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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook wants Open Graph language to ‘feel natural,’ represent actual behavior

Posted: 22 Oct 2012 03:02 PM PDT

Facebook's Chris Maliwat advised marketers and developers to build Open Graph apps that help people share "authentic" stories using "natural language."

Speaking at the Extole Social Advocacy Summit last week, Maliwat, who leads strategic partner development among the commerce vertical, explained that with Open Graph, marketers and developers can take the actions that people do on and offline and make them "structured and sponsorable."

This is core to the growth of the Facebook platform. Ultimately, Facebook wants every person, place and thing to be represented on its graph, and it wants those objects to be connected the same way they are in the physical world. People listen to songs, read articles, want products, play games, buy gifts.

"If it rings true and it’s authentic, that’s when you see the most engagement," Maliwat said. Campaigns that try to be overly branded or clever often don't do as well because they try to get users to take unnatural actions or make statements they wouldn't otherwise make. "We want Open Graph actions and objects to feel like natural language."

Maliwat suggested that the company would continue to expand the Open Graph infrastructure to better reflect offline behavior and connections. At f8 last year, Facebook made it possible for developers to add their own custom verbs to the Open Graph. At the same time, it began offering "built-in" actions: read, watch, listen. What this means is all apps where users watch videos use the built-in watch action, and activity from those apps has semantic meaning and can be aggregated. Follow and Like are other built-in actions. More so than custom actions, built-in actions help Facebook understand the relationship between objects so that it can properly organize them in News Feed, Timeline aggregations and eventually search.

"In the future, what you’ll see us doing more is translating natural language into the graph, into graph actions," Maliwat said. "You’ll see more built-in actions that feel natural."

The more Facebook can encourage developers to build apps that represent actions people take off-Facebook, the more valuable the social graph will be. Remember, CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently suggested that Facebook search would be about answering users' questions, not just returning results for a string of keywords.

Maliwat didn't offer any examples of future built-in actions, but Facebook has shown interest in "want" recently. We found the social network testing a Want button plugin for third-party websites earlier this year, and just this month, the company began testing a feature for fans to click "want" on products they see in "collections" posts. "Own" and "buy" might be other important built-in verbs for Facebook to have, but for now developers can create their own custom versions of these actions.

Having built-in actions is also important for reducing fragmentation. For instance, the company recently began requiring all custom actions that express affinity to be associated with the built-in Like verb. This way Facebook's system knows that "love," "favorite," "smileyface," "yum" and others are all variants of "like." Something similar might be needed for travel apps, which have different ways for users to express that they've been to different places. You can "travel" to a location, "check in" there, "pin" a place on your travel map or "update" your passport. If Facebook created a built-in "visit,” "travel" or “go” action, these custom verbs could all be associated with the built-in action and have the same semantic meaning in Facebook's graph.

Another reason for Facebook to continue to add built-in actions is to establish standards and best practices. For example, in May, Facebook set rules about how long an app has to wait before publishing watch and read actions. This was meant to reign in social news and video apps that some users began to see as spammy and manipulative. Similarly, Facebook removed the option for apps to automatically publish custom actions that represent a user's consumption activity, such as browsing a catalogue or looking up a recipe. Auto-sharing is still allowed for built-in actions, read, watch and listen. Custom verbs can be created, but users have to manually click a button or take an explicit action before their activity can be posted back to Facebook.

Marketers and developers who have created their own actions or are thinking about building new Open Graph apps should consider what type of stories they’re asking users to share and how that fits into or conflicts with Facebook’s vision for the platform.

Facebook’s new features driving Bingo Blitz’s renewed success

Posted: 22 Oct 2012 12:41 PM PDT

Buffalo Studios’ Bingo Blitz was featured on Facebook’s developer blog today, revealing how the game’s use of new Facebook features has helped the game succeed on the social network, iOS and Android.

According to the blog post, 80 percent of Bingo Blitz’s mobile revenue comes from players who log in via Facebook. Those players who log in with Facebook are also spending three times more and playing twice as much as other players. Finally, ever since Buffalo Studios revamped its Open Graph stories with custom art and content, Bingo Blitz has received 20 percent more Likes and comments on News feed Stories, as well as 500 percent more unique click-throughs to the game itself.

Facebook Subscriptions also provided the game with extra revenue via premium subscriptions (though no figures are provided about this), as well as helping retain players: 85 percent of subscribers are returning daily to collect in-game rewards.

Adopting all of these new Facebook features and providing regular fresh content has apparently kept a quarter of the game’s current monthly active users playing for more than a year. Buffalo Studios vice president of studio 0perations Brooke Olson says a major key to keeping long-term players involved with the game is to integrate Facebook within a title on all platforms it’s available for. By doing this, developers are able to provide “a connected game experience to players who use multiple devices or want to play with friends on different platforms.”

Our own traffic-tracking service AppData shows Bingo Blitz is definitely benefitting from the integration of Facebook’s new features. The game’s traffic started to fall off after it peaked in February with 3.7 million monthly active users and 1.1 million daily active users. Traffic gradually declined until mid-September, when a noticeable turnaround began. Now, the game’s up to 2.7 million MAU and 740,000 DAU.

This article was originally posted at our sister site, Inside Social Games.

