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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Farmville 2, Microsoft Live, Banjo, Causes, MeetMe, Ask.fm and more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by DAU

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 04:49 PM PDT

Zynga’s FarmVille 2 leads our list of fastest growing Facebook applications by daily active users. Earlier this week the game led our list of apps growing by monthly active users, as well.

The titles below grew between 155,000 and 1.3 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name DAU Gain Gain %
1.  FarmVille 2 7,900,000 +1,272,988 + 19%
2.  Microsoft Live 13,900,000 +875,271 + 7%
3.  schoolFeed 6,200,000 +760,973 + 14%
4.  Bing 3,800,000 +679,667 + 22%
5.  Yahoo! Social Bar 3,300,000 +494,974 + 18%
6.  Spotify 8,400,000 +409,619 + 5%
7.  Banjo 440,000 +364,896 + 486%
8.  Anita predictions 450,000 +329,092 + 272%
9.  Pandora 1,400,000 +282,587 + 25%
10.  Causes 580,000 +273,598 + 89%
11.  Candy Crush Saga 4,900,000 +254,817 + 5%
12.  Scribd 1,500,000 +253,396 + 20%
13.  MeetMe 590,000 +241,559 + 69%
14.  Pedido de contato ->> Aceitar 840,000 +229,614 + 38%
15.  21 questions 850,000 +225,219 + 36%
16.  TripAdvisor™ 1,600,000 +214,350 + 15%
17.  Hada Mágica 290,000 +193,712 + 201%
18.  SoundCloud 940,000 +169,500 + 22%
19.  Shufflr 640,000 +157,953 + 33%
20.  Ask.fm 1,300,000 +155,250 + 14%

 

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

Samsung Mobile USA, Facebook and others in this week’s top PTAT gainers among Product/Service pages

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 03:08 PM PDT

Samsung Mobile USA is this week’s top gaining page in the People Talking About This metric among product and service category pages. The page recorded almost 2 million additional engagements this week.

The top 10 product and service pages gaining PTAT saw increases between 77,056 and 1,964,759 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

# Name People Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth
1   Samsung Mobile USA 2,771,828 0 +1,964,795
2   I DRIVE SAFELY 693,165 +115,816 +602,861
3   Facebook 3,211,624 -423,389 +598,640
4   I Love My Dog 709,914 +99,139 +578,263
5   Hanes 196,978 0 +167,216
6   Escuela para Aprender a s… 426,520 -8,066 +140,224
7   Pro 7 120,402 +103,054 +104,104
8   McDonald’s Sverige 122,561 +15,240 +92,141
9   Du liebst mich? Zeig’s mi… 432,312 +91,200 +79,149
10   Colgate Max Fresh India 92,327 +22,029 +78,001
11   Petcentric by Purina 143,685 0 +77,056

With the release of the iPhone 5, Samsung has been promoting its competing device, the Galaxy S III. The company has supported the phone with an aggressive campaign including traditional advertising tactics such as billboards and TV spots. Samsung Mobile has been using Facebook social ads as a companion to these marketing efforts, purchasing promoted posts, sponsored stories and sidebar ads. The graph below shows how the page has increased rapidly in page Likes with the PTAT following suit.

Facebook‘s own fan page is the third top gaining page this week thanks to its first major ad campaign with Wieden & Kennedy. The video has received over 800,000 likes and 185,000 shares. The company has also been running promotions on how it has reached over a billion members, profiling celebrities, athletes and high profile executives around the world. Much of the text is in different languages, displaying the social network’s global influence.

Earlier in the week, the page had a PTAT over 4 million, but has only started to fall since. The page has over 77 million Likes making it the second most Liked page on Facebook, after the company’s feature phone app Facebook for Every Phone. It remains to be seen what other advertising efforts the company might make.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about pages among product and services, as well as other categories.

Facebook users convert at all hours, FBX partner Triggit says

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 02:52 PM PDT

Facebook users who see retargeting ads on the social network through the Facebook Exchange are clicking and converting throughout the day, says FBX partner Triggit. That’s an advantage over traditional real-time bidding exchanges, where conversions skew toward post-work hours.

Triggit says one e-tail client saw over 53 percent of click-through conversions on traditional display occur between 4-8 p.m. PST. Only about 22 percent occured between 7 a.m. and noon PST. With the Facebook Exchange, however, conversions were more evenly distributed throughout the day. Only about 41 percent of conversions on FBX occurred during those prime post-work conversion hours, 4-8 p.m., and about 32 percent occurred during working hours of 7 a.m. to noon. The differences are seen in the graphs below, though it’s important to note that the Facebook Exchange is still very new and trends are difficult to declare at this stage.

