Facebook recently introduced something that has been a staple of social media for years — hashtags. However, hashtags on Facebook feel somewhat incomplete. Facebook only rolled out hashtags on Wednesday to a portion of its users, leaving brands unable to take full advantage of this new feature, as many users were bewildered.

While Facebook’s younger and power users, who are also on Twitter and Instagram (where hashtags are the norm), may have understood, it confused others who aren’t on those other social channels.

So why did Facebook introduce support for hashtags, which are now searchable and clickable for some users? As other sites have speculated, Facebook (empowered by its acquisition of Storylane) could possibly announce on June 20 a revamp of notes or some other kind of blogging service that would serve as a Tumblr competitor. While this is not to say that Facebook will unveil such a product, it could happen in the future. Someday, users might be able to sort through posts and notes searchable by hashtags.

A Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook why hashtags were first rolled out to only a portion of users:

In regards to the rollout, we are starting small and hope to reach all users in the next couple of weeks.

While it was frustrating for many users who heard about the hashtags and assumed they’d be able to use them immediately, it’s understandable that the rollout process followed pretty much everything else Facebook has done in the past. Facebook traditionally introduces a new product to a portion of its userbase, examines how they use the product, and then continues rolling it out to a larger audience.

Could the rollout of hashtags signal that Facebook may be working on a way to see what friends are posting about by topic? One of the must frustrating things about Graph Search now is that users can’t find what friends are talking about. Hashtags could be the first way to solve this, but Facebook hasn’t released this capability publicly.

Something Facebook could announce on June 20 is a strengthening of its blogging service, to become a quasi-competitor with Tumblr. Facebook isn’t afraid to emulate other platforms, though the track record for doing so is hit or miss. When Facebook came out with the Poke app for iPhone users, it was basically a way to fire back at Snapchat — the texting app where messages dissolve in seconds. Facebook was betting that the ability to connect with Facebook friends through Poke would make it popular.

The acquisition of Storylane shows that Facebook does want to be a place where users write about what’s on their minds, and in more than just the status update box. By utilizing hashtags, it would further connect users to the things they want to read about — namely, what their friends are posting about. Right now, the hashtag search function is rather weak. You can see posts from friends at the top, but then it’s just a most recent list of posts from all over the Facebook ecosystem.

Even in the announcement of hashtags, Facebook called it a “first step,” showing that there is likely more to come:

Hashtags are just the first step to help people more easily discover what others are saying about a specific topic and participate in public conversations. We’ll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world’s conversations.

By rolling out a stronger and more prominent version of Facebook Notes, it would allow users to add tags to entries, much like on WordPress and Tumblr. Then, users could easily bounce between posts their friends have written (or discover new public entries). Other than clicking on a user’s Timeline, scrolling utilizing the browser search feature, there’s not really a great way to index posts around a certain topic.

If Facebook goes in this direction, it could certainly be powerful, not only from a user standpoint, but from a marketing standpoint. Advertisers could further target ads to people who have posted about certain topics, making ads more relevant for users.

While Facebook is very tight-lipped about releases, word usually does leak somewhere. Even if Facebook does not announce some kind of hashtagged blogging service on Thursday, it could be something the site adds later on.

As various Facebook execs have discussed, the company wants the social network to be a place where someone’s true self shines through. What better way to do that than through blogs?

Hashtag image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook’s gotten into trouble over the years for auto-sharing e-commerce activity. Determined to avoid another Beacon fiasco or scare people away from Offers they don’t want to tell friends about, Facebook now lets you choose to privately claim an offer rather than automatically share the news to friends. Facebook tells me Offers, which let brands post coupons, is getting other new features, too.

Facebook first debuted its Offers product in late 2011 as a replacement for Check-In Deals. Originally, businesses could buy ads or publish Page posts of coupons that you could ask to be emailed. Those emails could be printed out and brought to retail stores for discounts and gifts. Eventually Facebook introduced e-commerce offers that could be redeemed online with a code. Facebook said on its Q4 2012 earnings call that 42 million users have claimed Offers and 100,000 businesses have used the product.

