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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook platform industry hires: Offerpop and SocialCode

Posted: 03 Oct 2012 05:00 PM PDT

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we'll get it into our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn.

Offerpop

  • Mark Huerta, Director of Product Marketing – former Account Manager at Passenger
  • Drew Koloski, Lead Recruiter – former Director of Recruiting at Vente-Privee with American Express
  • Shea Burns, Account Executive – former Manager, Business Development at Vente-Privee with American Express
  • Ade Coker, Jr., Social Media Marketing Strategist – former Social Media Intern at Thrillist
  • Catalina Boneo, Account Executive – former Individual Development Coordinator at the Guggenheim Museum

SocialCode

  • Harry Johnson, Advertising Associate – former document reviewer at Posner and Rosen, LLP

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook says small businesses ‘just as important’ as big brands

Posted: 03 Oct 2012 03:42 PM PDT

As Facebook execs go on a speaking tour and court large brands and agencies during Advertising Week in New York, the company maintains that it wants the social network to continue to be a valuable platform for small businesses to connect with current and future customers.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said in a press Q&A Tuesday that serving small business is “just as important” as helping large advertisers achieve their goals. She says the company's current and future revenue is split between small businesses and larger brands.

Small and medium businesses often feel their interests aren't represented or recognized by Facebook as the social network grows and develops relationships with Fortune 500 companies and other prominent partners. New advertising products like Facebook Exchange and Custom Audiences are likely outside SMBs’ scope, and key things like mobile ad placements are still not available in the self-serve ad tool.

That said, the social network has made it easier for SMBs to create basic ads on the site, streamlining the ad tool and introducing the Promote button on pages. This year’s Timeline for pages redesign eliminated the advantage some bigger businesses had in customized landing tabs. Now all businesses have the same basic canvas of a cover photo and profile photo to draw in fans. Page owners also gained some additional free admin tools like post scheduling. The company puts out videos, whitepapers and other resources for people learning how to use Facebook for marketing.

Sandberg acknowledges small businesses make up a “huge” component of Facebook. There are 11 million SMBs on the site, 7 million of which have an active Facebook page and 3 million of which make at least one post per week. Sandberg calls small business the “holy grail of the Internet” since the long tail of advertisers collectively spend a significant amount. The hard part, she says, is that SMBs are typically late adopters of technology. Facebook has an advantage, though, in that its marketing and advertising products are so similar to the features people use daily to connect with friends and family. In fact many business owners start by promoting their business on their personal profile and then create a page when they start to see interest and results.

Sandberg pointed to Promoted Posts as an example of how Facebook is trying to keep the social network approachable for SMBs. Instead of asking, “Do you want to become an advertiser today?” Facebook asks page owners if they want to pay a small amount to sponsor a post they've already made and reach more fans and their friends.

Of course, to convince small businesses to pay for distribution that used to be free, Facebook will have to do what it can to make sure SMBs are seeing results. Facebook has a team dedicated to increasing SMB adoption of its marketing tools. These employees help the product team understand what to build to make the platform more useful to small businesses.

For example, Facebook currently has a job opening for a Principal Writer, User Operations to “educate small and medium businesses on Facebook by conveying complicated technical topics in simple, jargon-free language.” The candidate must have “a passion for helping small businesses succeed in a new economy.” The company is also looking for a Product Marketing Manager, Advertising Interfaces, which calls for someone to identify and assess “product opportunities for helping small and medium businesses use Facebook advertising more effectively.”

Adobe Photoshop, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer Arabia and others in this week’s top PTAT gainers among software pages

Posted: 03 Oct 2012 01:02 PM PDT

Adobe Photoshop is this week’s top gainer in the People Talking About this metric among software pages. The page has increased its PTAT over 275 percent over the last week.

The top 10 software pages gaining PTAT saw increases between 6,000 and 84,000 engagements. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

# Name People Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth
1   Adobe Photoshop 113,628 +1,484 +83,356
2   Google Chrome 81,015 +9,698 +34,552
3   Internet Explorer Arabia 37,280 +3,742 +23,884
4   Autodesk Students 28,834 +9,057 +21,161
5   Adobe Photoshop Elements 16,598 +2,508 +15,421
6   Zombie Apocalypse Surviva… 48,738 +574 +13,559
7   Smule 36,762 +3,296 +8,946
8   Opera en Español 25,993 0 +8,540
9   North Social 7,452 +99 +6,181
10   MikvahCalendar.com 9,816 -1,976 +6,167

According to the PageData graph, the page saw a huge 70,000 jump in PTAT between Sept. 28 and Sept. 29. Most of this engagement was earned by a photo post of a woman’s Photoshop toolbar tattoo. This post went viral and earned over 40,000 Likes, almost 10 times more than the next highest performing page post. This photo was originally published on Sept. 26, but over 12,000 shares helped the post maintain a long tail.

At No. 3 on this week’s list, Internet Explorer’s localized page for Saudi Arabia has seen steady growth over the last few weeks. The page, which is in Arabic, has shown focus on the gaming aspect of the browser. There is a high emphasis on classic Atari games with many posts being highlighted with large photos. Internet Explorer is still the leading web browser in Saudi Arabia which is likely why there is a localized page for Facebook.

App Center recommendation engine drives more repeat app users than previous Facebook games dashboard

Posted: 03 Oct 2012 11:00 AM PDT

Facebook today revealed that users who discover apps through App Center are 40 percent more likely to return to the app the next day compared to users of the previous Apps and Games dashboard.

Facebook App Center, which launched in June and became available worldwide on Aug. 1, is a personalized section of the desktop and mobile site to help users discover new apps on Facebook, mobile and the web. It focuses on surfacing high quality apps that users are likely to be interested in based on other apps they’ve tried and what their friends use.

In a note, Facebook engineers involved with App Center explained the technical challenges of building such a recommendation engine. They said App Center is similar to News Feed in that it learns users’ preferences to serve recommendations that are “timely, socially relevant and unique to them.” Demographic information, friend activity and a user’s history with apps all factor into Facebook’s app recommendation algorithm.

As for determining quality, Facebook uses a combination of star ratings and daily active user totals. Facebook conducts random sampling to collect star ratings shortly after someone has used an app. Facebook takes an app’s average rating and then includes a confidence adjustment based on the total number of ratings the app has. The company also considers an app’s average daily active users rather than monthly active since MAU can be skewed by spikes in activity throughout the month.

This recommendation engine — along with longer app descriptions, more images and additional information about which friends use an app or what in-game purchase is most popular — make App Center a better way for users to learn about apps than the previous apps and games dashboard.

Facebook says 220 million people visit the App Center each month. Users have been prompted to visit with links on the login page and above News Feed. In today’s blog post Facebook officially announced the My Apps section of App Center where users can manage the apps they’ve added and control their permissions settings — something reader Ryan Plant first pointed out to us in August.

Image credit: Ryan Plant

Facebook expands ‘promoted posts’ test for users’ personal updates

Posted: 03 Oct 2012 10:24 AM PDT

Facebook today announced that it will expand its test that allows users to pay to promote their personal posts at the top of friends’ feeds.

The test was first conducted in New Zealand in May and began to roll out to some users in 20 other countries last month. Today it will begin to appear for U.S. users with fewer than 5,000 friends and subscribers. Originally called "highlight," Facebook is now calling this option "promote," which is what it also calls an advertising feature for business and fan pages.

Users who are part of the test will see a promote button next to Like and comment on a user's Facebook posts. After clicking "promote," users will be taken through a payment flow. Over the past few months we’ve heard of prices ranging between free and $16. Facebook is likely testing a range of price points to understand demand.

Users who promote their posts will see some basic analytics on what percentage of people viewing their post saw it organically versus because of the paid promotion. Facebook says that promoting posts doesn’t change the audience that will see a post but it will appear higher in News Feed with a note that it is sponsored.

Promoted posts could be useful for letting friends know about garage sales, fundraising efforts or roommate searches, but Facebook also suggests using the feature for engagement announcements, wedding photos or other big news. This seems odd and reflects poorly on the social network’s algorithms that are meant to surface this type of content to the people it is most likely to matter to. For example, Facebook engineer Jocelyn Goldfein recently told Business Insider about the work she did to make sure that important news was shown to users even if they haven’t logged into Facebook in a while.

“We finally ended up dong some natural language processing and looking at the words,” Goldfein said. “Things like ‘thank you’ and ‘congratulations.’”

If that’s the case, it’s unclear why a user should pay to promote these types of posts. However, the feature is only a test and Facebook can monitor usage and sentiment to determine if it’s something worth pursuing. For example in 2009 the company tested a way for users to give give each other Credits for content they shared in the feed but it was never rolled out widely. The expansion of promoted posts to the U.S. suggests that tests in other countries went well.

torsdag den 4. oktober 2012 at 07.45