Facebook is No. 1 most downloaded iPhone app of all time – Celebrating 50 billion total downloads across the App Store this week, Apple released new all-time most downloaded apps with Facebook at No. 1 of the free iPhone downloads list. Instagram is No. 3 and Messenger is No. 16. Compared to Facebook’s three, Google has four apps in the top 25: YouTube, Google, Google Earth and Google Maps.

Among free iPad downloads, Facebook is No. 6, with Skype at No. 1.

Facebook courts media with new portal – Facebook has launched a new section of its developer site to focus on how media and journalists can best use the platform for distribution. It gives an overview of possible website integrations, such as the Like button, Facebook Comments and Open Graph optimization. It also offers best practices for managing Facebook pages, along with related research reports and case studies. Slate, for example, doubled its referral traffic from Facebook between the second quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013 by adding a new share button to its stories, optimizing its Open Graph tags and focusing on its page strategy.

Microsoft to redesign Facebook for Windows Phone – Microsoft announced this week that it would open the Windows Phone Beta app program to give users an opportunity to test the latest redesign of its Facebook app. Unlike Facebook for iOS and Android, which are developed internally by Facebook, the app for Windows Phone is created by Microsoft. The beta app will get Timeline,  the share button and more high resolution photos.

Facebook looks to expand Dublin operation with new office – Facebook has agreed to rent office space with room for at least 800 people in a building in Grand Canal Square in Dublin, according to Independent.ie. The company recently said it would be adding 100 employees to its Dublin headquarters, which is currently around 400 people. The new office would give the company room to grow. The Daniel Libeskind building where the new office will be is in an area sometimes referred to as Dublin’s ”Silicon Square Mile.” Google has an office nearby.      

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today announced a deal with Rovi Corporation to use Rovi Video, a database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities that can be used to improve search and discovery across its platform.

Rovi’s data helps power experiences like on-screen TV guides, iTunes, Flixter, BestBuy.com and many others. Facebook has been building out its “entity graph,” which are all the people, places and things that are represented with pages. Users primarily connect to these objects by Liking them, but now Facebook is making a push for users to do so through actions like “watch/want to watch,” “read/want to read” or “listen/want to listen.” Improving the metadata associated with these objects could give Facebook new opportunities when it comes to search, News Feed relevance, recommendations and offering new features for developers

Before the Rovi deal, Facebook used Wikipedia and Freebase to populate information about movies, TV shows and other entities, for example for the module on the “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” page below. However, those sources are community-curated and not necessarily as reliable as what Rovi provides for many of the largest companies in the world.

Facebook is clearly setting itself up to be a greater player in the entertainment space. The company recently made movies, books, TV shows and music a larger part of users’ Timelines and About pages and introduced structured status updates for people to share what they’re watching, reading or listening to, among other activities.

“We see the social interaction with movies, TV shows and video entertainment growing immensely over the next couple of years,” Facebook said in a press release. “With this in mind, we’ve sought Rovi as a valuable source for TV and movie information to help provide the backdrop that we need to enable developers to create a connected experience for consumers in their apps and services.”

With Rovi data, Facebook and third-party developers could start creating more social TV applications and other entertainment discovery experiences. In the past, Zuckerberg and other Facebook employees have described a vision where a user can turn on their TV and instead of viewing a typical schedule or flipping through channels, they could see what their friends Like or have watched. In 2011, Facebook Director of Platform Partnerships EMEA Christian Hernandez Gallardo talked about an idea that would let users indicate they wanted to watch a TV episode, invite their friends, get reminded, and then alert their friends when they’re watching. There’s a lot that Facebook or developers could ultimately offer once a foundation of data is in place.

For its part, Rovi will be able to gain a more comprehensive list of Facebook page IDs, which it can associate with Rovi IDs so customers can include links to the movie or TV shows’ Facebook pages.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

A popular storyline lately is that Facebook is failing to capture interest from teens who are turning to Instagram, Snapchat or other services instead.