Farmville 2, Muzy.com, TripAdvisor, JetSet Secrets and more on this week’s top 20 Facebook apps growing by MAU

Posted: 22 Oct 2012 11:15 AM PDT

FarmVille 2 again takes the No. 1 spot on our list of top non-game Facebook apps growing by monthly active users this week with 24 percent gain.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any non-game apps on the platform, growing from between 300,000 and 11.4 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain %
1.  FarmVille 2 58,400,000 +11,400,000  + 24%
2.  Scribd 25,800,000 +2,300,000  + 10%
3.  schoolFeed 27,700,000 +2,000,000  + 8%
4.  TripAdvisor™ 31,400,000 +1,100,000  + 4%
5.  Muzy.com 5,900,000 +900,000  + 18%
6.  Instagram 35,500,000 +800,000  + 2%
7.  21 questions 10,900,000 +700,000  + 7%
8.  SlideShare 3,400,000 +700,000  + 26%
9.  Geburtstag 2,700,000 +600,000  + 29%
10.  Birthdays 19,700,000 +600,000  + 3%
11.  JetSet Secrets 820,000 +480,000  + 141%
12.  Ruby Blast 4,200,000 +400,000  + 11%
13.  Photo Love 8,400,000 +400,000  + 5%
14.  CityVille 16,600,000 +400,000  + 2%
15.  Pinterest 20,000,000 +400,000  + 2%
16.  Anniversaires 3,300,000 +400,000  + 14%
17.  Diggle 1,200,000 +380,000  + 46%
18.  Bike Race 1,300,000 +300,000  + 30%
19.  4shared 5,300,000 +300,000  + 6%
20.  Subway Surfers 2,600,000 +300,000  + 13%
21.  Lost Jewels 3,400,000 +300,000  + 10%

 

No. 5 Muzy.com is an app to watch, picking up about a million new MAU this week after much slower growth previously. The app helps users edit photos and make collages to share to Facebook using Open Graph. Users can upload new photos or pull from their Facebook albums.

No. 11 JetSet Secrets and No. 17 Diggle are games that are also quickly building an audience, moving from our emerging apps lists into our top MAU gainers.

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 tests ‘suggested post’ label for non-social News Feed ads

Posted: 22 Oct 2012 10:45 AM PDT

Some Facebook users are seeing ads in the desktop and mobile feed with the label “suggested post” when there is no connection between the user and the advertiser who has paid for the content to be there.

In August, Facebook began testing a News Feed version of its page post ad format to allow advertisers to reach a broader audience than their own fans and friends of fans. Sponsored Stories, which were the first type of ad introduced to the feed, are only shown to users who already Liked a page or whose friends had Liked a page. Page post ads, along with mobile app install ads, are the first “non-social” ads to be shown in the mobile feed.

The new “suggested post” label is likely being tested to understand how users feel about this type of paid content being mixed with posts from friends and pages they chose to connect to. The label is more noticeable than the small “sponsored” note on other News Feed units. Although it might help users notice the ad and be more likely to engage, it might also lead more users to mark it as spam if they don’t find it relevant.

Relevance is key for News Feed ads to be successful. It is much easier for users to tune out bad ads in the sidebar, but if ads interrupt the core experience of browsing News Feed, it could hurt overall engagement. Although Sponsored Stories about what friends are interested in seem like they would be the most relevant ads because of social context, there are actually times when well-targeted page post ads might be better. For instance, a user might not have any friends that like the Babble Home page, as in the mobile ad above, but if the user enjoys cooking, an ad linking to recipes might be interesting. On the other hand, a Sponsored Story about three friends Liking the Petco page is irrelevant if the user doesn’t have a pet.

Facebook page post ads are similar to Twitter’s Sponsored Tweets, which appear within the mobile and desktop stream even if a user does not follow the advertiser or follow another user who does.

News Feed and mobile ads bring Facebook CPCs down to 2010 levels, TBG report finds

Posted: 22 Oct 2012 09:23 AM PDT

Social media ad company TBG Digital released its quarterly Global Facebook Advertising Report today with findings about how mobile and desktop News Feed ads have driven down costs per click to averages not seen since 2010.

CPCs in the U.S. decreased by 40 percent this quarter, likely because of the high clickthrough rates provided by News Feed ad placements. When more users click on ads, Facebook can earn its target CPM while advertisers spend less per click. In the U.S., average CTR increased 99 percent. New ad formats are clearly driving more engagement by being prominently featured in the main stream of content, though it's unclear how long this will last. Facebook continues to experiment with the size and design of ads in the feed, and typically ads see high CTRs when they are new and novel.

Not every country has adopted mobile and News Feed ads at the same rates as the U.S., and that's reflected in the data. CPCs decreased by 27 percent in Canada and 2 percent in the United Kingdom. CPCs increased 19 percent in France and 15 percent in Germany. TBG says campaigns driving off-Facebook are more popular in other countries, and since those ads do not appear in the feed, they haven't seen the same increases in engagement and reductions in cost.

Overall though, average CPCs during Q3 2012 are only 5 percent more than Q2 2010's CPCs, which is particularly significant since earlier this year CPCs rose to their highest levels ever — averaging over a dollar in the U.S. and Canada. Q3, however, was the first full quarter with mobile placements available, so advertisers were able to spend less for more engagement.

How all this affects Facebook’s own business will be seen on Tuesday when the company releases its Q3 financial results.

Images from TBG Digital

tirsdag den 23. oktober 2012 at 07.55