The relative frequency of conversions is clearly more evenly distributed in the second graph, which represents several hundred conversions on the Facebook Exchange. Triggit says this is reflective of users tendency to check Facebook at all hours, and shows that users are consuming and engaging with ads at about the same rate throughout the day.

“If anything, RTB on Facebook skews to the exact middle of the ‘work’ day, between 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. PST,” Triggit account manager Steve Palombo wrote in a blog post.

Triggit says about 60 percent of the advertiser’s conversions on FBX occurred during the typical 9-to-5 workday, compared to only about 40 percent across traditional display. Interestingly, FBX’s peak conversion time was during the lunch break of 12-1 p.m. PST. On traditional exchanges, the lunch hour produces a lower than average number of conversions.

TellApart, another company running ads on the Facebook Exchange, hasn’t seen the same patterns. TellApart CEO Josh McFarland says there is no significant difference in impression, click or conversion distribution throughout the day on Facebook versus other exchanges. He says bid volumes are distributed the same way throughout the day, but on major exchanges where competition is high, it takes a higher bid to win impressions. On Facebook, advertisers can win more impressions earlier in the day without necessarily raising their bids.

Triggit Marketing Director Christina Park says it wasn’t surprising that users on Facebook were coming up for bids all day and every day of the week “since everyone knows that Facebook is the most engaging site in the world.” What was less expected was that post-click conversions would come at faster rates on Facebook than traditional display. She noted that Facebook being a “brand-safe” site helps translate to a higher number of conversions. In an interview with AllThingsD, Triggit CEO Zach Coelius also suggested that traffic on other websites is often search-driven so users are looking for something specific, whereas Facebook is something that users always have open and are potentially seeing ads on.

Kenshoo Social provided the following data about clicks and conversions on Facebook, which also show relatively even distribution throughout the day, apart from sleeping hours. The data covers more than 8 million clicks and conversions for FBX and other Facebook ad types between Sept. 9 and Oct. 10.

We covered some earlier results from FBX partners here.

Facebook makes changes to Open Graph policy to reduce frictionless sharing, improve user experience

Posted: 10 Oct 2012 01:10 PM PDT

Facebook today announced a number of changes to its Open Graph guidelines and platform policies to cut down on practices that users find spammy or unwelcome.

Developers can no longer automatically share a user’s consumption of content unless they use built-in actions “Like,” “Watch,” “Read,” “Listen” or “Follow.” Apps with custom verbs must make sharing that action opt-in so as not to surprise or confuse users. For example, an app can not automatically publish that a user “browsed” a collection after they visit a section of an online store. The app can instead include buttons for active sharing, such as “want” or “favorite.”

This does seem to not affect games, promotions or other apps where users take an explicit action that can then be shared. Earning a high score, claiming a coupon or pinning a photo, for example, would still be acceptable. Apps like Foodily, which shares that users “found” an item when they click on a recipe link, will have to change. Rotten Tomatoes, which previously shared when users “checked out reviews,” seems to have already removed this action.

Facebook is also eliminating “authenticated referrals,” which is when clicking a link from Facebook takes users directly to an app’s permission dialog rather than a page with more context. This happened frequently with social news and video applications. A user would see an article or video in their feed and click on it, but instead of being taken directly to the content, they were hit with an auth dialog. Facebook announced this option last year at f8 and encouraged developers to use it to guarantee that all users navigating to an app from the social network would be logged in. Although this helped some apps like SocialCam and Yahoo Social Bar quickly gain millions of new users, it turned out to be a poor user experience in most instances.

Facebook is no longer allowing apps to post to a friend’s wall via the API. The company says these actions generated high levels of negative user feedback, including “hides” and “mark as spam.” There is still an option for apps to use the “feed dialog” for a similar effect and apps can include user mentions or tagging, which will appear on a friend’s Timeline after a user approves the tag.

To further ensure quality apps, Facebook added the following to its platform policies:

“Quality of content: you are responsible for providing users with a quality experience and must not confuse, defraud, mislead, spam or surprise users. For example, you must monitor your app’s negative feedback in Application Insights to ensure it stays below our thresholds, avoid excessive advertisements or bugs, and ensure the description of your app is consistent with your app’s content.”

Besides the restrictions announced today — which go into effect in 90 days — Facebook announced that it would make some Open Graph stories more prominent in News Feed and on Timeline. The company says its new image-led Open Graph stories receive 70 percent more clicks and up to 50 times more Likes than equivalent story types from before. Similarly, the new location stories provide double-digit gains in distribution to apps. Developers looking to increase distribution and engagement for their app stories should use Open Graph rather than the Graph API or “stream.publish.” See the differences below.

torsdag den 11. oktober 2012 at 07.16