There’s a new addition to the Circle of Moms — the popular Facebook application is offering new features to its Child Spaces pages. The site has amassed more than 5 million Child Space entries since its launch a little more than a year ago, and now mommies have even more ways to share and control information about their children.

The upgrade to Child Space entries give moms the ability to share information and updates on the pages through Facebook and Twitter, as well as set just who gets access to those updates. With personal security becoming an increasing concern across all social networks, Circle of Moms is also offering better control over privacy settings to protect any sensitive information.

Circle of Moms is also planning to grow the Child Space feature set further by offering vanity URLs and customized templates and themes to add even more personalization to the pages. Also slated is the ability to pull in content from photo and video sites, like Flickr and YouTube, to make tracking and cataloging every special moment easier and more complete. Photo printing capability will give those with access to the pages the ability to share pictures with friends and family off line.

Facebook was a large part of Circle of Moms’ early success, as well as its continued rapid growth. By adding these elements that mirror some of the latest offering from Facebook, Circle of Moms should broaden its appeal even further by functioning as an even more accessible and effective tool for sharing pictures and news about children with family and friends.

The application currently has nearly 2.4 million monthly active users, and should see further growth as the new Child Space features offer the privacy and and control moms worry about with the ability to share personal information that has made the app so popular.

Cell phone maker Motorola is eying a resurgence in the mobile market to counter years of slipping after being on top, and the company is hoping social media can help.

A new advertising campaign it’s planning will revolve around Motorola’s upcoming Android phones, with the Cliq coming later this year, followed by a barrage of new devices next year. The phone is featured prominently on the Motorola Facebook page, with a lot of comments on the page already discussing the phone and the company’s Blur interface.

According to a report on ChicagoTribune.com, Motorola recognizes that the move to market through social media is a little later than its competition. While the company has collected a little more than 58,000 fans on its Facebook page in the last 4 months, other companies, like Nokia, are well over the half-million mark. Motorola’s marketing division justifies the late move by saying by stating that they wanted to develop a product worthy of buzz instead of artificially manufacturing some sort of Web presence.

The Motorola Facebook page is a complete offering, similar to that of Nokia, which currently has the highest following among cell phone manufacturers with more than 683,000 fans. The videos tab offers information on current and upcoming Motorola products, and fans are able to post comments on the wall and upload their own photos, including a special album dedicated to photos submitted from Motorola devices.

Facebook has been pushing its live-streaming video service with companies like Ustream, while also making it easier for users to record or upload their own clips. The whole video focus seems to be paying off, as web measurement firm Nielsen reports today that the site was among the top ten video sites in September.

Facebook had nearly 111 million streams that were watched by 23.1 million unique viewers, Nielsen estimates. So its number of streams watched pales in comparison to most other sites on the list, starting with YouTube, which had 6.69 billion.

However, if you instead look at the number of unique viewers, Facebook is at number three, behind only YouTube’s 106 million viewers and Yahoo’s 30.1 million. Facebook itself grew by 8.6% in September to reach 88.3 million monthly active users, according to the company’s raw, publicly-available data that we analyze. It appears that approximately one quarter of the US Facebook population watched a video on Facebook in September.

Toyota is once again trying to make the world a slightly better place via the electric-car Prius (and make itself a profit). The car manufacturer is now using a Facebook page to inspire fans of the Hybrid to share the positive things they’re doing on a day-to-day basis. The app, called Random Acts of Prius, asks users to earn points for completing activities, then share those activities on the page and with friends.

A new random act is added daily for fans to complete, with a colorful bar graph tracking how many people have done each task. Acts are grouped into six categories, with color-coded bars representing health, creativity, happiness, environment, knowledge and community. So far, 275 acts have been completed since the application’s inception a little more than a week ago.

Each act is assigned a point value, and users can climb up through the ranks from Eco Connoisseur to Fuel Economist, Carbon Conservationist, Energy Efficianado and Hyper Miler. There is also the built-in ability to share your progress and acts with friends and in your news feeds, and stir up a little friendly competition in the race to Hyper Miler status. A leaderboard displays those with the most points, so those adding their own acts can track their progress against other users.

The Random Acts campaign should appeal to users on a number of different levels. The acts are simple and light-hearted, from hand-writing a letter to throwing a dinner party where everyone must wear a hat. My act only required a couple of lemons and a dirty kitchen.

Most of the acts have an environmentally-friendly theme, which caters to Prius owners and fans. The added element of a points system gives participants goals that they can share, and the campaign is something that users can feel good about sharing.

