D.C. Facebook Employees Get A New Boss

Joel Kaplan, a former staff member under George W. Bush, will join Facebook and lead the Washington D.C. office.

Previously an executive vice president at Energy Future Holdings, Kaplan has very strong ties to the Republican party.
Facebook is in need of growing the company’s D.C. efforts as they want to “demonstrate to policy makers that [they] are industry leaders in privacy, data security and safety,” the company said in a press release.
Evelyn Rusli of the New York Times is calling this a “significant coup.” Given the increasing scrutiny surrounding Facebook’s privacy practices, it’s critical that they continue to add staff members to increase their influence within the beltway.
It also sounds like a great career change for Joel Kaplan. According to the Times, he’s leaving a private equity firm that’s currently “sitting on billions of dollars of losses.” Sounds like the perfect time to jump ship and head to a company which is sitting on billions of dollars in new revenue!
In addition to Joel Kaplan, Facebook has hired another Republican, Myriah Jordan, who “recently served as general counsel to Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina,” the Times said.
I’m sure we’ll be hearing much more about the D.C. office in the coming months as it attempts to convince Congress that Facebook’s privacy practices sufficiently protect users.

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Posted in: data security and safety,Facebook,Facebook Ads,Facebook Developers Blog,Facebook Engineering,Facebook Marketing Solutions,Joel Kaplan,Myriah Jordan,Republican of North Carolina

How To Succeed At Facebook Advertising

Gordmans opened two new stores in Minneapolis and promoted them with several Facebook campaigns, working with BlitzLocal.com.
They created two different types of campaigns: one advertising an event, and another advertising a tab. Both were targeted at the city level. Because the scope was so narrow, tests included adding the city name as part of the ad image itself. Overall though, these ads definitely helped in garnering more visitors.

Sponsored Stories Outperformed Regular Facebook Ads

There are two types of sponsored stories – a sponsored like, which targets friends of your fans, and a Sponsored post, which shows messages to existing fans. Gordmans ran a highly targeted sponsored like ad:

• within the regions where the retailer has its 68 retail locations
• female demographic
• keywords related to bargain-hunting

While most Facebook ads are lucky to get a 0.05 percent clickthrough rate, this campaign drove a .4 percent CTR on the first day, which fell by 45 percent within 48 hours to .2 percent.
Generally, anything at or above 0.1 percent is highly optimized. Sponsored likes also cut the cost per click by 70 percent and cost per fan by 83 percent overall. That’s like getting a 77 percent discount off from Facebook.

In two days, this ad drove 515 clicks for $76 and gained 418 new fans. That works out to 18 cents per fan and a click-to-conversion rate of 81 percent.
Most brands out there are getting fans at between $2 and $10, the former via self-serve and the latter via premium ads. $0.18 for a new fan, one that is giving your brand permission to talk to them, is a great cost of acquisition.
Gordmans found the key to success with Facebook advertising is leveraging the endorsement of their existing fans. People are far more likely to click on events that are associated with what their friends are doing.

Highly Engaged Content Equals Positive Fan Growth

The creative refresh demand of social requires you to be able to iterate much quicker, to refresh your content and creative much more quickly than other types of online marketing.  Gordmans knew they needed to rotate ads to keep them fresh. Facebook ads are typically served to the same users multiple times, often in the same day, so they quickly tune-out repeat ads.
Gordmans also used the Webtrends Apps platform to develop fresh and engaging applications rewarding customers for engaging through fans-only promotions.
While apps have about a 10-to-14 day shelf life before people start to drop off in interaction, ads have around three-to-five days before you see a dramatic drop off. But because Gordmans’ wall postings resonated well with the brand, only five percent of fans have unsubscribed from the page.

Geo-Targeting Works

The average human attention span is about 30 seconds. In fact, successful Facebook advertisers try to relate images to their audience, for example by serving an image of a local landmark or in Gordmans case including the city name is another way to garner more attention.


By injecting the city name in the ad image in conjunction with the geo-targeting, the ads were more appealing and relevant.
Gordmans found that geo-targeted ads with the city name on the ad image performed better than the ads without it. With geo-targeted ads that offered fans the opportunity to check in and claim deals, Gordmans was able to drive customers to their brick and mortar stores.

More Earned Media At A Cheaper Rate

By measuring the number of impressions the Facebook page generated over time, then estimating a $5 cost per impression, we can determine the earned media value of the brand.
Earned media represents impressions generated for free, from efforts outside of the traditional ad spend, which includes viral and word-of-mouth publicity such as likes and shares.

This type of exposure has a high quality because  it leverages the trust of friends. With over 38 million impressions over a period of 79 days, at the aforementioned $5 CPM, we get $190,000 earned media value for that time period, which represents how much ad spend would have been required to achieve the same number of impressions via paid media.
Extended out over a year’s time, the value is $879,000 per year, or $4.5 million in perpetuity, assuming we’ve applied a 20 percent discount rate to the projection of earned media over time.

What’s Next?

Now in the works is a new Facebook places strategy— to drive check-ins, shares, and coupons.
Gordmans has had a lot of success in running Google Adwords campaigns with a focus on letting users redeem coupons. Running similar campaigns on Facebook will reinforce the Google campaigns, and with Facebook’s social twist tied into the coupon redemption strategy, they expect to see excellent results.

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Posted in: Facebook Ads,Facebook Developers Blog,Facebook Engineering,Facebook Marketing Solutions,Facebook Security,Help Center

Facebook Users Counting Down To Memorial Day

As the the holiday weekend approaches, the frequency of Facebook posts concerning Memorial Day increases in pace.

Status updates and wall shares related to Memorial Day are going up at a rate of about one every few seconds as of this writing.

This is based on our own admittedly unscientific keyword searches of Facebook posts by everyone; click here to see these results for yourself.

Many people are asking each other what they have planned for the three-day weekend. They’re also sending invitations to barbeques and parties. Others are sharing details on Memorial Day weekend sales.

Only the occasional post addresses the fact that the holiday honors those who’ve died in military service. However, we expect that type of posting to become more prevalent on Memorial Day itself.

Meanwhile, a Facebook page simply called Memorial Day has 11,674 likes as of this writing.

And we wouldn’t be surprised if Monday brings about a viral revival of the Memorial Day-themed application launched last year by Involver and the White House.

Readers, what are your friends posting on Facebook about Memorial Day?

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Posted in: and learn more about the people they meet,People use Facebook to keep up with friends,post links and videos,upload an unlimited number of photos

VOTE: Would You Switch To Spotify On Facebook?

Europe’s most popular streaming music service, Spotify, is coming to Facebook soon.

Make that: as soon as Spotify completes negotiations with all of the major recording labels in the U.S.
Once live, an icon leading to the music application may appear in the left-hand side of the Facebook home page.
The imminent availability of Spotify on Facebook begs the question: Would you change your music listening habits? European readers, would you go to Facebook to get the service instead of how you might already be listening to it now?
Let us know what you think by participating in the poll below. We’d love it if you could share your rationale for voting by posting a comment. And be sure to check back to see how everyone else is voting.

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Posted in: Bebo,Cyworld,Facebook,FriendFeed,Friendster,Hi5,ibibo,Jaiku,Myspace,Netlog,Orkut,StudiVZ,Tagged,Tribe.net,Tuenti,Twitter,Vkontakte,Whispurr

SEO Social and Search: A Small Business Primer

Decisions just got easier with the addition of new social features to Bing. By bringing together the power of search and Facebook, people can now receive personalized search results based on the opinions of their friends by simply signing into Facebook. These features, available now, make it easy to see what people’s Facebook friends “like” across the Web, incorporate the collective IQ of the Web into their decision making, and conduct conversational searches. Decisions can now be made not just with facts, but with the opinions of trusted friends and collective wisdom from the Web, resulting in smarter, faster decisions. Also available today is the new Bing Bar, that includes the first universal “like” button, making it easy for people to “like” any page on the Web.  As a publisher your messaging is going to be amplified due to how Bing is surfacing the messages to consumer.

With social media’s rise to prominence has come an increased influence on search.  Search engines are always striving to return the most relevant results when a searcher uses their services, and integrating social signals is one more way Bing can understand what matters most to a searcher.  By integrating social signals from the social sphere, we can help guide searchers to the best results.  If people feel something is worth calling out socially as “the best”, it’s obvious hearing their opinions at the time someone is scanning for search results can have an impact on click choices made by that individual searcher.  By watching signals such as this, Bing integrates results that matter more to searchers, returning more relevant results.  Those searchers are your customers.  The signals they see are coming from the “friends” and “followers” your business has online.
Here is a snapshot of how the features work:

• Microsoft data shows that nearly half of people say seeing their friend’s “likes” within search results could help them make better decisions; and who better than a group of trusted friends to guide everyday decision making? Bing’s new features make this possible.
• Liked Results, Answers and Sites. Cut right to the good stuff, by seeing what stories, content and sites friends have “liked” right in the search results. Planning a trip to Napa Valley, for example, can be overwhelming with the hundreds of wineries there are to choose from – luckily the “likes” of friends can narrow the choices on which vineyards are a must see.
• Personalized Results. Bing personalizes the search experience, by surfacing content your friends have “liked” from deep within search results to the top of the page. Because most people don’t go beyond page one of the results, they might be missing the best information.

