The facebook marketing_bible

The Facebook Marketing Bible www.insidefacebook.com

©2008 Inside Facebook 1

The Facebook Marketing Bible

33+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook By Justin Smith [email protected] Editor, Inside Facebook www.insidefacebook.com Version 1.04 May 11, 2008 ©2008 Inside Facebook. Unauthorized duplication or redistribution is expressly prohibited. Inside Facebook is not affiliated with or endorsed by Facebook, Inc.



Introduction

A large and growing portion of some of the most

valuable demographics are spending more of their

time and attention on Facebook and less on other

channels and media. Not only are US college

students and teenagers fully engaged in Facebook,

but adults, professionals, and people from around the world now constitute a

substantial portion of the Facebook user base as well.

However, most marketers lack a comprehensive understanding of the vast array of

explicit and implicit marketing channels Facebook offers - most of which are “viral.”

My goal here is to provide an introduction to what’s possible on Facebook to the

spectrum of marketers - from brand advertisers to volunteer grassroots evangelists.

Tactics are divided into three rough categories: tools for guerilla marketers, tools for

advertisers, and tools for application developers. Throughout and after each section,

I’ve offered recommendations for your Facebook campaign strategy.

Facebook offers many ways to get the word out and enable engagement with your

brand in more compelling ways than were ever before possible on the web. Here’s how

to get started.



Contents I. Tools for Guerilla Marketers 1. Profile Page 2. Groups 3. Pages 4. Events 5. Notes and Photos 6. Messages 7. Marketplace 8. Share / Posted Items 9. Networks 10. Mini Feed and News Feed > Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers II. Tools for Advertisers 11. Social Ads 12. Localization Opportunities 13. Integrated Opportunities 14. Beacon 15. Polls 16. Facebook Platform Ad Networks 17. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships 18. Sponsored Facebook Groups > Recommended Strategies for Advertisers III. Tools for Application Developers 19. Profile Box 20. Application Tabs 21. Application Info Sections 22. Designing Feed Stories 23. Feeds 2.0 24. Feed Publisher 25. Requests / Invitations 26. Facebook Notifications 27. Email Notifications



28. Application Directory 29. JavaScript API 30. Coming Soon: Translations 31. Coming Soon: Facebook Connect 32. Analytics Tools 33. Search Engine Optimization > Poll: Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps? > Recommended Strategies for Application Developers Conclusion



I. Tools for Guerilla Marketers

For the aggressive guerilla marketer, Facebook offers a bevy of viral channels to get

the word out to your friends and creatively reach your target audience. The best part

about these guerilla tactics is their cost: free. Everyone on Facebook can use these

strategies to recruit and to evangelize their causes.

Strategy: If you build it, will they come?

Marketers often wonder whether it makes sense to attempt to build their own

social network around their product, company, brand or service. Some hire

development shops to build a custom web site, others use white label products,

and still others use hosted services like Ning. The problem with this approach,

however, is that it’s extremely expensive to bring a significant enough number of

users onto your own service to make it worth the expense (which can often run in

the tens of thousands of dollars). In most cases, it makes much more sense to

craft your strategies targeting the social networks in which people already “live”

online—once someone builds their profile and friend list on a popular platform like

Facebook, it’s awfully hard to get them to move.

1. Profile Page

The starting point for your presence on Facebook is your profile page. Your profile

page is basically a landing page that you design in order to convert your friends to

engage with certain parts of your identity.

Not only is your profile the page that you have the most control over, it’s the place

where you can most deeply and authentically express your passion for the brand,

company, or product you want to promote. Your profile page is an opportunity to

craft a credible real-world story around the reasons your products or services are so



valuable. Take advantage of Personal Info,

Work Info, Photos, and applications to tell

bits and pieces of your narrative as it relates

to your brand. If you’re not buying your own

stuff, why should anyone else?

If you don’t want to associate your personal

identity with the product or service you’re

trying to promote, Facebook is not for you.

Inherent in the current state of Facebook is a

culture of transparency that devalues and

ignores inauthenticity. If you’re afraid to

show the real people behind your campaign,

that’s okay–-but save your time and money

and go somewhere beside Facebook.

Finally, most people don’t realize how

many page views profile pages receive. One

of the most common habits of Facebook users

is browsing the profile pages of friends and

stalking the profile pages of people they want

to learn more about. By connecting to

hundreds of partners, customers, associates,

and friends on Facebook, you’ll drive a TON of traffic to your profile page. Take

advantage of that huge opportunity.

2. Facebook Groups

Groups are oldest and simplest way to build community around your brand or

company on Facebook. By starting a group, you create a central place for customers,

partners, and friends to participate in conversations around your brand. Facebook

groups come with boards for posting discussion topics, photos, videos, and links right

out of the box. You can also easily send news and updates to your group members as



often as you like - messages arrive in their Facebook Inbox. And the best part about

Groups is you can create as many as you like for free.

Groups are one of the simplest ways to do viral marketing on Facebook. Once members

have joined your group, they can easily invite their friends to join the group via a

built-in Invite feature. If your members are excited about your group, it can grow

really quickly. (The group 1,000,000 Strong for Stephen Colbert grew from zero to one

million members in 9 days!) Additionally, your group name will usually appear on your

members’ personal profile pages until they leave the group. Many people view groups

as “Bumper Stickers” for their profile page in this regard. Because profile pages are

highly trafficked, these links can generate a lot of clicks to your group page.



Of course, groups do have their problems. First and foremost, Facebook removes

your ability to blast messages to your group once it surpasses a certain size. While

Facebook is working on removing this limit, group owners are still currently

experiencing this restriction at 1000-1500 members. However, Facebook has said

publicly that this limit will go away soon. Second, if your group becomes popular, it

can become a target for spammers. If you want to keep your group clean, be prepared

to spend time deleting spam wall posts and reporting users that spam your group to

Facebook. This can take a lot of time. Finally, while Groups do offer a reasonably

robust feature set with no setup, you’re not able to extend their functionality with

Facebook applications. In order to use those, you’ll need to get a Facebook Page.

Strategy: What about spamming existing Groups?

Many marketers choose to post links in existing Facebook Groups to their own

Facebook Group or website. While this tactic may work on a small scale,

Facebook’s automated systems will shut down accounts that post links in many

groups. A better approach would be to approach existing group owners and ask to

set up a reciprocal link exchange between your groups, just as you would on the

open web.

3. Facebook Pages

Pages were launched by Facebook in November

2007 as a way for businesses of many types to

easily establish a brand presence on Facebook.

Pages are a lot like groups, with some important

differences:

• Pages are more customizable than

groups. You can add content or even



Facebook applications to your pages to extend their functionality and the depth

of experience users can have with your brand.

• Pages get more prominent “Bumper Stickers” real estate than groups on the

profile pages of your fans.

• There is no limitation to the number of fans in your group that you can

message. This means Pages can be an effective way to communicate with large

numbers of Facebook users who are fans of your Page.

• “Fans” who join your group are NOT able to invite their friends to be fans of

your Page. Fans must either “Share” your page with their friends, or their

friends must observe that they “are a fan” of your Page either via their profile

page or News Feed.

• You can view demographic information on who your fans are. Facebook

enables you to export breakdowns by age and gender in Excel format.

• Facebook has taken an active role in cracking down on Pages not created by

authorized agents.

