After three weeks of fervent media speculation, Facebook has come forward to confirm a $1.5 billion financing round through Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Russia’s Digital Sky Technologies. The round, which valued Facebook at $50 billion, was done in two parts. The first part was a direct investment of $500 million by both firms, and the second involved $1 billion raised from Goldman’s high-net worth clients overseas.

Although the company could have raised an additional $500 million through the Goldman vehicle, it decided to cap the offer. While Facebook didn’t say what it would spend the round on, it did say it took the offer to “bolster its cash reserves” without substantially diluting its existing shareholders. Facebook said it didn’t initiate the round. Goldman and DST did.

Facebook added that it expects to pass the sensitive 500-shareholder limit sometime this year so it will start filing public financial reports in April of next year. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will make a public offering at that time, although other technology companies faced with a similar situation in the past like Google decided to file for an IPO anyway. Facebook spokesperson Jonny Thaw declined to comment on the company’s IPO plans.

Technologies and Goldman Sachs Also Recently Made $500 Million Direct Investment Investment Values Facebook at $50 Billion
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Jan. 21, 2011 — Facebook today announced it has raised U.S.$1.5 billion at a valuation of approximately $50 billion.

The transaction consisted of two parts. Today, Goldman Sachs completed an oversubscribed offering to its non-U.S. clients in a fund that invested $1 billion in Facebook Class A common stock. In December, Digital Sky Technologies (DST), The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc., and funds managed by Goldman Sachs invested $500 million in Facebook Class A common stock at the same valuation.

“Our business continues to perform well, and we are pleased to be able to bolster our cash position with this new financing,” said David Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer. “With this investment completed, we now have greater financial flexibility to explore whatever opportunities lie ahead.”

The investment generated a significant number of questions from interested parties and Facebook has addressed the most common ones below.

Why did Facebook raise this money? DST and Goldman Sachs approached Facebook to express their interest in making an investment, and Facebook decided it was an attractive opportunity to bolster its cash reserves and increase its financial flexibility with limited dilution to existing shareholders.

Why did Facebook choose to raise $1 billion in the overseas offering? Under the transaction’s terms, Facebook had the option to accept between $375 million and $1.5 billion from the Goldman Sachs overseas offering, at the discretion of Facebook. While the offering was oversubscribed, Facebook made a business decision to limit the offering to $1 billion.

What are Facebook’s plans for the proceeds of this transaction? There are no immediate plans for these funds. Facebook will continue investing to build and expand its operations.

Does this investment mean that Facebook will have more than 500 shareholders?

Even before the investment from Goldman Sachs, Facebook had expected to pass 500 shareholders at some point in 2011, and therefore expects to start filing public financial reports no later than April 30, 2012.

After releasing an initial whitelist of companies that have formally agreed to its platform terms for advertising providers late last year, Facebook has been making more updates — adding in a wide range of large companies, established online ad networks, and newer startups. Since we last covered new additions a couple weeks ago, Facebook has added six more. They are:

• ADTELLIGENCE
• Bizmey
• Casale Media
• Mediastay
• One iota
• Sometrics

Some of these companies have deep experience providing advertising of varying quality on the web, including adware and spyware. You may recognize Casale Media, for example, as the folks that provide unsolicited ad pop-ups that appear behind your browser, that you might not notice until you’re shutting down your computer.

Which is why, even as it adds to the list, Facebook continues to warn developers to not give ad providers a free pass just because they’re listed: “These providers are not approved by nor affiliated with Facebook and, therefore, it is your responsibility as the developer to ensure compliance with Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines even though the companies on this list have agreed to the policies as well.”

[Thanks to Tim for the tip.]

Facebook’s perennially active feed of life at its headquarters, Facebook Live, heads up this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, or those still under a million monthly active users, with over 400,000 MAU. At least that many people showed up to watch pop star Katy Perry meet Mark Zuckerberg, as well as demo some social networking tech.

