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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook exploring opportunities to sell premium services for businesses

Posted: 01 Oct 2012 01:27 PM PDT

Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told CNBC today that the company is looking at opportunities to sell premium services for businesses.

“As we increase our investment in monetization, we’re thinking about premium services for business,” Sandberg said. "We've heard from businesses all over the world that they want more from us. There are things they'd pay for they really want us to provide. So it's an area that we're currently starting to explore."

Sandberg didn’t offer any specific examples, though CNBC suggested “analytics or customer service” in its reports. Based on job listings posted to Facebook’s careers site over the past few months, we’ve suspected that the company could be making a play into providing CRM or data management solutions.

For example, in August, we saw Facebook put out a call for Product Marketing Manager, Monetization: “an expert in data management platforms” who will ”develop our plans and vision for how we can enable businesses to better reach their customers and prospects on Facebook."

Data management platforms help advertisers organize their first party data (web analytics, CRM), second party data (from strategic partners that can match CRM records or cookies) and third party data (such as from Acxiom or Datalogix) to improve their advertising efforts. Facebook is uniquely positioned to enter this space considering the wealth of data it has in each of these areas. It has already gotten into the ad exchange market with FBX and has started matching CRM data with Custom Audiences. The company has also begun working with Datalogix to understand how Facebook ads impact offline sales.

Facebook might also be interested in offering its own CRM system. In March Facebook added a listing for a Software Engineer, Sales/Marketing Tools with the job description:

“The Sales/Marketing Tools team is inventing the future of Social CRM (Customer Relationship Management). We work closely with Product, Engineering, Sales, and Marketing teams to design and develop a suite of applications for large advertisers, media agencies, and Facebook’s global sales force.”

Another listing for a Front End Software Engineer, Sales Tools, added at the same time, includes a similar description and the question, “Are you intrigued with applying the concepts of newsfeed, social, and leader boards to business applications?” The listing also mentions “building enterprise applications using social and gamification techniques.”

Since July, Facebook has been looking for an Executive Briefing Center Manager to develop strategy and lead execution for the company's new program to build relationships and win over new partners and advertisers. Executive briefing centers are areas for large companies to show off their technology and understand the business needs of potential clients and customers.

Sandberg wasn’t specific about the size of the opportunity for the premium services it is considering, but she said the company believes its potential in any area is “really big because of our sheer size and scale.”

Farmville 2, schoolFeed, 4shared, Wordox and more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 01 Oct 2012 12:26 PM PDT

Zynga’s FarmVille 2 comes in at the No. 1 spot on our list of top growing Facebook apps by monthly active users this week, adding 15 million new players.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 200,000 and 15 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name Gain Gain %
1.  FarmVille 2 18,000,000 +15,000,000  + 500%
2.  schoolFeed 22,600,000 +1,500,000  + 7%
3.  Texas HoldEm Poker 39,400,000 +1,400,000  + 4%
4.  21 questions 6,800,000 +1,300,000  + 24%
5.  Instagram 32,500,000 +900,000  + 3%
6.  4shared 4,300,000 +600,000  + 16%
7.  War Commander 5,800,000 +600,000  + 12%
8.  Birthdays 17,300,000 +600,000  + 4%
9.  Bubble Epic 2,700,000 +500,000  + 23%
10.  CityVille 17,000,000 +500,000  + 3%
11.  Oferece uma rosa 720,000 +480,000  + 200%
12.  Bubble Pirate Quest 2,400,000 +400,000  + 20%
13.  Lost Jewels 2,600,000 +400,000  + 18%
14.  Truths About You 2,600,000 +400,000  + 18%
15.  Get Revealed 1,700,000 +400,000  + 31%
16.  Threads of Mystery 1,700,000 +300,000  + 21%
17.  Hug Me 670,000 +290,000  + 76%
18.  Wordox 630,000 +240,000  + 62%
19.  Dragon City 12,100,000 +200,000  + 2%
20.  Keek 2,500,000 +200,000  + 9%

 

Two other Zynga games placed on the list this week: Texas HoldEm Poker at No. 3 and CityVille at No. 10.

No. 2 schoolFeed is an app to connect with classmates. No. 4 21 questions allows friends to ask each other questions. No. 6 4shared is a file-sharing service that users can log into with Facebook.

Most of the rest of the list was made up of games like No. 9 Bubble Epic and No. 18 Wordox, as well as novelty apps like No. 11 Oferece uma rosa and No. 14 Truths About You.

No. 20 Keek is a video sharing app for iPhone and Android that integrates Facebook Open Graph.

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 Thursday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Facebook says impressions, reach and frequency matter more than clicks

Posted: 01 Oct 2012 11:10 AM PDT

Clicks aren’t the right metric for brand advertisers, Facebook Head of Measurement and Insights Brad Smallwood told the audience at the IAB MIXX Conference in New York today.

Smallwood shared results from recent campaign studies that indicated impressions, reach and frequency were more valuable than clicks. Specifically, 99 percent of sales came from users who saw an ad but did not interact with it. Campaigns that optimized for reach were 70 percent more effective at driving ROI, and campaigns that optimized for frequency had a 40 percent increase in ROI.

Smallwood began by outlining the history of advertising and measurement, noting that for the past few years Facebook hasn’t had the right tools and metrics for advertisers to understand their performance on the platform. Now with the company’s partnership with Datalogix, which connects digital media and offline purchasing data, Facebook says it has found a better model that not only proves ROI but also helps advertisers improve their campaigns.

Clicks are important to direct response campaigns, but they’re only one part of brand advertising, Smallwood said, citing a past Nielsen study, which found no correlation between sales lift and clickthrough rate. Moving forward, Facebook will help its advertisers understand the value of the impressions they’re getting on the social network, as well as determine the optimal reach and frequency for their ads.

Smallwood said there is a “sweet spot” for the number of impressions that maximize ROI, but it might differ for different advertisers depending on the product, the campaign and other factors. For example, some advertisers will find that four impressions per user will increase profit. After that, retail sales might still go up, but not enough to cover the cost of advertising and production. When impressions are more evenly allocated — so one user isn’t seeing an ad twice and another seeing an ad 20 times — advertisers have seen a 40 percent increase in ROI. Facebook is applying these findings, and others related to reach, to its ad products to optimize how it serves ads to users.

Tom Buday, head of marketing and consumer communication at Nestle S.A. who went on stage after Smallwood, addressed some of the articles and conversations that try to declare whether Facebook or other social media platforms “work” or “don’t work” for advertisers. He says success or failure isn’t dependent on the advertising channel. It comes down to brand messages. Once advertisers have a quality message and they understand their overall brand health and performance, they can apply it to platforms like Facebook. Message quality is more important than ever, he said, because of the technology that is available. Not only do consumers have more control over the messages they see, they have the means to share whether they love or hate an ad with millions of people. He said Nestle has found Facebook to be a valuable platform for its different brands, including Gerber USA, which is seeing $3.91 ROI for $1 spent.

tirsdag den 2. oktober 2012 at 07.51