In March of 2008, Facebook launched an upgrade to Pages that will be welcome news

to businesses and marketers. It’s now easy to add custom Flash or HTML (FBML) to

your Facebook Page. In order to add Flash and FBML capabilities to your Page, install

the “Flash Player” or “Static FBML” apps. Adding the Flash Player will allow you to

upload your own Flash files to your page, while adding the Static FBML app will allow

you to enter your own HTML. This will allow Pages to provide much more customized

experiences.

In addition, Facebook added a Legal Drinking Age setting to Pages. If you operate a

page related to alcohol products or bars, you can now meet legal drinking age

requirements by editing your settings to only allow your page to be fully accessible by

those over the legal drinking age where they live.

Finally, Facebook added the Photos and Videos modules to Pages so that Page owners

can allow fans to upload photos and videos.

Pages are a good option for small or local businesses that want to establish a presence

on Facebook. Like groups, they’re another free and easy way to do viral marketing.



Pages will become an increasingly important marketing vehicle on Facebook over time

- especially as the volume of fan-endorsed Social Ads continues to grow.

Strategy: Groups and Pages are very similar. Which makes more sense?

This is a hard question, and the answer depends on the goals of your campaign. If

your campaign depends heavily on regular communication with large numbers of

people, Pages are definitely your best option. Facebook is going to continue to

build out Pages functionality for brand owners. By contrast, if your goal is to

maximize the number of people that come in contact with your brand, but

communicating with them over time is less important, the viral invitation feature

of Groups allows them to potentially grow much faster. You’ll just need to be

creative in giving your group members a reason to invite their friends.

Strategy: I’ve just created a page. How do I promote it?

Once you’ve created a page, there are a few things that you can do to grow your

“fan base” within Facebook:

1) Share/Post your page on your Facebook profile. This will convert more

friends and profile visitors to visit the Page.

2) Create Events within your page. When fans RSVP, their friends will see the

news in their News Feeds.

3) Post messages in related Groups. Use Facebook’s search function to post

messages in related groups about the existence of your page. If you don’t

feel comfortable “spamming” these groups with unsolicited Wall posts, try

messaging the group admins and officers to ask their permission to promote

your page within their group. They may even be willing to promote your

page for you.

4) Email the Page URL to your mailing lists and invite contacts to become



Facebook “Fans” of your page.

5) Buy Social Ads to promote your page. Facebook is hoping to promote Pages

more by integrating Page traffic stats into its Social Ads advertising service.

Also, remember that whenever someone becomes a fan of your Page, that news

appears in their Mini Feed and their friends’ News Feeds.

In the Spring of 2008, Facebook began offering a Group > Page conversion tool.

Essentially, if you’re the owner of a Facebook Group and want to convert the members

of that group into “Fans” of your Facebook Page instead, you can fill out a request and

Facebook will perform the migration for you automatically if your request meets its

criteria. According to Facebook:

If you have a group that fits into one of the categories offered for Pages and

you are the official representative of that artist, business, or brand, we can

help you convert your group into a Page. Please fill out your request by

providing us with the URL to your current group and the URL to the Page you

have created that you would like your group members and group content

transferred to.

Brand owners that originally created groups that have grown too large to manage

effectively should consider migrating their groups to pages.

Facebook Issues Guidelines for Promoting Pages Outside Facebook

While Facebook uses Social Ads and the News Feed to help brands promote Pages

within Facebook, the task of promoting Pages outside Facebook is largely left to

the brand owner. In order to help marketers clearly promote Pages without causing

Facebook brand confusion, Facebook has released the following Pages marketing



guidelines:

1) Use or reference to the Facebook brand should not imply partnership,

endorsement or sponsorship unless approved by Facebook Brand Marketing.

* Example Do: “Find us on Facebook to discover more about…”

* Example Don’t: Don’t: “Company X partners with Facebook in social

advertising campaign”

2) Do not use icons, visuals, logos, etc. taken from the Facebook site. Instead,

use the Facebook Page Badge or Facebook Page Screenshots.

3) A registered trademark symbol ® must be included in all print / online

displays of logo or wordmark that reference the Facebook brand.

4) When advertisers request use of Facebook brand features, they may or may

not require a Trademark License Agreement from the Facebook Legal team.

In other words, Facebook is trying to prevent marketers from incorrectly implying

special partnership or affiliation with Facebook to strengthen their own brand. For

more information and details on Facebook’s Page marketing do’s and don’ts, check

out the Pages Promotional Guidelines page.

4. Facebook Events

Facebook Events is a free application developed by Facebook that anyone can use to

promote marketing events, sponsored parties, or even product launches, transactions,

or company milestones.

When you create an event, it gets a fully-featured page, much like a group, that

includes a wall, discussion, photos, videos, and links. You can invite all of your



friends to the event; friends you invite will receive a special notification

requesting their RSVP. You can also add administrators to the event, who can also

invite all of their friends.

Facebook Events makes it easy to get the word out to hundreds of people, manage

your guest list, and build community around your upcoming event.

5. Facebook Notes and Photos

Notes and Photos are two Facebook applications that allow you to share blog posts and

pictures with your friends. You can use these features to post content about your

brand, but be careful to always do it authentically - don’t be spammy. If your photo

albums are all company logos, for example, you’ll lose a lot of credibility.



One feature that often goes overlooked within Facebook Notes and Photos is

“tagging.” When you publish a note or post a photo, Facebook allows you to “tag” that

note or photo with the names of your friends who are “included” in it. When you

“tag” a friend in your photo or note, he/she gets a special notification. However,

you don’t have to use “tagging” only to tag people that are actually “included” in the

note or photo–you can also use it to selectively choose certain people whose attention

you want to bring to the content you’ve created. When they view your note or photo,

they’ll see the other people you tagged in it - so make sure it’s a group of people

they’d be complimented to be included in.

6. Facebook Messages



The rise of Facebook Messages as a popular alternative to email has confused many

“old” people. Nevertheless, Messages can be a powerful vehicle for targeted

marketing on Facebook.

Messages are like email, except a lot less fully featured - Facebook offers no way

to search, sort, filter, categorize, or star messages. While Facebook’s default

privacy settings prevent you from seeing the full profile page of most Facebook users,

Facebook allows you to send messages to users you have no connection with.

However, Facebook has invested heavily in message spam prevention. If you use your

Facebook account to message users you have no connection with in high volume,

Facebook’s automated systems will shut down your account. While they do offer a

direct line to a hard to find sales lead or potential job candidate, it is not smart to try

to spam people using Facebook messages.

7. Facebook Marketplace



Marketplace is Facebook’s classifieds listing service. You can post a for-sale ad or

wanted ad in any of your networks for free. However, if you want to post your ad in

multiple networks, you have to pay $1 per network per listing.

Like with messages, spamming up the Marketplace will get your account deleted and

your ads removed. It’s most likely not worth your time to try to evade their systems.

Unlike other Facebook-developed applications, Marketplace does not get as heavily

used. Many Marketplace ads only yield a few leads. However, unlike Craigslist, which is

anonymous, all Marketplace responses are tied to real Facebook accounts. When you

receive a response to your Marketplace listing, you can see the respondent’s profile

page even if they’re not your friend.

8. Facebook Share / Posted Items

Facebook Share is a Facebook application that lets you promote any Group, Event,

Photo, Link, or Application you come across by a) giving it real estate in your “Posted

Items” list on your profile page, or b) sending it directly to your friends’ Inbox.



By posting it on your profile page, you can direct some clicks to the shared item.

However, while this is an effective promotional tactic, it’s not as targeted as

sending it directly to friends’ Inboxes. Those messages are more likely to convert

into valuable clicks.

9. Facebook Networks

Facebook Networks are like group pages for everyone who’s a member of an

Educational, Work, or Geographical network. While no Facebook members “own” any

pieces of network pages, network pages offer 1) another way for users to discover

events, posted items, and marketplace listings, and 2) discussion forums and walls

which any members can post to.

Network pages are probably the most commonly accepted places to spam in

Facebook. While you can post there, keep in mind that your messages may be

considered spammy even if they’re real and relevant.



10. Mini Feed and News Feed

While all the channels I’ve described above are useful for grassroots marketing on

Facebook, the wind that blows your marketing seeds is Facebook’s News Feed.

While you’re not able to publish directly to the feeds (unless you’re willing to pay or

build an application), Facebook’s Mini Feed and News Feed archive your users’



engagement with your brand and syndicate it to their friends, networks, and beyond,

amplifying the reach of your campaign by orders of magnitude.

When Facebook users join your group, RSVP to your event, become fans of your page,

share your photos, or further engage with your brand in any of these channels,

Facebook automatically adds a feed item to their Mini Feed. That feed item exists for

all to see, and is often in a prominent location on Facebook profile pages. Facebook’s

News Feed, which occupies most of the Facebook login landing page, then

amalgamates each user’s friends’ Mini Feeds into one unified stream of “recent news”.

It’s possible that one Mini Feed item generated by a Facebook user could be seen in

hundreds of their friends’ News Feeds.

The News Feed has revolutionized the way information is shared between friends on

Facebook. This can mean great things for your campaign and your brand. In fact, a

new marketing field I’ve called “News Feed Optimization” is emerging – for more

information, see the “Tools for Application Developers” section below.



Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers

Marketing on Facebook is really all about the News Feed. Getting prominence in

Facebook users’ News Feeds allows your brand to spread more rapidly and powerfully

than has ever before been possible on the social web.

The simplest way to get started on Facebook and get News Feed distribution is:

1) Start a profile page. (You have probably already done this.)

2) Build your network. Import all your email contacts and add all of your friends

as appropriate.

3) Start a group. (If you’re marketing a brand, skip groups and create a page.) Be

sure to make your group/page available to all of Facebook, not just your

school, regional, or work network.

4) Invite all your Facebook friends that it would be appropriate to invite to join

your group/page.

5) Ask all your group/page members to invite the 10 friends that they think

would be most interested in the group/page.

6) Create regular events within the group/page.

7) Message your group/page members regularly.

Every time a Facebook member joins a page/group, posts to it, or RSVPs to your events,

their friends will come into contact with your brand via the Mini and News Feed.

Thousands of Facebook users could touch your brand within a matter of days. (Of course,

you’ll need to mix in a healthy amount of link posting to keep everyone engaged.)

If you want to add more robust application functionality or advertise your group, you

should instead start off with (or switch to) Pages, since Pages is the product Facebook

will add increasing support to for brand owners going forward.



II. Tools for Advertisers

For marketers with a budget, Facebook offers both integrated and self-serve solutions

to reach broader slices of the Facebook audience. Depending on your budget, you can

get started as an advertiser on Facebook with as little as a few dollars for a short-run

flyer or as much as several hundred thousand dollars for a customized “sponsored

group” destination inside Facebook.

11. Social Ads

Social Ads replaced Facebook Flyers in November 2007 at the

same time Facebook launched Pages. With Social Ads,

Facebook offers advertisers the option to pay on a CPC or

CPM basis, whichever they prefer. Social Ads offers very

powerful targeting capabilities: when you create your ad,

you have the option to limit who sees your ad by age, sex,

location, keywords, education level, workplaces, political

views, and relationship status. Social Ads is the best way to drive traffic to your

Facebook Page.

Social Ads is completely self-serve and provides real time feedback on the size of your

target audience and the suggested bid range to achieve impressions. While Facebook

doesn’t guarantee your budget will be reached, I can’t imagine they’re anywhere

close to filling their inventory.



Social Ads also offers placements in the News Feed, and these units get much

better click through. You can also target Social Ads to friends of users who have

recently engaged with your brand via your Facebook Page or Facebook Beacon (for

more details on Beacon, see below). These units convert at a much better rate.

12. Localization Opportunities

While most of Facebook’s users speak English, a growing number speak many of the

world’s languages. Starting in the spring of 2008, Facebook launched versions of the

site in Spanish, French, and German, allowing users to experience Facebook

completely in their local language. As of May 2008, there are ongoing translation

projects in on in Français, Deutsch, Español, Català, Čeština, Dansk, Euskara, Galego,

Italiano, 한국어, Magyar, Norsk, 日本語, Nederlands, Polski, Português do Brasil,

Română, Русский, Slovenščina, Suomi, Svenska, ��, Türkçe, 中文(简体, and

中文(繁體.

Advertisers can now consider localized versions of your campaigns targeted to

Facebook users in specific countries. For a list of Facebook users by country, see the

“Translations” section in Tools for Application Developers below.

13. Integrated Opportunities

If you represent a large account, Facebook has partnered with Microsoft to serve

advertisers with higher campaign budgets (above around $50,000). Just contact

Facebook, and a sales rep will work with you to explore more integrated advertising

opportunities than are available via the self-serve Social Ads service.

14. Beacon

Beacon is Facebook’s new program (launched in November 2007) that allows partners

to send Facebook information about the activities Facebook users do on partner



websites, in order to be published inside Facebook via the Mini Feed and News Feed.

For example, Amazon might use Beacon to send a feed item to Facebook about a book

you just bought.

Initially, Beacon launched as an opt-out program that required users to explicitly

prevent their Beacon feed items from being distributed to their friends on Facebook.

However, after complaints by privacy advocates, Facebook modified Beacon to

become an opt-in program. While the potential for Beacon to increase the flow of

information valuable to marketers within Facebook is tremendous, it largely remains

untested.

Strategy: Should I try Beacon?

Many large advertisers backed away from Beacon after it first launched due to

concerns about consumer response. Now, however, Facebook’s Beacon

implementation is actually quite conservative—users must explicitly approve your

off-site Feed Items before they get News Feed distribution. Beacon’s potential is

immense—sharing your users’ activity on your website with their Facebook friends

is a marketer’s dream—if done appropriately. If your website serves large volumes

of users, integrating Beacon could be a powerful way to extend your brand within

Facebook.

15. Polls

Polls offer an easy way for marketers to

quickly conduct research within their targeted



audience. Results are streamed in real time to a dashboard that allows marketers to

break down results by gender and age. Based on your targeting preferences, you can

get hundreds of responses within an hour. Everyone should give Polls a try to see

how easy it is to conduct market research on Facebook.

16. Facebook Platform Ad Networks

When Facebook launched the Facebook Platform in May 2007, they also made a

promise to allow application developers to monetize their applications however they

like and keep 100% of the revenue. This market green-field led to the birth of a new

niche of ad networks dedicated to serving the inventory created by Facebook Platform

applications.

While the quality of these networks can be inconsistent, together they offer an

important way to reach the Facebook audience often engaged in a particular vertical.

Inventory is sold on a CPM, CPC, CPA, and CPI (cost per installation of YOUR

application) basis. Leading firms include SocialMedia (www.socialmedia.com),

Buddy Media (www.buddymedia.com), (disclosure: SocialMedia and Buddy Media

are sponsors of the InsideFacebook blog), RockYou (www.rockyou.com), Lookery

(www.lookery.com), Cubics (www.cubics.com), and others.

What eCPMs do apps charge? Data from Facebook application developers

Every ad network is different (and so is every app). Some can fill different types of

creative, and others can fill different user segments. For example, VideoEgg has a

unique high performing unit, but can only fill a small amount of inventory, while

Lookery has an open offer promising guaranteed rates for all European traffic.



While different ad networks make different claims regarding what kind of price

and performance they’ll be able to deliver, the best solution for all marketers is to

give several of them a try and stick with the ones that work best for you.

As a reference point, here’s info from current Facebook app developers on what

they’re making on a CPM/eCPM basis from ad networks serving the Facebook

Platform:

• tspree15 is making $0.60 CPM with Social Media

• cbovis is making $1.50 CPM with VideoEgg, but they can’t cover all his

inventory (the rest runs on RockYou)

• sweetsteve is making $0.27 CPM with Cubics, down from $0.43

• ejono is seeing a $0.40 CPM with Cubics

• cory is making a $4.78 eCPM with Social Media (much higher than the rest!)

• mzeitler is making a $0.50 CPM each with AdSense, FB Exchange, Social

Media, and RockYou (and by combining 2 units on a page is making $1.00

CPM)

• saintseiya is making $0.125 CPM with Lookery ($0.25 with 2 ads above the

fold)

• markdoub is seeing $0.10 CPM with Cubics, down from $0.43

• ersingencturk is seeing $0.04 CPM with AdSense

17. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships

Advertisers looking for more integrated opportunities inside Facebook applications can

consider approaching application developers and negotiating a sponsorship directly.

For example, beverage companies have sponsored “drink-sharing” applications, while

contact lens companies have sponsored “winking” applications. By browsing the

Facebook Application directory, you may be able to find applications fitting with

your campaign.



In addition, several firms have begun serving agencies and advertisers by helping

them connect with users on the Facebook Platform. These firms can connect brands

with application developers or create and manage custom applications for brands.

Firms Inside Facebook recommends include:

• Buddy Media (www.buddymedia.com)

• Federated Media (www.federatedmedia.net)

• Context Optional (www.contextoptional.com)

• Appssavvy (www.appssavvy.com)

Strategy: Why sponsor applications when I can sponsor Facebook itself?

While developers face many of the same monetization challenges as social

networks at the end of the day, developers have two big advantages over the

social networks that can actually enable them to deliver more value to marketers

than the social networks themselves (albeit in less volume):

1. App usage is a better signal for intent than profile data.

While users who indicate an interest on their profile may not have significant

purchase intent at any given time, users actively engaged in applications around

that same interest are more likely to conduct a relevant transaction. Of course,

that application needs to serve a need in high value verticals like travel, media,

finance, or shopping.

For example, it’s hard to know with much precision when users who list “skiing” as

an interest on their profile page are most likely to purchase a lift ticket just based

on profile data. While this is great for basic targeting, it’s nowhere near the level

of intent signaled by a Google search. However, users actively engaged in an

application used to research current ski conditions and find friends going skiing this



weekend are much more likely to have monetizable intent. Whereas profile data is

often write-once-live-forever, application usage is a better indication of activated

interest in a given vertical.

2. Apps offer better opportunities for brand alignment and integration.

While Facebook offers Pages and Social Ads for brand owners interested in building

a presence in Facebook’s social environment, applications can go much deeper and

offer experiences much more directly aligned with the values of the brand. With

Facebook Pages, brands can only achieve fairly generic levels of user interaction.

On the Page itself, users can post messages, upload photos and videos, and sign up

to receive future updates. When users become a “Fan” of your brand, their friends

will see a message that says, “Justin became a fan of Colgate Toothpaste.”

All of these things are great, but they leave a lot of value to brands on the table.

With apps, brands can create more directly aligned and integrated brand

experiences - both within the application itself AND in the “viral” messages that

users send to their friends.

For example, Federated Media recently did a BMW “What Drives You?” campaign

with application developer Graffiti in which users created over 6,000 entries and

shared their creations with their friends. Which is a more valuable brand

experience to BMW - looking at a Page with a logo and messaging, or drawing the

car of your dreams? Which is a better feed item to be seen by millions of friends -

“Justin became a fan of BMW” or “Justin challenges you to show What Drives You

in the Graffiti Car Contest”? You decide.

18. Sponsored Facebook Groups



Before Facebook Pages launched, the only option available to advertisers wanting to

establish a certified presence on Facebook was through the Sponsored Group program.

Sponsored Groups are Facebook Groups with the ability to customize the HTML of

certain regions on the page.

Surprisingly, the cost to rent a Sponsored Group on Facebook starts at US $100,000 a

month. Not surprisingly, the number of Sponsored Groups purchased over the years has

remained small. I expect Facebook to phase out Sponsored Groups as they seek to

bolster Social Ads and Pages.



In May of 2008, Facebook migrated the over 400,000 members who had previously

joined Apple’s sponsored Facebook Group “Apple Students” to a Facebook Page by the

same name. While it seems like this transition was handled as straightforwardly as

possible for users given Facebook’s deprecation of the sponsored group ad product,

Facebook and marketers should be careful when converting sponsored groups members

to Page fans in order to maintain user trust, since users’ original intentions for joining

a sponsored group may be different than necessarily expressing their “fandom.”

Recommended Strategies for Advertisers

For most advertisers, the place to get started is to build a fully-featured Facebook

Page, and drive traffic to it through Social Ads. Facebook ads that send traffic to

other websites historically have performed quite poorly, while ads that direct

traffic to Facebook Pages (or even Groups) perform well. Facebook users becoming

fans of your page is a valuable conversion, because you’ll be able to communicate

with them directly as long as they’re fans of your page. You can use those

communications to encourage further engagement with your brand.

For companies that have developed Facebook applications, advertising with

Facebook Application Ad Networks (like SocialMedia, RockYou, and Lookery) on a

CPI basis can be a powerful way to drive installations of your apps at reasonable

cost levels. You’ll just need to define the value of an application conversion (which

heavily depends on the nature of the app you’ve built) compared to a Page-fan

conversion in order to determine which channel is more cost effective.

Brand managers should seriously consider campaigns with firms that represent

Facebook Platform applications. Facebook apps are able to offer the best of both

worlds: deeply aligned and integrated brand experiences that get naturally shared

with thousands of friends through Facebook’s “viral” communication channels.



III. Tools for Application Developers

For marketers who can harness technical resources, the Facebook Platform offers

the most powerful way to create engaging connections with your target audience

on Facebook. Thousands of third-party applications have already been built on the

Platform APIs–many of which have allowed for new kinds of deep brand experiences,

and many of which turned out to be transient ad delivery vehicles that failed to take

user experience into account. While I can’t tell you how to dream up a good app for

your business here, I will explain the channels that your applications must absolutely

take advantage of in order to achieve maximum success.

Strategy: Where do most new application users come from?

The answer to this question depends largely on your application. Usually, it’s a

combination of the key viral channels Facebook makes available to application

developers: invitations, feed items, notifications, and the profile box.

Sadly, Facebook provides no comprehensive marketing dashboard for you. You’ll

need to build your own system to track each time an invitation, feed item, or

notification is sent out, whether or not it is clicked, and whether or not that click

turns into a converted installation and engaged user.

However, Facebook does provide some partial stats on application virality. Inside

your application settings page, Facebook provides information on the number

referrers to your app install page through the following channels:

• Product Directory - how many users found your app in the application

directory

• Profile Box Add Link - the standard link Facebook places in the top right of

your profile box



• Add Application News Feed Story – the Facebook generated News Feed item

(“Justin Smith installed the Video application”)

• Mini Feed Story

• Facebook Search

• From within your App - how many users clicked content within your profile

box or another canvas page that led them to install your app (unfortunately,

since all these links are part of your application, you’ll need to track them

yourself).



