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Inside Facebook


Bing continues to expand Facebook integration with Facebook friends’ photos search feature

Posted: 30 Aug 2012 03:06 PM PDT

Bing has added a new feature which allows users to search through their friends’ Facebook photos directly within the search engine. Users can access this through the Bing social sidebar or at www.bing.com/friendsphotos.

With a reported 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook daily, the feature looks to enable users to quickly find desired images. With users’ privacy in mind, the feature only searches through friends' photos that they have been made viewable. Once users access the tool, the images appear in a news feed displaying the most recently uploaded photos first. The tool allows for users to engage with the photos through Facebook’s native features without having to leave the Bing website.

Typing in the search bar will attempt to autofill the entry with a friend’s names. Under the search bar, users are also given the option to only display photos posted by friends or photos posted by fan pages.

Facebook has not implemented a photo search in the past so this is the first case of such a feature. The layout of this tool is similar to that of social network Pinterest. The new feature will roll out gradually, but users can request access here.

Bing began its Facebook integration by indexing page updates and publicly visible links posted by users in June 2010. Later that year Microsoft used Facebook instant personalization to influence its people search capabilities and to display Likes. Bing expanded its Facebook integration last year and began personalizing the rank of results based on the Likes of a user's friends. Just this last May, they introduced the social sidebar providing a way for users to connect on search topics.

Facebook careers: FBX, financial planning, internal communications, engineering, more

Posted: 30 Aug 2012 02:30 PM PDT

Facebook added 11 new positions to its careers page this week, including a second opening focused on the Facebook Exchange program (FBX).

The company is also looking for more vertical-specific account managers, software and hardware engineers, as well as a financial planning and analysis manager focused on the Facebook Platform.

New listings added to Facebook’s careers page:

  • Platform FP&A Manager (Menlo Park)
  • Administrative Assistant L&D – Contract (Menlo Park)
  • Software Engineer, Security (Menlo Park)
  • Manager, Hardware Engineering (Menlo Park)
  • Facebook Exchange (FBX) Partner Manager, Preferred Marketing Developer Program (Menlo Park)
  • Internal Communications Manager (Menlo Park)
  • Associate, User Operations (Austin)
  • Account Manager, Australia (Singapore) (Singapore – Sydney)
  • Account Manager, Auto (Los Angeles)
  • Account Manager, CPG (New York)
  • Client Partner, SouthEast Asia (Singapore)

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

Facebook hires: data center technicians, recruiters, marketing managers, designer and more

Posted: 30 Aug 2012 02:00 PM PDT

Facebook removed 14 job listings from its careers page this week, likely after making hires in the areas of infrastructure, recruiting, sales and marketing, design and account management.

New hires according to LinkedIn:

  • David Zhang, Software Engineer – former software development engineering intern at Amazon
  • Ricky Cacho, Ads Bug Contractor – previously worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

  • Head of Business Operations, Mid Market and Small & Medium Business (Menlo Park)
  • Administrative Assistant, Design (Menlo Park)
  • People Services Rep – Contract (Menlo Park)
  • Recruiting Coordinator – Contract (London)
  • Recruiting Operations Analyst (Menlo Park)
  • University Recruiter (Hyderabad)
  • Communication Designer (Menlo Park)
  • Data Center Infrastructure Delivery Supervisor (Luleå)
  • Data Center Network Technician (Prineville)
  • Data Center Technician (Forest City)
  • Account Manager, Preferred Marketing Developer Program (Menlo Park)
  • SMB Marketing Manager, German (Dublin – Hamburg)
  • Global Customer Marketing Pod Lead (New York)
  • Manager, Global Marketing Solutions, Gaming (Menlo Park)

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

Facebook may soon allow ad targeting by email, user ID and phone number

Posted: 30 Aug 2012 09:44 AM PDT

Facebook appears to be preparing an option for advertisers to target users by email address, user ID or phone number, based on an option that was temporarily visible in the Power Editor tool.

