Facebook has released several new security features designed to thwart unauthorized logins, cross-site scripting, and clickjacking that trick users into sharing spam to the news feed. Login approvals require suspicious logins to be confirmed with a code texted to a user’s phone, while self-XSS and clickjacking protection  warns users and requires them to confirm their actions when pasting links into their browser or clicking suspicious Like buttons.

These protections should reduce the prevalence of hijacked accounts and highly visible spam in the news feed that perpetuate the public perception of Facebook as less safe than the rest of the internet.

Facebook’s latest internal security efforts were announced alongside a new partnership with Web of Trust, a a crowd-sourced website reputation rating service that will be used to power alerts to Facebook users when they click malicious outbound links. Facebook has previously concentrated on improving security through user education and login protection features such as remote session logout and one-time passwords.

Login Approvals

Now Facebook is rolling out the two-factor authentication it announced last month. Users can visit Account -> Account Settings -> Settings -> Account Security to enable the feature, which will require them to verify their phone number. Once enabled, any time someone attempts to login to the account through a new or unrecognized device, they’ll have to enter a code sent to their phone via SMS. Users will also be notified the next time the successfully login of any suspicious attempts thwarted by the login approvals feature.

Users could be temporarily locked out of their account if they have Login Approvals in the unlikely event that both their phone and their approved Facebook login device were lost or stolen. Still, the feature offers a strong additional layer of security for those who opt in to it. It can also serve to protect users who may share their password with a loved one for use on their regular login device, but who don’t want those people to access their account from elsewhere.

Clickjacking Protection

Clickjacking refers to when a malicious website conceals an active link beneath an image or other disguise to fool a user into clicking a link they didn’t intend to. In the case of Facebook, malicious sites sometimes conceal Like buttons beneath video players or appealing offers, leading users to inadvertently share the spam site to the news feed, drawing in more users to the scam.

Facebook already has automated systems designed to identify and disable uses of the Like button for clickjack, as well as block or remove outbound links to clickjacking sites. Now Facebook as added additional protection against the tactic by requiring users to confirm they wanted to click a Like button that is suspected to be part of a clickjacking scheme. The Like won’t go through and stories won’t be published to the news feed unless the user confirms.

This feature could cut down on one of the most prominent Facebook security threats as of late, which has spread through links that promise videos of racy or gruesome content.

Self-XSS Protection

Self-cross site scripting is a security threat in which a spam news feed story, wall posts, or Message asks users to copy malicious code into their browser, thereby causing a hacker’s message to be posted to additional friends. These threats are becoming increasingly sophisticated over the years (if you want to get deeper into the topic, be sure to check out security researcher Joey Tyson’s Social Hacking blog).

The new security features detects when users attempt to paste malicious code into their browser, displays an alert explaining why the practice of copying code into a browser is dangerous, and prevents the code from being run.

By mixing education in with technical security features, Facebook can protect users now and teach them to protect themselves in the future.

The usual group of Turkish video applications was joined by a couple of custom tab apps, a free flight app in Spanish, a greeting card app, photo app and friend app. The apps grew from between 116,900 and 888,300 monthly active users. The list of top 20 emerging apps was compiled based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook and covers apps that grew the most in the past week, ending at between 100,000 and 1 million monthly active users.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	PowerVideo	895,884	+888,288	+11,694%
2.	Auto Hustle	794,953	+328,530	+70%
3.	VideoGezegeni	539,951	+283,558	+111%
4.	My Tab	781,791	+234,079	+43%
5.	Videohane	235,892	+233,793	+11,138%
6.	BandRx	774,200	+227,519	+42%
7.	Genç Video	305,338	+182,719	+149%
8.	vuelosgratis	238,523	+168,985	+243%
9.	Puzzle Saga	928,564	+166,837	+22%
10.	UFC Undisputed Fight Nation Game	890,573	+163,732	+23%
11.	N.O.V.A. Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance: ELITE	439,000	+143,550	+49%
12.	Sohbeti Arkadaşlık	346,545	+143,397	+71%
13.	Especially for You	699,313	+142,170	+26%
14.	BomBom	189,652	+140,642	+287%
15.	Buddy Rush	422,861	+139,443	+49%
16.	Hero City	198,041	+135,844	+218%
17.	Battle Pirates	400,138	+130,879	+49%
18.	My Top Fans	990,906	+120,760	+14%
19.	Videolar 2011	233,610	+118,182	+102%
20.	Spot The Difference	847,858	+116,938	+16%

