Facebook hired engineers and marketers this week, according to its LinkedIn feed and Careers page. The company also appeared to hire a manager of State and Local Public Policy – California and legal counsel in its India office.

As we covered Tuesday, the company also hired the team behind Android photo sharing app Lightbox.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin is joining the board of the event ticketing startup Eventbrite, the company is announcing today. The news of the appointment follows what has been, so far, quite a busy year for the startup, which has now sold 60 million tickets, and is expanding globally with websites in eight different languages.

Morin, whose background includes time as the former head of the Facebook Platform and several years at Apple, will bring his knowledge of social to the ticketing company, says Eventbrite.

Morin joins Barry McCarthy, former CFO of Netflix, Sean Moriarty, former CEO of Ticketmaster, Roelof Botha, former CFO of PayPal and Partner at Sequoia Capital, among others serving on Eventbrite’s Board of Directors.

“Eventbrite has long been a believer in the impact of the social graph, and the work that Dave did while at Facebook has had a profound impact on our business,” Kevin Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite says. “Our integration with Facebook Connect in 2008 predicated an exponential increase in traffic and engagement among event attendees,” he added.

Eventbrite is heavily benefitting from Facebook integration. In 2011, the company reported that every time an event was shared on Facebook, it generated an additional $2.52 on average in ticket sales for event organizers and 11 clicks back to the Eventbrite page. And this was before the launch of Facebook’s Open Graph in early 2012, and the introduction of “actions” like “bought,” or “want” or “watch,” etc.

Notably, Eventbrite was one of the Facebook Open Graph launch partners, but it’s not yet using “actions.” According to Tamara Mendelsohn, VP of Marketing at Eventbrite, however, they’re “working on something now” on that front, and we should see the results of that soon.

Facebook is also the number one driver of Eventbrite’s traffic, says Mendelsohn, but the company won’t share how much.

As for engagement levels, you can see in the chart below what the impact of Facebook integrations have already had on the company’s business. With Morin’s guidance on deeper integrations, those numbers should jump yet again.

Outside of social integrations and global expansion, the company has also been pushing itself forward in the mobile payments space. In March, Eventbrite launched a complimentary credit card reader to go along with its iPad ticketing app “Eventbrite at the Door,” which attaches to the iPad’s dock connector, allowing users to swipe credit cards. Just prior to this, the company had announced a product called “Endurance,” specifically for selling tickets to races and walks, like marathons and fundraising events. And only last week, Eventbrite announced integrations with SponsorHub for connecting event organizers with sponsors.

“Eventbrite is fundamentally changing the way people create, promote and find events and gatherings in their local communities,” said Morin in a statement. “I’ve been more than impressed by their level of innovation, their commitment to their users, and by their long term focus. The decision to join the board as they forge into making event discovery more mobile and social was an easy one. At the end of the day, we all live for great events.”

Eventbrite has been making a huge push towards reaching $1 billion in gross ticket sales this year, about doubling the number of events on the platform in 2011 (458,207 events in 2011) and tickets sold (20,798,509 tickets in 2011). In 2011, Eventbrite sold $400 million worth of tickets, up from $207 million in 2010.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

General Motors plans to stop advertising on Facebook, says The Wall Street Journal according to “people familiar with the matter.” But I spoke to a source close to Facebook that characterize GM’s efforts as “taking one swing and deciding to quit.” My source says GM’s efforts weren’t social enough, focusing on building apps rather than launching social ad campaigns that spread by word-of-mouth.

So what went wrong, and does Facebook need to offer more flexibility to advertisers?

Facebook was reportedly unable to convince GM that its ads are an effective way to reach consumers. GM Marketing Chief Joel Ewanick reportedly told the Journal that the company “is definitely reassessing our advertising on Facebook, although the content is effective and important.”

The auto maker supposedly spends a total of $40 million on Facebook, including $10 million on advertising, so the GM pullout won’t have a significant effect on Facebook’s $3.7 billion in revenue. However, it’s certainly awkward to have this news break just a few days before Facebook’s IPO. (And the timing probably isn’t a coincidence.)

I’m guessing GM doesn’t see things that way, but it’s worth noting that Facebook has highlighted successful auto campaigns in the past. For example, there was a Kia campaign that led to a 13-percent increase in awareness for the Kia Soul, as well as a Mazda check-in deal in the United Kingdom that led to a 34 percent increase in sales of Mazda MX-5 during one of the campaign months. Isolated anecdotes? Sure, but at least they show that Facebook isn’t totally inhospitable to car companies.

