As more businesses and other organizations have begun advertising on Facebook, more advertising professionals are handling multiple accounts. To help this group of power users, Facebook has recently introduced a dashboard that allows them to see basic information about each of their accounts in a single window, similar to Google AdWords My Client Center.

Stats include: Status, Clicks, Impressions, CTR percentage, Average CPC, Average CPM, and amount spent.

From the company blog post today:

Do you have access to multiple advertising accounts? Would you like an easy way to view all your accounts at once?

To help you quickly view all the accounts to which you access and manage, we are providing one easy-to-digest dashboard with your basic summary statistics for each advertising account. From this single view, you can easily navigate to a specific ads account, or sort the columns and determine how all of your accounts are performing. The dashboard will be visible when you log in to your Ads Manager.

Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip.

In June, Facebook’s US traffic looked like it might be hurting, perhaps from user frustration with a variety of privacy issues — key demographics registered a decline, and growth appeared to be roughly flat. But July brought recovery, as Facebook’s own data showed it gaining millions more users.

Here’s our look at what third-party web measurement firms are now showing for July  – and August, for those firms that have made their numbers available already — following up on our analysis of them from last month. With several exceptions, the overall trend is more Facebook growth in the US and around the world.

ComScore

Facebook had a solid July, going from 141.6 million to 145.5 million unique visitors. ComScore has its August US numbers out, and it showed Facebook adding another 2.5 million new uniques over July to reach 148.0 million. Facebook’s closest product rivals, MySpace and Twitter, continued to fall slightly, to 59.6 million and 23.8 million respectively last month.

Worldwide, the numbers aren’t yet available for August. But Facebook continued to boom in July climbing up 20 million from June to reach 571.5 million uniques. Other third parties don’t publish worldwide numbers, and Facebook only intermittently provides worldwide stats, so we don’t have a clear way of putting this number in context — other than to point out that comScore is generally closer than most to what Facebook self-reports.

MySpace continued to taper off, while Twitter appears to be a bigger hit abroad than in the US. On another note, comScore showed Facebook taking the lead in terms of time spent on site in the US in August.

Google Ad Planner

Aggregated from a variety of data sources, mainly Google’s own tracking tools, the Ad Planner shows similar gains in August — in the US. Facebook grew from 130 million the previous month to 140 million uniques. But world numbers did not show similar gains, as Facebook fell from 550 million to 540 million. Also, Google’s daily unique visitor count for Facebook shows choppy gains over the summer.

Quantcast

While August isn’t in yet, July is, and the firm shows Facebook rising from 130 million in June to 133 million. MySpace continued to fall, ending at 45.6 million and Twitter flat-lined at 44.4 million.

Compete

Finally, Compete’s numbers are in for August. We looked at July’s last month, and then it looked like Facebook was growing, from 124.7 million in June to 128.1 million. August dipped down, though, falling to 127.6 million uniques. Twitter and MySpace did, too.

Conclusion

Summer can be a slow month for web sites — and Facebook included, as some of the web measurement firms seem to show. However, the collective view of Facebook provided by these companies is an upward US growth trend in July, more of that in August (although maybe not as much), and a similar trend worldwide.

Our US estimates, derived from Facebook’s self-reported ad tool, showed the company with 133.9 million monthly active US users in August, up around 5 million from July. For more on our data and reports, be sure to check out our Inside Facebook Gold service.

Facebook has had one of the most exciting years in its history in 2010, presenting extraordinary opportunities alongside substantial challenges. As part of its growth, the Facebook ecosystem is now more diverse and complex than ever.

To further understanding of the key opportunities on Facebook today, we are proud to announce the latest edition of the Facebook Quarterly Business Review, Q2/Q3 2010, our detailed report tracking Facebook’s financial growth and corporate strategy.

The Facebook Quarterly Business Review examines all major business developments affecting Facebook from the beginning of Q2 2010 through now, and is only available through Inside Facebook Gold, our research and data membership service.

As we close the third quarter of 2010, Facebook is now rapidly bridging online identity, content distribution, and monetization. Social media is now driving more traffic than search to many publishers, while developers of virtual goods-based businesses are profitably leveraging social platforms to connect with hundreds of millions of direct-paying customers. All of this change is supporting (and supported by) Facebook’s own in-house advertising platform – the powerful monetization system that has enabled the company to announce that it had become “free cash flow positive” one year ago this month.

The purpose of the Facebook Quarterly Business Review is to provide readers with a detailed overview of every key aspect of and change affecting Facebook’s business since the close of the first quarter of 2010.

The Facebook Quarterly Business Review is available as a part of your membership to Inside Facebook Gold. To join Inside Facebook Gold, and download the Facebook Quarterly Business Review, click here.