Most of the Turkish video apps work the same way, although a few of them are different this week. The basic structure of the app is that each takes the user to a selection of videos, where they can watch, share, Like, or comment upon the videos. This week, several of the apps — notably VideoGezegeni, and Videolar 2011 — automatically post daily videos to your feed if you install the app. Finally, Sohbeti Arkadaşlık is an explicitly sexual app that says it’s for “chat” but automatically posts sexually explicit videos to your feed.

All that said, PowerVideo topped our list and grew by 888,300 MAU, VideoGezegeni by 283,600 MAU, VideoHane by 288,800 MAU,  Genç Video by 182,700 MAU, Sohbeti Arkadaşlık by 143,400 MAU and Videolar 2011 by 118,200 MAU.

Custom tabs included My Tab with 234,100 MAU; the app promises to allow Page admins to create customized welcome or other tabs for their pages. BandRx grew by 227,500 MAU and promises to all users, musicians in particular, to create a tab for their MP3s, videos, tour schedules, merchandise, social media content and more.

Vuelosgratis is a sweepstakes app from Air Europe Iluba in Spanish that grew by about 169,000 MAU. The app is something of a sweepstakes for users to invite their friends to the app and win a chance for free flights to Europe. Especially for You grew by 142,200 MAU and allows users to send sparkly greeting cards to their friends and publish to the feed. My Top Fans grew by 120,800 MAU; the app tells you who you “Top 8 Fans” are and then publishes a list to the feed. Last, Spot The Difference with about 117,000 MAU is a timed puzzle games where users have to compare two similar photos and identify the differences.

Buddy Media, the largest Facebook Page management company, has acquired Spinback, a provider of social ecommerce and analytics solutions for Facebook Twitter, email, and blogs. Spinback’s technology will allow Buddy Media to allow its clients to better track how social sharing of links to products and services drive sales.

This acquisition of both the team and technology follows our predictions that expensive Facebook Page management services are becoming commodified by companies offering free products, so the Page management industry needs to explore new revenue streams by expanding into ad buying or ecommerce through partnerships and acquisitions.

Buddy Media got an early start in the industry, helping brands market themselves on Facebook since the Platform opened in late 2007. At time, there were few powerful Page management tools, let alone free ones, and brands didn’t have any experience and therefore needed helped. Since then, Buddy Media has signed some of the world’s most prominent brands, grown to over 170 employees, and raised $38.3 million, including a massive $23 million Series C round in October 2010.

Now, though, solid free tools and Page tab app suites are proliferating and brands are gaining the experience necessary to require less hand-holding with day-to-day Facebook Page operation. More brands are still shifting marketing focus towards Facebook, but commodification means the Page management industry’s largest companies will eventually need to seek additional revenue streams if they want to keep growing, or even avoid shrinking.

The most obvious expansion area is facilitating Facebook ad purchases by their clients — a lucrative business where they can license tools or charge a percent of the growing Facebook ad spend of big brands. The other is ecommerce, where they can also license Facebook ecommerce storefront and analytics solutions.This appears to be just what Buddy Media plans to do with Spinback, its first full-fledged acquisition.

Spinback’s two main offerings are EasyShare, a product and purchase social sharing widget, and EasyTrack, which provides analytics on this sharing and the sales it generates. These technologies will allow Buddy Media to inform clients about what social channels are driving sales, what products are being shared most frequently and creating the most revenue, and who are the most active and influential customers and customer segments.

Spinback has signed over 20 retailers as clients since it launched in October 2011, with clients seeing an average increase in incremental revenue of $2.10 per Facebook wall post, and  a conversion rate of 10.9% for Facebook shares leading to purchases. The five-person company’s founding CTO, Paul Boutin, was formerly the founder and CTO of Payvment, the most popular Facebook ecommerce storefront application.

The acquisition will allow Buddy Media to attract more retail and ecommerce clients, and offer a wider range of services to Spinback’s and its existing clients. It will also protect it from commodification as brands mature from establishing a Facebook presence to attaining a healthy return on investment in social.

In a spectacularly failed attempt at undermining the competition, Facebook has admitted that it hired public relations giant Burson-Marsteller to plant news articles promoting a supposed privacy problem with a Google social product.

Up until today, Facebook had usually been on the receiving end of this sort of tactic — its attempt to go on the offensive is most notable for its underhanded ambition and failure. Here’s a quick look at what happened, followed by our analysis.

Journalists-turned-Burson-employees Jim Goldman and John Mercurio approached a number of journalists and privacy advocates in recent weeks, attempting to generate negative coverage of Google social search. In an email exchange with privacy advocate Christopher Soghoian, Mercurio asserted that “Google is collecting, storing and mining millions of people’s personal information from a number of different online services and sharing it without the knowledge, consent or control of the people involved.”

USA Today appears to have almost gone to press with that angle, but was alerted by others and published an exposé of the pitch instead, as well as a strong push back on the claim. ”Social Circle in fact allows Gmail users to make social connections based on public information and private connections across its products in ways that don’t skirt privacy,” it wrote, which is pretty true. If you want to take a look for yourself, check out Google’s help materials (and discussion among upset users), or read Search Engine Land‘s excellent dive into it.

Burson refused to disclose the client, until Newsweek’s Dan Lyons gained evidence that singled out Facebook, and got a confirmation out of the company. According to his article, the reasons Facebook did the campaign are as follows: “First, because it believes Google is doing some things in social networking that raise privacy concerns; second, and perhaps more important, because Facebook resents Google’s attempts to use Facebook data in its own social-networking service.” On the latter issue, Google tried to scrape Facebook user data, then won most of the press to its side when Facebook blocked its attempt. At the time, it appeared as if Google knew how Facebook was going to respond, and fully intended to create a press win.

Which brings us to the next point, which is that Facebook itself has been a target from competitors. After launching the Like button, the Graph API and other web-wide, currently successful efforts to win over users and advertisers at its f8 developer conference in April of 2010, Facebook was within days targeted by high-rankings members of Congress over potential privacy violations. These members of Congress, as we discussed at the time, displayed a poor understanding of the specific issues. It was very odd to see them react so quickly to such a nuanced issued. A well-placed person at another tech company told us at the time that they believed the politicians had been directed to the issue by another company.

Powerful interests are of course always attempting to manipulate the media to their own advantage, often in behind-the-scenes and underhanded ways. Google itself has been a victim of both public and secret (misleading) efforts by Microsoft over the years, sometimes with aid from Burson.

So, what stands out about this case is that Facebook went after Google in such an underhanded way over such a weak claim, and that it failed in its efforts so publicly.

At this point, both Facebook and Burson have tried to backtrack, or at least sideways-track. The latest comments from both companies, below. You’ll note that they contradict each other, as others already have. First, Burson, in an email to PRNewser.

Now that Facebook has come forward, we can confirm that we undertook an assignment for that client.

The client requested that its name be withheld on the grounds that it was merely asking to bring publicly available information to light and such information could then be independently and easily replicated by any media.  Any information brought to media attention raised fair questions, was in the public domain, and was in any event for the media to verify through independent sources.

Whatever the rationale, this was not at all standard operating procedure and is against our policies, and the assignment on those terms should have been declined. When talking to the media, we need to adhere to strict standards of transparency about clients, and this incident underscores the absolute importance of that principle.