If we take my source at their word, the GM news may also point to the fact that even if Facebook can work for large advertisers, there are challenges in bringing those advertisers on-board. Facebook executives themselves have said they’re moving away from traditional advertising to a new model, with ads that are built around stories. It’s a compelling idea, but for some traditional advertisers, it may be more appealing to just show a big, glossy ad — like the one that Ford ran on Facebook’s logout page.

[Additional reporting by Josh Constine]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook has nearly doubled the size of “Page-Like” Sponsored Stories in News Feed by adding a recent post from the page to the story.

It is unclear whether the change will make these ads more effective in helping advertisers get new Likes. However, because the unit also includes a recent post, advertisers can get across a more specific message and promote engagement in the form of commenting or sharing. Previously, pages could not get their posts featured in News Feed unless a user’s friend took action on that specific post. Now, a recent post will be displayed with any Page-Like story.

Facebook seems to be trying to find a design that makes Sponsored Stories effective for advertisers without making users feel their experience is being disrupted by ads. Although the new story takes up more space, it is in some ways less noticeable than the previous version, which looked very different from any other story in the feed. The old Page-Like stories included a much larger version of the page’s profile picture and listed more friends who Liked the page. This new unit emphasizes a page’s content rather than its logo. Because of that, the “Like Page” call to action has been moved the upper right of the story, which could be unfamiliar for users. However, the unit no longer includes the distracting “Find More Pages” link that took users to the page discovery browser rather than to an advertiser’s own content.

This is the second time the social network has redesigned the Page-Like Sponsored Story unit since it began showing ads in News Feed in January. In March, Facebook changed the unit from being a simple line of text to a much larger one including the page’s profile image and thumbnails of more friends who are connected to the page.

The new design will apply to Page-Like stories that have not been sponsored, but we have not yet seen an example of this.

Here is the previous design for “Page-Like” Sponsored Stories, which first appeared in March:

This is the first iteration of  ”Page-Like” Sponsored Stories in News Feed, which we saw in February:

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

As we approach the E3, the electronic gaming show in early June, I suspect that the value of “retina” high-resolution displays will soon become apparent. While the prospect of retina Macbooks is all but inevitable, we have reached a plateau when it comes to general computing and, more important, living room media.

The first question is, in short, why do we need a retina Macbook? Presumably it would be a superior experience for video and photo editing and offer designers far more real estate on a large screen, especially when viewing photos at lower resolutions. As evidenced by the iPhone’s retina display, gaming will become considerably more compelling. This presupposes a rich and vibrant OS X gaming ecosystem.

The second question is also quite interesting: If console manufacturers begin to promise 4K (4096 × 3072) video output, what does that mean for TV manufacturers? As we well know, the 3D craze was, just that, a craze. 3D hype was far overblown but 4K hype will be even crazier. Selling a few 3D screens would have been nice. Selling millions of 4K screens is a necessity. After all, 4K displays will be considerably more expensive and far less initially popular than even 3D. 3D was an iterative update, but 4K is a massive investment.

The market expansion of higher resolution displays is contingent on a few things. First, manufacturers need to be able to retool previous manufacturing facilities to produce 4K screens. This isn’t difficult, just a concern in a situation where 1080p and other resolutions are still widely popular.

Second, the global economy will need to be able to support a full upgrade from 1080p to 4K. Hard-core gamers will most definitely flock to the new resolutions, but will general users? Although the retina Macbooks will be sort of a gateway drug to higher resolution, convincing a cohort of television owners to upgrade will be tough, especially if they’ve just been burned by Blu-Ray (a dying, if not dead, format) and 3D.

It will also be delightful to hear all of the marketing-speak behind newer displays. While “retina” is out, expect HP, Samsung, and Dell to offer “High-Rez” laptops and maybe even “SuperPlasmaWonderDisplay” phones. Display marketing will depend less on pixels and more on arbitrary words stuck together.

We still have a while to go before 4K is even a “thing,” higher resolution screens are coming and console makers and gaming PC manufacturers will probably be the first to push it through into the mainstream. Whither go gamers, the public follows and, although this is just a guess, I suspect the first “cheap” 4K screens will arrive around CES 2015 and really hit stores by 2016 – plenty of time to get the last few years of use out of your PS3 and Xbox 360, not to mention your heavy-duty gaming PC.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Social enterprise software company Vitrue today announced a partnership with seven ad management companies to give its customers a way to track paid and owned media from its platform without necessarily forcing marketers to switch ad providers.

Vitrue’s Media Partner Program includes Involved Media, Marin Software, Nanigans, Optimal, SocialCode, Spruce Media and Unified, all of whom work with the Facebook Ads API to manage and optimize campaigns at scale. Vitrue has updated its Social Relationship Management platform with more collaborative workflow tools for community managers and media buyers, which could be increasingly useful as advertisers run Sponsored Stories and other ads that come directly from Facebook page posts rather than traditional ads with a headline, body copy and image.