The conclusion pundits are making — from primarily anecdotal evidence, it should be noted — is that Facebook is on the decline because it is losing a source of new users. What these reports fail to acknowledge is that teens grow up.

Facebook is very likely looking for ways to engage younger users more, and it recognizes that new tech or new attitudes could prevent the social network from gaining hold among the next generation. The company and investors are right to have concerns, but it is also important to recognize that how teens feel about Facebook now is not necessarily how they’ll feel about it when they reach they’re older.

For the college students who were first on Facebook, the service was about connecting with all the new people they were meeting on campus and for keeping close to the childhood friends they just left. For the older users who joined later, it was about finding people from their past. For many users now, Facebook helps them stay in touch with a range of people from different times in their life.

Middle schoolers and high schoolers don’t have these same needs. They spend at least six hours a day with most of their social network. They don’t need News Feed to know what their friends are up to.

Instead, they’re looking for more real-time communication tools to continue the one-to-one and small group conversations they’d been having at school. Text messages and Snapchats fill this need. Teens are also looking for safe spaces for self expression as they start to explore their own identity. Facebook with its feeling of permanence from Timeline and Graph Search, plus the fact that parents and teachers are also on the service, is not the ideal channel for this. That’s why Instagram and Tumblr are so popular with teens. They aren’t tied back to a profile with your real name and everyone you know. They’re places for experimentation and reinvention, in a way that LiveJournal, MySpace or chat rooms might have been for people who are adults now but grew up with the Internet. Most teens just want to be cool, and Facebook hasn’t made being cool a priority as it went after its first billion users.

However, when today’s teens go to college, they may find Facebook just as valuable as the millions of students who first made the site a sensation years ago. Email has never been popular among young people, but when they enter the workforce, it often becomes a necessity. The same could be true for Facebook as teens grow up.

When people get older, they have more people to stay in touch with but less time for one-to-one communications. They also get more comfortable with themselves and find things that are important to their identity that they’re willing to share more widely. News Feed and Timeline suddenly have more appeal.

Of course, it’s possible for another service besides Facebook to fill this need and catch on among the next generation, but to write off Facebook just because of how teens use it today is shortsighted. The Napster generation was never expected to pay for music in the future, but now that they’re adults with disposable income and streaming platforms like Rdio and Spotify exist, they’re increasingly buying monthly subscriptions.

Facebook might find ways to engage teens now by improving Messenger, owning Instagram and building alternatives to other popular new services like Tumblr and Snapchat. But what might be most important is building a positive brand image and staying top of mind among teens so that they turn to the social network more when they need it in the future.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook began testing new designs for its mobile app install ads and page post ads in its iOS app this weekend.

Following an update for Facebook for iOS, some users began to notice that the ads got a bit of a refresh. Page post ads have a new Like button in the corner, potentially making them more effective for fan generation, not just engagement and content marketing. Late last year Facebook changed the way page post ads appear to non-fans so that instead of a call to action to Like the page, the ads promoted interaction on the post itself. Now, these ads do both.

Mobile app install ads have been redesigned to include a “suggested app” label and a profile picture. Previously, app install ads had a banner image only, and this was at the top of the ad, not underneath the ad copy like it is now.

Facebook often tests a number of variations for ads and News Feed stories to determine the best designs for different outcomes. Advertisers aren’t always able to see how their ads look to other users so we try to track these changes for them.

On the company’s fourth quarter earnings call last month, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he expected to have to spend a lot more time tinkering with ads in the feed to avoid hurting user experience, but instead Facebook has been able to increase the number of these ads without significantly hurting engagement levels. The addition of advertising in the feed has led to a 1 to 2 percent reduction in Likes and comments, which is less than expected and Zuckeberg says he feels “very confident” about the direction of advertising on the social network.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook is partnering with data vendors like Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon to allow advertisers to match data from consumer loyalty programs with user profiles in order to target ads by offline purchase habits, according to Ad Age.

The social network did not confirm the report or offer any comment, but Ad Age cited an OMD social media director who has been involved in beta tests. The news is also in line with what we have heard from sources familiar with Facebook’s advertising plans, who told us that Facebook would soon introduce new targeting options based on data from outside of the social network.

