Mobile video service Qik has integrated with Facebook to make sharing on-the-go videos as easy as sharing mobile photos. The marriage is possible through Facebook Connect, which enables Qik members to automatically upload videos from mobile devices to their Facebook pages.

Qik lets users share live streaming mobile video with friends, family, or customers on the web. While the Facebook integration won’t let you stream live content to your page, it does upload the video immediately when you’re done. If you have a non-touchscreen Windows Mobile device, you can select which videos go to your Facebook page to channel business and personal content to the appropriate places.

Setup is easy; just click on the Edit Profile page and look under the Networks tab to add Facebook as a network to your Qik account. When you log in to your Facebook page, you’ll automatically sign in to Qik. There’s also a “Connect with Facebook” tab on the Qik login page, as well as the top of the home page.

Comments made on Qik videos will be displayed on your Facebook wall, as will notices when you follow new Qik users. You can also add links to your Facebook status that will redirect to your Qik account when you start live feeds.

While the Qik integration is great, allowing apps like Qik to integrate mobile video into Facebook Pages would open a number of new doors for businesses. For example, think of promotional events, customer testimonials, introducing new products, or posting how-tos. Since everything is handled from your mobile device, you wouldn’t be tethered to bulky recording equipment, and there wouldn’t be any extended upload time between when video is shot and when it hits your page.

Although Facebook allows anyone to create a Facebook Page, Facebook’s intention with Facebook Pages has always been for them to be managed and operated by the actual brand, artist, celebrity, or politician themselves. That’s why they’ve given Facebook Pages so much more prominence in the home page stream, and built advertising products around driving traffic to those Pages.

In order to help the Facebook marketing community better track the growth of “authentic” Facebook Pages (Pages which Facebook has awarded a vanity URL), PageData by Inside Facebook has just launched a new feature enabling marketers to show only “official” Facebook Pages in the PageData rankings.

Now, you can see which brands and celebrities themselves are active on Facebook and growing the biggest fan base. Here’s how the standings look as of today, Wednesday, April 22, 2009.

It’s almost no surprise, but “Britain’s Got Talent” + YouTube sensation Susan Boyle is the fastest growing authentic page on Facebook, with over 120,000 new fans in the last day. Susan has actually added nearly 1.5 million fans in the last 5 days, making her Page the fastest growing Page we’ve ever seen!

Top Gainers Today

Looking out over the past week, Ashton Kutcher remains the fastest growing Page over the last 7 days (a title soon to be taken by Ms. Boyle), but as you can see by the graph below, Kutcher’s growth on Facebook has subsided in recent days. Meanwhile, Vin Diesel, Jackie Chan, Oprah Winfrew, Miley Cyrus, Linkin Park, Shaq, Tiger Woods, and Red Bull have all had great weeks on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

And as always, for those who want to accelerate their Facebook Pages marketing learning curve, be sure to check out Inside Facebook’s industry-leading resource for marketers and application developers: The Facebook Marketing Bible. Inside Facebook has been providing industry-leading resources and reports for marketers and brands since 2007. Check out:

• The Facebook Marketing Bible – Agency & Brand Edition
• Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook

As always, please let us know how we can make PageData a better resource for you. PageData is still in beta, so please send all feedback and questions to mail AT insidefacebook DOT com!

As the number of social apps and games making money through virtual currency continues to grow, the number of companies helping those developers monetize their apps continues to increase as well. Today, Inside Facebook has the exclusive first look at a new company focused on helping European social app and game developers monetize through virtual currency.

New startup SupersonicAds is coming out of stealth mode for the first time today. The company, based outside Tel Aviv, Israel, is focusing its efforts exclusively on the European social app and game developer market, founder and CEO Gil Shoham tells Inside Facebook.

Shoham, most recently a VP at AdsMarket, started SupersonicAds late last year with many former teammates from video sharing site Metacafe, where he served as general manager and head of international sales for several years. Arik Czerniak, a co-founder of Metacafe, is also a partner in SupersonicAds.

“Over the last couple of years, people have discovered that CPM performs pretty poorly in social media,” Shoham says. “But if you integrate the advertising in the right way for the right audience, it works well.”

Shoham says the company chose to focus on Europe because that is where it has experience working with advertisers and publishers. It has spent the last few months developing and scaling its technology infrastructure, putting tracking and customer service functions into place, and optimizing performance.

In addition, Shoham says the company has localized its service for every language in Europe, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch.

SupersonicAds is now live on Honesty Box on Facebook, whose lead developer Dan Peguine is also coming on board as a strategic partner for the company, as well as on Save An Alien, a popular virtual pet website.

While SupersonicAds is open to any and all advertisers, Shoham said he expects offers related to mobile content, gaming, and dating will work well for European users. The company plans to add a mobile payment option as well, but hasn’t finalized its choice of SMS partners yet.

For now, the company is focused on building out its core platform. It is self funded, but may raise money later this year, according to Shoham.

As virtual currency monetization space continues to grow, we’ll have all the details for you here on IF and ISG.

Inside Facebook is live here at ad:tech San Francisco for the panel on “Social Media + UGC” including:

• Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO, SocialMedia
• Mike Hoefflinger, Director of Brand Product Marketing, Facebook
• Andy Mitchell, VP, Interactive Marketing, CNN Worldwide
• Randi Zuckerberg, Director of Market Development, Facebook

Here are the highlights from the session.

Andy Mitchell: Regarding the Obama inauguration integration with Facebook, the fact that we were promoting CNN on Facebook, a different platform, shows the success we had promoting this idea within the company. We also promoted it in Spanish.

We pushed everyone to our Event page, because the power of Facebook is getting one user engaged, and letting them get their friends engaged. We tested a number of different ads as well.

We ended up with 1.2 million RSVPs for the inauguration. So at the last minute we scrambled and created a “waiting room” in case we couldn’t serve all those live streams. Anheuser Busch, Starbucks, and Sprint ran very successful sponsorships of the event.

Mike Hoefflinger: There are 200 million users on Facebook today, including 60 million Americans, 30 million of which logged in today. How does advertising blend into that experience? Engagement ads on the top right side. For example, here you see an event unit that blends very organically with the user experience even though it’s bought media. In addition, once users establish a relationship with you you get the opportunity to publish information to their stream and it’s perfectly natural, just like information from users friends is perfectly natural.

Our home page is the most engaging page on the internet in terms of total time per month, which means we’re on the right track in terms of designing the right product for our users. And as long as the advertising you’re building fits well within the user experience there are benefits to be gotten by everybody.

There is no single magic formula for every brand, but there are common success themes.
- ask questions, extend invitations.
- promos, incenstives, exclusive content (what’s in it for them?)
- align with cause/passion (is it something they care about?)

Some examples:

- Starbucks drove awareness of promotion and in-store sales. They used an event engagement ad reach block on the day of the event. Over 1 million people responded, 650k confirmed. Strong ROI and positive user response. They continue to feed the system with events as a way to promote in store promotions.

- Papa Johns and Coke are publishing into the stream from their Facebook pages, getting into asking questions. Papa Johns got about 4000 comments on a recent question they posted around March Madness. These are things you can do all day long as long as they’re consistent with user expectations. Engagement ad couples with free pizza offer. Grew fan base by 130,000 people in 24 hours.

- Adidas and Red Bull made available exclusive content about their athlete base, taking fans behind the scenes. Adidas is up to 1.5 million fans, which to them represents up to 250m annual consumer spending. It’s a good way to get their fan base fundamentally more engaged with their products and the athletes behind their products instead of just mailing out discount offers.

Finally, think 360, promote across all channels. For example, Vitamin Water is promoting their Facebook page in their TV advertising, and they are being very consistent.

Audience Questions:

Question: What did the CNN experience teach you about people?

Andy Mitchell: You definitely saw the gamut, but overall the fact that people are not anonymous on Facebook like they are on blogs made their contributions a little more thoughtful.

Question: Is there such thing as too much sharing?

Mike Hoefflinger: it’s important for Facebook to give users the tools to manage that. It’s up to the user to decide what connections they want to establish as well as to decide whose updates they want to see in their stream. We’re not going to try to algorithmically handle that for you, we’re going to give you the control to do that yourself.

Question: How did the concept of fans come about?

Randi Zuckerberg: We realized that there were a lot of people who needed one to many relationships because friendships are one to one and they were reaching their 5000 friend limit.

Question: What’s the difference between Facebook status updates and Twitter tweets?

Andy Mitchell: Twitter is about speaking to a lot of people, but Facebook is more about sharing different types of content.

Randi Zuckerberg: With the inauguration, there were 2 different views of status updates – what everyone was saying, or just what your friends are saying.

Question from Seth Goldstein: What do you think about advertising formats in products like CNN Live? You’ve socially enabled your content, how do you socially enable your advertising?

Andy Mitchell: Some of the things we’ve done is show people video clips of Barack Obama and ask people to comment and that showed up in their news feed. As a marketer for a content company i think the best thing i can do is use content as marketing.

It was just last week that Inside Facebook detailed the action Facebook Platform payment providers are seeing – but the consolidation is already starting.

Today, Spare Change, one of the top providers of micropayment solutions to app and game developers on Facebook and other social networks, announced that it has been acquired by PlaySpan. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

PlaySpan, which has built a white label virtual currency monetization platform for online and social games, is itself just a relatively young company. It raised a $16.8 million Series B from Easton Capital Group, Menlo Mentures, Novel TMT Ventures, STIC and others last December.

However, the company says it is already powering over 1,000 online games, social network applications, and virtual worlds. PlaySpan also recently announced a deal to power payments for hi5 and acquired game payments company PayByCash last year. In addition, the company operates the Ultimate Gamer Card retail card business.

Spare Change was one of the earliest players on Facebook and other social networking platforms, enabling users to purchase Spare Change “credits” with real cash, which they could then spend in very small increments with any of the 700 apps or games in the Spare Change network. It was founded Lex Bayer, Simon Ru, and Mark Rose, who will stay on with PlaySpan at Spare Change’s Cupertino, CA headquarters. PlaySpan is headquartered in Santa Clara, with offices in Virginia, Ohio, and Mumbai.

We expect to see consolidation in the Facebook Platform payments and virtual currency monetization space continue throughout the year. For more backgroud, see our earlier report Facebook Platform Payment Providers Report Strong Growth in Q1.

While branded virtual gifts have been part and parcel of the advertising offerings of large Facebook platform application developers (and Facebook itself) for a long time, Facebook’s redesigned Pages product is allowing businesses and brands to integrate virtual gifts in their own Facebook public profile pages in new ways.

Now that Facebook Pages can have application tabs, brands are developing custom virtual gifting applications, installing them as a tab on their Facebook Page, and promoting the gifting tab from the stream.

For example, check out the new Bud Light page that allows users to send friends gifts carrying the Bud Light logo. When you send a friend a virtual Bud Light, the gift will appear on his or her wall with any message you choose to include. This will then be seen in the updates on all of his or her friends’ home pages, potentially putting the brand in front of a large group of people every time a gift is sent. This creates a huge opportunity to drive traffic to the Fan page, which is mostly comprised of videos of Bud Light commercials and a list of free wallpapers.

The Bud Light virtual gifts are currently centered around holidays and special events, with the initial rollout carrying a St. Patrick’s day theme. There are also gifts for graduations and birthdays, as well as a few just for fun. Buddy Media, who developed the application, says new gifts will be added based on the season or special promotional events in hopes that Facebook users will consistently send the branded gifts and keep the Bud Light name rolling through their updates.

Using virtual gifts to deliver brand messaging is proving to be an effective tactic in social network advertising. The best thing about branded virtual gifts is they’re a rare form of advertising that people actually like to receive. For a deeper dive on how virtual gifts can fit into your marketing plans, check out our Facebook Marketing Bible or Agency & Brand Edition. Also, see our previous coverage on other brands doing branded virtual gift campaigns in Facebook:

• Dell, eBay, and Sephora Launch Black Friday Virtual Gift Campaigns on Facebook
• Facebook Advertising: Sierra Mist Runs a Holiday Virtual Gifts Campaign
• AdNectar Building a Sponsored Virtual Gifts Network for Facebook App Developers

It’s hard to believe, but tomorrow is Inside Facebook’s third birthday! We wanted to take this opportunity to say thank you! to all of the developers, entrepreneurs, marketers, agencies, investors, analysts, and press in 188 countries around the world that read Inside Facebook daily.

It’s your support that has made the growth of Inside Facebook possible. We truly enjoy working with all of you. And, just in the last month, Inside Facebook has been cited on CNN, ABC News, The New York Times, Forbes, and Le Monde, the largest national newspaper in France.

To celebrate the occasion, we’re giving away a new Amazon Kindle 2 to a lucky reader!

Just email mail AT insidefacebook DOT com letting us know how you’ve used Inside Facebook or the Facebook Marketing Bible over the last year in your work or business,  along with your company name and role, and you’ll be automatically entered to win. The winner will be announced here later this week! Even if you don’t want to enter the contest, we’d love to hear from you. (Note: submissions become the property of Inside Facebook.)

Again, thanks to everyone for your continued support of Inside Facebook, and cheers to the next 3 years!

When we first covered white label Facebook application developer LOLapps last September, the company had just closed a $3.5 million Series A funding from from Polaris. Today, the company has disclosed for the first time that its network of applications is reaching 44 million uniques per month on the Facebook Platform.

How? Rather than developing its own applications, LOLapps has developed a tool for anyone to white label their own. The company’s flagship products, Quiz Creator and Gift Creator, have been used to create “hundreds of thousands” of Facebook applications (like What Greek God Are You? and Girly Girl Gifts), LOLapps co-founder and CEO Kavin Stewart tells Inside Facebook. Collectively, those applications reach 44 million people inside Facebook per month – nearly 25% of the entire Facebook audience.

“As new trends come out, people come to our platform and create a bunch of applications around it,” Stewart says. “This lets us ride every micro-trend.”

Revenue Models: Branded Apps and Virtual Goods

Big brands have also been using the company’s tools. For example, Coach recently created a gifting application around its hand bags. However, the company does not yet have a sales team and says it is just starting to build out its product line for brands. “We only found out about the Coach application because their agency asked for help,” Stewart says.

For now, the company is making money by using the inventory across its extensive network of applications to drive traffic to applications it operates which monetize through virtual currency. For example, the company’s Adopt a Rainforest application lets users earn virtual currency by participating in offers or buy virtual currency directly.

Up Next: White Labeling Mob Wars

While the company has achieved tremendous reach through quizzes and gifts so far, it seems to be smelling revenues around social games. As such, Kavin Stewart exclusively tells Inside Facebook that LOLapps is hard at work creating a white label platform for many of the most popular types of Facebook games – starting with “Mob-style” RPGs.

So if you thought you’d seen all the Mob games out there, prepare to see hundreds or potentially thousands more. While anyone will be able to customize the look and feel of the game, LOLapps will operate all instances of the game, which will be monetized through virtual currency. Other game templates are in the works too.

Conclusion

“It’s pretty early, but you can see the potential,” Stewart says. “If we can figure out the right parameters, a variety of partners should be able to use our platform to promote their content and products.”

It looks like LOLapps is certainly off to a great start. Stewart says the company is profitable and is looking to expand its 18 person staff.

Like last year’s profile page redesign, Facebook’s recent home page redesign has shaken up the AppData application developer charts. Several developers who saw the change as a disruptive opportunity have moved up or into the top 10 on Facebook, while many others have continued to grow at smaller scale.

Here’s a look at the top 10 developers on Facebook by total reach, 6 weeks after the redesign:

1.

Zynga

Moving into the top spot for the first time this week with over 40 million monthly active users is huge social game developer Zynga. With over 30 games on Facebook (and many more on MySpace and other social networks), Zynga is also known for its rumored revenues of over $40 million last year from loyal customers in Texas HoldEm Poker and Mafia Wars.

2.

RockYou!

Holding steady at just under 40 million monthly active users is RockYou. With over a dozen social apps and games, as well as one of the largest ad networks on the Facebook Platform, RockYou has been near the top of the Facebook developer charts since the beginning of the Facebook Platform.

3.

LivingSocial

The poster child of the new Facebook redesign, LivingSocial has rocketed from the middle of the pack to having the largest app on the Facebook Platform in a matter of weeks. LivingSocial’s namesake application was the app that made the “top 5″ phenomenon popular after the new stream launched.

4.

Slide, Inc.

Hanging tough at #4 is Slide, which like RockYou has been a perennial top developer on the Facebook Platform by total reach, led by its flagship FunSpace, Top Friends, and SuperPoke applications. However, the last month has been more difficult for the company, having slipped from over 40 million monthly active users to just under 30 million now.

5.

Playfish

European social game developer Playfish is holding strong at #5, with over 26 million monthly active users. The company’s suite of Facebook games have proved very engaging over time, and the company is monetizing through a combination of virtual goods and sponsorship campaigns.

6.

Causes

Famous for its election day rally, Facebook “Great App” Causes has remained in the top 10 despite significant seasonality around major events. Lately, Causes has been seeing increased traction around its birthday donation feature, though the app is down from 25 million to 17 million monthly active users in the last few weeks.

7.

FamilyLink.com

FamilyLink has been riding the explosion of Facebook users over 35 in recent months, having grown to nearly 16 million monthly active users. It’s been holding steady there for the last month, up from 10 million monthly actives at the beginning of the year.

8.

Flixster

Flixster’s Movies application has seen significant growth in the last quarter, from just over 6 million monthly active users to nearly 15 million. Flixster has always done well with its quiz library, and has added its own “top 5″ feature recently as well.

9.

6 waves

International social game developer 6 waves burst onto the scenes earlier this year, revealing just how large its audience was (over 20 million monthly active users at the time). Since then, 6 waves’ audience has slipped to just over 13 million active users as of today, but it’s still in the top 10.

10.

Quiz Monster

Quiz Monster, responsibile for some of the most prevalent quiz applications that have flourished since the Facebook redesign, has also ascended into the top 10 just in the last 4 weeks. It strongly encourages users to post their quiz results to their profile, for their friends to see in thier stream. Quiz Monster now reaches nearly 9 million monthly active users, up from 2 million just one month ago.

Four days into the seven day voting period on Facebook’s new governing documents, 290,000 Facebook users have turned out to vote. Currently, votes for the proposed (revised) governing documents lead votes for the current terms of service 73% – 27%, a ratio that has held since just after voting began.

At the current rate, about 500,000 people will vote by the time the voting period ends on Thursday. A turnout in that ballpark would reach about 1% of the 60 million vote threshold Facebook set at the outset of the vote needed for the outcome to be binding. Nevertheless, Facebook is very likely to adopt the new governing documents anyway.

For its part, Facebook is promoting the vote heavily, including messages at the top of everyone’s profile page, Facebook ads, and enabling users to post their vote to their profile for friends to see in their stream. So far, about 1.4 million people have visited the Facebook Site Governance voting application, but only 20% of those who visited the app have logged a vote.

While Facebook’s decision to revert its terms of service a few weeks ago and propose a new way of updating its TOS proved great fodder for the press, it appears that most Facebook users simply do not feel strongly enough about the proposed changes to the terms to participate.