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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.

onsdag den 29. august 2012 at 07.14