More recently as spotted by Inside Facebook, the social network has been testing Offers with larger photos, a “remind me” option, and the ability for businesses to send you a reminder to redeem your claimed offer. Now those features are getting an official launch, and more iOS and mobile users will start seeing coupon posts in their news feeds.

Along with bigger images that should entice clicks, you will now see “Shop Now” and “Remind Me” buttons on Offers. Respectively, these direct you to a third-party website where you can redeem your Offer, or let you get details in an email for redemption in the future. All your claimed, redeemed, and expired Offers are now recorded in your private Offers section of Facebook. To make sure you don’t forget about Offers you claimed, businesses now have the option to send you a single Facebook notification linking you back to that Offer.

Most importantly, though, claiming an Offer doesn’t automatically trigger a news feed story shown to friends any more. Previously as soon as you clicked to claim an Offer, your friends would know about it. Now after you click Shop Now or Remind Me, you’ll have a button that lets you share the news of your claim. If you don’t opt in, friends won’t hear about it

That’s useful because maybe you don’t want people to know you’re keen on some discount fast food, or that you’re finally getting around to taking that Rosetta Stone course on Spanish. While viral activity stemming from Offer-claiming is one of the free product’s big selling points to businesses, it clearly pushed users’ privacy limits just a bit too far. If Facebook wants to become a serious player in e-commerce, it has to take advantage of its word-of-mouth factory without making people fear their private shopping habits will end up embarrassing them.

[Image Credits: Marvel's The Avengers via J&J, Inside Facebook]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a guest post by Greg Lieber, VP of Business Development at SHIFT, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer that offers a collaboration platform for marketers.

Facebook’s updates to the Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) requirements, which put a large emphasis on paid media, will be a huge benefit to both developers and marketers alike.

These changes reflect the fact that the PMD team is refreshing the important ecosystem it created by reminding marketers that the Paid, Owned, and Earned media paradigm is here to stay on Facebook. The new requirements may seem daunting for PMDs not focused primarily on paid media, but compliance will yield a major benefit by allowing PMDs to concentrate on their core competencies through the pursuit of smart partnerships.

Inside Facebook recently wrote that Facebook will be seeking developers that can advise marketers on ad spend, even if they’re primarily focused on areas like Pages, Apps or Insights. There is no question why Facebook is making this play: Ads-focused PMDs have helped establish the PMD program as one of Facebook’s significant revenue drivers. However, by giving unpaid media developers the option to partner with an ads provider, many PMDs will be able to concentrate their efforts within their own areas of expertise, rather than delve into unchartered territory. Top-notch page management tools will be able to add new features, as will analytics-driven tools, custom integration developers and so on.

Facebook is also looking to PMDs for continued innovation around its various APIs. From a product perspective, each “badge” area of the PMD marketplace is saturated with technologies that sometimes offer strikingly similar capabilities. Ask any agency exec and they’ll likely contend that it has become virtually impossible to differentiate between some PMD offerings — and they are right!  In addition to demonstrating “clear proprietary value above and beyond Facebook’s native tools,” the PMD team has set higher standards for both current PMDs and new applicants with respect to quality and time. Satisfying these requirements will bring out the best in PMDs’ products, and as a result, help marketers.

Clearly the most impactful of the updates is that all PMDs will now need to either build ad tech to support their unpaid media technology or partner with an ads provider to boost content. PMDs that aren’t resourced to build an ads product will need to find an open platform with which they can integrate while enabling them to reach new customers via partnership. Integrating apps into an open platform where marketers can collaborate and work with PMDs across all four badged areas will help customers streamline their Paid, Owned, and Earned efforts. These integrations will also create a robust environment where brands, agencies, and publishers can access the best technologies and execute stellar Facebook marketing campaigns.

It is clear that the PMD program is taking steps to preserve its community of best-in-class developers focused on making social marketing easier and more effective. If this community is going to flourish, then let’s work together to do it right.

Greg is Vice President of Business Development at SHIFT, the leading collaboration platform for marketers. Fortune 500 companies such as American Express, Marriott, Verizon and Toyota use SHIFT to execute their marketing initiatives and measure bottom line impact. Founded in 2010, SHIFT is the only open marketing platform with both Twitter Ads API access and the Facebook sPMD classification. SHIFT has offices in Santa Monica, New York, Chicago and Palo Alto. Follow Greg on Twitter.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook launches News Feed filters — first look.