The full table of contents is below:

Facebook has added a new incentive mechanism called Top Contributor to the Help Discussions section of its Help Center. The feature, a leaderboard like what you see in games, inspires people to answer questions well in exchange for recognition.

However, there are bigger changes coming to the Help Center. Questions will one day replace it, according Questions Product Manager Blake Ross. First, here’s a look at the new leaderboard.

As part of Top Contributor, users now earn points for answering customer support questions of fellow users, and can vie for a spot on the Top Contributor leaderboard. Facebook benefits from incentivizing user-to-user support because the more inquiries that can be answered by fellow users, the less professional customer support personnel they have to hire.

Users visiting the Help Center will see that the left sidebar now includes links for Top Contributor, as well as a My Score sublink of Help Discussions. When clicked, Top Contributor shows a leaderboard of the first names and profile pictures of the top 32 contributors. The top 5 contributors are also shown on the Help Discussions Home Page. Users can’t click through to see a leader’s support questions and answers, though, as this would raise privacy concerns and the added visibility could make it difficult to displace a leader from the board.

Users can rise to the leaderboard by answering questions for 5 points each and having their answers marked as the best for that question for 25 points each. The current Top Contributor currently has 299343 points. Users can see their current point totals within different periods of time by clicking the My Score navigation link.

Similar to how Facebook’s invite incentive system Impact works, Top Contributor adds game mechanics and rewards of prestige to users who help Facebook. With so many users playing social games, it seems natural to incorporate these mechanics. However, Facebook needs to make sure users don’t sacrifice quality in order to get more points. Inaccurate support answers can lead users to make more calls to professional support, and invites from strangers can scare potential users away from Facebook.

Facebook may seek to improve the quality of user-to-user support answers by tying them more directly to a person’s identity. Blake Ross, Product Manager for Facebook Questions says that the tool which currently allows users to ask friends and the public about time travel, their favorite restaurants, dating or anything will eventually power the currently more isolated, post & comment-style Help Discussions.

In response to a query on Facebook Questions asking “Is it OK to use Questions for Facebook support issues?”, Ross said “Absolutely. Most Facebook employees monitor questions about their products. In fact, Questions will ultimately replace our user-to-user help center.” If a user’s friends can see a record of their support answers, they’ll be inclined to give better answers. Using Questions to power Help Discussions will also bring support inquiries out from the trappings of the Help Center and onto the home pages and news feeds of users, increasing the likelihood they’ll receive answers.

As Facebook continues to grow across time and language boundaries, finding crowdsourced solutions to their customer support needs is essential. The challenge will be getting experienced users to help novices, and to avoid letting the blind lead the blind.

Update: We have received reports that some users may secured the abnormally large number of points necessary to be on the leaderboard by using an autoresponder. Facebook appears to have disabled some accounts on the leaderboard, as a few now show no name or profile picture.

A couple apps we haven’t seen before appear on this week’s AppData list of fastest-growing Facebook apps by daily active users, along with several names that have shown up repeatedly over the past few weeks:

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Windows Live Messenger	4,811,124	+360,499	+8%
2.	FrontierVille	7,298,649	+298,203	+4%
3.	Causes	1,074,432	+293,256	+38%
4.	Millionaire City	1,532,091	+183,668	+14%
5.	Celebrity Birthdays	171,918	+171,912	+2,865,200%
6.	Kingdoms of Camelot	867,681	+153,589	+22%
7.	Are YOU Interested?	614,547	+152,039	+33%
8.	Games	1,219,795	+150,107	+14%
9.	YoVille	1,220,663	+144,739	+13%
10.	Phrases	4,219,861	+127,128	+3%
11.	小小戰爭	127,223	+126,980	+52,255%
12.	The Fortune Teller	379,569	+123,094	+48%
13.	City of Wonder	1,075,063	+122,795	+13%
14.	Car Town	944,165	+120,255	+15%
15.	Samsung Mobile	615,405	+107,208	+21%
16.	Friend Facts™	129,444	+106,222	+457%
17.	Madden NFL Superstars	118,290	+105,048	+793%
18.	Fashion World	1,179,023	+100,674	+9%
19.	FantaBook	133,734	+98,491	+279%
20.	Give Hearts	823,542	+97,211	+13%

Windows Live Messenger is the leader, having this week entered the ranks of the top five apps by DAU with 360,499 new daily users. The Windows app is emblematic of Facebook’s worldwide expansion, since the app’s growth is mainly from international users who are accessing both Live Messenger and Facebook on a regular basis.

Causes, the venerable philanthropic app, has gone from a plateau to a sudden leap in DAU for no clear reason. It has done so before, though, so it’s too soon to say whether the extra users will stick around.

At number five, Celebrity Birthdays is one of the new apps mentioned above, having reached 171,918 DAU in short order. There’s nothing unusual about this app; it simply shows you a printout of celebrities with your own birthday.

The dating app Are YOU Interested? is showing some DAU growth of its own, although not enough to keep up with its monthly active user growth. The app’s developer, SNAP Interactive, seems to be spending heavily on advertising, with the usual result of many new users not sticking around.

Finally, check out some of the games on the list, including Millionaire City and Kingdoms of Camelot, two older games that nevertheless keep up consistent growth; we discuss why in more depth this morning on this list’s counterpart at Inside Social Games.

Twitter has launched the biggest redesign in its company history, introducing a new interface for Twitter.com that makes it easier to share and consume information with other users. The company is now providing features to users that are quite similar to what outside developers have already built — but the move also creates more possibilities for third parties.

Here’s a closer look at what’s visible now, and what could be coming in the future. Overall, the change is likely to reinforce Twitter’s value to marketers, in ways that are similar to Facebook’s Pages feature.

The new Twitter site includes a right-hand pane, that defaults to a variety of information about users — follower counts, follow suggestions, trends, and other information that you could see in the previous right-hand navigation column on the site. But Twitter is also including a way new way of reading tweets: if you click on any tweet in the left-hand column, you’ll see detailed information about it appear on the right, including items mentioned in the tweet and tweets mentioning the user who tweeted.

And, if the tweet includes links from any of 16 companies who have signed business deals with Twitter, you’ll also have the option to view the content of the link in the right-hand pane. Most of the companies are the in the media business, but a couple aren’t and they point the way to how Twitter could build out its value to many more third parties.

One is Etsy, an online handmade items store. If you click on links to Etsy listings, you have the option to view the media in the listing. The listings include images of the crafts, or other products for sale, as well as their prices.

The other non-media company is Kiva, an online microlending site. Its links reveal the profiles of entrepreneurs in developing countries, looking to raise money for their businesses.

In both cases, you’d need to click through to the home sites to make a transaction. But Twitter could decide to introduce a payments system directly into its interface, minimizing the amount of clicking required to make purchases — allowing people to buy what they see in links, without having to leave the site. That could ease the flow of commerce through the service, and open up new revenue streams for itself, if it decides to take a cut of the money it helps generate.

Similarly, it could enable a variety of other interactions within these panes. Perhaps it could allow some social games in here as well at some point? For now, the feature looks more like how companies are using tabs on Facebook Pages, and less like a full-blown developer type service, but that could change.

We asked the company for more details about its plans for this pane and its platform during its launch event today in San Francisco. For now, employees we spoke to said, it is trying to refine the new product — but it is clearly open to exploring these sorts of ideas, judging by some of its early partners.

For more details on the wider launch, be sure to check out Techmeme.

A month after we wrote about PayNearMe’s new option for Facebook users to pay for Credits at their local 7-Eleven, the company’s business plan has become significantly more official: it’s announcing the launch of a full platform today, along with partnerships with virtual currency company Super Rewards, Friendster owner MOL, Amazon.com, Lexicon and several financial services.

PayNearMe’s solution, aimed at people without credit cards or other electronic payment methods, is pretty simple. Users who can’t pay online can now choose how many Credits they want to buy, print out a receipt, and visit their nearest 7-Eleven to pay in cash.

Although people without access to traditional electronic payment aren’t always visible online, they’re a market worth $1.3 trillion annually, according to chief executive Danny Shader. “We’re trying to make it easier for that other quarter of the country to conduct transactions,” he says.

That group is certainly visible to Facebook app developers, who have been reaching out to teens through companies like Rixty, which sells virtual currency through Coinstar machines in supermarkets.

Over time, PayNearMe hopes to expand to even more services. “Our growth strategy is dependent on signing up additional interesting merchants, and having those merchants inform consumers that they can pay this way,” says Shader. “In most cases, we’re better, faster and cheaper than all the alternative ways this audience can pay.”

That plan could also be good for the growth of virtual currency and games driven by micro-transactions. Ease of payment is often the biggest obstacle for users, and each new option can help grow the market considerably.

Facebook has made more changes to its new content publisher, including restoring the ability of users to paste a link into the status publisher and have it automatically format a rich media post. While this functionality was available in the old publisher, it was stripped from the new version, forcing users to choose the type of content they wanted to publish ahead of time. This restoration will make it easy for users to add a link to a status update they’re composing.

Facebook has also removed the ability to delete a link while in the process of composing a link-based story in the publisher. Users instead can switch story types using the publisher’s tabs, but in doing so they’ll lose any description of the link which they’ve written.

Facebook’s publisher helps users share some of the 30 billion pieces of content distributed per month on the site. While it can post simple text status updates, or upload photos and videos, the publisher’s ability to reformat any URL into a compelling snapshot of that website is its biggest strength.

You can post a news article link and the publisher auto-populates with the article’s headline, lede, and an image. Insert a YouTube URL and you get a streaming video player with a thumbnail of the video and its description, or paste a URL ending in “.mp3” for a streaming audio player complete with artist and album name. By creating a compelling post without requiring the user to type anything, Facebook has made sharing a fluid and natural part of browsing the internet.

For the last few weeks, though, users had to know whether type of content they wanted to publish before they started composing. If a user began writing a status update about an upcoming concert, then decided they wanted to include a link to one of the artist’s songs, they’d lose their original text. By restoring auto-formatting of URLs placed in the status publisher, Facebook takes the burden of choice off of the user.

However, users can no longer reverse this process to turn a link story into a text-only status update. Previously, while composing a link story, users could click an “x” button to remove the link, turning the optional user-entered description into a status update. This button has been removed, forcing users to click the status publisher tab or reload the page in order to clear the link. Switching to the status tab caused the publisher to drop the link story in progress — description and all. While users can switch back to the link tab to regain their progress, they must copy and paste to use their link description as a status update.

Users can still post a hyperlink in a simple status update, though not by clicking the “x” button like before. Since a hyperlinked status update is smaller and can be shown on mobile devices, some reports say it can get better news feed placement and more clicks than a full-sized rich link story. Those concerned with their news feed optimization can achieve this trick by pasting a URL into the status composer, letting it auto-format into a link, then clicking back to the status tab. This will show the URL unlinked in the composer, but it will become an active hyperlink once published.

While these changes may seem minute, at Facebook’s scale the loss of just one second on each share costs millions of hours in productivity a month. As long as Facebook’s mission is to “Give people the power to share”, it will continue to iterate on the publisher.

Thanks to Brandglue for the tip.

Today, DefinedLogic launches Open Audience Manager, a tool which helps enterprise-level companies manage the Like buttons on their Open Graph-enabled web sites.The browser-based tool lets clients treat those who’ve clicked each Like button as a different audience to which news feed stories can be published.

Large companies that have a diverse audience spread across their Like buttons could benefit from the ability to communicate on a granular level, delivering highly relevant content customized for each user segment instead of having to broadcast the same message to everyone.

Unfortunately, Facebook doesn’t permit the tool to adopt existing Like buttons without resetting their Like counts, so clients must create their site’s Like buttons through the Open Audience Manager to access the publishing functionality.

DefinedLogic is a traditional IT consulting service, but a portion of its team of 60 employees worked to develop this software-as-a-service. Clients pay a monthly fee depending on how many Like buttons they’re tracking with OAM, plus a start-up fee for customized integration into their existing workflow and analytics systems. The tool is launching with one large, undisclosed retailer, DefinedLogic tells us, and it is testing with two more retailers as well as two agencies. It is also working on a stock, self-serve version of the tool without customized integration, but that won’t be ready for market until next year.

A client first uses the tool to create Like buttons for their site. They enter Facebook’s required Like button information, including site name, page title, public description, type, thumbnail image, and page URL. OAM then generates a code for that Like button to be embedded in the client’s site. As new buttons are created and receive their first Likes they show up in the Dashboard, which also displays a client’s most popular Like buttons.

The core of Open Audience Manager is the Pages tab, which lets clients see a list of all their Like buttons and associated Like counts. From here clients can access each Like button’s publisher where they can craft feed updates to be sent to that button’s audience. Text, image, image link, and footer action link (next to the timestamp) can all be customized to create a rich, highly targeted feed story.

After publishing, clients can view analytics about each story, making it easy to see what kind of content best engages a Like button’s audience. Graphs and counts show how many clicks each element of the story received, how many Likes and comments the story itself generated, as well as how many Likes it drove back to the original Open Graph object. Post Activity lets clients see all the comments made on the each instance of the stories they publish, since there is no single, centralized version of the story as with those published by Facebook Pages. Without the tool, tracking the conversations surrounding Open Graph object-authored stories would be extremely difficult or impossible.

Using the Administration options, a client can set up different privilege sets for a sites different management teams. For instance, engineers could only be allowed to create new Like buttons, while the marketing team could only be permitted to publish stories. Like buttons can be set up under different channels, allowing a single person to manage to numerous separate sites with a single license of OAM.

DefinedLogic’s product is especially useful to large retailers looking to implement hundreds or thousands of Like buttons on their website. For instance, a clothing company might have products which appeal to very different demographics. A message about any one product might be irrelevant to 90% of the people that Like their official Page. But by using OAM, the company could send sale information about men’s belts to only their users who’ve Liked men’s belts on their site. Those seeing the story are much more likely to click, and the company doesn’t bother the rest of their user base. DefinedLogic is currently working on integration with product databases so if a company lowers the prices on 500 of their items, OAM could automatically publish “Fall Discounts” stories to anyone who Likes one of those items.

The barrier to Open Audience Manager’s success is Facebook’s precautions against companies bait-and-switching those who Like objects on their sites. Facebook doesn’t allow companies to change the destination URL or other properties of a Like button to prevent a user’s Like from being reassigned to something they don’t approve of. Therefore, to use OAM with a Like button, it must be created within the tool. DefinedLogic has included a proxy system so clients can in fact change the destination URL of a Like button, but OAM still can’t adopt existing Like buttons without severing the connections the buttons have already made.

DefinedLogic is still optimistic, though, as few companies have already fully rolled out the Like button on their sites. Even those who have implemented the button might still consider switching to OAM. “I’d rather lose 10 Likes than not be able to communicate with the next thousand” said Vidar Brekke, Emerging Media Strategist for DefinedLogic. He says that while Facebook is trying to protect its users from having their Likes reappropriated, users already Like many dynamic Open Graph objects. “If you Like the New York Times home page, that will change every day.” If Facebook created a protocol for the authorized transfer of publishing capabilities to a new app ID, it would stimulate experimentation and more widespread integration of the Like button.

By making Like button more easy to manage, Open Audience Manager encourages third-party sites to integrate the Like button and begin reaching specific niches of their audiences.

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our data service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Please see Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

For several months running, Arabic has been one of the fastest-growing languages on Facebook. Like other languages, the biggest gains for Arabic have come from a handful of countries: in this case, Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

At first glance, these countries seem too widely scattered to be a cohesive market. A resident of Morocco probably might not be able to carry on a spoken conversation with a Saudi Arabian, three thousand miles and several dialects away. However, the written language is the same. And Facebook has been busy going after this greater Middle East market, inking a deal in February with a regional ad service provider that allows it to better target users in the area.

Since then, Facebook presence has continued to expand. Here’s a view of three months of growth for Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia:

With penetration rates and overall user numbers beginning to reach an interesting size, it’s worth a brief look at what might keep Facebook from becoming dominant in these countries.

The good news for Facebook is that there’s not a clearly entrenched competitor — decade-old competitor Maktoob, for example, said recently that it has 18 million total users, but it’s not clear how active the site is now versus what Facebook has already gained.

But being the only contender, at least for the moment, does not equal safety. As Facebook has found during the “Everyone Draw Mohammed” scandal, when it was banned for a time in both Bangladesh and Pakistan, its own desire for openness can play against it when users or governments get offended.

Saudi Arabia, the most religiously strict of the trio we’re looking at today, did not ban Facebook at the time. But its own priorities may lie elsewhere. As more Saudi women find access to the internet and create Facebook profiles, the country’s clerics could turn against it. In a February article, the Global Post pointed to both increased online freedom for women and a cleric naming the network “corrupting” and “the door to lust.”

In Egypt and Morocco, the potential problems are more political. Take for instance Egypt’s contentious 2011 presidential election, in which Hosni Mubarak, who has been president for 29 years, will take on Nobel prize winner Mohammed ElBaradei. For the moment, Facebook is a strength for both men.

ElBaradei, on the other hand, has accumulated almost 250,000 followers on Facebook and called for civil disobedience. Egypt’s freedoms are fragile and potentially subject to change; if Facebook finds itself unintentionally allied to ElBaradei, it could potentially suffer censorship.

Similarly, in Morocco, which is ruled by one of the world’s few remaining monarchies, civil rights groups have taken to Facebook to call for change in ways not condoned by the government.

It will take time for the political and religious authorities in these countries to learn about and understand Facebook. The results won’t be entirely predictable. One potential outcome could be a user exodus to a culturally sensitive network, like the recently-founded Madina.

But for now, Facebook is still enjoying unimpeded growth in these markets — and that trend may well continue into the future.

The traffic and growth data cited above is excerpted from the full Facebook Global Monitor, September 2010 edition. The Global Monitor is available through Inside Facebook Gold, our data and analysis membership which also includes analysis on developments, risks and opportunities in the Facebook business ecosystem. To learn more or join the membership, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.