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

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by thousands 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 with additional content designed for agencies and big brands is 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 October 31st all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms). Now that Facebook has crossed the 250 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience inside Facebook.

The October 2009 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• The latest updates on Facebook Pages, including new status tagging and Twitter integration. 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 why marketers should choose Facebook Pages over Facebook Groups, key SEO strategies every Facebook Page owner should know, and the best tools to manage your Facebook Page. See the table of contents below for more details.
• The latest updates on Facebook’s advertising tools, including several powerful new targeting features and the new “free sample” direct response ad unit. With Facebook’s new “connection” targeting, birthday targeting, and time scheduling tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences better than ever before. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new “Open Stream” API and what it means for marketers, publishers, and developers, including how Facebook Lite fits in. With the new Open Stream API – which just opened up to everyone last week- Facebook has released the power of the Facebook stream to live anywhere developers can put it – including publisher websites, desktop applications, and mobile phones. Find out exactly what you can do with the new Open Stream, and what it means for the future of the Facebook Platform and Facebook Pages.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new developer Gift Shop program and “Pay with Facebook” virtual currency payment service for application developers. Find out the latest on what Facebook’s new payment program means for the future of virtual currency payments on Facebook (and Facebook revenues) – including Facebook’s latest international currency efforts.
• The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site and build more social context through Facebook Connect and Facebook Share, including the new Connect for Mobile. With Facebook Connect (now available in dozens of languages) 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 enhanced Facebook targeting tools, 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. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• Plus, more updates on Facebook’s “Live Stream” widget for live events on your website or Facebook Page, recent rule changes for Facebook Platform ad networks, and more.

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

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $149 with 12 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!

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

The London Facebook Developer Garage is taking place this Thursday 24th September at the usual location of Sun Microsystems, 45 King William Street, London. The topic this month is “What NOT to do in social media!”, taking a look at some of the high profile failures in the space as well as some insider advice on how to avoid the pitfalls and boost an application’s chances of success. Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, is the headline speaker and is going to be covering Audience Engagement on Facebook.

There’s the usual networking sessions and beer and pizza provided by Sun. In addition, speakers will include:

• Iskandar Najmuddin from Nudge discussing the latest technical updates and changes to platform
• Mat Clayton from Wakari/MixCloud/Web Ticketing on how *not* to develop a Facebook app based on his experience developing some of the biggest facebook app marketing campaigns
• A look at the five biggest ‘epic fails’ in social media over the past few years from Hermione Way, presenter of Techfluff.tv

The doors open at 6pm and talks start at 7pm. Standard tickets are £7.50 or £4.50 for students. You can find out more about the event on the Facebook event page and tickets are available on Eventbrite as well as on the door.

Facebook today announced an officially supported method of running Unit Tests against your Facebook Connect integrations by way of the 3rd party application Watir. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Unit Testing is a series of automated tests to ensure the functionality of your application remains intact, particularly after updating or changing your application code.

To date, there is no easy method to execute Unit Testing on the Facebook.com domain for formal Facebook applications due to the complexity of the site, session keys, and authentication procedures. As such, typical 3rd party test suites such as Selenium fail in these conditions. However, it is usually a given that website administrators can introduce Unit Testing on their own domains and web applications to ensure functionality. Now that the line is being blurred between traditional web app and Facebook application via Facebook Connect, it is important that website administrators have a formal, sanctioned way of testing their own domains.

If you’d like to get the automated tests setup and running on your Facebook Connect integrated site, stop by the Wiki article for a more detailed explanation and instructions. As mentioned above, you’ll need to install the 3rd party Watir test frame (written in Ruby) which is currently available for both IE and Firefox.

Facebook was buy far the most-searched term in July, according to a fresh look by Compete at the data today. Among the fastest-growing terms, it was searched for 69.5 million times. Number two was Craigslist, in distant second, with 32.9 million queries.

The number of searches for a company often correlates with its overall popularity. Facebook got much more popular this year, growing 495 percent from 11.7 million in July of the previous year. Microblogging psuedo-rival Twitter also saw notable growth, going from only 300,000 queries in July of 2008 to 4.68 million this July, an increase of 1,461 percent.

As a reference point, Google Trends shows searches for Facebook continuing a halting climb through this month. Twitter, is staying relatively flat, although it continues to get relatively more press coverage, according to Trends. Note: It’s not clear if the drop-off in press coverage that both sites are apparently seeing now is an actual drop-off, or just an incomplete projection of the most recent data.

Following Facebook’s announcement last week that it reached 300 million monthly active users and was “free cash flow positive,” the company has been making a concerted effort to woo the advertising industry at Ad Week in New York. Most prominently, it has announced a deal with audience research firm Nielsen this morning, where the firm will gather ad-effectiveness data from within Facebook to share with agencies and advertisers.

Nielsen will begin placing specially-designed polls within right-hand window on the homepage where “sponsored” advertising posts normally appear. More, from the companies:

Nielsen BrandLift measures aided awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration via a set of short, specially designed one or two question surveys. The surveys collect the information marketers need as a seamless part of the Facebook user experience.

Working directly with Facebook’s advertising clients, Nielsen will conduct hundreds of Nielsen BrandLift tests over the coming months. The frequency of the surveys will be carefully controlled to limit any one user from being asked to participate too often. No personally identifiable information will be collected as part of this program.

Company chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg talked about the deal, a multi-year strategic alliance, in more detail today at Ad Week, together with representatives from Nielsen as well as advertiser Sony. She gave the example of Proctor & Gamble’s women-focused Secret deodorant’s Facebook page. In a test run, it gained 220,00 fans in five days (apparently through advertising) and then used BrandLift to track the results. The campaign, including the page and the ads, drove 11 percent in purchase intent among the general population, and 33 percent among women between 13 and 18 years old.

Facebook seems to have already convinced many advertisers that it is a good place to spend money. For example, Nielsen said today that Facebook had 14.7 percent share of display ad views in the US for August, 2009, up from 1.8 percent in January. This echos comScore data showing Facebook and MySpace together comprised more than 20 percent of US display ads in June. Anecdotally, ad industry insiders see “massive budgeting” being done for Facebook now, along with other social media sites.

This success further explains Facebook’s continued focus on advertising versus other forms of making money, such as a payments system. It has grown its revenues this past year primarily, from our understanding, through a combination of display ads for large brands and self-serve ads for everybody else. The company is on track to make more than $550 million by the end of the year, sources have recently told us.

Facebook is meanwhile continuing to flesh out its advertising products. For example, it recently introduced a way for a brand to include a direct-response form as part of an ad, which a few companies have been using to let users sign up to receive free samples. We’ve covered how Chik-Fil-A and Texas Pete Hot Sauce have used this feature to help attract more users to their pages. Today, Sandberg said that Texas Pete has managed to give away 5,000 hot sauce samples in just two days, something it has not been able to do so easily before. We’re also seeing this unit, which Sandberg called the “engagement sample” unit, in other ads now. See the screenshot above for Bear Naked granola bars.

BrandLift will start becoming available for advertisers this week.

A few weeks ago, Facebook told us it would start testing a new ads manager and bulk uploader soon. Now, some advertisers are starting to see the new version of the ads manager, which providers much easier campaign management, in-line editing, search, and easier navigation.

As you can see by clicking on the image below, the new interface allows for much more efficient campaign management than the current ads manager. This will be welcome news for advertisers who either manage multiple in-house or client campaigns. Choosing a campaign at left will load all active ads on the right. However, whenever ads are edited, they’ll still need to be reapproved by the Facebook Ads team.

Here’s how the new ads manager looks:

How were advertisers chosen to participate in the test rollouts so far? “A small group of advertisers from our active advertiser base was randomly chosen to participate,” according to Facebook. “We will roll the new Ads Manager out to all advertisers over time.” The FAQ for Facebook’s new ad manager can be found here.

Facebook says it will also soon start testing a new tool for advertisers to bulk upload many ads at once, instead of manually creating them in the standard campaign manager or through third-party scripts. Agencies, app developers, and direct response advertisers who often want to target and test hundreds or thousands of specific creatives will soon be able to do so much more easily.

(Thanks to Sam Goldfarb for sending in the above screenshot.)

[Editor's Note: This is a guest post by David Bailey, a partner at Kauth, Pomeroy, Peck, & Bailey LLP.]

The saga of the Facebook hit game Mafia Wars has made the issue of intellectual property obvious to any serious social game creator. But given how these laws have developed in the rest of the gaming industry, many games likely contain intellectual property. This will gradually reshape social gaming.

In 2008, Mob Wars creator David Maestri — a developer at top social gaming company SGN — left to launch the game on his own. He was sued by SGN, and settled amicably: He owns the game but SGN has some rights. Then, he sued top social gaming companies, Zynga and Playdom, for creating quite similar games called Mafia Wars and Mobsters. Those cases were settled earlier this year. Meanwhile, these companies and many others have continued building mafia role-playing games and expanding them to other platforms, like the iPhone.

Today, social game developers are increasingly focusing on strategies to prevent imitators from luring away potential users.

A mixed IP history

Unfortunately, games inspired by the successes of others have plagued the entire industry since its inception and the courts have rarely intervened. This inability to prevent imitation, however, has led mainstream game developers to devise a number of successful strategies for preventing imitators from gaining a significant user base. More “traditional” strategies pioneered by console gaming developers are based upon copyright and trademark law, and are equally applicable to social games. Newer strategies are also emerging in the Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) and social gaming industries that leverage innovation in underlying technical infrastructure as the basis for seeking patent protection for game features.

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games

If Taylor Swift’s recent surge in Facebook Fans is any indication, it may be true that anything Kanye West touches turns to gold. The country/pop star has seen an increase in her Facebook page traffic following last week’s much-publicized incident on the MTV Video Music Awards on September 13th.

After Kanye West jumped on stage to interrupt Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to announce that Beyonce had made one of the best videos of all time, there was an immediate backlash against West and resounding support for Swift. Even Beyonce took the time to hand over the mic during her own acceptance speech for an award later in the programming to allow Swift to finish her “thank yous.”

The support has translated into more Facebook popularity for Swift, with almost 100,000 Fans adding their names to Taylor’s page in the last week, giving her at a little more than 2.2 million total Fans as of today. Overall growth has continued to be gradual, but you can see a day-to-day increase in Swift’s page growth starting on September 13th.

There are an overwhelming number of comments offering congratulations to Swift and condoning West’s ill-advised interuption. The over-all theme of the posts on her wall mirror the public sentiment, offering an interesting look at how celebrity Facebook pages are echoing what’s going on in their lives. We’ve seen pages leap in popularity when an actor or musician is promoting a movie, show or album, but this is essentially Fans using Facebook to connect and air their opinions on celebrity news.

In the United States, Facebook grew by slightly more than five percent between July and August, according to web measurement firm comScore, from 87.7 million monthly unique users in July to 92.2 million last month. This is the second month that comScore has put Facebook in the top five, after Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL — all of which have more than 100 million users.

Meanwhile, Facebook itself reported 81.2 million monthly active users at the end of August, in its advertising tool. ComScore and Facebook use different measurement methodologies, although the firm tends to be closer to Facebook’s own numbers than other third-parties.

ComScore also reported that Facebook, measured as an ad network, was viewed at least once by 46.7 percent of the total US Internet population in August — 33rd place, well behind various sorts of media conglomerates and other networks.

What does the firm report about Facebook’s competitors? Fox Interactive Media, which includes MySpace, dropped from 80.9 million monthly actives in July to 77.5 in August. And, surprisingly, Twitter also dropped. It had 21.2 million uniques in July but only 20.8 million last month.

Facebook has been telling marketers to expect an announcement at Ad Week in New York tomorrow morning. Word appears to have leaked out early. It will be partnering with market research firm Nielsen to better measure the impact of ads, according to the Wall Street Journal. Facebook has confirmed the story with us but says it will be giving out more details tomorrow.

This is another step in Facebook’s advertising system becoming more mainstream. More, from the report:

Under the partnership, terms of which aren’t expected to be disclosed, Facebook advertisers who are also Nielsen customers will be able to measure the impact of the ads they buy on Facebook through polls that Facebook will show its users who have seen the ads. Facebook will then compare the users’ responses to those of other people who didn’t see the ads and package the data for advertisers, according to the companies.

Facebook’s in-house brand and self-serve ads have appeared to be fueling the company’s revenue growth over the past year. The company is on track to make more than $550 million, largely from these sources.

The product will be called Nielsen Brand Lift, the report says, and “the companies also plan to launch a service that would give data about advertising on other sites.”