Sources familiar with Facebook’s ad plans previously told us that the company was working with some premium advertisers to target audiences by email address, though we had not heard about the UID and phone number options. These are powerful new opportunities for businesses to reach their existing customers and leads, who may be increasingly difficult to reach through traditional email and telemarketing campaigns. If this test rolls out to all Power Editor users and the Ads API, companies will be able to remarket to people through News Feed and other Facebook ad units.

Some Power Editor users temporarily had access to a new “Custom Audiences” tab today. The tab originally appeared next to the “Page Posts” tab, but soon disappeared. Advertisers can select which type of information they are targeting and then upload a CSV or TXT file with email addresses, user IDs or phone numbers. According to the screenshot above, personally identifying information will be hashed before being uploaded to Facebook, and there are additional terms for using this functionality, though we haven’t been able to read them.

We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information.

Rockstar Games, Farmville Neighbours, EA Sports Madden and more among this week’s Most Talked About game/toy pages

Posted: 30 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

Rockstar Games is this week's top gaining page in the People Talking About This metric among games and toy pages.

The top 10 pages gaining People Talking About This saw increases between 37,765 and 98,203 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

# Name People Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth 
1    Rockstar Games 118,426 +5,973 +98,203
2    Farmville Neighbours 185,731 -60,433 +95,767
3    EA SPORTS Madden NFL 368,973 +144,138 +93,919
4    Guild Wars 2 125,208 +56,430 +76,069
5    Fruit Ninja 233,548 -4,422 +70,147
6    Sims 2 94,009 +25,399 +66,962
7    Game-Hot 125,479 +2,826 +59,129
8    Ubisoft Brasil 104,002 +20,860 +47,740
9    GTA V 55,066 +11,866 +39,823
10    Twister 75,397 -965 +37,765

 

Last week, game developer Rockstar Games had three days where page Likes grew substantially, and the page’s PTAT has followed suit. Gaining over 5,000 new likes in one day, the page’s success is due in part to their game GTA V, the No. 9 top gaining page this week. Rockstar’s most popular page posts have been photo albums containing screenshots of the highly anticipated game. Using photo albums for increased engagement is a great strategy for increasing EdgeRank, and Rockstar has seen significant engagement not only with the photo album post, but each photo as well.

The No. 2 most talked about page this week is Farmville Neighbors, an unofficial fan page for website FarmVille-Masters.com. This a self-run fan page that offers news and updates of new items for FarmVille players. The page retains a large PTAT because of the frequency of posts. In the last 24 hours, the page has published over 30 posts, though most received fewer than 40 likes and only a handful of comments. However, this engagement accumulates and contributes to the page’s growing PTAT.

The page is also open to publishing identical posts at different times of the day. This could be to ensure more people see their posts, but for some users this could be considered spammy and can clutter user’s news feeds causing them to unsubscribe or unlike the page all together. Instead, they could elect to use promoted posts which will give them more prominence in user’s news feeds as well as mobile.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about pages among retail and consumer merchandise, as well as other categories.

Facebook updates platform policies, limits games on third-party sites

Posted: 30 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Facebook announced a platform policy update for games on third-party websites on Wednesday, limiting the access these titles will have to users’ friends and additional permissions.

Developers will no longer be able to cross-link or promote their web games from within the games they have on Facebook canvas. That said, users will still be able to use Facebook Connect to login to a game and have that game publish back to Facebook. While this doesn’t affect Zynga because of pre-existing contractual agreements, it will affect other developers like Kabam and King.com.

We’re told by sources that the change is due to Facebook re-allocating resources toward canvas and mobile, and games using Facebook Connect haven’t seen the same kind of traffic that titles on Facebook canvas and mobile platforms have.

This might also be related to Facebook’s current payments policy. The company requires canvas games to use Facebook Payments (formerly known as Credits), of which it takes a 30 percent fee. Games off-Facebook do not have to use this payment system, even though they have been able to use all the same APIs as canvas games.

Not only that, but if users are spending time on third-party sites, that’s less exposure they’re getting to Facebook advertising. It would be hard for the company to make a case for continuing to support web games that don’t help it monetize. Although Facebook doesn’t yet make money off of iOS or Android games that integrate Open Graph or Single Sign-On, that area is growing more rapidly than desktop web games and likely needs more internal resources.