19. Profile Box

Surprisingly, the most common way new users find

applications is through application profile boxes on

their friends’ profile pages. The challenge of profile

box design is making it both compelling for an existing

user to keep it on his/her profile, and appealing enough

to a new user to click on and install the application. If

your profile box doesn’t provide the profile owner

sufficient value to merit its presence on the profile

page, your user will hide your profile box, or worse,

uninstall your application. Simultaneously, if your profile

box is too spammy, your user will get rid of it instantly.

In January 2008, Facebook implemented a “Profile Box Cleanup Tool.” This tool

prompts users to remove excess unused profile boxes from their profile pages.

While it’s unclear how frequently Facebook will prompt users to clear their profile

boxes, it is clear that app developers who don’t design compelling profile boxes will

experience an increase in removals over time.

Major Update: Facebook Profile Redesign

In the spring of 2008, Facebook announced major impending changes to the design

of the Profile Page. These changes include:

• The creation of “Feed,” “Info, “Wall,” “Photos,” “Boxes,” and application

tabs

• Moving all current profile boxes to a new “Boxes” tab

• The creation of a third profile box unit, called the “main profile” box, that

will appear on the left column of the Feed, Info, and Wall tabs.



• The Feed tab will contain new, larger story types and a new feed Publisher.

This will be the default tab when viewing your own or your friends’ profiles.

• Users can now add tabs entirely devoted to individual applications.

• The Info tab contains static information about you. Applications will also

have the ability to publish content to this tab.

Details on each of these changes are below.

On the whole, the upcoming updates to the profile page will have a big impact on

how users interact with each other and express themselves with applications. With

the profile redesign, Facebook wants to give users more control over their profile

and make the profile more communication focused. In order to integrate with the

new profile design, developers are going to need to adapt to and take advantage of

several new integration points on the Facebook profile.

Starting in late May, Facebook will open a developers’ sandbox that will allow

developers to test their apps. A few weeks after the developers’ sandbox opens,

Facebook will push the new profile design live to all users. If developers do

nothing, their apps will continue to work as is. However, in order to take

advantage of new opportunities for integration with the redesigned profile page,

developers will need to update their apps in several ways.

The Facebook profile redesign will have a big impact on the developer community.

Developers will need to think long and hard about how to make their apps more

valuable to users, specifically in the integration points that Facebook is providing.

While much of the first year of the Facebook Platform has been about virality, it

will be harder for purely “viral” apps that don’t provide much value to users to

grow - the second year of the Facebook Platform will be about engagement.

Kicking profile boxes off the default view of the profile page will definitely make it

harder for users to discover and re-engage with applications. Facebook must

embark on a major user education campaign to help users understand the new



tools they have to organize application content on their profile page (specifically,

moving boxes between tabs and adding new app tabs) and share application

content with their friends (specifically, the new feed publisher).

Impact on profile boxes: Application profile boxes will largely be moving to a new

home in the updated profile design. All current profile boxes will be moved to the

“Boxes” tab with the update (the title of the “Boxes” tab is still up in the air). The

specific migration flow has not yet been determined, but the specifics of how

Facebook implements it and helps users decide how to organize their new profile

pages will have a big impact on developers. On the Boxes tab, users will be able to

add, remove, and organize their profile boxes.

In addition, the Feed, Info, and Wall tabs will have a left-hand column that will hold

“main profile” boxes that will be height limited (to about 250 pixels) but otherwise

will be very similar to current profile boxes. Users will be able to move their profile

boxes between the Boxes tab and the “main profile” area fairly easily. Finally, users

will be able to have up to 5 boxes in their “main profile” area - more than that will be

put into the “Extended Profile” that developers have come to know well since the

initial profile cleanup tool.

20. Application Tabs

Another major new integration point for developers is app tabs. These will be built

like “semi-canvas” pages, meaning Facebook will be proxying the images but hitting

the apps for the tab’s content. Like profile boxes, app tabs can’t be built with iframes

or using auto-play Flash, but developers will be able to build fully interactive FBML

pages.

The only place users will be able to add tabs is on the profile itself, using the “+”

button to the right of their default tabs, and up to 6 tabs will appear (the rest will be

accessible via a “More” dropdown). Facebook will provide a drop-down list of users’



applications, sorted by those they use most. Facebook’s intention for app tabs is that

they’ll meet the personal expression needs of those users for whom profile boxes are

not enough. However, the page is also a place visitors will be able to initiate

interactions, like starting a game. Developers won’t be able to create different views

for the profile owner vs. profile visitor - similar limitations to the current app box

FBML rules to prevent profile page spam.

21. Application Info Sections

One of the new integration points for developers in the profile redesign is the new Info

tab. This will be a very structured tab, much like the Info sections on the current

Facebook profile page, containing key-value pairs on which information will exist in

comma separated text or thumbnail lists. Unlike the Info sections currently on the

profile page, content added to the Info tab from apps will link directly to the

application (not Facebook search results). There will be an in-line editing flow on the

Info tab for users; Facebook will provide a suggested type-ahead editing interface.

Users will be able to add content to the Info tab from within application canvas pages

(in FBML). After users see a popup confirmation, the content will be added

automatically. Each application will get its own section on the Info tab that look much

like the different Info sections currently in Facebook’s current profile.

22. Designing Feed Stories

The Mini Feed is a powerful part of the Facebook Platform API that allows developers

to publish news about a user’s engagement with their applications. Like the profile

box, your feed items must be compelling to the profile owner while not being

spammy, AND attract your user’s friends to click on the feed item and explore the

app. If you mess up in either direction, users will hide your feed item, and thanks to a

recent new feature from Facebook, uninstall it in-line.



As I mentioned earlier, the Facebook News Feed offers immense value by syndicating

your feed items to thousands of users’ home pages inside Facebook.

Strategy: Designing High Performance Feed Items

1. The most important thing you can do as a Facebook application marketer is

to publish engaging, authentic Feed items.

Whenever a user performs an action within your application, consider whether

hearing about that action would be valuable to that user’s friends. If so, publish a

Feed item about that event.

For example, the Moods application invokes a Feed item when a user changes their

mood. The feed item simply contains this contextually appropriate “news” about

my friend Holly–she has updated her mood within the Moods application (I’m glad

to hear she’s feeling happy).

Likewise, the Books application publishes a Feed item when a user indicates that

they have started or finished reading a book. This is also news that I find

appropriate and interesting about my friend–I might even casually follow up with

Jonathan about this “news”.



In January 2008, Facebook banned using the word “message” anywhere in your

feed item copy in order to prevent user confusion regarding whether or not

applications had access to the Facebook Inbox. While it may create a short term

performance boost, your feed items should not be so aggressive that it creates

confusion with Facebook itself – Facebook is likely to ban more words in the future

that could cause this same issue.

2. Be sure you optimize your Feed items for all of the Feed item elements

made available to you by Facebook: title, body, and images.

The Facebook Developers Feed Item documentation describes the requirements

and limitations of each Feed item element as the following:

• The title is required, and is limited to 60 displayed characters (excluding

tags).

o The a tag is allowed, and there can be zero or one instance in the

title.

o One fb:userlink tag is allowed, and the uid parameter must be

populated with the user id on whose behalf the action is being

published. If there is no such fb:userlink tag found, then one is

automatically prepended to the title.

o The fb:name tag is allowed, and there may be multiple instances of

this tag.

o No other tags are allowed.