That was a headline on Inside Facebook in 2008, when the social network first enabled users to sort their feed by content type.

Facebook rolling out more prominent design of News Feed filters.

That was in 2010 when Facebook offered filters for status updates, photos, links, pages, games and friend lists in a drop-down menu in the top right of their feed. The following year, filters took a backseat. Some were removed entirely, others buried in the bookmarks bar.

Now, the company is giving filters another chance in its latest News Feed redesign, but few have acknowledged that content-specific feeds are hardly new ground for Facebook. Giving users the option to view different feeds might be preferred over not giving them this control, but filters have never gotten mass adoption and are an old approach to a problem that needs a new solution.

Facebook VP of Product Chris Cox says users have been asking for these features and he believes they will use them. Cox says Facebook has evolved and there is more content from users, pages and apps than ever before, which makes filtering more important now. That’s understandable, but simply creating more reverse-chronological feeds doesn’t seem like the best way to help users make sense of all the data and content available to them.

There was clearly some reason why the company didn’t think filters were necessary in 2011, after three years of offering them and just before it opened the floodgates to Open Graph apps like Spotify. At that time, it decided to combine “top stories” and “most recent” into a single feed, with a real-time Ticker on the side.

It’s possible that Facebook was wrong to de-emphasize filters in its previous News Feed update and users will be relieved to be able to sort their feed again. But there’s not much to point to this being the case. CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said that refinements to its News Feed algorithm last year increased engagement on the order of 50 percent, suggesting users were more interested in their feed than ever. There also had to be some data that led Facebook to move away from filters in the first place. Keep in mind that Facebook had separate feeds for music, games, pages, links, notes, friend lists and interest lists when it announced the redesign last week, and few people even realized it.

It’s likely that the majority of users just aren’t that interested in filters. That said, the product team might be more successful in getting people to use filters more regularly this time by featuring them more prominently and improving the overall look of the feed with more images and less clutter. But perhaps Facebook needs to try something completely different instead of reverting to features that debuted in 2008.

The actions people take and information they share online have the potential to be tremendously valuable to their friends, but it’s hard to recognize when those stories are presented one after the other in a feed. Facebook is addressing part of this problem with Graph Search, so users can find what they want, when they want it. However, Graph Search requires users to know what they’re looking for, whereas News Feed is great for showing users things they wouldn’t have thought to ask for.

A hybrid of this is something that doesn’t simply show users what’s most recent but helps users discover what is likely to be most relevant to them by compiling activity from different sources and identifying trends or making suggestions. Users can see components of this in the music feed. The sidebar suggests popular songs and upcoming concerts. The feed also includes stories about recently released albums and posts from pages that are similar to ones that users Like.

It’s the music feed that seems most like the future Facebook should be striving toward. Simply showing users a photo-only feed or a pages-only feed isn’t very useful. But if those photos and page posts could be distributed among different feeds for categories like music, movies, news, food or shopping, then users might find more value in filters. Until then, the addition of multiple feeds seems more like an attempt to quell the latest critiques about the social network’s News Feed algorithms than a remarkable new way for users to experience Facebook.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

We’re at We are in New York for the Inside Social Apps conference at the New Yorker Hotel. Inside Facebook Lead Writer Brittany Darwell is moderating a panel consisting of 360i VP of Emerging Media David Berkowitz, Wildfire By GOogle Chief Evangelist Maya Grinberg, Salesforce Marketing Cloud VP Myles Kleeger and Fan Appz Founder and CEO Jon Siegal. The conversation deal with how marketers and brands can generate and engagement and increase awareness and reach among key demographics.

Darwell: A lot has changed since we held ISA in San Francisco earlier this year. What has evolved over this past year and how has it changed what marketers do? Is it better? Worse? More expensive?

Siegal: It’s become increasingly more complicated. There are far more channels. The landscape is very challenging but there’s never been a bigger opportunity to leverage these opportunities. I think the days of just counting likes and retweets are over and we’re looking at them to try and figure out how to make them meaningful.