In terms of overall effect, the official page has a little more than 42,000 fans, and it’s steadily gaining a few dozen new people per day, according to PageData. On it, fans can add their own photos and commentary to the page wall, and they seem to be actively doing so. The app itself has 1,200 monthly active users to date.

In recent weeks we’ve been hearing rumors about gaming giant EA looking to acquire social gaming companies — specifically Zynga and Playfish. Both companies have denied the rumors, so assuming there are no deals that are about to be inked and announced, here’s what appears to be going on.

EA, as many in the gaming industry have expected, is starting to look around for acquisitions. If anything, we’re surprised we haven’t heard rumors about other gaming giants, like Activision/Blizzard and Ubisoft doing the same.

Zynga, as we wrote a couple weeks ago, has to our knowledge spurned funding earlier this year, and since grown revenue to possibly more than $200 million for this year. At some point recently, it was having “preliminary” talks with EA, according to multiple sources, with one person saying that the asking price was $1 billion. Zynga has flatly denied everything. We believe that Zynga could look to go public as soon as March, once its 2009 financials have been audited.

We have a few more details on what has supposedly been happening with Playfish….

> Continue reading at Inside Social Games

The new scare film “Paranormal Activity” is building audiences through social media sites like Facebook, relying on Web buzz to steadily increase the numbers of screens where the ultra-low budget movie is shown. The film is promoted as “the first ever major-film release demanded by you,” letting internet demand drive the markets where the movie was initially shown.

Distributor Paramount Pictures took an unorthodox approach to promoting and advertising the film, only releasing the movie to a few screens in mostly younger, college-town markets. Producers then bought limited TV spots for the trailers, which feature mostly audience reaction as opposed to clips from the film, as well as an appeal to fans to get online and demand the movie come to their town.

By catering to areas and demographics that are already heavily involved in social media, the promoters of “Paramormal Activity” were able to tap into those early viewers’ social networks and spread buzz about the film through Facebook and Twitter. The movie’s official Facebook page currently has almost 63,000 fans, and offers users the opportunity to demand the flick come to their town and upload their own video reaction to the movie. There’s even a printable flyer to help spread word about the film.

The movie was good enough to inspire those that did have the chance to see it during its initial limited release to take to the web and spread word through their news feeds and tweets. An announcement on the fan page touts more than 1 million people have demanded the film show at a local theater.

Of course, you have to have a strong product when using positive word of mouth to promote a movie, and by all accounts, “Paranormal Activity” delivers. And it’s not like Paramount had a lot to lose: the movie was made for practically nothing by Hollywood standards (reports vary between $11,000 and $15,000), and has already taken in more than $7.1 million at the box office. “Paranormal Activity” is now set for nationwide release this weekend.

The movie version of the popular children’s book Where the Wild Things Are is set to premier this Friday, and its Facebook page appears to be riding the success of a multimedia advertising blitz. It has grown from 72,000 users on the first of the month to 1.37 million fans today.

The page itself has been getting updated nearly every day acting as a sort of hub for other promotional efforts. There are links to various trailer videos, behind-the-scenes footage, music from the film, sneak-peaks and other features. Besides YouTube previews, the Warner Bros. movie also has a nice-looking iPhone app, and even a hipster clothing line.

The page includes some other notable interactive features. One is some sort of app where you can upload profile photos, and include a picture of your face instead of the main character’s within a cutout photo. There are also tabs for videos and the soundtrack. The page has had impressive growth overall. Since the 1st, the fewest users it gained in a day was 60,000.

While monthly visitor numbers don’t tell the whole story about the health of a social network, in this case it was more of the same for top social networks Facebook and MySpace, and microblogging service Twitter in the US, according to Compete.

Facebook grew relatively slowly in September according to Compete, by 1.93% to 125 million. MySpace, however, fell 9.66 percent to 50.1 million. Twitter, stayed at around 23.5%. None of the sites have seen any serious growth for the last few months according to these numbers, although Facebook and Twitter both grew quickly earlier this year. MySpace had actually been growing through June, when it reached 61.0 million.

Compete’s numbers tend to run on the high side compared to other analytics companies, although similar directional trends are usually visible across multiple results. You can see the same trend for September in Hitwise’s market share results from yesterday. The internal data that Facebook makes publicly available showed an 8.6% increase in September to 88.3 million monthly actives. Neither comScore nor Quantcast have released their September data yet.

Last week, we wrote about 8 ways that restaurants of any size can use Facebook pages to bring in more business. All of the successful examples we used were from national brands with big marketing budgets — Pizza Hut, for example, has built its own application so Facebook users can place orders from the site.

