebook. According to Brooks, War Commander developer Kixeye sees higher ARPU from users coming in from the game’s page on App Center. This post originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games. |
| BandPage Everywhere looks to help artists make websites more social after tab apps lose traction Posted: 24 Jul 2012 01:06 PM PDT Music technology company BandPage, which was previously focused on Facebook tab development, today announced BandPage Everywhere to bring Facebook integration and other key features to all of an artist’s sites across the web. BandPage Everywhere allows musicians to update their bio, music tracks, photo gallery, tour dates and videos from one central place and then have it update on a number of other sites. Additionally, the app integrates Facebook Open Graph so users can RSVP to events and favorite certain songs, and those actions will be shared back to the social network, even if they are taken on off-Facebook. This adds a social layer that many musicians would be unlikely to implement on their own.
Now BandPage hopes to recover by expanding beyond Facebook and providing musicians with an easy way to maintain their presence across different sites. We’d like to see the company introduce more custom Open Graph actions to allow users to share what songs they listen to, videos they watch and other activity back to Facebook. BandPage should also consider making more mobile-optimized experiences. More about the new BandPage Everywhere extensions is available here.
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| Posted: 24 Jul 2012 11:26 AM PDT
Facebook confirmed that it was testing the feature, which was first reported by Marketing Land. This seems to be an extension of the interest lists feature the social network launched in March. After rolling out Timeline for pages, Facebook began giving users the option to add pages to an interest list to subscribe to content without Liking the page. However, the feature is hidden in a drop down menu so it is unlikely that many users knew about it. If Facebook expands its test with the subscribe button, more users might be more likely to connect with pages this way and perhaps organize them into lists. Users can view interest lists as a separate feed or see summaries of content in News Feed. Here is a screenshot of the new feature from Marketing Land reader Craig Smith:
We do not have the button on our own accounts, but here is the way to connect with a page without clicking Like:
We’ve previously questioned how ads will be targeted depending whether a user Likes a page or subscribes to it. We’ve also pointed out the problem that Facebook pages don't get any information about how many users subscribe to their content through this button or interest lists. Facebook introduced subscribe for personal accounts in September 2011 to allow users to allow for asymmetric relationships between users. |
| Posted: 24 Jul 2012 10:41 AM PDT The Weather Channel added Facebook integration to its website today that will let visitors know about any severe weather that might be affecting their friends in other locations. When visitors connect with Facebook, The Weather Channel will indicate which friends live in areas that are currently at risk for hurricanes, tornadoes, snow storms and other serious weather occurrences. Users will be able to easily share weather alerts with these friends. This is a useful feature that could help warn people about weather danger, and at the very least, lead to more friendly messages and personal connections between friends who might not live near each other.
The app uses the “current city” on friends’ profiles to know where they live. The app does not use check-ins, so it won’t be able to tell if a friend is visiting another location. The Weather Channel will prioritize friends that users have listed as family or close friends using Facebook friend lists, and the company says it is working on a way for users to designate their top friends directly within the app. My Friends’ Weather is a good example for other websites to consider when they think about making their business more social. We’re likely to see many more sites build new features that personalize users’ experience by using information from their Facebook profile. Even The Weather Channel could go further to integrate Facebook by allowing Facebook login to pull a user’s own current city and recent check-ins to provide weather updates for those locations. The site could pique users’ interest by showing them which of their friends are experiencing the highest and lowest temperatures on a given day, for example. The Weather Channel could also tap into Open Graph publishing to make it easier for users to share their actions from the site. Currently there are “love” and “ugh” buttons for users to say how they feel about the weather, but rather than being custom verbs that support frictionless sharing, the buttons bring up a separate share dialog. If the site used the new Open Graph format, it could also create interesting aggregations on users’ Timelines. For example, the app could show users how many “ugh” days versus “love” days they’ve had in the past month or year.
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Facebook users are more likely to Like or comment on a page post after clicking on a mobile Sponsored Story than users who click on a desktop ad, according to 
Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen announced today that he is leaving Facebook to start something new, though he 
BandPage was one of the first page app developers to 
Some Facebook users are seeing a subscribe button on business pages that allows them to receive News Feed updates from a page without indicating that they “Like” it.
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