Darwell: As far as mobile social apps go, what were marketers coming to you to do?

Berkowitz: Before, there was a lot of motivation to create things that were fun and didn’t have huge audiences. But now, we’re taking things that were a little silly and frivlous, but we now take it and figuring out how to have it help business.

Grinberg: I think monetization is a big theme this year and will be next year. As social networks grow and mature and gets its niche marketing message for brands, goals are going to be really important. Our clients are coming to us with more specific goals like selling more tickets, so having goals is a huge evolution for the year.

Darwell: What are the goals and motivations for creating apps?

Siegal: A couple of years ago, people would do throwaway applications, but now they’re focusing on things are really sustainable. You don’t run a website for a month and then stop.

Darwell: Are you seeing changes on the platforms like the types of apps?

Some Facebook users are seeing a “Most Shared On” module in News Feed that highlights popular links from news sources they Like.

The module, which began appearing some time in the past few weeks, is a new way for news pages to get their content seen in the feed.

“We’re introducing new kinds of News Feed stories that make it easier to find content that you might be interested in,” a Facebook spokesperson said in an email. “The ‘Most Shared On’ stories appearing in News Feed show the most frequently shared links from a page you have Liked. E.g. If I have liked Inside Facebook’s page, I may see a News Feed item that lets me know the ‘most shared’ links from Inside Facebook that day.”

Users who Like news outlets on Facebook will see a link in their feed under the “Most Shared On” title, with an option to view more stories. The module does not include captions that the page might have included in its original Facebook post, and in fact, some of the links might be to articles that the page has not already shared in a post. The module considers all content from the domain.

The feature is different from the “Trending Articles” module, which displays activity from Open Graph news reader apps and is not related to Facebook pages that users Like. Also, here Facebook is using an article’s total “share” count, not how many people have “read” it.

For now, only news sources are eligible to have their content displayed this way, but if Facebook decides to expand the feature, this type of aggregation could be useful for some business pages that regularly share links to their site.

Bottom screenshot from Kobi Gamliel via Social Marketers, a private industry group for social marketing professionals.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook has just confirmed with me that it is launching a retweet-style “Share” button for the mobile news feed. The much-requested feature is now rolled out for the mobile site, and will soon come to the iOS and Android apps. Like the web version, it lets people take links and photos posted by someone else or even a Sponsored Story ad and quickly repost it with optional commentary.

Facebook has always been about personal updates, not blindly passing on links, but it could start looking a lot like Twitter soon. Inside Facebook reported the mobile site button was a test, but when I asked Facebook, the company confirmed this is not a test and all mobile site and app users will have it soon.

To try out the Share button, go to m.facebook.com and scroll through the feed until you see a story about a link, photo, video, or public status update posted by one of your friends or Pages you Like. The Share button is in the bottom right next to the Like and Comment buttons. It brings up a composer where you can add an optional description. When shared, the story will show “via [name of who originally posted it]“.

The new mobile Share button shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. It’s one of the most requested features. At at talk in September, when asked about whether a Share button was in the works for mobile, one Facebook mobile manager said “I want to use it. We build products that we want to use.” The team also remarked that there weren’t technical limitations stalling it.

That means Facebook was likely mulling over the impact it would have on the atmosphere of the news feed. Right now, most content shared to Facebook is relatively unique. Occasionally popular articles or memes get shared by lots of friends, but that’s a coincidence. When people do use the Share button on the web, they often give their own description of a link.

But on mobile where typing is more of a pain, a Share button could encourage people to rapidly re-share link after link. That might make the feed seem repetitive and impersonal. Similar to the low-friction, easy-to-tap retweet button on Twitter mobile, Facebook users might Share instead of Liking.

Advertisers and marketers might be A-OK with that. Share buttons also appear on stories with internal links to Facebook Pages. Share could make links posted by Pages a lot more viral on Facebook. Finally, users can also Share ads they see in the news feed that are Sponsored Stories of links.

Facebook is surely monitoring the effect the mobile Share button has to make sure it doesn’t degrade the quality of the feed. One benefit it could have, though: you might start seeing from outside your personal social graph, which could expand your perspective on the world. Like seeing retweets of people you’d never follow, Share could bring dissenting opinions about world news and social issues to your feed.