• The body is optional, is limited to 200 displayed characters (excluding tags),

and can include the tags fb:userlink, fb:name, a, b, and i.

• Up to 4 images can be displayed, which will be shrunk to fit within 75×75,

cached, and formatted by Facebook. Images can either be a URL, or a

facebook PID. If it is a URL, you must own the image and grant Facebook the

permission to cache it. Each image must have a link associated with it, which

must start with http://



As you notice above, both Moods and Feeds use short titles to get your attention

and longer, more descriptive bodies. Moods also includes an image, which is very

attention grabbing.

Be careful, however, to resist the temptation to always max out the images you

include with every feed item just because they’re “essentially free ad space”. This

could make your Feed items seem spammy and adversely affect your Feed item

conversion rate.

3. Include inviting, provocative calls to action that lead the reader to install the

application directly.

Ultimately, the value of the News Feed the application developer is that it’s

powerful, free marketing. The News Feed can be used to convert your users’

friends to do things you want them to do - like install your application. You need to

make this conversion process as quick and easy as possible.

For example, you’ll notice that the Moods application asks the reader, “How are

you feeling?” immediately after the Feed item body. Clicking this link leads to the

Moods application installation page. As a result, the Moods application has

experienced significant growth despite not doing any active marketing.



The Books application prompts the reader to click on the title of the book my

friend just finished reading. However, clicking this link does not lead me to install

the application, but rather through an affiliate link to Amazon, where the Books

developer will earn a commission on anything I purchase.

Recently, Facebook enabled a new way of increasing the selection frequency and

distribution breadth of feed items called Feed Templates. By registering feed

templates in your Developer Settings, your feed items can now be a) lumped together

and shown more often, and b) shown to friends of your app’s users who don’t have the

app installed (previously, only friends who had the app could see your app’s feed

items in their News Feeds).

Updates: News Feed Optimization – Strategies and Techniques

In January 2008, Facebook made a change to the way these “templated” feed

items are distributed to users without the app: if the feed items link to application

pages that require the user to install the app in order to be viewed, Facebook will

lower that feed item’s rank. Apparently, Facebook wants application developers

to give new users more of a “taste” of applications before requiring them to install

the app. Whether this translates into a deeper philosophical shift remains to be

seen, but it could be interpreted as a sign that Facebook wants more applications

(or at least application elements) available to users without requiring installation.

In February 2008, Facebook made another change to the way feed items work to

prevent an often-spammy practice: “passive” feed items. Passive feed items were

those that were published without your explicit action – for example, “Justin was

invited to play Poker” instead of “Justin has been playing poker.” This became a

problem when aggressive developers spammed users’ Mini Feeds even when they

weren’t using the app. It is now deprecated.



Testing, tracking, and optimizing your feed items is definitely a worthwhile

investment for any application developer. You should instrument your feed items as

early as possible.

23. Feeds 2.0

The focal point of the profile redesign is the new Feed tab. For profile owners and

friends, it will be the default tab you see. For profile visitors who aren’t friends, the

Info tab will be shown by default (Facebook says this is because it’s more likely you’ll

want to learn basic information about non-friends, like where they live or go to

college, before you want to learn detailed info about their recent activity).

With the new Feed, there will now be 3 different feed sizes:

• One-Line Stories. This is very similar to what currently exists on the Facebook

profile. In the profile redesign, app developers will still be able to use the API to

publish feed stories to users’ profile pages.

• Short Stories. Short stories will be slightly larger feed stories, that will have

limited FBML. Users can embed images and (soon) Flash.

• Full Stories. These will be up to 700 pixels of free form FBML.

Unlike one-line stories, app developers will not be able to automatically publish short

and full stories via the Facebook API. Instead, users will have to approve them.

Developers can use feed forms to create multiple versions of feed stories that the user

can choose from for publication. When developers want to publish a short or full feed

story, users will be given a popup preview of the story, the choice of size (one line,

short, full), and the button to approve it. This is a major shift from the current

framework of auto-publishing feed stories, but Facebook believes it must give users

more control over their profile in this way in order to keep the Feed from becoming

spammy.

After a story has been published, users can change which version (one line, short, full)

of the feed story is published in their Feed via UI in the feed itself. This means that



app developers can publish one line stories automatically, and users can “make them

bigger” later on. Facebook will encourage developers to create feed stories in all

sizes, so that users can choose which one they like best. Obviously, larger stories are

likely to generate more application click traffic than smaller stories.

In addition to being able to publish stories for app users themselves, developers will

also have the power to let users publish stories into their friends’ feeds (for example,

giving a gift). Once the sender approves the feed story, it will automatically appear in

their friends’ feed. However, recipients will be able to change or remove the story

later on.

Since removing passive feed publishing earlier this year, developers have been unable

to publish feed stories for users not using the app. Now, users will again be able to

share app content with their friends not using the app (currently or at all).

24. Feed Publisher

The new publisher flow (a significant upgrade from Wall attachments) will allow users

to share content from apps both on their own and friends’ profiles. It’s the main place

Facebook wants profile viewers and owners to interact, and this is the change that’s

likely to have the most impact on users.

At the top of everyone’s feed will be a way for you to create content on their feed or

yours. For example, you may want to add a photo or video, write a note, send a gift or

song, draw graffiti, or share links. The interaction will be similar to the way wall

attachments currently work. (Facebook thinks of its Wall as just another application

that integrates into the Feed’s publisher flow.) When you create content, it will look

like a feed story and go directly into the feed. The default feed size will be long for

your own profile, short for your friends’.

When you want to attach content to a feed, you’ll be shown Facebook’s default apps

(like photos and notes), as well as apps that users have recently used to create

content on their feed or otherwise used pretty recently. (In addition, when visiting



others’ profiles, users will be invited to use apps that others have recently used to

create content on their profile.)

Developers will be able to design the publisher interface that users will use to share

content from their apps. For example, users may want to be able to search for songs.

And in addition to the “attach-post” flow, developers will have the opportunity to

create a multi-step wizard interaction (though like profile boxes, they can’t be

iframes, but can be FBML or on-click Flash). Finally, developers will have the option to

display a text comment field (or the app can provide that themselves).

Finally, developers will have option to specify different publisher flows for your own vs

others’ profile if they want. For example, adding a video would be pretty similar, but

it would be weird to send a gift to yourself.

25. Requests / Invitations

One of the most powerful viral channels available to

Facebook Platform application developers is request

(invitations). The requests API allows users of your

application to invite many friends per day to install your

app (the exact limit depends on how much users rate your

invitations as spammy). When maximized, invitations can lead to very quick growth.

However, encouraging your users to invite their friends to install your application is

not as easy as you think. The scenario must be compelling enough for your users to

send invitations on your behalf, and the invitation itself must be compelling

enough for the recipient to convert. These examples show two different invitation

requests, each of which is compelling for different users.



Updates: Facebook Reigns in Invitation Flood

In February 2008, Facebook made two changes to invitations that affect

developers:

1) “Clear all invitations” button. For users with dozens of unwanted

invitations, it became difficult to clear them all. Thus, Facebook added a

“clear all” button that removes all unanswered invitations.

2) No more infinite invitation loops. Some developers were employing a very

aggressive practice of requiring users to invite friends before being able to

access promised functionality. Facebook cracked down on this practice –

which created a very poor user experience – by punishing developers who



did it by turning off their ability to send invitations until that behavior was

stopped.

3) Variable invitation limits. Until February 2008, applications were limited to

sending 20 invitations per day, no matter what. In March, Facebook

imposed variable limits that depend on how much users accept your

invitations and rate your application as spammy. Most apps are seeing

allocation limits of 8-12 per day – a significant decrease. In May 2008,

Facebook made these limits even more sensitive to user feedback, making

it harder for spammy app developers to keep growing and rewarding

developers with good user feedback ratings with more opportunity for

growth. To see what your current limit is, go the Developer Insights page

for your app.

All in all, while these changes are apparently negative for the developer

community, they will protect the Facebook Platform user experience in the long

run, and are ultimately good for developers building quality applications.

In February 2008, Facebook added the ability for users to select Friend Lists in the

multi-friend-selector box. This could be an interesting new way for your app users to

choose request recipients. (i.e. Business related applications might spread more

quickly if many users have work-related friend lists and this change allows batch

selection.) Friend Lists were made more prominent in the Facebook user experience

with the launch of Friend List-based privacy controls in March 2008.

26. Facebook Notifications

Notifications get less press than feed items and invitations because they’re not as

effective at spreading your app. Because Facebook mysteriously assigns your apps a

spamminess rating based on the number of notifications your apps send out, many

developers choose to use notifications sparingly to prevent having their notification



channel shut down by Facebook. However, notifications have been proven to be an

effective tool for retaining existing users of your app.

Like the new dynamic invitation limits Facebook instituted for invitations, notification

limits are now dynamic, depending on user response. If your notifications are too

spammy, Facebook will decrease the limit on how many you can send.

Update: Facebook Wants More Synchronous Notifications

With the full launch of Facebook Chat in April 2008, Facebook users were

introduced to a new interface for receiving notifications. While notifications used

to be presented in a kind of restricted “inbox,” now notifications are accessible via

a red flag in the chat bar which pops open a notification “bubble.”

Shining more light on Facebook’s thinking behind this change, Facebook said,

“Whether it’s to announce the giving of a gift, the challenging to a game, or the

joining of a cause, your applications’ notifications will make a more instant

impact. We encourage you to think about new ways to integrate with Facebook

when you send notifications.”

Facebook’s intent with Chat, and Notifications going forward, is to encourage a

more synchronous communication experience for users. Why? Facebook’s average

session length is likely very short (lots of “Log in - Check News Feed - Check

messages - Leave” types of paths in their server logs), and synchronous

communication sessions (i.e. games) are much longer than asynchronous ones.

Facebook needs apps to help make sessions longer.



27. Email Notifications

Email notifications are just like Facebook Notifications, except they are delivered

directly to your users’ email address INSTEAD of to their Facebook Notifications inbox.

While originally scheduled to be deprecated by Facebook, Facebook recently enabled

a new API method for email notifications that allows developers to send users up to 5

email notifications per day.

Updates: Emails Reinstated as Core Application Marketing Channel

In March 2008, Facebook turned on new application email allocation limits as part

of the Platform team’s continuing efforts to build a comprehensive Application

Reputation System that controls access to Facebook’s viral marketing channels

according to user feedback.

The new email allocations limit the number of emails that applications are allowed

to send per user per day. Like request and notification limits, applications are

assigned a bucket rating. For email limits, buckets are assigned based on user

disable rates.

In addition, Facebook added a new app “allocation” that changes the location of

the disable link within emails. For applications with low disable rates, the disable

links will appear at the bottom of emails; for apps with high disable rates, the

disable links will remain at the top.

Taking into account the effect that putting the email disable link at the top of the

email has on email disable rates, Facebook Platform’s Tom Whitnah writes,

Since having the link at the top generally increases the rate that users click on it,

clicks from the bottom of an email will be weighted differently than clicks at the

top, so that scores will be based on the quality of the communication, not the



location of the message. We will also take into account fluctuations in the amount

of email sent, so your email limit will not decrease if you start sending less email

overall.

This is a good move for the Platform, since only a few developers were abusing the

email disable link location, and putting the disable link at the top leads to many

users inadvertently disabling their application emails - a bad experience for all.

28. Application Directory

Although hard to find, a surprising number of application installations come directly

from the Application Directory. When submitting your application for inclusion in the

directory, be sure to create compelling art and copy for the listing, as well as your

application’s About page. Doing this up front will create a meaningful difference in

the number of users that add your application from the directory in the long run!



29. JavaScript API

In January 2008, Facebook announced a JavaScript Client Library that allows Platform

applications to run on any website, not just Facebook.com.

This is indeed an interesting and perhaps very powerful development in the

evolution of the Facebook Platform that will enable new classes of Facebook

applications and websites. Additionally, web developers will now be able to more



naturally take advantage of the value provided by Facebook’s “viral channels” by

integrating features that just “work better” on Facebook into their existing websites.

However, the main constraint on developers using the Facebook JavaScript APIs is

that, of course, you must go through Facebook to talk to the user. All JavaScript apps

still require Facebook login.

I would like to see any examples of web apps taking advantage of the Facebook

JavaScript Client Library - if you’ve built one, please let me know.

30. Coming Soon: Translations

In February 2008, Facebook launched a Spanish language website. This marked the

first major step Facebook has taken to internationalize and grow its user base in

Europe, Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Shortly thereafter, Facebook

launched in German, French, Norwegian, and Japanese. There are translation projects

currently going on in Français, Deutsch, Español, Català, Čeština, Dansk, Euskara,

Galego, Italiano, 한국어, Magyar, Norsk, 日本語, Nederlands, Polski, Português do

Brasil, Română, Русский, Slovenščina, Suomi, Svenska, ��, Türkçe, 中文(简体,

and 中文(繁體.

At the same time, Facebook said that it intends to help application developers

internationalize their apps for users in different locale settings by making available

some of the same tools Facebook has employed to translate its own site.

While this has not happened yet, clearly Facebook is signaling to the developer

community that helping apps through the extremely difficult process of



internationalization is a top priority. (Though of course, there is no way Facebook can

solve all the technical challenges associated with building localization support.)

I think there is a major opportunity for application developers to piggy back on

Facebook’s international growth. Facebook is starting its Translations effort in

Spanish, French, and German. Where will they go from there? Here’s a breakdown of

where Facebook users live, by country, as of February 2008:

Canada 8,724,260

United Kingdom 8,680,900

Turkey 2,848,020

Australia 2,347,200

France 1,279,920

Sweden 1,095,440

Norway 1,067,540

Colombia 777,960

South Africa 732,660

Mexico 648,360

Egypt 612,720

India 540,820

Germany 481,880

Finland 429,840

Israel 427,940

Singapore 421,240

Denmark 409,800

Spain 333,040

New Zealand 312,280

Malaysia 296,700

United Arab Emirates 286,820

Belgium 258,340

Lebanon 252,060

Italy 239,560

Ireland 228,900

Switzerland 221,100

Saudi Arabia 202,020

Greece 184,300

Netherlands 181,700

Pakistan 179,600

China 170,620

Jordan 150,220

Japan 142,180

Venezuela 137,100

Thailand 115,600

Philippines 112,340

Indonesia 111,620

Chile 106,960

Panama 105,620

Argentina 96,620

Austria 81,860

Korea, Republic of 75,860

Kuwait 69,980

Peru 68,200

Russian Federation 64,160

Dominican Republic 53,020



Developers who take advantage of emerging and quickly growing markets – such as

many of those listed above in Europe and Asia – have a lot of room to run. Most

American developers don’t understand many of these markets, and will be too focused

on running their core businesses in the US to focus their efforts abroad.