But it’s not just friends that can help out. There’s also value in the larger brain trust of the Web. Bing now brings the collective IQ of people to decision making online when friends may not have the right expertise, or a person may not know exactly what they’re looking for.

• Popular Sites. See collective “like” results related to trending topics, articles, and Facebook fan pages, to find the most popular content.  When searching a recipe site, for example, see what articles on the site people have liked, to help find the perfect recipe for dinner.
• Social Messages. Searchers can also benefit from knowing what major brands and companies are sharing on Facebook. For example, when planning a vacation and searching for a rental car, Bing will show recent Facebook posts alerting people to a new deal at the top of the results.

Many decisions require a discussion with friends. By combining Facebook’s communication tools with Bing, search can become conversational – taking decision-making on Bing from a passive experience to an active dialogue. Bing’s vision is to combine the power of discovery with the empowerment of conversation.
To clarify, this does not rerank the search results per se.  When Bing understands a searcher’s results contain annotations from their friends, we bring those results to the main page or results so the searcher can see them.  They are inserted for viewing, not replacing anything we would show in the organic results.  Bing expands the real estate on the page to showcase the socially annotated results.  The results themselves shift to accommodate this, with the order of ranking remaining the same.  Regardless of whether you are logged in socially or not, the actual order of the ten organic results does not change.
Here’s how social works with Bing:

 

It all starts with people sharing and liking content.  These actions lead people to share their feedback via outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.  Bing collects the publically available information to work into our processing and indexing of content.  From there, we process the data and factor that into ranking.  All of this happens very rapidly, with signals being collected in real-time, and results showing nearly as fast on search results pages.
Rising above the noise
Here are some things to consider as search engines become more social.  Some will be items you already perform, while others may require you to rethink how you approach building your site, content and community.

• Quality: Create unique, interesting and useful content.  Deploy the like button smartly across your content so that customers can express their sentiment to help you show up better in search.
• Trust: Work on getting trustworthy sites linking to your site. 
• Popularity: Being popular helps. While quality of your inbound links matters more, having a number of trustworthy links pointed at your content helps, too.
• Timeliness: Practice frequent updating of your sites or blogs.  Visitors like to know your site is current.
• Simplicity: Make it easy to Like and Share content.  Enable functionality which encourages visitors to share your content.
• Share: Include links in updates via your own social spaces.  The perceived quality of your posts increases when you include links to relevant, useful content.
• Relationships: Seek ways to encourage trust-worthy people to share your posts and content.  Avoid spammy clumps or groups who randomly “Like” things.  Organic is best.
• Frequency: The number of people “Liking” what you said/shared in the last minute, hour, day, week is easily seen by the engines.  Work to increase your influence.
• Change: Be prepared to turn on a dime, and for the flash mob as new things go viral.  Focus shifts quickly today, so be ready to take advantage of shifts as they occur.

Things you should be doing now

1. Growing your social footprint.  Get started with a Facebook fan page to leverage the ability to get “Likes” into the SERP.
2. Accessing data to help you improve your website.  Sign up for a Bing Webmaster Tools account to not only see the data available about your site, but to watch for updates and future announcements from Bing.
3. Balance your marketing plan.  In addition to well-planned search engine marketing and social media plans, you should be seeking to balance where you get traffic from. By including paid search as part of your plan you create a safety net for potential organic algorithm changes, and can drive highly targeted, converting traffic immediately.
4. Cover the basics for long term traffic.  Since we’ve mentioned it above, make sure you’re making progress on that search engine optimization plan.  Work to ensure your website is as optimized as it can reasonably be.  This makes for a better product for your users, and for the search engine’s crawlers as well.

Wrapping up
There is a lot of conversation about the future of search these days.  One thing we can tell you for certain is that social will surely play a role in whatever future search has.  The ability to use social signals to fine tune search results, making them much more relevant for every searcher, is simply too important to overlook.  Search and social will each continue to evolve.  While neither will replace the other, they will continue to remain inseparable as part of a well-rounded marketing plan.
Final thought on managing social: Avoid spammy communities
As Link Farms flourished over the past few years with a goal to game the search engines with paid links, today we are seeing the advent of Like Farms.  In the images below, you can see the difference between content which gets shared organically (on the top), though people sharing with legitimate friends and followers, and the kind of sharing that happens through Like Farm-style sharing (on the bottom). It’s pretty easy for Bing to spot these activities as the patterns are obvious. 
If you are growing a legitimate community of followers they can actually help you share your content.  This does take time, though, so be ready to put in the work if you want the success.  Taking shortcuts like using auto-follow services to boost your fan counts, or using “auto-Like” services may seem like a smart use of your time, but in the end they won’t help your efforts.  You’ll end up wasting time, and sometimes even money, on tactics that simply don’t work long term.