Last year Facebook began working with Datalogix to measure how Facebook ads affect in-store sales. Datalogix has information from loyalty cards and programs at more than 1,000 retailers. Facebook can then match email addresses or other information associated with those memberships with the email addresses or information associated with users’ Facebook accounts. All emails and personally identifiable information is anonymized, but the companies can compare the differences in sales among groups who saw certain Facebook ads versus those who didn’t. It makes sense that Facebook could also use the matches to create groups for ad targeting.

Many media companies, including DSPs, DMPs, agency trading desks, ad networks and exchanges, already partner with Datalogix and similar companies to target users by offline purchases in a privacy safe way. Most consumers are unaware that this goes on, but when Facebook moves into this area it is likely to face much more scrutiny. Not only is Facebook under a greater microscope, but users feel a personal connection to the service and often worry about who has access to their information and how it could be used. On the other hand, most people don’t think about browser cookies often, and they likely haven’t heard of companies like BlueKai or AppNexus, which already help advertisers target them by their online and offline behavior. Facebook will have to take extra precautions to prevent users from feeling exploited.

The social network has evolved its position on ad targeting in the past year. Instead of having advertisers target their ads only based on information users have added to their profiles, it now allows targeting by first-party data like CRM lists through Custom Audiences and cookies through Facebook Exchange. Now it seems to be letting in third-party data from vendors like Datalogix.

This trend was foreshadowed by a job listing Facebook added to its careers page in August 2012. The job description for a Product Marketing Manager, Monetization says, “Facebook is seeking an expert in data management platforms. This role will develop our plans and vision for how we can enable businesses to better reach their customers and prospects on Facebook.”

Data management platforms help advertisers organize their first party data (web analytics, CRM), second party data (from strategic partners that can match CRM records or cookies) and third party data (such as from Acxiom or Datalogix) to improve their advertising efforts. As we wrote about previously, Facebook is uniquely positioned in each of these areas, and because it can match data to a unique user profile, it has an advantage over systems, which tend to rely on cookie matching. And with Facebook, advertisers can combine demographic, interest and other targeting to ensure they’re reaching the most relevant audience.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook event pages now have the option for admins to add custom cover photos. These banner photos replace the small thumbnail photos that event pages had previously.

The change, which was first written about by AllFacebook, brings the design of event pages more in line with business pages, profiles and groups. It also gives event promoters more options for getting people interested in their events through an eye-catching photo or an image that shares more information about the event.

Cover photos are available for events created by individuals or by pages. When a user creates an event, they will see a blank space above their event with a button to add a photo. They can upload a new photo or select one they’ve previously posted to the social network. They can move an image up or down to reposition it, but they can not adjust the size through Facebook.

Unlike personal profiles and fan pages, events only have the option for one large photo, not a cover photo and a profile picture. The cover photo will be scaled down to thumbnail size when the event appears in News Feed, on Timeline or in ads.

It is unclear whether these images will have to adhere to Facebook’s page guidelines, which dictate that covers may not include more than 20 percent text, price or purchase information, contact information, references to Facebook features or calls to action. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today revealed that bugs in its page insights product led reach and impressions to be misreported for months. Fixes are being rolled out today and over the weekend, the company says.

Facebook says the bugs only affected reporting, not delivery, so page reach wasn’t actually reduced, it may have just appeared that way from insights data. This was limited to page insights and did not have an impact on ad insights.

The social network says pages will be affected differently depending on their fan based and when and how frequently they post, but overall it expects most pages to see an increase in reach or no change. Pages that ran News Feed ads are likely to see an increase in paid reach. It’s possible some pages could see an increase or decrease in organic reach.

TechCrunch, which got details about the bugs, says one issue was the result of Facebook’s new mobile apps. In speeding up its native apps, the social network accidentally stopped counting how many people saw a page’s posts. A separate bug caused desktop News Feed ads to be counted as both organic and paid impressions.

Engagement rate and virality, which are metrics that are computed from reach and impressions, could also be affected.