31. Coming Soon: Facebook Connect

In May 2008, Facebook announced Facebook Connect, a comprehensive set of Platform

services designed to let users take their Facebook identity, friends, and privacy

anywhere on the web.

The idea behind Facebook Connect is a big one. As owners of a very large and

relatively authentic part of the social graph, Facebook wants to allow users to share

the identity, privacy settings, and friend lists that they have established on Facebook

to application providers around the web. Historically, most social apps have attempted

to build their own social graph (i.e. many failed social networks) or have punted on

the idea of identity altogether (i.e. blog comments). With Facebook Connect, users

can trust that their privacy will not be violated when they share their Facebook

identity and friends with other sites.

Facebook Connect has 4 main features:

• Trusted Authentication. Facebook users will be in total control of permissions

granted (though the identity crowd will note that it’s a proprietary

authentication system).

• Real Identity. Users can bring their real identity with them wherever they go on

the web, including basic profile information, profile picture, name, friends,

photos, events, groups, and more.

• Friends Access. Users will be able to take their friends with them wherever they

go on the web. This will allow developers to create an entirely new class of

applications leveraging much deeper social context.



• Dynamic Privacy. Users’ Facebook privacy settings will follow them around the

open web. For example, if you change a profile picture or change a setting, this

will automatically be updated in Facebook Connect partner websites.

With Facebook Connect, Facebook hopes to take the Facebook Platform to a much

deeper level around the open web. I think there is substantial opportunity for

developers to integrate Facebook Connect support into their existing social web apps,

and to consider creating new apps to take advantage of the deeper social context that

is now possible.

32. Analytics Tools

Any web marketer will tell you that measuring and analyzing user behavior and

conversions is vital to the constant improvement of any marketing campaign. While

Google and others have spent lots of time and energy building analytics infrastructure

services for the general web, specialized analytics services for the Facebook Platform

are still in their infancy.

Because of the nature of social network application development, app analytics is

inherently a fragmented problem: because only part of users’ interaction with your

software occurs in places that you can measure, application developers must depend

on the platform for visibility into channels the platform owns (on Facebook, this

means the News Feed, invitations, notifications, and others).

Although it did not provide developers with very much information at all for the first

few months of the Platform’s launch, Facebook has been slowly but steadily adding

more metrics to the Developer dashboard, including total invitation and notification

conversion rates recently (though they still don’t provide News Feed impression stats).

The rest is left to the developer.

Most developers will want to build their own analytics systems that gather user

behavior data. From there, the specific tables and reports you build and KPIs you

optimize for depend on your particular marketing and business strategy.



However, an increasing number of third party tools are aiming to help developers

understand what their users are doing:

• Developer Analytics is a new service created by recent Berkeley and UPenn grads

Charles Yong, Richard Chen, and Jing Chen that tracks top applications and

provides predictive demographics and application overlap/affinity information in

the “Advanced Statistics” of each application’s stats page. Watch for new more

robust services coming from Developer Analytics in the near future.

• Sometrics is a new service started by Ian Swanson, Matt Gray, and Joe Hsieh in

Los Angeles. Sometrics provides app developers with a light tracking code that

records traffic, demographic, and conversion data, and appears to be the first

firm to track traditional web analytics and social-network-specific metrics.

33. Search Engine Optimization

While most developers think about optimizing their Facebook viral channels, most

don’t think about SEO as an important user acquisition strategy in the same way that

most webmasters traditionally do.

To help app developers increase their prominence in search engine results pages

(SERPs), Facebook recently enabled developers to serve XML sitemaps off the

apps.facebook.com. Sitemaps are used by webmasters to notify search engines of

updates to pages and page structure, and generally are a worthwhile exercise in any

SEO strategy. Since apps are served from apps.facebook.com, developers get to ride

on the back of Facebook’s PageRank - potentially a big leg up on regular web apps.

Obviously, applications that serve pages without requiring logins have the most to gain

from SEO, since Google’s crawlers don’t login to Facebook and install apps.



Poll: Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

When the Facebook Platform launched in May 2007, it included access to a number of

Facebook’s powerful communication channels right from the start (unlike some other

platforms that have launched since). Access to these channels - profile boxes,

invitations, notifications, and feed items - allowed applications to spread quite

quickly. However, due to user experience complaints, Facebook has been putting in

place limits on how much apps can use these viral channels throughout much of 2008.

While Facebook has not been explicitly clear in explaining what that feedback is, we

ran a Facebook Poll to gain some anecdotal quantitative evidence on what users are

complaining about. While the sample size was very small (only 200 responses), the

results may offer some clues on upcoming Platform changes.

Question:

What do you hate most about Facebook apps?

Answer Choices:

• Too many invitations

• Too many notifications

• Too much clutter on my profile

• Too much clutter in my mini feed

The Results:

• Invitations are still the most annoying thing about apps (especially for women).

• Mini Feed stories are clearly the least annoying thing about apps.

• Profile clutter is still a big problem (especially for older folks).

Assuming Facebook is seeing roughly the same data in its user experience testing,

what are some possible conclusions for the Platform?

• Facebook will likely update the rules on invitations again. Per-user limits or



stricter per-app limits are possible changes.

• Given that the new profile page is about to become dominated by the

Feed/Wall, apps will be increasingly given more functionality here.

• Facebook is also solving the profile clutter problem with the new profile page

design. Only 3-5 apps will have a box on the default tab. The rest will be

migrated to the new “Boxes” tab (name still TBD).

Poll Data:



Recommended Strategies for Application

Developers

Achieving viral distribution of your application on Facebook is all about taking full

advantage of all the viral channels Facebook makes available:

1) Invitations – make sure your apps give users natural and compelling ways to

invite their friends to add the app. Applications that prompt users to invite

their friends as part of the first time experience have historically grown

quite quickly.

2) Feed Items – every time your user performs a significant action in your

application, invoke a feed item on their behalf. Feed items are extremely

valuable from both an acquisition and retention perspective.



3) Notifications – notifications are like mini-email-newsletters, so think of

them as vehicles for increasing engagement. However, be careful not to be

too spammy, or Facebook will shut you down without telling you why.

Ultimately, the goal of any application is to get its viral factor above 1. Take

advantage of every opportunity to optimize your application’s virality:

Viral Factor = conversion rate * engagement rate * invitation rate

• Conversion rate = the percent of invited users who add the app. Maximize

this by iterating on your invitation copy.

• Engagement rate = the percent of users who use the app. Maximize this by

designing compelling features and making thorough use of feed items and

notifications.

• Invitation rate = the number of invitations sent per user. Maximize this by

designing features that encourage your users to invite their friends.

Finally, think about each of the profile integration points deeply. The profile box,

the main profile area, the tab, the publisher, and the application info section are

all powerful and vital channels for the success of your application. For many

developers, they’re also the primary source of viral growth.



Conclusion

Never before has a social platform emerged that combines the authenticity of

Facebook’s culture with the raw power of Facebook’s multitude of viral channels to

offer such an unprecedented marketing opportunity.

While some remain pessimistic about the potential of social networks to become viable

direct marketing channels, I believe that direct marketers who craft intelligent

strategies for the Facebook environment–which will require much more creativity than

SEM campaigns–will find success. At the same time, Facebook offers brand marketers

entirely new paradigms for designing immersive and persuasive brand experiences.

At the same time, we are still early in the game, and we have a lot left to learn. Only

when marketers learn how to capture new kinds of value available for the first time

ever inside Facebook will the markets realize just how valuable Facebook is.

♦

Date post:	19-Oct-2014
Category:	Technology
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