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Posted in: Amigos de facebook en vene zuela,bing,ceo,google,yahoo

Deals get Social

A few months ago we launched Check-In Deals, to help you get special offers when you check in at local businesses from your mobile. Today we're going a step further and testing a new feature to help you find fun experiences to share with your favorite people: Deals on Facebook.

Initially, Deals will be available to people in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco and we hope to expand this test to other cities in the future.

Deals get social
While many Deals on Facebook offer discounts, it's more important to us that you find interesting experiences around you to do with friends.  We've worked with partners and local businesses to help deliver the best social activities in your area.  And once you've found a deal you like, having the deal on Facebook makes it easy to share, buy and plan with your friends.

For example, Austin City Limits Live is offering an 'All Access Experience' for concerts starting in May. You can buy this deal and get backstage passes, sound check access and a catered dinner in addition to attending the show.

How to find Deals
You can find deals on Facebook in a couple of different ways — for example, you can get deals updates through email and notifications to find out about new deals in your area. You can also check out the Deals tab of your home page. If your friends chose to share this information, you may also see the deals friends buy or like in your News Feed.

We are working with aDealio, Gilt City, HomeRun, kgb deals, OpenTable, Plum District, PopSugar City, ReachLocal, Tippr, viagogo, and zozi, so you can buy their Deals on Facebook too.

Whether you're making plans for this weekend or your best friend's birthday or a big anniversary, check out Deals on Facebook today to find cool things to do with friends.

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Posted in: Facebook Ads,Facebook Developers Blog,Facebook Engineering,Facebook Marketing Solutions,Facebook Security,Help Center

How people are using Groups on Facebook

It's always been easy to share with all your friends on Facebook, but until we introduced Groups last October, there wasn't a simple way to share with just a few people. Much of what we share in our daily lives is only meaningful to smaller groups of people, like our family, roommates, or co-workers. With Groups, you can create a private space to share with just those friends.

In the six months since our launch, people have created over 50 million Groups on Facebook. It's grown quickly because of its social design. Instead of making everyone build and manage individual friend lists, one person can create a group for their families and everyone in the family gets to use it.

We've received some great feedback about how people are using Groups and what new features they would like to see. Today, we're happy to announce some new improvements, including integration with Questions, the ability to upload photo albums, and additional membership controls.

How people are using Groups

People are using Groups to communicate with many of the important communities in their lives, like their families, best friends, and teammates. My own family uses a group to stay connected to each other. As a Californian with a brother living in Peru and parents back in Wisconsin, we use our group to update each other about our lives, share vacation photos, and discuss where we're going to meet up next.

I also have a group with my roommates. Because we have such different schedules, we can go a whole week without seeing each other in person. Our group is where we meet to divide up chores, settle our bills, and make plans for the weekend.

Popular group names among college students 19-22 years old (larger words represent greater popularity).

Popular group names among people 60-75 years old.

New improvements to Groups

You've always been able to post updates to Groups, but now you can post questions and polls for only members to weigh in on. You'll get quick responses to questions like "What movie should we see?" and "When should we should hold our next soccer practice?"

Where before you could only upload individual photos, now you have the option to upload entire albums directly to your group, making it even easier to share your photos with the people who most want to see them.

For group owners, we're also adding a control that lets you approve people before they are added to the group.

For people who were using our older version of Groups, we've created a tool that makes it easy to upgrade to the new Groups format. Owners and members of old Groups will be receiving information about how to upgrade within the coming weeks.

Send button lets you share with Groups

In addition to the other new group features, we're also introducing the Send button.

A year ago, we launched the Like button, which gives you a quick way to share the things you find on the web with all your friends. But there are times when you find something that you only want to share with a few specific people.

Say you're on Orbitz and want to tell your roommates about a great idea for a summer vacation, or you come across a Huffington Post article that you only want to share with people at work. With the new Send button, now you can share things with any of your Groups or individual friends on Facebook.

Starting today, the Send button will be available on over 50 leading websites, and it will appear in more places soon.

Create a Group today

It's been exciting to hear about the many ways people have been using Groups to communicate with the different people in their lives, and we hope you all enjoy the new features, which will be rolling out over the next few days.


 

Elliot Lynde, an engineer on the Groups team, is currently working on scanning in all his old photos to post in his family group.

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Posted in: español,español facebook,facbook,facebok,facebook es,facebook español,facebook inicio,facebook it,facebook italia,faceboook,www.facebook,www.facebook.com en español,www.facebook.es