Inside Facebook

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible - Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 3 Months of Free Updates: $59 USD

The newly revised and expanded Facebook Marketing Bible: 28+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook - April 2008 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible contains three detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, and Tools for Application Developers. Each part outlines the best available channels for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

The April 2008 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• Facebook’s Pages upgrade. Now you can use custom HTML and Flash, restrict underage access, and allow users to upload photos and videos. Also, new tips for promoting Pages.
• Detailed information on Facebook’s upcoming changes to the core Profile page, and what that means for application developers. This is going to be a BIG deal.
• Updates to the new feedback-based allocation system for application use of viral channels. Now, emails are subject to allocation limits as well.
• New information for app developers on gaining traffic through SEO via sitemaps.
• Info on new Facebook Platform application analytics tools.
• Sending application invitations to Friend Lists. With Facebook’s recent Friend List-based Privacy update, Friend Lists will slowly become more important.
• Facebook’s continued international strategy. Facebook is now live in French, German, and Spanish.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $59 with three months of updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Tools for Guerilla Marketers

1. Profile Page
2. Groups
3. Pages
4. Events
5. Notes and Photos
6. Messages
7. Marketplace
8. Share / Posted Items
9. Networks
10. Mini Feed and News Feed

> Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers

II. Tools for Advertisers

11. Social Ads
12. Integrated Opportunities
13. Beacon
14. Polls
15. Facebook Platform Ad Networks
16. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships
17. Sponsored Facebook Groups

> Recommended Strategies for Advertisers

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible - Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 3 Months of Free Updates: $59 USD

III. Tools for Application Developers

18. Profile Box
19. Mini Feed
20. News Feed
21. Requests / Invitations
22. Facebook Notifications
23. Email Notifications
24. Application Directory
25. JavaScript API
26. Coming Soon: Translations
27. Analytics Tools
28. Search Engine Optimization

> Recommended Strategies for Application Developers

Conclusion

Facebook’s Pete Bratach posted a note tonight regarding a recent notice from the Adobe Flash team that an upcoming April update to the Flash Player could break many Facebook applications. The security update significantly affects cross-domain functionality and could affect a large number of apps that use Flash.

Specifically, if any of the following apply to your app, you will be affected by the update:

• You use sockets or XMLSockets, regardless of the domain to which you are connecting
• You use addRequestHeader or URLRequest.requestHeaders in any network API call when sending or loading data cross-domain
• You provide access to content on remote domains as a web service provider
• You have SWFs that are exported for Flash Player 7 (SWF7) or earlier that communicate with the hosting HTML by any means
• You use “javascript:” through network APIs to communicate outside a SWF

For more information, check out the full post at the Adobe Developer Center.

Hi5 announced earlier this week that with next week’s launch of the Hi5 Platform with OpenSocial 0.7 support, developers can expect to use a full suite of viral channels starting March 31:

• Invitations
• Notifications
• Emails
• Friend Updates (like Mini Feed and News Feed)

While the devil is always in the implementation details, this is a promising sign for developers considering building for Hi5. Of course, Hi5 will need to implement good spam control to keep quality high.

Since there’s been a lot of press lately about Googlers jumping ship for Facebook, I thought I’d search Facebook’s network to see how many folks at the company used to work at Google.  As it turns out, over 40, or almost 10% - and mostly engineering or product people. 

 

Here’s the full list:

• Sheryl Sandberg (COO)
• Gideon Yu (CFO)
  
• Andy Yang
• Ankur Pansari
• Benjamin Ling
• Catherine Lee
• Chris Kim
• Chuck Rossi
• Dale Dwelle
• David Braginsky
• David Ellis
• Don Faul
• Donn Lee
• Emily Young
• Ethan Beard
• Gina Emmett
• Jaime Schopfin
• James Mayfield
• Jason Min
• Jessica Ghastin
• John McKeeman
• Julie Tung
• Justin Rosenstein
• Kristina Holst
• Mark Rabkin
• Mark Slee
• Mary Ann Bailey
• Michael Kim
• Navid Mansourian
• Olaoluwa ‘Ola’ Okelola
• Pedram Keyani
• Peter Deng
• Peter Wong
• Sandra Liu Huang
• Sean Murphy
• Sean Tizoc Spiers
• Suedy Ezzatyar
• Tanja Balde
• Ted Loh
• Valerie Hajdik
• Wayne Chang

Chinese billionaire Li Ka-Shing has increased his stake in Facebook from $60 million to over $100 million, and may invest more, according to Chester Yung over at MarketWatch.

With US dollars so cheap, it will be interesting to see if more foreign investors step in to snap up premium equity in hot sectors. Ka-Shing and Germany’s Samwer brothers are two foreign investors in Facebook that participated in the big recent round at a reported $15 billion valuation.

While most developers think about optimizing their Facebook viral channels, most don’t think about SEO as an important user acquisition strategy in the same way that most webmasters traditionally do.

To help app developers increase their prominence in search engine results pages (SERPs), Facebook recently enabled developers to serve XML sitemaps off the apps.facebook.com. Sitemaps are used by webmasters to notify search engines of updates to pages and page structure, and generally are a worthwhile exercise in any SEO strategy. Since apps are served from apps.facebook.com, developers get to ride on the back of Facebook’s PageRank - potentially a big leg up on regular web apps.

Obviously, applications that serve pages without requiring logins have the most to gain from SEO, since Google’s crawlers don’t login to Facebook and install apps.

This afternoon, Facebook turned on new application email allocation limits as part of the Platform team’s continuing efforts to build a comprehensive Application Reputation System that controls access to Facebook’s viral marketing channels according to user feedback.

The new email allocations, originally announced to developers last week, limit the number of emails that applications are allowed to send per user per day. Like request and notification limits, applications are assigned a bucket rating. For email limits, buckets are assigned based on user disable rates.

In addition, Facebook added a new app “allocation” that changes the location of the disable link within emails. For applications in buckets 5-8, the disable links will appear at the bottom of emails (as they used to); for apps in buckets 1-4, the disable links will remain at the top.

Taking into account the effect that putting the email disable link at the top of the email has on email disable rates, Facebook Platform’s Tom Whitnah writes,

Since having the link at the top generally increases the rate that users click on it, clicks from the bottom of an email will be weighted differently than clicks at the top, so that scores will be based on the quality of the communication, not the location of the message. We will also take into account fluctuations in the amount of email sent, so your email limit will not decrease if you start sending less email overall.

This is a good move for the Platform, since only a few developers were abusing the email disable link location, and putting the disable link at the top leads to many users inadvertently disabling their application emails - a bad experience for all.

More and more Facebook users are seeing a new feature in recent days called “People You May Know.”

People You May Know is based on social proximity - Facebook looks at your friends-of-friends and suggests people that you have the most mutual friends with. So far, I’ve found several friends through the feature - it’s nice to glance at a new set of people every few minutes.

After last week’s launch of more robust privacy controls, “People You May Know” marks the second new feature in several days that employs the notion of friends-of-friends. Where else might FOF show up within Facebook sometime soon?

(I hear graph traversal is a pretty difficult technical problem, so don’t expect to see a “shortest path” feature a la the old days of Friendster any time soon )

Before last week, almost no one on Facebook created Friend Lists. Why? Because there was no point. Besides being able to send bulk messages (as long as your Friend List was under 20 people in size), all you could do after creating your Friend Lists was, well, look at them.

Starting last week, however, Facebook elevated Friend Lists to central status within the Facebook user experience by making it the basis around which users can specifically limit access to certain information for certain friends. By enabling Friend List-based privacy, Facebook has taken a major step toward solving a very complex problem - accurately mimicking the way in which we all limit access to certain personal information to specific friends.

Like in the “real” world, on Facebook, Friend Lists are a very private concept. Whereas your Groups affiliations are very public, no one can ever see what Lists you’ve created or put your friends in. The primary purpose of Friend Lists is to help you organize the myriad of people you’ve connected with so that you can share more information with confidence.

Has Facebook made the problem of limiting access to certain info easy for everyone with this release? Of course not. Whenever adding more robust and granular control, it’s impossible to not also introduce more complexity and conceptual overhead for users.

But by making Friend Lists so prominent - they’re now on every Facebook friend request and confirmation page - Facebook has for the first time created a context for millions of users to begin the (perhaps arduous) task of grouping friends into sets with permissions that mirror those in real life (and certainly much more powerfully than “we hooked up” or the Limited Profile ever did).

Look for Friend Lists to slowly increase in prominence in both the Facebook and Platform experience over the coming months. As Facebook knows more about how you organize your friends, it will then be able to offer more robust ways to communicate with them.

After announcing and launching the Facebook Platform at F8 last May in San Francisco, Facebook is currently in the planning stages of F8 2008 this summer in San Francisco. While last year’s F8 drew over 500 developer attendees, Facebook said today that it expects at least 1,000 this year.

With over 100,000 registered Developers and nearly 20,000 applications published in the Facebook directory, I would expect to see at least that many gather to hear directly from Facebook about plans for year 2 of the Platform! We’ll keep you updated as more details are firmed up.