Here’s the official wording from new Facebook platform policy that affects developers using Facebook Connect for games:

Special provisions for games:
a. Desktop web games off of Facebook.com may only use Facebook Login (Authentication, excluding user connections such as friend list), Social Plugins and publishing (e.g., Feed Dialog, Stream Publish, or Open Graph). When authenticating, these games may not request additional permissions other than age, email, and our Publishing Permissions (effective December 5, 2012).

b. Games on Facebook.com and mobile must not share the same app ID with desktop web games off of Facebook.com. You must not use Canvas apps to promote or link to game sites off of Facebook, and must not use emails obtained from us to promote or link to desktop web games off of Facebook.com (effective December 5, 2012).

We’ve reached out to a few developers for comment but have yet to hear back or have been told they have no official comment.

This article originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games.


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AllFacebook: Facebook Updates Graph API To Make Data More Accessible To Developers

Daily AllFacebook Feed - Thursday, August 30, 2012

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Facebook Updates Graph API To Make Data More Accessible To Developers

Developers were pleased with Thursday's improvements to Facebook's Graph API, which allows them to access data in the social graph quicker and easier. Facebook updated field expansion and made a tweak to pagination. Facebook software engineer Harshdeep Singh announced the changes in the site's developers blog: Field expansion significantly improves performance for API calls and reduces your coding effort for retrieving data from the social graph. You can now make advanced Graph API... read more>>

Use Bing To Search Friends' Facebook Photos

The Bing-Facebook integration continues to deepen. The Microsoft search engine announced Thursday that you can now use the site to search friends' photos. No, this doesn't mean those embarrassing photos from spring break are open for the general public to see on Bing. When you visit the site, you can only search for your friends' photos that have been made viewable. Bing explains that now users don't have to mine through profiles... read more>>

Facebook Respects Users' Rights More Than You Might Think

It seems like on a weekly basis, Facebook rolls out a new feature that promptsusers to accuse the site of playing a 21st-century Big Brother. However, an attorney-turned-tech entrepreneur feels that Facebook is actually one of the better social media sites, in terms of respecting users' rights.Andrew Nicol recently launched Clickwrapped, a comparison of the terms of service and privacy policies on sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and Twitter. Of... read more>>

social media jobs of the day

Mobile Ad Manager
Motive Interactive, Inc.
San Diego, CA

Senior Objective C Engineer
Machine Zone, Inc.
Palo Alto, CA

Contract Social Media and Community Manager
Aruba Networks
Sunnyvale, CA

Project Manager
High 5 Games
New York, NY

Built-in Post Targeting Rolled Out To Facebook Pages With More Than 5,000 Likes

Facebook has been testing more advanced methods of post targeting, allowing select pages to target posts based on gender, age, language or location. Now sister site Inside Facebook reports that all pages with more than 5,000 likes have this ability. If your page has more than 5,000 likes, here's what the new feature looks like: Page administrators can choose to target news feeds of specific types of user, based on categories such as... read more>>

Another Update For Apple Devices: Facebook Page Manager

Facebook is putting some serious work into its Apple iOS devices. After giving Facebook and Messenger applications an upgrade, the site turned its attention to Page Manager. Facebook announced recently an update for those who manage their pages using their Apple devices. The Page Manager update includes the ability to display the page cover photo, swipe to view photos in the album and gives admins the power to change the profile photo,... read more>>

Could Facebook Make Waves With Waze?

Facebook has made quite the flurry of acquisitions lately. Last week, the social network acquired Threadsy. The word on Wednesday is that Facebook could consider purchasingWaze, developer of a well-liked, free, community-based traffic-nav app. Waze has nearly 6,200 users talking about it and the app has garnered 126,000 likes. The rumors of the possible acquisition were first reported by Israeli financial daily newspaperGlobes,then followed byForbesandBGR.Reports claim that there was a recent tête-Ã-têtebetween... read more>>

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December 4-5 | New York City

Our two-day conference provides proven solutions for building brands and engaging prospective customers. Learn how to grow your follower base and deliver real revenue-generating results. Learn more.



California Gives Thumbs-Up To Facebook/Instagram Deal

The long-awaited acquisition of Instagram by Facebook cleared another major hurdle on Wednesday. The California Department of Corporations approved the social network's request to issue stock following the purchase of the popular photo-sharing application. While the deal has yet to officially close, it is almost a done deal. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the deal was approved by the California Department of Corporations, who declared that the deal was fair. Last... read more>>

Facebook's Open Graph Working Out Nicely For Fitness Apps

Facebook users love announcing workout results. Luckily, they've got a variety of ways to do so. The site's developers blog Wednesday highlighted four such applications that have taken advantage of Facebook's Open Graph to find success on the social network. With these apps, users can post a map of their run, gain a personal trainer in their pocket, count calories burned and share successes. Apparel giant Nikedeveloped one of the apps to... read more>>

UPDATED: Romney, Ryan Dominate Facebook-CNN Election Insights

Not surprisingly, a visit to the Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool today reveals that Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan are dominating the real-time tracker following the first day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. People talking about Romney are up 115 percent today, following Ann Romney's highly personal speech in primetime Tuesday night. Last night's keynote was delivered by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who may not have helped... read more>>

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September 13-October 11, 2012 | Online
Learn best practices for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, and Foursquare. Over five weeks, you'll determine the social media sites that matter most to you, based on your personal and professional goals. Register now.



Flip Through Your Facebook Timeline With Yearly Leaf

Companies are figuring out every way to maximize the Facebook experience while users are online, but what about when they're not logged in? A new project called Yearly Leaf is conducting an experiment in social permanence: by connecting with Yearly Leaf, Facebook users can order a moleskin-bound book recapping a year of their life on the social network. Seattle-based Yearly Leaf, started by Mark Michael and Daniel Rust, takes the special moments... read more>>

Facebook Help Center Flooded With Spam

Any confused, challenged or perplexed Facebook user who heads over to the Facebook Help Center Forumis in for nothing but added frustration these days.That's because a gang of slimy spammers has full-on infiltrated the forum center, originally built to capture and address user questions from authentic Facebookers, who'd be hard pressed to slip in an organic question now amid the "Watch Live!!!!" posts and threads of jumbled nonsensical emoticons. It was Sophoswho... read more>>

Attorneys Using Facebook Pages For Marketing Purposes

Facebook pages are helping a wide array of entities get their name out there - not just companies. Attorneys are also establishing a presence on the social network. Attorney and marketing maven Michael J. Evans recently posted on his blog tips for fellow lawyers to become successful on Facebook. As has been repeated by countless Facebook marketing gurus, Evans points out that having a Facebook page is not just about likes. He... read more>>

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The Facebook Marketing Bible
The Leading Resource for Marketing and Advertising on Facebook
The Facebook Marketing Bible is the comprehensive reference for marketers on Facebook, whether youre running your first test, or youre ready to maximize your existing campaigns. Learn more.



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AllFacebook: Facebook's Open Graph Working Out Nicely For Fitness Apps

Daily AllFacebook Feed - Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Here's the latest from AllFacebook as of 4 p.m. ET. Visit AllFacebook throughout the day for breaking news and insider gossip.
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Hear branding and marketing experts from HBO, Rosetta Stone, and TrialPay at AllFacebook Marketing Conference NYC.

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

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Facebook's Open Graph Working Out Nicely For Fitness Apps

Facebook users love announcing workout results. Luckily, they've got a variety of ways to do so. The site's developers blog Wednesday highlighted four such applications that have taken advantage of Facebook's Open Graph to find success on the social network. With these apps, users can post a map of their run, gain a personal trainer in their pocket, count calories burned and share successes. Apparel giant Nikedeveloped one of the apps to... read more>>

Romney, Ryan Dominate Facebook-CNN Election Insights

Not surprisingly, a visit to the Facebook-CNN Election Insights tool today reveals that Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan are dominating the real-time tracker following the first day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa. People talking about Romney are up 115 percent today, following Ann Romney's highly personal speech in primetime Tuesday night. Last night's keynote was delivered by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who may not have helped Romney... read more>>

Flip Through Your Facebook Timeline With Yearly Leaf

Companies are figuring out every way to maximize the Facebook experience while users are online, but what about when they're not logged in? A new project called Yearly Leaf is conducting an experiment in social permanence: by connecting with Yearly Leaf, Facebook users can order a moleskin-bound book recapping a year of their life on the social network. Seattle-based Yearly Leaf, started by Mark Michael and Daniel Rust, takes the special moments... read more>>

social media jobs of the day

Creative Services Manager
Fast Company
New York, NY

Social Media Blogger / Business Writer
SocialMedia.org
Austin, TX

Marketing Manager - Gaming Industry
Playforge Games
San Mateo, CA

Facebook Help Center Flooded With Spam

Any confused, challenged or perplexed Facebook user who heads over to the Facebook Help Center Forumis in for nothing but added frustration these days.That's because a gang of slimy spammers has full-on infiltrated the forum center, originally built to capture and address user questions from authentic Facebookers, who'd be hard pressed to slip in an organic question now amid the "Watch Live!!!!" posts and threads of jumbled nonsensical emoticons. It was Sophoswho... read more>>

Attorneys Using Facebook Pages For Marketing Purposes

Facebook pages are helping a wide array of entities get their name out there - not just companies. Attorneys are also establishing a presence on the social network. Attorney and marketing maven Michael J. Evans recently posted on his blog tips for fellow lawyers to become successful on Facebook. As has been repeated by countless Facebook marketing gurus, Evans points out that having a Facebook page is not just about likes. He... read more>>

Restaurants Compete With Major Chains Through Facebook

Smaller chain restaurants may not be able to compete with major chains in terms of volume, but they do have a vital way of bringing in business and keeping customers happy: Facebook. A story in Nation's Restaurant News illustrates how restaurants are reaching out to customers through social media. The story details how regional chains Lenny's Sub Shop and Toppers Pizza have used Facebook and other forms of social media to grow... read more>>

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Inside Social Apps
December 3 | New York City

Inside Social Apps brings together today's leading developers of social and mobile apps and games for an intensive summit on the future of app and game growth and monetization on social and mobile platforms. Learn more.



Facebook App Allows Customers To Report Power Outages Online

Want to let your utilities company know that the power is out? There's a Facebook app for that. Chicago-based ComEd announced Tuesday that it has released a Facebook application that allows customers to report power outages. By clicking on the "Report an Outage" tab on ComEd's Facebook page, users can let the company know when and where they've lost power. Users can also check on the status of outages through the... read more>>

Facebook Camera Update Includes Album Options, Notifications

Facebook has been pretty busy updating its mobile applications. Now it's time for Camera to get a slight upgrade. The company announced Tuesday that it released Camera 1.1, which includes a few tweaks and fixes. A Facebook spokesperson announced that Camera 1.1 (now available on Facebook or at the App Store) includes the ability to upload photos to specific albums. Users will also receive notifications when someone comments, tags, or likes a... read more>>

Doctors Use Facebook As A Diagnostic Tool

Facebook is being used increasingly in the medical field, and not only for patients seeking advice. A report from the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota shows that one doctor used a patient's Facebook profile(with her consent) to pinpoint what caused a stroke by looking at recent photographs. DoctorsManoj Mittal,Jeff Sloan, andAlejandro Rabinstein of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota wrote a case study showing how the social network could be an efficient tool for... read more>>

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Social Media Marketing Boot Camp
starts October 18 | Online
Join our eight-week online conference and hands-on workshop where you'll launch a social media marketing campaign and measure it's results with the biggest names in social media. Learn more.



Facebook Posts Take Users Behind The Scenes At GOP Convention

With the Republican National Convention officially beginning Tuesday in Tampa, Fla., the phalanx of politicos in town is taking to Facebook to share status updates from a range of activities, including fundraising events, delegation meet and greets, and speech preparations. The photos, links, and comments mean Facebookers are getting a peek behind the curtain at the Super Bowl for politicians, aka the GOP convention. Facebook Manager of Policy Katie Harbath compiled this... read more>>

Facebook Would Need To Pay Menlo Park Before Building West Campus

Facebook is continually planning to expand, but the company's latest addition will cost it a little extra. The social network is planning to build a second building in Menlo Park, Calif. - a 22-acre West Campus that would employ more than 2,000 people. The city of Menlo Park told Facebook that it would require an agreement similar to the one in place when the company originally set roots in the Bay... read more>>

McAfee Social Protection Facebook App Officially Launches As Free Public Beta

McAfee Tuesday officially announced the launch of a free public beta version of McAfee Social Protection, a new Facebook application and browser plugin that displays users' Facebook photos as blurs, which can only be displayed properly once users' friends have installed McAfee Social Protection. Photos cannot be downloaded, shared, or captured as screen shots, and the app includes facial-recognition software that alerts users if photos are uploaded to the social network that... read more>>

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AppData
AppData is an independent data service tracking application traffic and growth on social platforms. AppData provides comprehensive performance data, including MAU and DAU leaderboards for developers and for applications, historical data, and market and audience information. For more information, click here.



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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook


Facebook updates Camera app for iPhone with notifications to draw users back in

Posted: 28 Aug 2012 05:13 PM PDT

Facebook today released an update for its standalone Camera app for iPhone, which now includes the option to upload photos to albums, as well as notifications when friends Like, tag or comment on photos.

Facebook says photo albums were the app’s most requested feature. Push notifications about friend activity on a user’s photos seems to be a way to encourage users to re-engage with the app. However, users are likely already receiving notifications about this activity through the main Facebook for iPhone app, so it’s unclear if this will result in double notifications, which occasionally happens with the standalone Messenger app.

Users will see their notifications in the “News” tab from the homescreen.

Users can add photos to an existing album or create a new one by clicking the new icon that looks like an album from the photo upload screen. When users create a new album, they can title it, provide a description and location, as well as designate the privacy level. This is useful since the Camera app allows bulk uploads that users might want to organize into albums for different events.

Facebook launched Camera in May, just weeks after announcingits intent to acquire mobile photo sharing service Instagram. Instagram has 45 times as many downloads as Camera, according to the Office of Fair Trading, which investigated the deal.

Last week, the social network launched a faster version of its Facebook for iPhone and iPad apps, and updated Facebook for Android and iOS Messenger.

U.S. iPhone users can download the updated Camera app here. The app is not yet available worldwide.

Facebook gives page owners new option to reach friends of fans with ‘Promote’ button

Posted: 28 Aug 2012 03:28 PM PDT

Facebook has introduced new audience options through the ‘Promote’ button on page posts so that pages can now indicate whether they want to reach just existing fans or both fans and their friends.

Previously, page owners who clicked “Promote” would see a message saying, “Get more people who Like your page to see this post.” If page owners dug into the Help Center, they would learn that Promoted Posts would also be seen by a larger percentage of the friends of people who interact with the post. Now Facebook has made this clearer by offering the audience option, as well as allowing page owners to pay for reach that is higher than their total fan count.

Promoted Posts make it easier for page owners to create ads directly from their posts. These are ideal for expanding the reach of a given piece of content, and are less about increasing a page’s Likes. Page owners cannot select demographic or interest targeting from the Promoted Posts module, but if they use the new post targeting options when they create the post, it will be applied to the paid campaign as well. We’ve heard about some users encountering errors when trying this, however.

When pages pay for Promoted Posts, fans will see the posts in their News Feed in the same format as they would organically, but with a “Sponsored” label. When a fan Likes, shares or comments on a Promoted Post, some of the person’s friends will see a Sponsored Story about the action in their mobile or desktop feed. Page admins who select “people who like your page and their friends” as their audience for Promoted Posts will see two separate ads within a campaign in their ad dashboard.

Promoted Posts are done on a cost per impression basis. The cost per reached fan seems to vary by page, but Facebook has not commented on what factors may influence price. This feature began being tested at the end of April and rolled out to all pages with 400 to 100,000 Likes a month later.

SumAll helps businesses see correlation between social activity and sales

Posted: 28 Aug 2012 12:16 PM PDT

Data visualization company SumAll today launched its Social Metrics tool, which allows businesses to see their Facebook and Twitter activity overlaid with web traffic and revenue data.

The free service helps companies understand how their social marketing efforts have an impact on sales. Users connect their Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, eBay, PayPal, Shopify or other payment processing accounts to SumAll. Through an interactive dashboard, they can select which data sources to compare over different time periods.

For example, a business could look at whether the addition of new fans on Facebook correlates with revenue in any way. It could see whether Facebook engagement leads to additional transactions, or if fan advocacy has more of an effect on sales from new customers or existing customers.

SumAll CEO Dane Atkinson says the company’s vision is to unlock data from the cloud and make it “beautiful and accessible.” It is working to integrate data from the Facebook Ads API, AdWords, MailChimp and other services to give businesses a more complete picture of how their marketing and advertising relates to real business outcomes.

SumAll, which launched in beta 10 months ago, is free. Atkinson says that down the road the company may begin to charge for access to deeper insights, but he believes that people should be able to see their data for free. This makes the tool ideal for small and medium-sized businesses, like Diamond Candles, Freaker, Urbio and others already using the service. Atkinson says SumAll has 7,000 customers looking at $1 billion in transactional data. The New York company raised $1.5 million from Battery Ventures, Wellington Partners and General Catalyst Partners in June. It has a 30-person team.

 

Does Romney have a better Facebook strategy than Obama?

Posted: 28 Aug 2012 08:25 AM PDT

Republican candidate Mitt Romney is leading President Barack Obama in Facebook engagement and new Likes, in part because of a strong social ad campaign that takes advantage of the latest opportunities on Facebook.

Obama might have the most Facebook fans of any politician — approaching 28 million — but the average number of interactions per day on his page has not been much higher than on Romney's page, which passed 5 million Likes this weekend. There are likely several factors at play here. Larger pages routinely have a lower percentage of engaged users compared to pages with fewer Likes. New fans are more likely to see page posts than people who have Liked the page for a while, so Obama might not be reaching much of his audience as Romney currently is.

But beyond these inherent disadvantages, the Democratic campaign doesn't seem to be taking the right steps to maximize its impact on Facebook. It’s posting less frequently and seems to be running fewer social ads.

Romney's team, on the other hand, is using all the newest Facebook marketing and advertising features. In addition to posting more than four times per day on average, they're running Sponsored Results so that Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan show up in the results when users search for "Obama," "Biden," "Democrats," "Republicans" and other political pages. This is something that only became available last week. The Republican campaign is also running page post ads and Sponsored Stories, including in the News Feed. All these ads drive users to Romney and Paul's Facebook pages, leading to more new Likes and a higher People Talking About This count.

Obama's campaign seems to have been only running traditional ads in the sidebar. This type of ad, which leads off-Facebook and does not have a Like button or social context, is known among social marketers as the worst performing unit on Facebook. Not only do these ads cost more and have lower average clickthrough rates than others on the social network, when users do notice and interact with them, there is no social amplification of this action. Users' friends won't see that they Liked the page or engaged with a post because there are no calls to action from the ad to do these things.

However, with Romney's social ads, each paid action can result in additional exposure. For example, users might see that their friends claimed an offer or shared a photo. And each new page Like opens up more of an audience to target with Sponsored Stories, which only appear to friends of fans.

In 2008, many pointed to Obama's use of digital and social platforms as a key factor of his success. But Facebook moves fast, and his team doesn't seem to be as up to date as the Republicans are this time around. The campaign might be too reliant on organic activity, which as many marketers are discovering, isn’t necessarily enough to succeed on Facebook anymore. Obama’s team might also be weaker than Romney’s on Facebook because it is putting more effort toward other channels like Twitter and YouTube.

Follow the candidates' Facebook progress using our Election Tracker and PageData tools.


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