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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

New Facebook platform industry hires and promotions: HYFN, Nanigans, Optimal

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 05:05 PM PDT

Facebook Ads API partner Optimal hired a new chief revenue officer, HYFN promoted a number of executives and Nanigans seems to have hired a new software engineer this week on our industry hires roundup.

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 and promotions:

HYFN

  • Scott Mallone, VP Creative – promoted from Director of Interactive
  • Ashley Heron, VP Interactive – promoted from VP Digital and now assuming responsibility for all projects
  • Matt Fitz-Henry, EVP, GM – promoted from SVP, GM

Nanigans

  • Kris Sullivan, Software Engineer - former software engineer at JNJ Mobile www.MocoSpace.com

Optimal

  • Patrick Toland, Chief Revenue Officer - former senior vice president and managing director of North America at TBG Digital

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

Facebook tests page post ads in News Feed to reach users beyond fans and friends

Posted: 14 Aug 2012 03:09 PM PDT

Facebook is testing a News Feed version of its page post ad format, which will allow advertisers to reach a broader audience than their own fans and friends of fans, a company spokesperson tells us.

This ad unit will look just like a post from a page that a user is a fan of, except it will include a “Like Page” button in the top right corner and the word “sponsored” at the bottom, according to a screenshot provided by Facebook. Previously, a page could only advertise in News Feed if users already Liked it or if they had a friend who did. This latest test, along with the mobile app ad unit announced last week, show Facebook is no longer limiting News Feed inventory to entities that users have already connected to.

Early tests of Sponsored Stories in the feed show much higher clickthrough rates than ads in the sidebar. However, because these ads don’t necessarily have social context, they could confuse or frustrate users. Facebook says News Feed page post ads are a very small test for now, and the social network will gauge performance and user sentiment to determine whether this will roll out wider.

Facebook experimented with ads in News Feed as early as 2006, when users who joined sponsored groups would be notified when friends interacted with the same page. When Beacon launched in 2007, Facebook also gave advertisers the option to put messages in the feed. When the company introduced News Feed Sponsored Stories earlier this year, it seemed to be taking a more conservative approach by only allowing brands to sponsor content that could otherwise appear in their feeds organically.

Advertisers, however, want to reach new audiences and they want their ads to be as effective as possible. News Feed page post ads could be ideal for advertisers as long as they don’t turn off users who look to their News Feed for updates from family and friends, not brands. At the same time, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets model inserts brand content into the feed without requiring a user to be connected to an advertiser in any way, and the company does not seem to have suffered any backlash.

onsdag den 15. august 2012 at 07.50