For local restaurants short on time and money, even taking the time to create a page can be a challenge. But some have figured out how to use Facebook to really boost their businesses.

Here’s an interesting anecdote about Mo’ Bettah Steaks, a Hawaiian restaurant in Bountiful, Utah. One of the owners, Kalani Mack, first set up a Facebook account to watch over his daughter’s activity on the site. But then, according to a recent Salt Lake Tribune article, he realized he could use it for his livelihood. He and others from the family-run restaurant now regularly post photos, thoughts, customer anecdotes and more to the page, they let fans post their own items, and are actively commenting back to the people who engage with them.

They’re also running a contest that makes good use of Facebook’s features to spread more news about the restaurant. Post a photo of yourself and your favorite Mo’ Bettah dish on your Facebook profile, then tag yourself and Mo’ Bettah on the photo — “otherwise we won’t see your pic and won’t enter your name in the drawing.” By tagging, of course, anyone who enters the contest also broadcasts the photo to their Facebook friends.

So far, the page has 1,819 fans. Considering that this is a small, locally-owned business, that’s not bad. “Just being in contact with customers directly that way was huge,” Mack tells the Tribune. “I’m not sure what kind of value it brought them, but I noticed that they enjoyed being in contact with their favorite restaurant.” And, in June Mo’ Bettah opened up a second restaurant in Salt Lake City. “I attribute the second location totally to Facebook because of what it’s done,” he said. “It clearly increased our business. We were not planning on expanding to Salt Lake City until 2010[.]”

As with any new technology, it takes time to spread from the early-adopter crowd to the general population. A recent Citibank survey of 500 small business executives in the United States reveals the scope of the issue: “76 percent have not found social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to be helpful in generating business leads or for expanding their business during the last year, while 86 percent say they have not used social networking sites to get business advice or information.” For local restaurants, it may just a matter of trying things out.

Are you a small business with an interesting experience using Facebook pages? Let us know in comment, or email us: eric (at) insidefacebook (dot) com.

And, check out our Facebook Marketing Bible.

Creating a page on Facebook is pretty easy — so easy, in fact, that a lot of “unofficial” pages have sprung up for brands and celebrities. But Facebook is trying to make pages an integral part of its advertising products, so it wants the brands themselves to own their presence on Facebook. This means the company regularly takes “unofficial” pages and folds them into the official ones; and now, it is also pushing a stricter process for proving that one owns a page.

Last week, apparently, it introduced a new verification process. It has been emailing large page owners, according to the guys at Lonely CEO Media, asking owners to confirm that “I am the Authentic Representative of the Entity that my Page Represents.” In this form, available here, Facebook says it will “only provide publishing rights to a Page if the admin is an authentic representative of the Page’s name.” It’s not clear how broadly Facebook will demand this sort of certification.

It gives three different ways of certifying page ownership.

1. “Add a badge or a Fan Box widget to your website that links to your Facebook Page.”
2. “Add an email address that is officially affiliated with the entity of your Page to your personal Facebook account. You can also add the email address of a company authorized to manage your brand (e.g., management or PR firm).”
3. “Add another admin to your Page who has an email address that is officially affiliated with the entity your Page represents.”

The latter two options are straightforward. The first one is more interesting, as it cleverly both proves that the page owner has control over their own web site, and gets the owner actively promoting the page (and Facebook itself).

As large pages grow to have millions of users — many of whom comment, “like,” or otherwise engage with the page regularly — the real estate value is continuing to go up. And just like real estate in real-life, this means more shady characters will try to fraudulently claim pages as their own. To that end, Facebook is also introducing a way to resolve ownership conflicts.

From the site:

When a Page appears to be authorized, often we’ll receive a complaint for removal from another claimed representative of the entity promoted on the Page. Sometimes this is caused by the complaining representative being unaware of the Page administrator’s affiliation. As a courtesy to you, we forward your contact information in such circumstances to the complaining party in an effort to facilitate a quick resolution. Please check the ‘I Agree” box below to acknowledge that you agree to this process.

This new authentication form is hardly the end of the problem. Twitter, for example, has also recently rolled out a verification process for accounts, yet people continue to make fake ones. Facebook may now have more questions to answer, as the Lonely CEO guys note: “What legal obligations does this create for Facebook? Is Facebook suddenly responsible for the accuracy of pages? To what degree are these communities responsible for the identities they present? In addition, what will happen to abstract pages (like “Ice Cream” or “Pizza”)? Many legal and practical implications will continue to pop up as the issue evolves….”