The strategy of partnering with several ad providers could allow Vitrue to serve a wider range of customers than if it had decided to acquire a single company as others in the industry have done. Last year, ad platform Efficient Frontier acquired page management company Context Optional, and in February Vitrue competitor Buddy Media bought Brighter Option to create its new BuyBuddy solution for paid media.

Another Facebook marketing software company, Involver, recently announced partnerships with several of the companies now also working with Vitrue. Involver’s “Engagement Optimization API” can be incorporated into any ad platform to allow marketers to optimize Facebook campaigns based on post-click engagement within Involver applications.

Vitrue’s solution works a little differently. Members of the Media Partner Program log into Vitrue’s platform to see a brand’s Facebook page data and per-post metrics. Community managers have the ability to flag posts that receive high engagement and notify media buyers that the post might be a good one to apply paid media to.

In both cases, Involver and Vitrue can remain agnostic and offer customers a number of options for ad platforms. This eliminates the risk associated with acquiring a single company and then convincing customers to switch to a new ad service. Vitrue says it is looking to add more ad platforms to its partner program in the future.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Today at the Finovate conference in San Francisco, a company called edo announced the introduction of what it describes as “geocommerce” offers, which, as the name implies, are offers and deals from merchants that are tied to a location. But there’s more to the edo platform than that. The company also targets its offers based on your previous transaction history – not entirely unlike the early stage startup BankOns that Capital One just snapped up yesterday.

More importantly, what’s interesting about edo is how those offers work. There’s no check-in, no need to launch a mobile app, and no special hardware or Point-of-Sale modifications on the merchant’s side. Instead, edo ties to consumers’ bank cards, allowing them to not only receive the offers in real-time, but receive their discounts in real-time, too, immediately after checkout.

According to Jeff Fagel, Vice President, Marketing and Brand Development at edo, the company wants to connect online advertising to in-store through its new advertising channel. “There’s an opportunity to change how consumers shop and save,” he says. “The world is impersonal, non-targeted and cluttered – there are a lot of deals out there, but they’re not very relevant,” he explains. “We’re really about keeping it simple.”

By simple, what edo means is that using its service requires very little effort on the consumer side. All you need is a credit or debit card. In fact, in some cases, you don’t even need to sign up – you’re opted in by default by your bank. (Opt-out is available, of course). But because edo is a white label product, it’s up to the participating financial institution to decide whether or not the service is opt-in or opt-out. As of today, edo has gone live with 140+ bank and financial institutions, the largest of which are Fifth Third Bank and Ally Bank here in the U.S. And edo says more large institutions will be coming on board over the course of the year.

So how does the service work? For starters, the banks will target users based on their spending behavior. And really, just the spending behavior – the banks don’t need to pull any personally identifiable info, your demographic profile, or anything else but how you like to spend and where you spend in order to start sending you offers. And you don’t need a mobile app to receive them. Although a smartphone application is part of edo’s platform, non-smartphone owners can choose to receive offers via text or email.

Upon redemption, which again, involves no extra steps that would make it different from a normal transaction (it’s just a swipe of the card as usual), the offered discount is immediately credited to a consumer’s account. Handy.

Fagel says that edo is moving further into its testing period with its banking partners this summer, and by the end of summer, will have 10 million consumers on the platform. By Q3, it will have 50 million – a number which is being determined by the large banking partners expected to go live by then. Even in its early days, banks on edo have seen their card volume increase by 20%, driven by increase use and spend on the card. On the advertisers’ side, they’re seeing redemption rates of anywhere between 2% and 75%, but the average is around 2% to 4%. However, in certain categories like dining and quick service restaurants, redemption rates are 10% to 20%, Fagel says.

“We’re also seeing quite a bit of repeat purchase – individuals who had not been at a location in the last 60 to 90 days,” he adds. For example, in a campaign with a national sub shop, following the first redemption of the offer, 30% of consumers made 1-2 more visits and 40% made 3+ more visits. Fagel attributes the success here to the way that edo can not only attract new customers, but also encourage current customers and reactivate lapsed customers to use the discount being offered.

“There’s so much choice out there these days, we might just need an extra push or incentive,” says Fagel, “and it’s simple, you’re just using your card.”

Edo currently has partnerships with 200 national and local merchants, and it takes its cut from the overall purchase price paid at checkout. The rate varies somewhere between 5% and 10% on the target basket, with the advertiser/merchant paying out both edo’s cut and the discount to the consumer.

While the service will only initially be available to banking and financial services institutions, which will then offer it to their own customers, edo is already working on other direct-to-consumer offering through other partners, like PageOnce, for example, which will allow others to sign up, too.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook for Every Phone topped our list of growing Facebook pages this week, followed by movies, TV shows, music and sports pages. Pages on our list this week grew from between 306,200 to 2.8 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

#	Name	Total Likes	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Facebook for Ever…	83,637,430	3,180,055	+367,086	+2,846,529
2	Titanic	22,892,031	881,644	+91,656	+708,414
3	Adele	27,669,596	705,398	+98,336	+644,644
4	LMFAO	16,697,537	775,245	+67,903	+534,030
5	avast! antivirus	1,446,737	456,587	+33,150	+508,753
6	R. Kelly	1,413,748	11,291	+1,519	+494,669
7	The Simpsons	49,837,267	627,957	+70,376	+477,883
8	Resident Evil 5	655,578	15,711	+177,775	+455,448
9	Jeremy Lin	954,881	552,606	+34,979	+438,508
10	Bruno Mars	22,943,294	483,290	+58,667	+418,369
11	Will Smith	30,644,431	483,394	+56,619	+407,946
12	Shrek	25,376,860	435,245	+55,910	+392,434
13	Pitbull	19,474,502	632,015	+48,650	+366,527
14	Harry Potter	45,517,914	697,066	+54,100	+364,686
15	FC Barcelona	30,490,655	1,112,574	+50,679	+363,069
16	[V] Music – Chann…	592,168	11,932	+805	+357,875
17	Cristiano Ronaldo	43,530,725	1,065,239	+43,141	+341,488
18	Intel	9,664,877	373,855	+43,722	+329,931
19	Real Madrid C.F.	27,754,247	2,129,163	+41,839	+328,538
20	Smiley	1,105,766	513,346	+20,085	+306,159

Facebook for Every Phone, the page for Facebook’s feature phone mobile app, grew significantly this week. This week’s growth could be related to the app’s new release of two filters for mobile photos. Intel‘s page grew, likely because of advertising and by fans sharing photos from the page. There also were a few pages, one for an antivirus software and another for an Australian music website, that appeared to grow as a result of page consolidations, after experiencing one-day jumps.

Movie pages were led by “Titanic.” Shrek made the list, as did movie star Will Smith. Music pages included several artists that are touring and posting lots of photos, such as LMFAO, Pitbull and Adele.

Football (soccer) pages, including FC Barcelona, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Real Madrid C.F., have been posting photos and news items resulting in a lot of engagement. The pages also post in multiple languages, enabling more users to engage.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at: Sociable Labs, Fiveonenine Games, SponsorPay,  Machine Zone, King.com, Kixeye, PopCap Games, Ryzing,GameHouse, IMVU, Nuukster, Kobojo, Sneaky Games, Circle of Moms and SoJo Studios.

• Social Interaction Designer

• Director of Monetization

• Senior Agency Sales Executive

• Senior Operations Engineer
• Build/Release Engineer
• C/C++ Game Developer
• Scalability Engineer
• Senior Graphics Engineer

• Game Artist
• Senior Producer, Skillgames
• Hadoop Developer/Engineer
• Senior Producer, Social Games

• Technical Director of Game Engineering
• Senior Accountant – Revenue

• AS3 Flash Developer

• Lead Animator
• Technical Marketing Campaign Manager

• Lead Software Development Engineer

• Senior Program Manager

• Flash Engineer

• Lead Game Developer (H/F)

• Programmer

• UI Developer

• Mobile Games Lead (PM/Design)

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Today any local U.S. business can start using Facebook’s Offers product – free-to-create coupons that businesses can share to the news feed, and that users can bring to brick-and-mortar stores for redemptions. First announced in February at the Facebook Marketing Conference, the product has been in private testing with a select group of brands who worked with Facebook reps to run the offers. Now the promotional product is available in a self-serve interface.

While it doesn’t cost businesses anything to run offers, Facebook could still make money on them. If they perform well in the news feed and drive business to physical stores, those stores may spend more on Facebook ads that increase their Page fan counts — and the subscriber bases for the coupons.

To create and distribute an Offer, U.S. businesses that list a local address can go to the post composer on their Page’s Timeline. There they’ll be walked through a tour of the product. Then they can add a thumbnail, headline, and fine print before being able to post the coupon to their fans.

Facebook warns that businesses need to train their cashiers or other staff members on how to process offers when customers bring in a printed email or show the confirmation message on their phone. Otherwise they could end up with confused employees and angry patrons.

Businesses have spent years building their fan counts, both organically and through paid Facebook ads. However, many have wondered what the actual value of a fan is. With the launch of Offeres, Facebook has given them a clearer answer to how fans drive a return on investment in fans. Pay for ads, get more fans, Offer a free drink with entree purchase, recoup ad costs with sales of entrees. Boom. ROI.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch