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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

FTC issues approval for Facebook-Instagram deal to move forward

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 03:33 PM PDT

The Federal Trade Commission announced today that it has closed its investigation of the Facebook-Instagram acquisition without taking any action, which will allow the deal to move forward.

The commission was unanimous in its decision to end investigation into whether the deal violated antitrust laws. The FTC regularly looks into acquisitions over $66 million. When Facebook announced that it planned to buy the mobile photo sharing app in April, the deal was worth $1 billion in cash and stock. However, with Facebook’s share price suffering since its initial public offering, that value has dropped. Instagram agreed to $300 million in cash and 22,999,412 shares of Facebook common stock, which would be about $747 million at today’s share price.

The acquisition could close relatively soon, allowing the companies to begin integrating. Contrary to popular belief, employees of Facebook and Instagram have been working separately for the past four months. Instagram, for example, launched a blog for businesses and added a new photo map feature last week. Facebook released its own mobile photo-sharing app called Camera, which allows users to add filters to their photos and share them quickly with friends.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in April that Instagram will continue under the Instagram name and continue to support posting services beyond Facebook. Users can continue to have followers and follow people without connecting with them directly on Facebook.

Facebook adds ‘subscribe to page’ button to News Feed stories

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 01:57 PM PDT

Facebook appears to be testing a “subscribe to page” button on page-Like stories in News Feed.

With subscribe, users can receive News Feed updates from a page without indicating that they "Like" it. They can also add pages to interest lists to get a separate feed of posts on a particular topic. It is unclear how pages that a user subscribes to are factored into ad targeting or whether subscribers are more likely to see page posts than fans who Like the page are. Facebook could be planning future changes to distinguish Like from Subscribe.

As we covered previously, page-Like stories also include the “Find More Pages” link, which leads users to the page discovery browser.

Facebook introduced subscribe for personal accounts in September 2011 to allow users to allow for asymmetric relationships between users. Last month, some Facebook users began to see a subscribe button on business pages. That hasn’t rolled out to all users, but now some users who can’t see the subscribe button on pages are seeing the option below News Feed stories.

A week ago, Facebook added subscribers to insights so page owners can see how many people are following their page this way. It seems that only users who clicked the subscribe button are counted in this metric, not users who follow the page via an interest list. There still isn't a way for admins to see which interest lists their pages are included on, though Facebook gave this option to personal profiles in June.

Facebook updates messages layout to look and function more like email

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 12:48 PM PDT

Facebook today announced a new design and features for its messages product on the web. The two-paned layout and addition of keyboard commands makes the update similar to some email clients.

When users access messages from Facebook.com, they will see one column with recent messages and another column with an individual conversation. This should allow for faster browsing, similar to how users navigate messages in the Facebook for iPad app. Users can also search by a sender's name or keyword at any point. In the previous layout, users could only search for names and keywords from the main inbox. When they opened a message, they could then search within that conversation.

Facebook says there will be a number of keyboard commands to make it easier to navigate messages and take other actions. Users will continue to be able to add multiple files, photos and emoticons to their messages. The “Other” folder for messages from non-friends also remains. Facebook says new product is available to a small percentage of users today and will roll out to everyone over the next few weeks.

Ads and bookmarks are not visible in the image provided by Facebook below, but a spokesperson tells us that is because the image is just a mock-up.

Although the company introduced Facebook.com email addresses in 2010, Facebook messages weren’t the Gmail-killer some in the industry were expecting. Much of what Facebook launched that year was aimed at making Facebook messages feel less like email at all. It created a single inbox for email, messages, sms and chat interactions. Users’ entire conversation history is included with every message, and subject lines were removed.

Those features are still in tact with the redesign, but it is interesting to see the social network move to a more traditional email layout and introduce keyboard shortcuts, which email power users tend to favor.

Earlier this year, Facebook made a change to users' settings that hid all third-party email addresses from Timeline, displaying Facebook.com addresses instead. Many saw this as a way to promote its own messaging product over other services like Gmail.