Facebook says it will not be able to backfill page insights with accurate historical data. Instead, pages will have to look at their performance moving forward to estimate the impact, if any, on their pages previously. Facebook advises page owners to track their organic, paid and viral reach, as well as impressions for their page and posts over the next few weeks, beginning Monday.

Facebook discovered the bugs as part of an engineering audit of page insights. The company says it has put “a number of additional quality and verification measures” in place to avoid issues like this in the future.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Ads on the Facebook Exchange have lower costs per click and costs per impression, but web retargeting has lower costs per unique and better clickthrough rates, a recent AdRoll study has found.

AdRoll also found that there was little overlap in audiences reached with FBX and web retargeting, indicating that advertisers should employ both to maximize their retargeting efforts.

AdRoll looked at 468 advertisers who ran campaigns on standard display and FBX in the last six months of 2012. On average, FBX offered 82 percent lower CPMs and 70 percent lower CPCs than web retargeting. However, cost per unique was 86 percent higher than elsewhere on the web, and clickthrough rates averaged 40 percent lower. Web display ads are much larger than Facebook ads, and they often include rich media, whereas Facebook ads are static and mostly text.

AdRoll found that only 8.3 percent of uniques — or 10.75 million out of 130 million — were reached by both FBX and web retargeting. This suggests that advertisers should be running campaigns through both in order to reach a more complete audience.

In a blog post on the topic, AdRoll wrote:

“Our research showed that both web retargeting and Facebook Exchange have their strengths and are incremental to one another. We found that by leveraging both platforms for retargeting campaigns, advertisers can maximize their return on investment. To do otherwise would be leaving money on the table!”

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Some Facebook users are seeing prompts in News Feed to Like pages related to the URLs their friends share, according to Lost Press Marketing.

For example, if a user Likes a post from a friend who shared a link to the New York Times, Facebook might prompt the user to Like the New York Times page directly from the post. Facebook is testing language like “Want to see more from [this publisher]?” and “Keep up with [this publisher].”

The feature seems aimed at getting users to discover more relevant content in their feeds, while also building connections that will improve ad targeting, Graph Search and other personalized aspects of Facebook. Publishers could benefit from the free promotion, though they might not be able to track which Likes are coming from the new prompt.

Facebook has been making pushes across the board to get users to Like more pages. For example, last month Facebook began recommending similar pages after a user clicks the Like button on a page’s Timeline. Last year the social network tried a number of ways of promoting its pages discovery browser, for example, including a link along with Page-Like Sponsored Stories, suggesting that users visit it after they hide an ad, and adding it to the bookmarks bar on the left-hand side of the site.

Facebook has not provided any additional information about the new page-Like prompt. It’s unclear whether it applies only to media outlets or if brand pages will be promoted when users share links to their sites.

Image via Lost Press Marketing

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook is trying a new design for ads in the desktop News Feed, grouping ads for three different pages into one horizontal “Pages You Might Like” unit.

The new format, which began rolling out over the weekend, helps Facebook fit more ads in the feed without taking up much space. The three-in-one unit is similar to what Facebook has been doing in the mobile feed since August 2012. Now the ads in the mobile module will appear on desktop simultaneously. The ads here are mostly Sponsored Stories, which mean a user has a friend connected to the page, but non-social ads seem to occasionally appear in the unit as well.

To increase revenue, Facebook needs to move more of its ad inventory from the desktop sidebar to the feed. Feed-based ads have higher clickthroughs and generate more revenue per impression. The social network can put a lot more ads in the sidebar, but these are not as effective for advertisers and they don’t translate to mobile. However, ads in the feed can be more interruptive for users, and the balance for Facebook is a delicate one. Creating ad types that are useful and even enjoyable is going to be necessary as more paid content is being slipped between the posts from people and pages that users want to see.

Facebook also began testing a “Games your friends are playing” module in the desktop feed this weekend. The design is similar to “Pages You Might Like” but the example we saw did not include any paid suggestions. We have not heard back from Facebook whether this module will include ads.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook