The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 40+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook – April 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by hundreds of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today. It is also available in French, Spanish, and Italian. (A special edition for agencies and big brands is now also available.)

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

In addition, Inside Facebook is happy to announce that through April 30th all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (terms).

The April 2009 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• The most detailed information and recommended next steps on Facebook’s redesign of Facebook Pages / Public Profiles anywhere. With “Facebook Pages 2.0,” what used to be known as Facebook Pages are now becoming “public profiles.” These big changes to Facebook changes mean marketers need to think in entirely new ways about how to reach and engage users inside Facebook through Facebook Pages/Public Profiles. We’ve broken down all the new elements piece by piece and offered detailed and specific advice for marketers hoping to reach more users inside Facebook than ever before – including details on Facebook’s new SMS service, Page invitations, and home page stream. See the table of contents below for more details.
• The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site through Facebook Connect and Facebook Share. With Facebook Connect and Facebook Share, publishers have new opportunities for both enriching their sites with deeply social features and leveraging Facebook’s powerful feed system for driving traffic to their site. Get new details on metrics early Facebook Connect partners are seeing, and learn how to optimize your Facebook Share integration.
• New tools for advertisers to target their Facebook Ads better than ever before. With Facebook radius and language targeting, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in much more powerful ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars.
• New opportunities and policies for applications in the home page stream. With the new stream, developers have unprecedented access to the News Feed through Feed Forms. Learn more about how you can use Feed Forms to maximize your distribution inside Facebook, as well as new policies applying to the way you can use feed stories.
• Plus, more updates on the Facebook Home Page Redesign, tools for Pages, and more.

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $79 with three months of free 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. Pages / Public Profiles

• “Facebook Pages 2.0″
  • The New Wall Tab – Making Pages More Dynamic and Viral
  • Status Updates – Now for Pages, Too
  • Application Boxes – Changing Places
  • Tab Management – Choosing a Landing Page
  • Conclusion – Facebook Learning from Twitter, Pages Getting Better
• The Future of Sharing on Facebook: A Hybrid Public/Private Model
• Adding Custom Modules to Your Page
• Strategy: Groups and Pages have some similarities. Which makes more sense?
• Strategy: I’ve just created a Page. How do I promote it?
• Group to Page Migration
• Guidelines for Promoting Pages Outside Facebook
• Official vs Unofficial Pages
• Pages and SEO
• Ways Page Owners Can Restrict Content for Underage Users
• How to Import Your Blog into Your Public Profile
• Page Invitations
• SMS Service for Pages
  
• More Features Coming Soon

3. Groups

• Strategy: What about spamming existing groups?
• SEO
  

4. Events

• Events API
• Events SEO
  

5. Notes and Photos

• Events API
• Events SEO
  

6. Messages

7. Status Updates

8. Share / Posted Items

9. Mini Feed and News Feed

10. Feed Importing

> Data: Latest US Facebook Age and Gender Demographics

> Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers

II. Tools for Advertisers

11. Social Ads

• How Specialty Brands are Driving Sales on Facebook
  

12. Engagement Ads

• Summary of ad units available to Facebook advertisers
  1. Sponsorship Units on the New Facebook Home Page
     • Social Video Ads
     • Sponsored Virtual Gifts
     • Events Ads
     • Pages Ads
     • Polling Ads

  2. Advertising in the New Facebook News Feed
  3. Advertising on the Profile Page (and other pages)
     

13. Virtual Gifts

• The Future of Virtual Gifts on Facebook
• Scheduled & Holiday Virtual Gifts
  

14. Performance Ads

• Radius and Language Targeting
  

15. Localization Opportunities

16. Integrated Opportunities

17. Facebook Platform Ad Networks

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• What eCPMs do apps charge? Data from Facebook application developers

18. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Sponsorship Resellers/Rep Firms
• Strategy: Why sponsor applications when I can sponsor Facebook itself?

19. Specialized Facebook Platform Advertising Service Providers

> Recommended Strategies for Advertisers

III. Tools for Application Developers

• Strategy: What is the Right Way to Market Through Facebook Applications?
• Strategy: Where do most new application users come from?

20. Profile Box

• 5 Things Developers May Not Know About the Facebook Redesign
• Profile Integration: Tour of New Facebook App Settings

21. Application Tabs

22. Application Info Sections

23. Designing Feed Stories

• Strategy: Designing High Performance Feed Items
• News Feed Optimization: Strategies and Techniques

24. Feeds 2.0

• Feed Forms
• Feed Clustering
• Action Links
• Policy Update: All Feed Story Calls to Action Must Now be Action Links
  

25. Feed Publisher

• Publishing in the Feed with Feed Comments

26. Requests / Invitations

• Policy Updates: Requiring Invites to Access Hidden Features, Offering Incentives for Invites, Ads on Profile Page Prohibited
• Strategy: Facebook’s Evolving Approach to Platform Governance
• Sending Application Invitations to Non-Facebook-Members

27. Chat Invitations

28. Facebook Notifications

• Chat Integration: Facebook Wants More Synchronous Notifications
• Policy Update: Bulk Pre-Selection Prohibited
• Spammy Affiliate Marketers Sure to be Shut Down
  

29. Email Notifications

• Updates: Email’s Status as Core Application Marketing Channel in Doubt

30. Application Bookmarks

31. Application Directory

32. Status Updates & Donations

33. Demographic Restrictions

34. Verification and Certification

• Great Apps Program
• Application Verification

35. Translations

• Data: Stats on Facebook Apps Built for International Markets
• Tutorial: Translating Your Applications Using Facebook’s Crowd-sourced Translation Service

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

36. Analytics Tools

• List of Leading Third-Party Facebook Platform Analytics Providers
• New Metrics for Developers with Facebook Profile Redesign

37. Search Engine Optimization

38. Mobile

• Facebook for iPhone and Connect for iPhone

39. Customer Service

40. Custom Tags

> Poll: Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

> Recommended Strategies for Application Developers

IV. Tools for Webmasters

41. Facebook Connect

• Overview: Integrating Facebook Connect with Your Website
• Related: Google Friend Connect
• Examples: 40 Sites Live with Facebook Connect Today
• Variety of Facebook Connect Plugins Now Available for Blogs and Wikis
• Citysearch: Each Item Shared Through Facebook Connect Generates 30 Clicks
  

42. Comments Box Widget

43. Live Feed Widget

44. Facebook Share

Conclusion

It’s been nearly a month now since Facebook rolled out its new home page redesign. As usual, there was a lot of fanfare, and many users protested the change. However, now that March data is rolling in, let’s take a look at what’s actually happening.

Summary

According to Compete, Facebook’s US growth rate accelerated in March (this is likely largely due to Facebook’s incredible growth rate amongst users over 35), and Facebook’s overall share of time spent online in the US also increased. However, whether these trends correspond to increased engagement (i.e. visits per user or time spent per user) is unclear.

1. US Unique Visitors Hits All Time High in March

Compete shows Facebook hitting over 91 million unique US users in March – up 23% over February and up nearly 200% since a year ago. Meanwhile, MySpace also recovered a bit in March, up nearly 5% to 55.5 million US uniques, and Twitter grew an astounding 76% to over 14 million US uniques.

2. Overall Share of Time Spent Also Hits New High

New data also shows that, while Facebook’s share of time spent took a dip shortly after the new home page launched, it quickly recovered and hit new highs in % of time spent at over 6.5%, up 13.3% since 30 days ago.

3. Changes in Retention and Engagement Unclear

Although Compete measured a jump in unique users to Facebook in March by nearly 25%, time spent only increased by just over half that. Thus, according to Compete, overall time spent per unique user slightly decreased in March.

There are a couple possible reasons this could be the case:

• Because such a large portion of Facebook’s visitors in March were new users, these new users likely brought down the overall time spent per user number, simply because new users spend less time on Facebook (since they are just learning to use the service and usually have a small network of friends).
• Overall, Facebook users find the real-time stream slightly less engaging than the old algorithmic News Feed.

Of course, this data needs to be taken with a slight grain of salt because it is just one month of data from one provider, and there is widely known to be very high variability in core metrics between Compete, Comscore, and Hitwise. Nevertheless, the data clearly does show that 1) Facebook users are not revolting en masse, and 2) the changes have not greatly narrowed Facebook’s appeal.

Despite the growing interest in Facebook Connect as a way to integrate Facebook identity and sharing features on any site around the web, one of the untold stories about sharing on Facebook is the simple power of the Facebook Share button. With the latest Facebook home page redesign, the Facebook Share button just became a lot more powerful: now, every shared item is guaranteed to show up on users’ friends’ home pages.

By optimizing the way your site supports Facebook Share, webmasters can get as much as the 20-30 clicks per feed story that some Facebook Connect partners are seeing with much simpler integration work (it can be as simple as adding one line of code). Here’s how to optimize your site for maximum Facebook Share click-through traffic.

1. Add the Share Button to Your Site

There are 4 different versions of the Share button: icon only, link only, link and icon, and share button. Grab the code here and put the button you like best on all pages you want your visitors to share.

2. Make Sure Facebook Can See Your Title and Description

When sharing content on Facebook using Share, Facebook looks for a title, description, and thumbnail image to pull into the feed story. While Facebook will always try to find this for any shared link, you can actually specify this copy for the Facebook crawler if you want to have more control over the copy or images that show up in Facebook.

At the very least, you should test out sharing content from your site in order to make sure Facebook is picking up a title and description for pages shared from your site. Just make sure you’re setting these two lines of code in your site’s header:

<meta name=”title” content=”SXSW Driskill Flashmob: When Friends Converge & Create Memories” />
<meta name=”description” content=”When we peer into the looking glass into what truly made SXSW Interactive a unique and successful culmination of culture and real life networking, we see something very different and exceptional.” />

3. Specify a Particular Thumbnail Image

Once you have the basic plumbing in place, Facebook gives you the option to explicitly specify which image shows up next to content your users share. If you don’t specify what to pick here, Facebook will choose images from the page and let users pick which to show.

If you want to specify a particular image for Facebook Share, add this line of code to your header:

<link rel=”image_src” href=”http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3640/3354626316_25f2e12dbf.jpg?v=0″ />

Here’s how it would look inside Facebook:

4. Optimize for Multimedia

In addition to basic content sharing, Facebook also makes it possible to add metadata to your page to make audio and video sharing more powerful.  When you use these tags, your shared content can be playable directly in the feed.

First, you have to add this line to your site’s header to let Facebook know which type of multimedia it is:

You may also specify the type of content being shared by using the following tag:

<meta name=”medium” content=”medium_type” /> (where medium_type could be “audio”, “image”, “video”, “news”, “blog” 0r “mult”)

<meta name=”title” content=”video_title” />
<meta name=”description” content=”video_description” />
<link rel=”image_src” href=”video_screenshot_image_src url” />
<link rel=”video_src” href=”video_src url”/>*
<meta name=”video_height” content=”video_height” />
<meta name=”video_width” content=”video_width” />
<meta name=”video_type” content=”Content-Type header field” />

<meta name=”audio_title” content=”audio_title (eg. song name)” />
<meta name=”audio_artist” content=”audio_artist_name” />
<meta name=”audio_album” content=”audio_album_name” />

When Facebook redesigned the site last month, it relaunched its Pages product, which businesses use to build their Facebook home pages. With the redesign, Facebook aimed to make Pages behave more like regular Facebook profiles, with the Wall presenting users with a content stream of posts (links, notes, status messages, etc.) published down the center of the page. While fans of the page might choose to post something on the Wall, the company will often seed it with their own content to spur discussion and engage users.

In that regard, many Inside Facebook readers have asked about the best way to automatically feed blog posts from their company website to their Facebook page. Below, we’ve chronicled the easiest way to do it. We also give our thoughts on whether it’s best to set up the automatic feed via the “Notes” application, or to post information manually with the “Links” application.

How to import your blog to Pages (public profiles):

1. In the “Applications” menu in the bottom left corner of your Facebook page, choose either “Ads and Pages” or “Page Manager” (it may or may not be in your bookmarks – you may have to find it in the Applications menu).

2. Choose the “Pages” menu item at the top, and then click “Edit Page” next to the page you want to import your blog into. You should then arrive at the main administrative console of your Facebook page.

3. About half-way down the page, you will see the “Notes” box. Click on the pencil symbol in the upper right corner of the Notes box, and choose “Application Settings.”

(If the Notes application isn’t present in your Page Manager, add it by going to the Notes application here, clicking Add to Page, and choosing your Page.)

4. You will then be brought to the “Import an External Blog” page. Paste in the URL of your blog. You must check the box that reaffirms you have the right to be publishing that content. Click “Start Importing.”

5. Now, you will see a preview of your posts that Facebook imported from your company blog.

6. To make it permanent, you must scroll to the bottom of the page, where you’ll find a button to “Confirm Import.” The automatic feed will not be complete until you confirm it.

Conclusion

If you’re pressed on time, or you blog frequently, then setting up an automatic blog feed to your Facebook page might make the most sense. But we believe the Notes application limits user engagement with your company page for a couple reasons:

1. When Facebook users click on a post that was imported automatically, they are not brought to the blog post at your company website. Instead, they will be directed to where the post resides in the Notes application inside Facebook.
2. While there is a link that directs users to the “original post,” it’s not prominently shown, making it difficult to redirect Facebook users to your own site (where, ideally, they can interact with your products more deeply).

As a result, you may find it more beneficial to post manually via a status message or the “Links” application. It will take a little extra effort on your part, but we think it could yield better results.

As part of its new process for updating the site’s new Terms of Service documents, Facebook has announced the first-ever user vote on proposed changes. On April 16, Facebook will be posting revised versions of the new Facebook Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities governing documents based on feedback it’s received since introducing them in February, and the voting period will run from April 16 to April 23.

Here’s how Facebook’s voting process works:

• Last month, after reverting previous changes to its Terms of Service in response to user and press complaints, Facebook announced a new process for making updates to the TOS that includes a user comment period on any proposed changes.
• If at least 7,000 users comment on the proposed changes during the comment period, Facebook will hold a user vote.
• If 30% of all active users (defined as users who have logged in once in the last 30 days) vote, the results will be considered “binding.”
• If less than 30% of all active users vote, the results will be considered “advisory” (i.e. non-binding).
• Voting will be done through an application on the Facebook Platform developed by Wildfire, and Ernst & Young will “audit the vote tabulation… to ensure the votes are accurate.”

Facebook has clearly set the threshold for binding user votes extremely high – taking a conservative estimate that 175 million users have logged in during the last month, that means over 52 million users would need to vote on the changes to the new terms for them to be considered binding. Given that just over 3,000 users have commented on the proposed changes during the 30 day comment period, the probability of 52 million users voting on the changes (unless Facebook were to promote voting in an unprecedentedly heavy way) appears low.

Thus, the results of this vote will likely be considered “advisory.” What that means exactly, however, is unclear. Facebook is taking the stance that it is listening to user feedback about changes to the site’s TOS, but of course, it’s still running a business.

It will be interesting to see how the first voting process goes. How heavily will Facebook promote it? How many users will participate? What will it matter? We’ll have all the details.

Facebook announced new policies on Friday that affect the way application developers can design feed stories.

Of the changes announced, the one that should have the most immediate impact on developers is the new requirement that all calls to action in feed stories must now be formatted into Action Links. This means that developers who had put calls to action in the images or body of the feed stories need to update their design.

The idea behind the new policy is Facebook’s motivation to protect the integrity of the feed by preventing aggressive application developers from putting “too spammy” content in their feed stories. Action links (which appear next to Facebook’s default action links, “Comment” and “Like”) are more structured than the body of feed stories.

In addition, Facebook says that, “Applications cannot include a call to action in a Feed story unless the call to action directly pertains to acting on or viewing content described in the story, or offers the opportunity to perform the same action described in the story.”

The new policies go into effect Monday, April 20.

Check out the top headlines and insights this week from Inside Social Games:

Monday, March 30

• Poetic Justice? Lexulous Rises Against Mattel & Hasbro
• Gowalla is a New Location-based iPhone Game for Friends and Travelers
• Offerpal Partners With Outspark, Aeria Games

Tuesday, March 31

• Sparkle to be the First Virtual World for the iPhone
• TenCent Reaches New Heights in Virtual Goods Sales

Wednesday, April 1

• The Top 25 MySpace Games for April, 2009
• The Top 25 Facebook Games for April, 2009

Thursday, April 2

• Paradise Paintball is a 3D FPS Inside Facebook
• Virtual Greats Acquires NBA License for Branded Virtual Gifts in Social Network Apps, Virtual Worlds
• SGN Hires Eric Lindstrom as Chief Creative Officer
• Super Rewards Expanding More Broadly Across the Social Web

Friday, April 3

• Special Forces – Familiar Game, New Style
• 25 Random Things Attempting to Ride Facebook Meme

Sunday, April 5

• Interesting Metrics From Flash Gaming Summit

In its efforts to prevent the spread of malware, Facebook’s security team has begun working with the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) to combat the Koobface virus, which first surfaced on Facebook in the summer of 2008 and has frequently installed malicious code on users’ machines.

Koobface is a worm that crawls the social network by sending Facebook messages to people from the accounts of infected users. The messages contain common subject lines, such as “check out this video.” Inside these messages, users will be asked to click on a link. If users click on that URL, their Facebook user name and password can be stolen, and they unknowingly enable their account to send out the same fraudulent messages to their friends. In many cases, malware will also be installed on their computers.

Here’s a look at how (and why) Facebook decided to reach out to Microsoft in contending with the security challenges posed by Koobface.

1. Dealing with the problem at its root: Facebook user machines

So far, Facebook has done a thorough job at dealing with Koobface, both preventively and reactively. As we highlighted, Facebook’s security team has implemented several security measures to stifle the spread of the virus. Those measures include the following:

1. Facebook deletes content generated by the worm.
2. Facebook blocks Wall posts that contain links to known phishing sites.
3. Facebook uses automated systems to detect abuse on the site more quickly.
4. Facebook posts updates on the status of security issues to the Facebook Security Page.

But according to Ryan McGeehan, a threat analyst at Facebook, those measures fail to address one inescapable fact: Once Facebook users fall victim to Koobface, the virus usually infects their machines and operating systems, where, if left untreated, it can launch more attacks when those users connect to the Internet (and Facebook specifically). As millions of Facebook users have the Windows Operating System, McGeehan said it made sense to reach out to Microsoft.

“Windows is out of our jurisdiction, so it made sense to talk with Microsoft,” McGeehan told Inside Facebook. “There’s a direct correlation of infected machines and the resulting [Koobface] spam.”

2. Getting results

After Facebook worked with Jeff Williams, a principal group program manager for MMPC,  Microsoft added  security patches to its Windows Updates to fix the machines of Facebook users that had been infected by the Koobface virus.

As Williams wrote in a guest blog post on Facebook on Thursday, “Since releasing our newest version of MSRT two weeks ago, we’ve removed Koobface nearly 200,000 times from over 133,677 computers in more than 140 different locales around the world.”

By fixing the operating system on those machines, McGeehan and his team hope that the overall spread of Koobface on Facebook can be curtailed more effectively. In the meantime, he says both companies will remain vigilant, as Koobface has a way of resurfacing in different forms. In his post, Williams noted that the virus is “highly polymorphic, with over 20,000 variations to date.”

Conclusion

Facebook realizes that it can only do so much to stop viruses like Koobface that derive a lot of their strength from festering on user machines. Facebook’s security team will continue to work with other technology and security vendors to align their efforts in fighting the spread of viruses and malware on the Web. Facebook’s work with MMPC (and the strong results) serves as an excellent example of how such conversations benefit not only the Facebook ecosystem, but Web users in general.

“Everyone on the Internet has problems with these kinds of malware,” McGeehan says. “It’s my job to connect with the other people in the industry, so we can help them and they can help us deal with it as effectively as possible.”

There was a hidden gem in this week’s Facebook Platform update push: 3 new API calls to handle application moderation.

This has been a long requested feature with the initial enhancement filed back in October 2007. Even after the push, the new feature went largely unnoticed until it was mentioned by a Platform Team Member in this thread. Nonetheless, here are the API calls which were added:

• Admin.banUsers – Prevents users from accessing an application’s canvas page and forums.
• Admin.unbanUsers – Unbans a list of users previously banned using admin.banUsers.
• Admin.getBannedUsers – Returns a list of users who were banned by an application using admin.banUsers.

For the time being this new feature does not have a graphical user interface; all actions must be done via the Facebook API. Also worth noting is that this feature is only useful to developers wishing to ban users by their Facebook ID — you’ll need to implement your own solution using iFrames if you’d like to ban users by IP address.

It was only a few months ago that Facebook converted its gifting currency from real dollars to virtual credits in an effort to lay the groundwork for the expansion of its virtual gifting business. Now, Facebook is experimenting with a new way for users to give the virtual credits they have purchased to friends in response to content they share in the feed. The pilot program has been launched at a few college campuses, the Facebook company network, and the VentureBeat company network, where details were first published earlier tonight.

Here’s how it works: Currently, the only way to acquire Facebook credits is to purchase them in the Facebook Gifts store at the rate of $1 per 100 credits with a credit card (there are no other virtual currency payment options at this time). The only way to spend Facebook credits is on virtual gifts for friends, which usually sell for 100 credits each (though some sell for 200 credits or more, and occasionally sponsored virtual gifts are available for free). Now, however, Facebook is experimenting with a way for users to give credits to each other in the context of content they have shared. For example, if your friend posts a link that you like, you can either leave a comment, “like” it, or (now) give them virtual currency in response.

Many of the core dynamics of sharing on Facebook are powered by users’ incentive to accumulate social capital by sharing valuable information with their friends. In this credit gifting experiment, users can now get rewarded (“paid”) much more explicitly for sharing valuable content. Although Facebook credits are not currently redeemable for cash, Facebook has done a good job of keeping them scarce and closely pinned to the dollar in order to make the act of gifting them more meaningful.

Facebook’s product designers regularly apply principles of game design to the Facebook experience, and experimenting with explicit virtual currency gifting in the feed is another example of some of those principles in action. However, the current version of the test does not include many other common features that incentivize game play behavior like levels, leaderboards, or even showing users’ currency balance. Rather, Facebook is banking on the fact that because these credit gifts are readily visible to friends as an attribute of the content shared, they will share many of the same social capital exchange characteristics as wall posts, comments, and likes – albeit in a more meaningful way.

Finally, it’s important to note that this experiment appears to not be clearly related to the possible development of a universal virtual currency that could be shared by Facebook and application developers, as was speculated on last week after Facebook’s Gareth Davis said the company was “looking at” different virtual currency options. Such a system would obviously have many other moving parts and require much more complex economic management. Rather, this is essentially a test of a major expansion of Facebook’s own virtual gifting system.

According to VentureBeat, Facebook gifts and credits product manager Jared Morganstern says the test is going “well” so far. It will be interesting to see what Facebook decides to do with the experiment.