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Facebook Live	757,727	+412,928	+120%
2.	Что твои друзья думают о тебе?	795,481	+314,454	+65%
3.	購物天堂	483,697	+311,378	+181%
4.	TheFacepad	800,323	+221,369	+38%
5.	The Pokerist club — Texas Poker	355,220	+204,706	+136%
6.	朋友大配對	405,295	+202,583	+100%
7.	Günlük Burç Yorumları	273,724	+198,060	+262%
8.	Miscrits: World of Adventure	835,830	+179,122	+27%
9.	Pizza World	179,007	+178,960	+380,766%
10.	樂業超市	312,793	+172,425	+123%
11.	Bingo Island	807,621	+166,183	+26%
12.	CineGratisYa	469,778	+150,218	+47%
13.	Paradise Life	918,154	+142,777	+18%
14.	How old do you look?	476,159	+137,506	+41%
15.	Cooking Mama	295,838	+135,611	+85%
16.	SpeedDate	588,769	+132,562	+29%
17.	Tavla	650,090	+125,970	+24%
18.	Kamera Şovları	210,665	+125,301	+147%
19.	พืชVSมนุษย์หุ่นฟาง	152,537	+124,055	+436%
20.	Gambino Poker	537,681	+123,584	+30%

Although it may rise, Facebook Live usually falls back down again after whatever event it’s covering is over. It’s followed up by Что твои друзья думают о тебе?, which we first spotted a week ago; in Russian, it’s a simple friend quiz, which posts to users’ walls.

Absent an official iPad app from Facebook, TheFacepad continues to grow (along with rival Friendly for iPad). But its continuing weakness at retaining users suggests that when Facebook does release its own app, it won’t have much trouble taking over the market.

The trend this week in games is board and card titles, but there are a few interesting examples, like Miscrits: World of Adventure, which puts a new spin on the well-known Pokemon-style monster collection genre. We cover the games in a bit more depth this morning over at Inside Social Games.

Soon, Facebook Page admins might not have to choose between muting their community by only showing their own posts, and displaying a wall full of inane, off-topic, or offensive user content. Facebook’s User Operations team told SocialVoice “The ‘Top Posts’ filter is part of a structured test on several Pages to allow admins to surface the most engaging user-contributed Wall posts.”

A rollout of the filter would reduce the need for Pages to employ community managers or use Page moderation tools, and would improve the Page browsing experience.

Like the news feed’s default Top News filter, Top Posts gives posts with Likes and comments more prominence, allowing a Page’s own community to influence what user content visitors to a Page see first. Posts that aren’t necessarily favorable for the Page but that receive Likes and comments could also be surfaced. Instead of seeing the old “[Page] + Others”, “Just [Page]“, and “Just Others” filters, Pages with access to the tested feature show “Top Posts”, “Most Recent”, and “[Page]“.

All Page admins currently have the choice of making the default tab of their wall display only the Page’s updates, or user updates as well through the Page admin interface. The latter option often leads to a wall filled with low-quality content, or worse, one that requires constant moderation to keep it from being overrun by spam and hateful users harboring grudges.

Some of the world’s largest brands default their Page walls to display user content because it fosters a sense of community, but must hire community managers who work around the clock in order to remove offensive content. To increase moderation efficiency, they have to license tools by companies including LiveWorld, Parature, and Buddy Media that automatically flag or delete posts with certain keywords.

The costs of these employees and tools prohibit smaller brands and non-business Pages from using a community wall. If the limited tests of the Top Posts filter go well, Facebook may roll out the feature to all Pages. This could put some community managers out of a job or decreasing tool licensing, but would improve the Facebook user experience in general.

The Top Posts filter could also improve the loyalty of users who share high-quality content to Page walls. The additional prominence of their posts would snowball into more and more Likes, validating the enthusiasm of these users for the Pages they care about and leading them to post more frequently.

[Thanks to Bryan Person for the tip.]