Meanwhile, Facebook tells All Things D that it was intending something more above-board.

“No ‘smear’ campaign was authorized or intended. Instead, we wanted third parties to verify that people did not approve of the collection and use of information from their accounts on Facebook and other services for inclusion in Google Social Circles—just as Facebook did not approve of use or collection for this purpose. We engaged Burson-Marsteller to focus attention on this issue, using publicly available information that could be independently verified by any media organization or analyst. The issues are serious and we should have presented them in a serious and transparent way.

You and your readers can look at the feature and decide if they have approved of this collection and use of information by clicking here when their Google account is open: http://www.google.com/s2/search/social. Of course, people who do not have Gmail accounts are still included in this collection but they have no way to view or control it.”

Regardless of how either party feels about how the effort has been received, both appear to have taken serious brand damage — at least in those circles that care about nasty press battles — and they’ll need to work hard in the coming years to put this behind them.

We are very excited to announce today that Inside Network has been acquired by WedMediaBrands! Our full team will be joining WebMediaBrands and we will be staying in our Palo Alto offices. More coverage of the news is up here, here, here, here, and here.

As the newest member of the WebMediaBrands family, we will continue to focus on building out our industry-focused sites, including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games, and Inside Mobile Apps; our research and data services, including AppData, Inside Virtual Goods, Facebook Marketing Bible, and Inside Facebook Gold; and events, including Inside Social Apps.

Over the past several years, WebMediaBrands has developed a powerful network of news, events, education, and research services for the social media industry. We’re excited to be joining forces and combining our efforts to move even faster to deliver products and services to what are in our view two of the most exciting areas in tech over the coming several years – the social and mobile application ecosystems.

Together, we expect to continue focusing on building the highest quality news, research, data, and events serving all of the entrepreneurs, developers, marketers, and analysts that make this industry so vibrant. We’re very thankful to get to work with all of you. We’re looking forward to what’s ahead!

The following is an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising your company, app, or brand using Facebook. The full version of this article, available through a Facebook Marketing Bible subscription, includes detailed strategies for using the audience funnel and reach data that Facebook recently added to its Ad Manager to run more effective advertising campaigns.

Last week, Facebook’s Ad Manager began showing several new types of data that can help advertisers — if they know how to use them.

Most importantly, advertisers can now see post-impression conversion data about what kind of social actions have been taken within 24 hours of a user seeing an ad. By optimizing for these “connections”, as they’re called by the Ad Manager, rather than cost per thousand impressions (CPM) or cost per click (CPC), Facebook advertisers can better ensure their ads for Facebook properties are generating a return on investment.

Facebook now provides data on an ad’s reach, or how many unique users of a targeted audience see an ad, in the data charts and the audience funnel. It also shows the frequency of a given ad, denoting the average number of times each person you reach saw your ad.

Here we’ll explain strategies for creating and tracking ad campaigns that produce high social action conversion rates, explain how to control your reach, and walk-through using frequency to recognize when to rotate ad creative.

Optimizing for Connections

One of the columns in the data provided by the Ads Manager is Connections. This denotes how many people Liked your Page, installed your application, or RSVP’d for your Event within 24 hours of seeing the ad. If your advertisement is designed to drive these types of conversions, you want to work towards achieving the lowest cost per connections, not the lowest cost per click.

This is because an unqualified click, one from a user with no real interest in your Page or application, doesn’t create a return on investment. To go even deeper, a connection’s true value is based on the worth of that user. You may be able to drive a lot of clicks, or even a lot of connections for a low price by targeting less desirable demographics, such as young users in developing countries, but these won’t give you as high a return on investment as fewer connections from people with a need for what you’re advertising and the money to pay for it.

To hone in on the demographics that produce the most Connections, first run a test of your ad that is targeted very broadly by demographic. Include all possible age groups, genders, countries, relationship types, languages, education backgrounds and work histories. If what you are advertising appeals to certain interest demographics, consider running a version of the test which a few dozen relevant keywords as targeted interests.

Since your ads will be targeted at a wide, inclusive audience, Facebook won’t charge a very high CPC, making these types of campaigns good for testing. The longer the test the better, but those with smaller budgets should test until they generate at least 100 connections.

Then go to the Reports tab of the Ads Manager and export reports with the Report Type set to “Responder Demographics” and “Responder Profiles”. Analyze these reports looking for trends in the demographics and interests that were common to those that formed connections with your advertised properties. Then run individual campaigns targeted at these demographics and interests segments.

For instance, if many of your connections came from users age 25-30, target that age group. If many came from a specific state, target individual campaigns at that state. If many had one interest you targeted but not another, target that interest in its own campaign.

Access strategies for using the Ads Manager’s audience funnel and reach data, as well as Sponsored Stories and Facebook’s other social ad units in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising on Facebook.

Web of Trust, a crowd-sourced website reputation rating service, has partnered with Facebook to protect user from clicking malicious outbound links on the social network. When users click a link to a site with a poor reputation rating, Facebook will show a warning message.

The Web of Trust partnership should help reduce the risk of phishing, spam and scams on Facebook, improving security, which has been a public relations problem through the years for the social network.

With a 20 million user community and 31 million sites rated, Web of Trust will protect users in real-time, rather than focusing on preventive education like some other risk-abatement programs.

In addition to phishing and scams, Web of Trust will increase protection from unscrupulous ecommerce sites and reduce the likelihood that younger users will click through links on Facebook to adult content.

When users click a URL on Facebook, the social network will scan the site to see if it has been flagged by Web of Trust. If so, users will see a message indicating that the site “has been classified as potentially abusive.” A large button encourages users to “Return to previous page” or they can click a small link to ignore the warning and continue to the site.

Users can download the Web of Trust browser add-on to rate sites and help protect fellow web citizens. If more Facebook users immediately used Facebook’s own flagging system or that of Web of Trust, spammy sites that spread through the news feed via phished accounts could be blocked more quickly.

To date, Facebook has worked to protect users by offering educational resources such as the Safety Center, asking users to provide information to assist with account retrieval in case they are hacked, and added security features such as account owner and login verification. It also recently extended its partnership with McAfee to eradicate worms such as Koobface through the Roadblock feature and provide a free subscription to anti-virus software.

Web of Trust’s reputation model may work well for long-existing risks, but new malicious sites that pop up might not be rated before they threaten Facebook users. Facebook’s security team and internal automated systems for alerting users to malicious links will continue protect users from suspicious outbound links, but now they’ll be augmented with the power of Web of Trust’s crowd.

Facebook posted a slew of jobs for its Dublin, Ireland offices this week, in addition to research and marketing positions, several engineering jobs, and a few positions in data centers according to its Careers Page. The company’s LinkedIn feed showed a position opening up in Singapore while the Careers Page showed a job opening up in Hong Kong. Overall Facebook seems to be looking to fill positions along a range of

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Oracle Application Developer
• Product Manager, Legal and Security
• Leader of US HR Business Partner Team
• People Analytics Manager
• University Recruiter, Creative (Product Design, User Experience)
• Audience Researcher (Palo Alto)
• Client Satisfaction Researcher (Palo Alto)
• Sales Marketing Manager (Palo Alto)
• Channel Marketing Manager
• Sales Marketing Manager (Palo Alto)
• Strategic Partner Development, Commerce
• Data Center Network Technician (NC)
• Data Center Technician (NC)
• Hardware Validation Engineer
• Lead Data Center Technician (NC)
• Relationship Manager, Agency Relations – London, UK
• DSO Account Manager (Hong Kong)
• Associate, Ad Operations (Chicago)
• Associate, Ad Operations (Dublin)
• Danish Branding Sales Specialist
• Inside Sales Associate, Danish (Dublin)
• Inside Sales Associate, Norwegian (Dublin)
• Norwegian Branding Sales Specialist
• Data Analyst (Software Engineer) (Dublin)
• Software Engineer 1105001
• MySQL Database Engineer (Dublin)

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Partner Engineer – Ads (New York)
• Account Executive (Singapore)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Facebook made hires this week in everything from its intern program, sales, to recruiting, platform operations and more according to posts on LinkedIn and information removed from its Careers Page.

Posts removed from the Careers Page — which strongly suggest that the positions had been filled — included engineers and data center technicians, while LinkedIn showed mostly sales positions.

Most significantly, top developer and long-time Facebook employee Joe Hewitt announced on Friday that he was leaving the company. He has been there since his startup, Parakey, was acquired in 2007. Well-known beforehand for his work on the Mozilla Firefox browser and developer bug-tracking tool Firebug, he made a wide range of contributions at Facebook, including single-handedly creating the first versions of its hit iPhone app. In a personal blog post, he says that he’s looking to create more tools for developers and designers, and hints that what he does could be mobile-related.

New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:

• Jimmy Ahmed – currently working in Advertising Sales, formerly an Americas Sales Manager at DivX, LLC.
• Mark Cowan – was Head of Emerging Markets, CEEMEA and currently works as a National Account Executive.
• Ilan Dee – currently an MBA Intern Platform Operations, formerly worked in Global Product Manager at Cision.
• Nick Gianos – now working as a Parter Manager, formerly worked at Facebook as a Principal in Online Sales Operations.
• Sohan Jain – a Software Developer Intern, formerly an intern at Hulu.
• Gokmen Karasu – now an Account Manager, formerly performed a similar job at Ping Digital.
• Margaryta Skrypachova – Software Engineer Intern.

Recent departures, per LinkedIn:

• Brandon Brock – formerly worked in Online Sales Operations.

Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:

• Administrative Assistant, Local Sales and Marketing
• International Payroll Lead (Dublin)
• Security Manager (Incident Response)
• Oracle Application Developer
• Associate, Corporate Communications / Product
• Onboarding Programs Manager
• Recruiter, International – Contractor (Palo Alto)
• Recruiter, International Group – Contract
• Strategist, Market Solutions (New York)
• Director, Platform Operations
• Document Control Analyst
• Manager, Supply Chain Operations
• Data Center Lab Engineer
• Hardware Test Engineer
• Account Specialist, Online Sales Account Management (Austin)
• Manager, Ad Operations (Singapore)
• Analyst, Online Operations (Austin)
• Fraud Analyst (Palo Alto)
• Payments Partnerships Associate (Palo Alto)
• Analyst, User Operations – Spanish (Palo Alto) – Contractor
• Director, Platform Operations (Palo Alto)
• German Branding Sales Specialist (Dublin)
• Software Engineers, SWE1103B (Seattle)
• Site Operations Engineer 1104002

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Professional social networking Facebook app and site BranchOut has raised an $18 million second funding round to grow its engineering and sales teams. Previously only available as a destination app, the company is also launching a Jobs tab app for Facebook Pages of companies looking to hire.

We spoke with BranchOut founder Rick Marini about the company’s product roadmap, and why he think Redpoint Ventures, Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, and Floodgate made a wise investment despite the app’s currently low traffic numbers.

When we first profiled BranchOut in August 2010, a month after its launch, the app had a promising and relatively unexplored idea — offer a Facebook-based professional network that lets users discover where their friends work. While it was fun, the app wasn’t focused on helping users and companies find each other, and forming BranchOut connections with one’s existing friend base seemed redundant.

BranchOut’s founder Rick Marini had initially bootstrapped the company with money he made from the sale of his earlier venture Tickle.com to Monster, and revenues from his previous Facebook app, SuperFan. By September, BranchOut had raised $6 million from Accel Partners.

Since then, the professional network and hiring application spaces on Facebook have grown competitive. Simply Hired created a job-seeker Facebook Connect destination site, and Identified recently launched a professional social network based on Facebook data that properly concentrates on allowing users to be discovered by recruiters and approach companies. Work4 Labs has improved its Work For Us page tab app with impressive relevancy algorithms that suggest users jobs they’re qualified for and friends they should recommend openings to.

Q&A

Inside Facebook: This new tab app lets Pages post full descriptions of their openings with links to share the postings and a button to apply by email. The app’s current iteration is very basic compared to Work For Us by Work4 Labs, though, which sorts lists of job openings and friends to suggest jobs to by relevancy. Could you explain the impetus for releasing the Page tab app and how it compares to existing solutions?

Rick Marini, Founder and CEO of BranchOut: The Jobs tab is the second in our line of enterprise products. The first was job postings on [BranchOut's destination app]. We were focused on the consumer side, but now we’re shifting gears towards enterprise. Companies told us “I don’t only want the jobs on BranchOut, I also want them on my Page.” We didn’t want to have a hole in our product suite, and since its release we’ve signed up Levi’s Groupon, Kiva, and charity: water. They can either pay us directly to have the jobs tab product, or they can pay a $99 posting fee on BranchOut and we give them the app for free. For volume we give them a discount that depends on the number of jobs they post.

The features you mentioned in Work For Us — all those things are in the works and will be available in BranchOut’s app within the next 30 days. We don’t see the tab as a major breakthrough, but it’s an important part of our suite. Work For Us is a service provider, and we are going to have a very similar service, but we have a community of professional networking folks which goes much deeper.

The third enterprise product is a subscription-based product for recruiters. It offers advanced communication and granularity of search akin to LinkedIn’s competing Pro product.

IF: Speaking of your community, though there is a lot of opportunity for professional networking on Facebook, your app only has 6,000 DAU right now. Do you think that warrants the $18 million in funding?

RM: We turned up our viral features in January and got up to 250,000 monthly active users. We eventually grew to about 500,000 MAU, but people were feeling like we were sending a lot of invites and lot of wall posts – it was feeling a little spammy. We’re building for the long-term so we self-imposted limits on wall posts and notifications. We knew it would bring down the numbers but we didn’t want that stigma of being spammy. We reset our user acquisition method to be driven by our core features — recommendations and badges.

I don’t think the consideration was around the size of the user base. It’s around leveraging Facebook — the biggest distribution method. We’re by far the largest professional social network on Facebook, we have the right core team, first mover advantage, and a great relationship with Facebook. Investors are looking for a long-term play here.

LinkedIn is a great company, they built a foundation for professional networking online and gave recruiters experience paying for an enterprise service. But I think all networking, professional and social, will happen on Facebook. If recruiters pay on LinkedIn for a similar service, they’ll pay for it on BranchOut. Facebook has 700 million plus users — it’s 15 times larger than LinkedIn. It’s your true support network, the people who will really help because the strength of connection is really strong. This is why people would want to invest in a large series B.

IF: But won’t you need a larger user base to make that third enterprise product valuable?

RM: The size of the database matters. We are looking for other ways to grow the database such as working with companies to sign on all their employees and recruiters. Recruiters can then tap into the friends of employees and ask for warm introductions, because when you authorize BranchOut, it’s not only pulling your data but the data of your friends. The BranchOut database is quite large in this sense.

IF: How exactly will the funding be used?

RM: The funding is going to be focused first and foremost to build out a world-class team. Three areas to beef up are our engineering team, the product team, and now it’s the time to ramp up our sales. Over 40 clients say “we want to do the same recruiting search within Facebook as we can within LinkedIn.” We need to hire a sales team to ramp that up.

Conclusion

BranchOut’s destination app will still need to convince users that its safe to use a professional networking tool that lives within Facebook where sensitive personal and social data is held. It will also need to provide more value to job seekers rather than viral mechanics like the quiz shown above for it to grow to the size where it will become useful as an enterprise solution to recruiters. Now it has the money to get to this point, but with other companies encroaching on its turf BranchOut will have to truly excel to become a success for its investors.