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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Zynga games, SongPop, social readers, Bing, Shazam and more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 20 Aug 2012 04:18 PM PDT

The Ville leads our list of the fastest growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this week with 11 percent gain that pushed the game past 60 million MAU.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 900,000 and 15.7 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain %
1.  The Ville 60,600,000 +5,900,000 + 11%
2.  SongPop 15,800,000 +1,200,000 + 8%
3.  Washington Post Social Reader 5,800,000 +1,100,000 + 23%
4.  Yahoo! Social Bar 38,700,000 +1,000,000 + 3%
5.  Bing 26,100,000 +1,000,000 + 4%
6.  Instagram 27,500,000 +800,000 + 3%
7.  Shazam 3,000,000 +700,000 + 30%
8.  Dragon City 10,600,000 +600,000 + 6%
9.  Zoosk 14,600,000 +600,000 + 4%
10.  Bubble Safari 30,900,000 +500,000 + 2%
11.  Texas HoldEm Poker 36,400,000 +500,000 + 1%
12.  Causes 2,800,000 +500,000 + 22%
13.  Ruby Blast 2,900,000 +400,000 + 16%
14.  schoolFeed 16,400,000 +400,000 + 3%
15.  Zynga Bingo 7,200,000 +400,000 + 6%
16.  Pinterest 16,300,000 +400,000 + 3%
17.  MeetMe 1,700,000 +400,000 + 31%
18.  Rotfltube 550,000 +340,000 + 162%
19.  ChefVille 540,000 +340,000 + 170%
20.  Tab Builder: Like 1,400,000 +300,000 + 27%

 

No. 2 SongPop is approaching 16 million MAU for its cross-platform name-that-tune app.

News apps, No. 3 Washington Post Social Reader and No. 4 Yahoo! Social Bar, are benefitting from Facebook’s more prominent trending articles module.

No.5 Bing and No. 6 Instagram continue to grow steadily.

Music app Shazam came in at No. 7 with 30 percent gain likely related to an iOS update released late last week.

Other Zynga games on the list this week include No. 10 Bubble Safari, No. 11 Texas HoldEm Poker, No. 13 Ruby Blast, No. 15 Zynga Bingo and No. 19 ChefVille.

Video sharing site Rotfltube is a notable app in the top 20 because of its 162 percent growth, likely coming from Open Graph integration that shares users’ viewing activity.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

How Facebook search ads change the competitive landscape for businesses

Posted: 20 Aug 2012 02:22 PM PDT

For years of search marketing, companies have had to bid on their own keywords to protect their brand and avoid losing traffic to competitors. Now they'll probably have to do it for Facebook, too.

Facebook announced its plans to offer search-based advertisements called Sponsored Results last month and recently we've seen a number of examples from Match.com, EA and Kixeye. It seems that if Sponsored Results comes out of beta and expands to more advertisers, the competitive landscape of the social network may increase to the point that businesses will have to pay for these ads just to ensure they aren't being overshadowed by competitors. In the process, Facebook can collect more revenue than ever.

Take what's going on during the beta as an example. We've seen game developers EA and Kixeye both bidding on Zynga games, which means that when users search for Farmville, they see results for EA and Kixeye games first. Even worse for Zynga, when users search for the developer's CityVille game and hit enter — as frequent players are likely to do out of habit — they might end up in EA's SimCity Social. That's because Sponsored Results often appear above organic results, and hitting the enter key takes users to whatever appears first in the typeahead search window.

The same is happening with Match.com bidding against searches for dating app Zoosk. But Match.com is even running ads targeting people who search for Pinterest, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Washington Post Social Reader and a number of other top apps on the platform. This type of activity could incentivize a range of developers to run Sponsored Results campaigns purely to protect their position.

We may start see this happen among pages, too. If brands don't run Sponsored Results for their own page name, someone else probably will, as most companies know from what happens with Google search. It might not be long before Facebook joins AdWords and becomes a part of brands' "always-on" advertising efforts.

For the past few years companies have gotten into "Like races" with their competitors. One brand would run Facebook ads to boost their Like count and then similar brands would run ads to keep up. But all that was for what was essentially a vanity metric. With Sponsored Results, competitors can actually redirect users to their own pages, so the pressure is even greater to allocate budget for it.

Still, it remains to be seen how effective Sponsored Results will be in driving consumer action, whether it's using an app, Liking a page or making a purchase. If the ads don't drive results, few businesses will bother trying to stake their claim or bid against competitors at all.

Facebook makes more tweaks to search: tests ‘top hit’ and increases size of results

Posted: 20 Aug 2012 10:26 AM PDT

Some Facebook users noticed changes to the social network's search feature this weekend, including a larger window for typeahead results and a "top hit" option.

With search-based ads called Sponsored Results in beta with partners like EA and Match.com, Facebook seems to be working to improve its search offering and make it a more prominent part of the site. For years people have wondered what type of moves Facebook would make in the search space. The changes we've seen this summer suggest that search is something the company is putting more weight behind and something investors and others should begin watching closely.

This weekend we noticed the list of search results now appears in a window that extends beyond the frame of the search bar. This helps focus a user's attention, but also could allow for longer advertising messages that accompany sponsored results.

A new "top hit" feature is appearing for some users on select queries, though there is no clear pattern for when it shows up and why. Facebook typically organizes search results by category: people, pages, apps, groups, lists, shared links and more. With "top hit," Facebook seems to be trying to give users the most relevant result from among all those categories, but from what we've heard from users who have the feature, it doesn't always do so. For example, in the search below, the user was looking for the official Heroclix Facebook page, of which he is a fan. The page does not appear at all in the typeahead.

Facebook has a long way to go in terms of providing relevant search results, but the company currently has three open positions for software engineers focused on this area. The job description includes the line, "You can help build the next-generation search experience for Facebook to help 800 million people around the world find what they're looking for in a quick, fun, easy-to-use way."

It is likely that Facebook users most often search for their friends and pages or apps they are already connected to. But if people begin to use Facebook search to find things they want more information about, as they do on Google, advertisers and users could find more value in the product. In June, Facebook updated its search bar to include the words, "search for people, places and things." Last month, the social network added a "search the web" function to its typeahead search results, which leads users directly to a page of Bing results. Previously, conducting web searches through Facebook required a few additional clicks.

tirsdag den 21. august 2012 at 07.49