 

Facebook widens Sponsored Results test, makes search ads available through API and Power Editor

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 10:22 AM PDT

Facebook is expanding its test of search-based ads today by making Sponsored Results available through the Power Editor tool, according to an update received by some of the social network's partners. We’ve also confirmed that Sponsored Results have been added to the Ads API.

Sponsored Results allows businesses to buy ads in the typeahead search results, which the company calls "one of the most used features on Facebook." Advertisers target exact pages, profiles, places or apps they want to show up next to, rather than bidding on keywords or phrases. Advertisers can also layer on Facebook’s demographic, interest and category targeting.

Sponsored Results can lead to an app or page, including custom tabs, but they cannot link directly to sites off-Facebook. However, if a third-party website integrates Facebook, like Match.com does, it can run ads to App Center, which subsequently takes users off-Facebook. The ads can include a short promotional message, as seen below. The unit is not yet available to users in France.

Facebook's search ads, announced in beta last month, are one of the social network's most aggressive monetization efforts. The structure of the program intensifies competition among businesses on the platform. If early tests show the ads are effective, it may get eventually get to a point where businesses will have to pay for Sponsored Results just to ensure they aren't being overshadowed by competitors.

Beta partners Match.com, Zynga, EA, Disney Interactive Media Group, King.com and Kixeye all seemed to be bidding on each other's apps. For example, when users search for Zynga's Farmville, they may see results for EA's SimCity Social and Kixeye's Battle Pirates. Match.com was serving ads to users who searched for Instagram, Pinterest and other top apps on the platform. Often times the sponsored result will appear above the organic listing, but in other cases users will see a “top hit” before an ad.

GraphEffect launches social marketing collaboration platform to change how teams work together on Facebook efforts

Posted: 22 Aug 2012 09:04 AM PDT

Facebook ads management platform GraphEffect today announced the beta launch of a new social network for marketers aimed at helping cross-organizational teams collaborate.

GraphEffect followed the model of Facebook and other networks, giving users a profile, stream, messages and groups. It added task management and communication features called "follow-ups" and "sidebars." Then, it turned its existing "ad manager" and "story manager" products into apps on the platform. GraphEffect will release APIs for developers to build their own marketing collaboration apps. Since GraphEffect is focused on Facebook marketing and advertising, developers might want to create tools for search and display campaigns, project management, working together on presentations or other functions.

It's important to distinguish that the goal of this social network isn't to connect with marketers everywhere and build up a large list of friends. It's really about bringing people from different departments of an agency together with vendors, clients and platform reps.

"We want to make people work more efficiently with lessons we learned from social networking," GraphEffect CEO James Borow says.

When marketers log into GraphEffect, they'll see a feed of recent activity from people in their groups and updates about their ad campaigns. Groups can be created for different teams and projects, and those also include a feed of recent activity, as well as file sharing. Users can leave a comment that's visible to the whole group or create a "sidebar" with specific people. Sidebars are private messages that display within context rather than sending users to a separate section of the platform. Users can also flag any item for follow-up.

GraphEffect is yet another platform working to promote collaboration while reducing email. For example, there's Yammer, the "enterprise social network," which Borow says is limited because it focuses on connecting people from the same company rather than cross-organizational teams. The idea with GraphEffect is to get account services, clients, community managers, art directors, analytics, PR, Facebook reps and others using the same platform, which was built for getting marketing work done.

Borow believes that the trend over the next few years will be to learn how people interact on Facebook and then apply it to different verticals to create the best tools for each space. He cites Lore as an example of what's being done for education. These vertical-specific platforms help build more complex graphs that aren't currently represented by Facebook's friends and subscribers model. GraphEffect hopes its latest effort helps pioneer the marketers graph.

Get a test drive of the platform and request an invite here.

torsdag den 23. august 2012 at 07.35