Flickr now allows its visitors to quickly login or create an account on the popular Yahoo!-owned photo sharing site using their Facebook account. Yahoo! became an OpenID relying partner earlier this week, and now appears to be rolling out the reduced friction new user on-boarding process to its sites. Since Flickr users can instantly share their links for their public photo uploads to Facebook, Flickr may see more referral traffic. However, Flickr may also experience decreased direct visits since users won’t have to check the site to see if friends have added new photos.

Once users have created a Flicker account using their Facebook credentials, they can visit their Flickr account settings to connect the two accounts via Yahoo! Updates. This allows users to automatically share their Flickr activity to their Facebook feed, and use their Facebook profile picture as their Yahoo! public photo.

Photos uploaded to Flickr don’t appear to be syncing to Facebook just yet, so it’s unclear exactly how they’ll appear in the news feed or in a user’s photo albums. Feed stories might look similar to the ones posted by the sync feature for sharing photos to Facebook that Flickr released in June. The ability to simultaneously post Flickr photos into your Facebook Photos albums, not just share a story about the upload, would be a much more useful tool but also one that would eliminate much of the need to browse Flickr at all.

Facebook is the world’s most popular photo sharing site thanks to its friend tagging feature. Still, many professional photographers preferred to use Flickr to display their work because it allowed high-resolution uploads while Facebook didn’t — until recently. In an effort to win over serious photographer, Facebook dramatically revamped its Photos product in September, adding high-res uploads, bulk tagging, and a light box viewing mode. It has since premiered additional new technologies, including facial recognition tagging suggestions and drag-and-drop photo and album reordering.

With Facebook touting these new features, Flickr reinforcing its connection to the social network, and photography becoming more about sharing with friends than hoarding ones memories, Flickr could have trouble proving its added value.

Update: The feature now appears to be working. It took eight hours for the news feed story about my photos being posted to Flickr yesterday to appear on Facebook, but now the delay is down to just a few minutes. The feed story displays a thumbnail of one uploaded photo, with a “See More” link that reveals thumbnails of additional photos. When users click one of the thumbnails or the “Visit Flickr” action link, users are brought to the uploader’s Flickr Photostream.

Since the photos don’t appear in a user’s Facebook albums and can’t be viewed within Facebook, the integration should not be perceived as victory of Facebook Photos over Flickr.

The following is an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, or brand on Facebook. The full version of this article includes details on how social game marketing deals are structured, specific price points of startup fees and cost per engagement, and a case study of a successful multi-faceted marketing campaign for Disney’s film Tron: Legacy within Booyah’s social game Nightclub City.

Social games hold a great deal of marketing potential for brands. By working with a game developer to turn what people find compelling about your business or product into virtual goods and game features, you can expose your brand to all of the game’s players in a memorable, interactive way.

Advertising through television, print, display, or search ads online might get your brand in front of potential customers for a few seconds, but social game integrations can translate into hours of exposure per user.

There are 4 key points to a successful in-social game marketing campaign.

1. Find a game in which your brand can be naturally integrated.
2. In exchange for their engagement with branded content, offer players something cool or that helps them in the game.
3. Make the integrations optional, not mandatory, and only interrupt the game with content like videos when requested.
4. Offer access to the branded content for a limited time only, creating a sense of urgency so players want to experience it before it’s gone. However, let users keep any branded virtual goods they’ve earned or purchased.

Some of the most common brand types and the styles of social games they should market in include:

• Fashion and apparel brands within shopping games
• Restaurant chains within city-building or restaurant-management games
• Entertainment media brands within nightlife games
• Consumer packaged good brands within pet games
• Automotive companies within car games
• Travel brands within gambling games
• Credit and insurance companies within resource management and farming games

Brands can reach a variety of marketing goals such as banner impressions, video views, Likes to a Page, or social media mentions all through a multi-faceted marketing campaign within a social game.

Learn more about brand marketing on Facebook, in social games and beyond, at the Facebook Marketing Bible.

Facebook quietly updated its Insights analytics tool last night, making changes to what data is displayed about user engagement on posts made to Facebook Pages. Or so it seems.

The change appears to still be going live, and there’s not yet any official announcement about what’s new. So, we’re checking with Facebook for more details, and here’s what we’re seeing now.

First, Insights data about posts on Pages is now starting to appear in real-time, whereas previously it could take hours before the data would appear.

Second, the data available on Posts looks to have increased from just impressions and percentage feedback to also include click-through rates and Likes, as you can see in the image above. Note that CTR and Likes had previously appeared in Facebook’s Page documentation, but had not been pushed live until now.

Third, the impressions data currently visible also appears to be inaccurate. Some have speculated that Facebook went from showing total impressions to unique impressions for each post. However, from speaking with various Page administrators and service providers, our understanding is that the data visible is simply not accurate. We expect a bug fix will soon resolve the problem.

We’ll be updating this post with more information as it emerges.

[Hat tips to Amit Lavi, BrandGlue, and the Social Marketers group on Facebook. Image with permission, from Kelly Orange of Specialty Produce via Mari Smith.]

January 25th | San Francisco

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is now sold out!

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is Inside Network’s second conference on the future of monetization on social platforms. This one-day summit features industry leaders from every corner of the social app and game ecosystem.

Registrations to Inside Social Apps are now sold out.

Sign up for the waiting list here.

Who’s Speaking?

We’re honored to present the following confirmed speakers at Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011:

	Bret Taylor CTO, Facebook		Eric Chu Group Manager, Android Platform, Google
	Kristian Segerstrale Co-founder and CEO, Playfish (now part of EA)		Vish Makhijani SVP Business Operations, Zynga
	Kevin Chou Co-founder and CEO, Kabam		Peter Relan Executive Chairman, CrowdStar
	Rick Thompson Co-Founder, Playdom (now part of Disney), and Investor		Jason Oberfest VP Social Apps, ngmoco:) (now part of DeNA)
	Rex Ng Co-Founder and CEO, 6waves		Deborah Liu Commerce Product Marketing, Facebook
	Sean Ryan EVP and GM Games, News Corp		Bill Gossman CEO, hi5
	Anil Dharni Co-founder, Funzio; Founder, Storm8		Paul Bettner GM, Zynga with Friends
	Jens Begemann Co-founder and CEO, Wooga		Dennis Ryan EVP Worldwide Publishing, PopCap Games
	Eric Goldberg Managing Director, Crossover Technologies		Carey Kolaja Senior Director, Digital Goods Operations, PayPal
	Raph Koster VP Creative Design, Playdom (now part of Disney)		Atul Bagga VP Equity Research, Games, ThinkEquity
	Manu Rekhi GM Games and Platform, MySpace		Martin Essl Strategic Software Partner Management, Sony Ericsson
	Matthaeus Krzykowski Founder, Xyologic		Asokan Thiyagarajan Dir. Platforms & Tech. Strategy, Samsung
	Justin Smith Founder, Inside Network		Kim-Mai Cutler Lead Writer, Mobile & Social Applications, Inside Network
	Eric Eldon Editor, Inside Network

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 – January 25th in San Francisco

Social applications first emerged in 2007, and are today maturing into a global media ecosystem. With the launch of the Facebook Platform, followed by platforms from MySpace and other social networks, developers worldwide could leverage the social graph to create new kinds of social experiences never before possible.

Now, three and a half years later, what started out as sheep throwing and vampire biting has quickly become a profitable billion-dollar industry, punctuated by numerous major acquisitions by the world’s leading media companies and developers. But now, new challenges are emerging, affecting big players and new entrants alike.

Inside Social Apps will investigate the latest trends and challenges for social applications, and look at what’s to come for developers throughout the space – including the growth of virtual goods and social applications on mobile devices.

What are the biggest uncertainties and opportunities facing the future of social games and applications in 2011, and who is leading the way?

Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 takes place January 25th, 2011 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, and brings together the world’s leading entrepreneurs to weigh in on the future of social app and game monetization.

Inside Social Apps will be a one-day summit led by Inside Network’s Eric Eldon and Justin Smith, and will take in-depth investigative approach to the day’s discussions. At Inside Social Apps, Inside Network will work alongside founders and executives of the top social networking, social gaming, mobile social gaming, payments, and virtual goods infrastructure companies to analyze the most important issues affecting the industry. Inside Social Apps is geared towards developers on Facebook, iPhone, Android, and emerging online social platforms.

Inside Social Apps will be a content-rich day of critical discussion, followed by an evening of casual networking.

Register Now

The countdown has begun and Inside Social Apps InFocus 2011 is days away! We’re expecting a full house for the event — sign up for the waiting list now.

From all of us at Inside Network, we look forward to seeing you on January 25th in San Francisco at Inside Social Apps!

We had a few interesting posts this week pertaining to partner engineering and management and global Credits marketing.

The position for Partner Engineer of Ads in New York is set to work with Facebook’s strategic partners as they integrate the social network into their web sites, applications, devices and more. This person will travel and is expected to have substantive technical knowledge.

The Partner Manager of API Programs will be based in Palo Alto, Calif. and works to “accelerate advertiser growth, satisfaction and value by guiding tool developers to build value-added third-party applications” to support Facebook’s growth. Substantive technical knowledge is also required for this position.

Facebook is also seeking a Global Credits Marketing Manager to lead its Credits marketing to developers, partners and users from the Palo Alto office. Part of the job is brand awareness, including with retailers and work to create new markets for Credits. The ideal candidate would have about a decade of marketing communications experience in technology and a strong understanding of techology.

Facebook also advertised a Product Manager of Search position based in its Palo Alto offices. It’s not clear if this position will be augmenting Facebook’s relatively straightforward search results on its site, or developing something more full-fledged.

Facebook added a handful of account executive and manager positions in its Austin, Palo Alto, Madrid, New York, London and Chicago offices. A few more positions were added in Dublin, Singapore and Hyderabad.

Jobs that were removed from the Page, and thus possibly filled, ranged from an Associate for Corporate Communications to a European Facilities Manager to an Analyst of Platform Operations – Arabic. A handful of jobs in Facebook’s Dublin, Ireland offices disappeared, as well as some account executive positions, a SWE1101M Software Engineer position was filled, as well as a technical recruiting job. Some other jobs no longer appearing on the Page: Product Manager, Search Relevance (Ranking), Manager of Global Compensation, Diversity Programs Manager and finally, Partner Development Manager of Mobile in Hong Kong.

For more Facebook-related jobs, check out the Inside Network Job Board.

The Washington Post Company has officially launched its full-service Facebook marketing and advertising agency SocialCode. The agency will offer Page management, app development, social commerce, fan monetization, message testing, and advertising through Facebook’s Ads API.

As former newspaper readers move to Facebook to consume content, The Washington Post is experimenting to see if social marketing can replace ailing brand advertising in print as a core revenue stream.

The Washington Post has been a pioneer in how publishers can use Facebook. It was one of the first major newspapers to integrate Facebook Connect, and was later a launch partner for social plugins, which have led to a 280% increase in referral traffic. The Washington Post’s CEO Donald Graham has also been an advisor to Mark Zuckerberg and a Facebook board member since 2008.

Graham’s daughter, Laura Graham O’Shaughnessy, is general manger of SocialCode, which soft-launched in July. Like many Ads API services, SocialCode was initially developed by The Washington Post’s to manage its own Facebook marketing efforts, but will now be used to help brands. The company will compete with other full-service agencies like Webtrends, Buddy Media, and Experian, which just acquired Ads API tool provider Techlightenment this week.

By leaving the familiar local marketing industry for the internet, The Washington Post as well as Tribune and Gannett that have both recently launched digital services, will have to contend with services from around the world, not just in the cities where they own media outlets. These established publishers will likely need to leverage their existing relationships with brands to make up for their late start.

Developing a stable of high quality technologies for efficient creation of apps and dynamic optimization of Facebook ads can take significant time and resources. We’ll be doing a full profile of SocialCode’s services in the near future to see how it compare with other Facebook marketing options.