Oh, and your memes and cat photos are going to go viral like never before.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

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Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Inside Network has a new blog in its lineup of industry-facing publications. We’re pleased to introduce Inside Social Commerce, our site tracking the convergence of social media and e-commerce.

As our readers know, Inside Network — home of AppData, PageData and Inside Network Research — is dedicated to mapping the intersections between social media and various verticals. Our existing blogs Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps have all faithfully covered the branching ecosystems of social, game and mobile applications. Inside Social Commerce adds to the diagram by examining apps and pages that drive e-commerce on a variety of platforms.

The concept of social commerce is hardly new; advertisers and product marketers have long understood the need to generate social activity around a product to create purchase intent and enduring appeal. With the rise of Facebook and smartphone applications, marketing and sales practices have evolved significantly beyond direct mailing campaigns and jingles in TV commercials. Now we have consumer product companies building and launching apps to drive audience engagement, micro-social networks emerging around specific demographics of consumer and increasing marketing dollars being dedicated to Facebook campaigns and promotions within social and mobile games. New ad networks have sprung up on Facebook, mobile and the open web to direct the eyeballs and clicks of the most engaged audiences to online storefronts. We even see Facebook itself becoming one of those online storefronts with Gifts and the new Collections feature for retailers.

The point of it all is to make someone somewhere buy something, to guide a user from the point of interaction with social media (e.g. pinning a picture of a baby covered in lipstick to their Pinterest board) to the point of sale (buying lipstick from a cosmetics website). The goal of Inside Social Commerce is to document this emerging area and all of the techniques various product sellers, social networks, ad networks and third-party service providers use to make the process better, faster or at least more interesting.

Whether you’re selling something or not, we invite you to check out Inside Social Commerce here where you’ll already find a number of articles tracking current events in social commerce — like ShopIgniter’s new engagement and promotion platform, Amazon’s credit lending to Amazon.com retailers or Yellowdog Media’s expansions beyond its Yardsellr app. Our blog is currently headed up by Damon Brown, author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Facebook Marketing among other social media publications. Be sure to follow both him and the blog on Twitter and Like the Inside Social Commerce page on Facebook. You can expect great things in the months to come.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook e-commerce platform Payvment launched social discovery and shopping site Lish.com in beta this week.

Lish.com surfaces the top trending products among the more than 4 million products across Payvment’s seller network of more than 175,000 merchants. The Pinterest-esque site optimizes for impulse buys, allowing users to make one-click purchases using Paypal. The site also integrates Facebook Open Graph to share users’ feelings about different products.

Payvment CEO Jim Stoneham tells us Lish came about based on several insights the team got from its Shopping Mall app launched in February 2011. The canvas app aggregated items from page owners’ store tabs, highlighting products your friends liked, items from celebrity sellers, recommendations and more. Users could also search for specific items or browse by category.

People care about what’s trending

As it turned out, 90 percent of clicks were in the “trending products” module off the the lower left side of the page. Somehow this section was more appealing than the products that appeared larger and more front-and-center. With Lish, the company decided to focus exclusively on trending products. The site shows users what is popular among other users based on user purchases, feedback, views and other cues.

Social shoppers don’t need a cart

Stoneham also says Payvment realized the average number of products per cart in the Shopping Mall app was 1.1, and the average sale was about $25. That means most users were coming to the app, finding one thing they liked and buying it. Stoneham says it was clear that the shopping cart wasn’t necessary. As such, Lish promotes impulse purchases with Paypal one-click buying.

Friends really do influence purchases

Payvment found that product links that users shared to Facebook had a 3.6 percent conversion rate. This is compared to 1 to 2 percent conversion rates that are average for e-commerce sites. For all the talk about how users don’t go to Facebook with purchase intent, Payvment has seen that users are quite influenced by their friends and are prone to making impulse buys when they see something they like in News Feed. Lish looks to capitalize on this by promoting sharing through Open Graph. On each product, users can click a smiley-face, meh-face or frowny-face. That activity is then published to Timeline, Ticker and News Feed.

Lish is still in an invite-only period, but Inside Facebook readers should be able to gain access through this link.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook