The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week’s highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Context Optional, LeadBolt, Metamoki, Inc., Spooky Cool Labs, Social Point, Ubisoft, Glu Mobile and Kabam.

• Account Manager — Social Marketing
• Software Trainer–Social Marketing Suite
• Software Trainer–Social Marketing Suite
• Ruby on Rails Developer – Product Suite

• Publisher Sales Manager-Digital
• Advertising Sales Director-Digital

• Senior Backend Software Engineer
• Backend Software Engineer

• Game Server Engineer

• Associate Active Game Manager
• Games Metrics Analyst
• Build Engineer SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES
• Release Manager SOCIAL NETWORK GAMES
• Associate Active Game Manager

• Design Director
• Customer Insights Analyst
• Senior Producer
• Technical Director

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

Facebook’s very own Page topped our quarterly  list of the most Liked Pages on the platform for the summer. It edged out Zynga and some popular musical artists since our last post in the spring, essentially pushing down the top Pages from the spring a notch each, although most of the Pages on the list have remained the same.

As always there are tons of musicians, some TV shows, movies and brands also made our list. We gathered the information for our list with our PageData tool, which counts the number of Likes as Pages grow. Pages on our list ranged from Facebook’s with 48.9 million to 25.7 million for SpongeBbo SquarePants; last time we compiled a list, Zynga’s Poker game was on top with 41.8 million Likes. See how other top brands are maximizing their returns on their Facebook campaigns in the Facebook Marketing Bible. See the list below:

1. Facebook – 48,937,442

2. Texas Hold’em Poker – 47,060,502

3. Eminem – 43,597,895

4. YouTube – 41,950,335 

5. Rihanna – 40,970,115

6. Lady Gaga – 40,845,124 

7. Shakira – 37,267,475

8. Family Guy - 35,150,975

9. Justin Bieber – 33,219,214

10. Linkin Park – 32,525,479

11. Coca-Cola – 32,463,564

12. The Simpsons – 32,226,366

13. Katy Perry – 32,218,637

14. South Park – 32,181,879

15. Cristiano Ronaldo – 31,221,454

16. Harry Potter – 29,920,891

17. Lil Wayne – 29,169,770

18. Bob Marley – 28,719,894

19. Akon – 27,966,380

20. Megan Fox – 27,238,727

21. Disney – 27,142,012

22. Vin Diesel – 26,583,235

23. Beyoncé - 26,060,654

24. MTV - 25,993,181

25. SpongeBob SquarePants - 25,707,177

There were specific themes that showed up on our list of applications growing on the Facebook platform by daily active users this week. Horoscopes were big, as were friend quiz-type apps, a few mobile phone apps and two dating apps made the list; then there was a handful of others, including BandPage by RootMusic. The apps on our list below grew from between 90,200 and 1 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	The Fortune Teller	1,530,015	+1,017,648	+199%
2.	21 questions	1,713,694	+584,031	+52%
3.	Static HTML: iframe tabs	2,117,994	+557,711	+36%
4.	Facebook for Every Phone	1,087,553	+318,179	+41%
5.	60photos	2,127,101	+254,034	+14%
6.	Seçim Anketi	243,154	+242,122	+23,461%
7.	Daily Horoscope	6,121,234	+216,473	+4%
8.	Windows Live Messenger	17,198,638	+213,710	+1%
9.	Gardens of Time	3,733,501	+209,129	+6%
10.	Friend Buzz	226,101	+192,862	+580%
11.	Mahjong Saga	358,729	+191,744	+115%
12.	MyCalendar	277,681	+189,440	+215%
13.	Astrology	2,995,140	+151,072	+5%
14.	Between You and Me	511,185	+144,955	+40%
15.	Cupid	356,117	+130,318	+58%
16.	BandPage by RootMusic	1,444,551	+117,163	+9%
17.	Gourmet Ranch	371,509	+103,046	+38%
18.	HTC Sense	6,251,749	+97,790	+2%
19.	Samsung Mobile	1,998,964	+93,998	+5%
20.	eBuddy	2,393,765	+90,207	+4%

The horoscope apps on our list had one thing in common (aside from providing horoscopes): daily Wall posts. The Fortune Teller grew by over 1 million DAU, Daily Horoscope by 216,500 DAU and Astrology by 151,100 DAU.

Friend quiz-type apps were on our list in varied forms. 21 questions asks users questions about their friends, publishing answers to their Walls; the app grew by 1.7 million DAU. 60photos asks users to rate friends’ photos, publishing to their Walls, and growing this week by 254,000 DAU. Friend Buzz asks users questions about their friends, posting the answers to their Walls, consequently growing by 192,900 DAU this week. MyCalendar asks users to customize a calendar with friends’ birthdays and other events, growing by 189,400 DAU this week. Between You and Me grew by about 145,000 DAU this week, publishing answers to quiz questions to the Walls of a user’s friends.

Mobile apps abounded this week, intriguing given Facebook’s mobile announcement last week. Facebook’s mobile app, Facebook for Every Phone, grew by 318,200 DAU this week, while the Android app  HTC Sense grew by 97,800 DAU. Samsung Mobile grew by about 94,000 DAU and eBuddy, a mobile messenger app, by 90,200 DAU mostly in Mexico, Indonesia and India.

Two dating apps made the list, the Turkish Seçim Anketi with 242,100 DAU and  Cupid with 130,300. Cupid’s taken a huge dive from a month ago, perhaps due to the summer, but seems to be bouncing back. Other apps included Static HTML: iframe tabs for Page tab creation with 557,700 DAU, Windows Live Messenger grew by 213,700 DAU while BandPage by RootMusic saw 117,200 DAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

Israeli social game monetization platform and Facebook approved offer partner SupersonicAds today announced that is has raised a $4.2 million first institutional round of funding led by Greylock Israel. The money will go towards building a sales team so it can solicit more European and Middle Eastern game developers and advertisers using its BrandConnect product. This  allows brands to place video ads in games and reward users with virtual goods or virtual currency such as Facebook Credits.

In related news, major social game developer Crowdstar has partnered with social video ad network Jun Group to allow its gamers to earn rewards for watching commercials. The SupersonicAds funding and Crowdstar deal should both help expand incentivized view video ads to more Facebook games, and accelerate the shift of ad dollars away from television and towards social games, particularly those on the Facebook Platform.

Supersonic Ads came out of stealth in April 2009 to provide offer walls for european games. It later added video ads to its offer walls, but with time discovered that serving opportunities to complete video offers during gameplay caused more users to partake so it launched BrandConnect.

The product places a widget within a social game that displays signage such as “Earn Free Credits”, and when clicked opens the video offer. It has been used by Kellogg’s, Intel, and Disney, and boasts stats including over 50% (and up to 80%) of people exposed to a campaign view the entire video, 20% then Like the Page of the brand advertised, and 40% later visit the brand’s website.

In May of this year, Facebook announced that it would deepen its partnership with TrialPay to serve video offers from the Facebook sidebar and within games, and that SupersonicAds and several other video ad networks would contribute inventory. Then in June, SupersonicAds became Facebook approved offer partner, meaning it could reward users with Facebook Credits for completing “hard offers”  – direct response offers that require a user’s personal information such as making purchases or signing up for subscriptions.

These partnerships make SupersonicAds one of the only companies allowed to serve both hard offers and soft offers (those that don’t require user personal information such as video offers) on the Facebook Platform. Now to fill this inventory SupersonicAds needs a bigger sales force, so it secured this round of funding.

Meanwhile, Crowdstar’s partnership with Jun Group will bring video offers to popular games such as It Girl and Happy Aquarium. However, since the Jun Group is not an approved offer partner, it can’t distribute Facebook Credits to users that completing any type of offer. Crowdstar will be able to distribute its own earned currency or virtual goods to users that watch Jun Group video ads, though.

With television watchers increasingly using digital video recorders that let them skip commercials, advertisers need to consider where else they can place their compelling, high-production video ads. Along with video streaming services such as Hulu, which recently implemented Facebook Connect, social games are becoming lucrative real-estate. By solving a gamer’s needs by providing virtual currency or goods for watching ads run through services such as SupersonicAds and Jun Group, brands can not only make users watch the entirety of their ads, but instill a positive impression on them as well.

Page management company Vitrue has acquired GamesThatGive, a developer that allows brands to offer games to their fans in which engagement triggers donations to charity by the hosting brand. The acquisition will allow Vitrue to provide its clients with GamesThatGive games, helping them generate brand lift through sustained exposure to gamers and the good will generated by their donations. Game mechanics that encourage Liking of a brand’s Page and sharing with friends will also help Vitrue clients gain new fans.

Vitrue is one of the larger Facebook Page management companies. It serves brands including AT&T, McDonalds, Ford, and Best Buy as well as agencies such as Digitas and Saatchi & Saatchi with its licensable Social Relationship Manager platform. This includes a suite of promotional engagement apps for driving brand exposure and fan acquisition. The company has been in business since 2006, and has taken a total of $33 million in funding, including a $17 million Series C round in February of which may have in part been used to pay an undisclosed price for the charity game developer.

The GamesThatGive acquisition will augment Vitrue’s app suite with versions of simple, classic games such as Snake, Breakout, Columns, and solitaire that can be offered within a branded wrapper and linked to from a business’ Facebook Page. Users are compelled to play because time spent in the game and completion of levels cause donations to be made to a charity of their or the brand’s choice.

GamesThatGive has already powered games on the Pages of brands such as Starbucks, Master Card, and UNICEF, as well as existing Vitrue clients such as Best Buy. The company claims that some of its games average over 40 minutes of game play per session, draw 80% of visits from returning players, and “have achieved over 100% virality, bringing in over 1,100 additional fans for every 1,000 fans driven to the game.”

These stats are reasonable, considering Facebook users are often eager to act for social good as long as they can share the news of their contribution with friends. GamesThatGive also uses a unique style of Like-gate, where users can double the donation their play generates by becoming a fan of the hosting brand. This type of incentive probably has a high conversion rate, and combined with wall posts by existing gamers translates into a powerful fan acquisition mechanic.

Vitrue’s clients will now have less need to license games from outside developers in order to offer a constant rotation of promotions. The GamesThatGive team will be moving to join Vitrue in San Francisco, where the developer’s founder and CEO Adam Archer will oversee gaming-related functionality. Vitrue currently only offers quiz and trivia games, but Archer may bring the expertise necessary to build more robust custom games in addition to the simple games his company has already developed.

For more on how brands can market themselves within social games, visit the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s comprehensive guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

Facebook Ads API tool and managed-spend service provider TBG Digital has released its Global Facebook Advertising Report for 2011 Q2 (.PDF). The report indicates that the number of Facebook ad impressions brands bought to gain fans for their Facebook Pages increased 104% in Q2, and 1900% year over year. TBG Digital says it ran 60 billion ad impressions in 2011 Q2, and just under half were brand advertising of this nature, so we can interpret that the actual number of impressions of ads for brand Pages run by the company’s clients has grown from approximately 1.4 billion to 27 billion.

Other key findings include that ads aimed at driving sales had a more than 350% higher conversion rate when aimed at existing Facebook fans, advertising by retailers has grown significantly to 36% of total impressions, and Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad unit produced a 32% lower cost per acquisition.

The report shows that Facebook Pages have become so important to brand presence on Facebook that brands are aggressively increasing spend on fan acquisitions. It also demonstrates building a fan base produces clear return on investment by lowering the cost of attaining sales and additional fans.

The data for TBG Digital’s report analyzes a total of 200 billion impressions ran in 21 countries by 167 clients of the company’s licensable ad management tool and managed spend service. The tool and service both allow clients to tap into Facebook’s Ads API to more efficiently create ad variants, A/B test to find top performing creative and targeting combinations, optimize bids, and analyze results in order to get a higher return on spend than would be possible by running ads manually.

Showing Facebook as a good place to advertise is in the interest ofTBG Digital’s business, so one could expect there to be some potential for bias. However, the company had the report’s methodology and conclusions verified by The Psychometrics Centre of University of Cambridge.

In the recent past TBG Digital reports have shown that Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad units provides a 46% higher click through rate, a 20% lower cost per click, and an 18% lower cost per fan than Facebook’s standard ad units. For those less familiar, Sponsored Stories take the actions of friends such as Liking a Page and turns them into Facebook sidebar ads that show the friend’s name and face. TBG Digital  also indicated that by advertising to Facebook fans rather than non-fans, acquisition costs can be lowered for registrations by 44%, for event signups by 33%, and for purchases by 15%.

Brands Push to Gain Fans Before Price Increases

Brands, recognizing the value of Facebook fans, have been pouring money into upping their Like counts this year. In 2010 Q2, most Facebook advertising pointed offsite, either to brand websites or purchase sites. Total share of impressions pointing offsite has since dropped to just above 50%. Now, ads pointing to Facebook Pages now make up nearly half of all impressions, having risen 1900% since 2010 Q2, and 104% during 2011 Q2.  This data is based on 170 billion ad impressions for 146 clients.

Brands may be concerned that as adoption of Facebook by businesses increases, so will the cost per acquisition of fans. Therefore, brands are trying to amass large fan bases while doing so is still relatively cheap. The shift towards ads pointing within Facebook benefits the social network, as clicks of these ads lead to it being able to serve more ad impressions.

With High Conversion Rates for Fan-Targeted Ads, Retail Spends More

The retail and finance industry spending on Facebook ads significantly increased during 2011 Q2 when analyzing 120 billion impressions. Retail now makes up 36% of all Facebook ad impressions, and Food and drink industry spending has also increased. A 60 billion impression study shows that retail advertising saw the highest click through rate, followed by arts and entertainment, and food and drink.

TBG Digital conducted a study of 170 billion impressions that included 150 billion impressions of ads aimed at driving sales by two major retailers. It concluded that advertisers are able to attain an average 435% higher conversion rate when targeting fans instead of non-fans when trying to attain sales, loyalty program registrations, and event RSVPs.

Many companies have spent the last year concentrating on building their fan base, and are now ready to monetize these fans with conversion-oriented ads. With a growing set of ecommerce applications allowing retailers to sell products from their Facebook Pages, high CTR, and high conversion rates when advertising to their fans, retailers are finding Facebook a lucrative place for their ad dollars.

Sponsored Stories Produce More Qualified Clicks

As we noted, TBG Digital previously reported that Sponsored Stories can increase CTR and lower CPC and cost per fan. The reduction in acquisition cost goes beyond Facebook fans though, with the new report showing a 32% lower CPA when using Sponsored Stories instead of standard Facebook ads. However, this study only looked at 208 million impressions.

This indicates that the social context and trusted recommendation produced by Sponsored Stories that display the names and faces of friends make users more likely to become fans, make purchases, register, or RSVP. A combination of low cost and high performance means Sponsored Stories could become a core component of many Facebook campaigns once more advertisers learn how to use them.

TBG Digital also included data about changes in average CPM and CPC pricing for Facebook ads. The report indicates that CPC prices rose in several major markets including the US. However, we’ve received conflicting reports from other Ads API tool and service providers so we’re hesitant to make a steadfast conclusion about changes in ad rates at this time. We’re following up with Facebook and additional Ads API partners and will soon release a study looking at ad rate data from multiple sources.

Overall, the report suggests that interest in Facebook ads is growing, the channel is proving to perform for many industries and desired conversion types, and that Facebook’s newest ad units can drastically improve advertising efficiency.

A recent set of updates to Zynga’s S-1 document sheds new light about the company’s business position, as it prepares for an initial public offering. For starters, Google has indeed invested, although the terms were not disclosed.

More interesting is the special relationship that Facebook and Zynga have formalized over revenue and traffic, in two developer addendums. (You can find the full set of docs here, although sadly some of the most interesting bits have been removed).

At first glance, the terms read as if Zynga had a special deal with Facebook, where it gets a portion of the ad revenue from Facebook ad units that run alongside its games in canvas apps. However, the terms specific that it is not canvas app ad revenue – instead, it’s referring to Zynga web sites like FarmVille.com, or even Facebook ads that might run within games.

We asked Facebook about the matter and got this response: “When we reached our agreement with Zynga last year, we discussed the possibility of displaying ads sold by Facebook on some of Zynga’s own pages. This isn’t something we’ve opted to do so far, and we are not working on an ad network right now.”

> Continue reading on Inside Social Games.

A few non-gaming companies active on the Facebook platform  brought on engineers and sales staff this week, but there seems to be a lull in summer hiring in general among them.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into next week’s post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

Vitrue

• Thomas Jefferies, Facilities Manager/Infrastructure Engineer – previously worked a similar job at Mastec.

Efficient Frontier

• Caroline Soeur, Account Director – previously worked as a director of project web marketing at Isobar.

Tealium

• Brian Schulman, Director of Sales – has done work in digital marketing analytics.

Hearsay

• Erin Colbert, Senior Customer Marketing Manager – formerly worked at HubSpot as Senior Inbound Marketing Consultant.

Facebook recently updated its Android native mobile app, adding several ways to interact with Pages in version 1.6.1. Users can now see a list of Pages they’re an administrator of, and post updates as these Pages, allowing the app to be used as a Page management tool. All users can now see a list of Pages they Like, search for Pages, and tag Pages in their status updates.

With its 32 million daily active users, these additional capabilities should assist with Page growth since it will be easier for users to find, share, and engage with Pages.

Facebook for Android has been experiencing strong and steady growth recently, gaining 3.6 million DAU this month. For comparison, in the same time span Facebook for iPhone has seen erratic growth and only gained 1.2 million DAU despite being more popular with a total DAU of 45.8 million.

The last update, Facebook for Android 1.6, allowed users to upload videos and browse Page walls. Before then, the only way users could interact with Pages was by seeing their updates in the news feed. This meant the app lagged significantly behind the Facebook for iPhone app in terms of Page management capabilities. Android users would have to visit m.facebook.com to view Pages they Liked, search for Pages, or post to them.

Now when users click the search icon on the app’s home screen, they’ll see a tab for Pages. When tapped, it displays a list of Pages the user is an admin of, followed by a list of their Likes. User can click through to one of the Pages they admin and post as that Page from the wall. This will allow admins on the move, such as managers of touring musicians, to easily publish status updates, photos, and videos to their fans.

When users are composing status updates, they can use the @symbol to tag any Page. This allows users to share Pages with friends, and could lead to a very small increase in the rate at which Pages acquire new Likes.

In the latest Platform Updates to the Facebook Developer Blog, the company announced the ability to manage Pages, change their wall settings, and install tab applications via the Graph API. This should make it easier for developers who manage multiple Pages.

Facebook added a referral attribute to the Send button for tracking which Send Button and what type of Send button story led a user to click back to a developer’s site. Developers can now use the Graph API Explorer with test accounts, and the set of payment methods displayed when users buy Facebook Credits is now optimized by country. In the previous Platform Update, Facebook announced  that developers can now name their test users, and can use the App ID where they previously used their API key.

As the Page management industry grows and developers begin to administrate numerous Pages for clients or their own apps, Facebook has sought to improve the tools for managing Pages as a team , and for single admins to efficiently manage one or many Pages without using the graphical user interface.

To further this effort, Facebook now allows Page admins to retrieve Page access tokens through the Graph API using the call:

https://graph.facebook.com/PAGE_ID
  ?fields=access_token&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

This token can then be used to make changes to the Page. Wall settings such as whether users are allowed to post can be pulled using the /settings connections. These settings can be changed via an HTTP POST to PAGE_ID/settings. For instance, an admin could quickly close the walls of all of their Pages in the event of a public relations crisis or their app breaking.

Developers can also “read, install and manage app tabs for a Page via the /tabs connection.” This allows them to check which tabs are currently installed and  add new ones. For example, a developer could simultaneously install a promotional app across all the local branch Pages of a single business for a coordinated marketing push. Details for managing Pages via the Graph API can be found in the Page object documentation.

Facebook launched the Send button in April to facilitate sharing of content around the web with specific friends rather one’s entire network through the Like button. In May it added Send button metrics to Domain Insights, as well as the Graph API and FQL Insights table.

Now, a referral parameter can be included in implementations of the Send button so developers can be sure which Send button is generating emails, Group posts, and Facebook messages that are leading to referral clicks. Developers can also see which of these three Send types led to the click. The following is an example of an added referral parameter that can be embedded along with a Send button:

<html><body>
<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:send href="YOUR_SITE_URL"></fb:send>
</body></html>

Clicks to your website will generate a referrer URL containing the ref value and parameter, for example:

http://www.yoursite.com/home?fb_ref=top_left&fb_source=message

This data will help developers optimize the placement and style of their Send buttons, and choose on which web pages to include the social plugin. It will also help developers determine what Send button message type is being used most often. For instance, if they see that their content is frequently being sent to Facebook Groups, they might include messaging on their site encouraging users to share with their Groups.

A few weeks ago, Facebook launched the Graph API Explorer to allow new developers to get acquainted with the API, and experienced developers to test their apps. Now developers can log in to the console as a test account. The permits them to test installing apps, posting content, and taking other actions that generate news feed stories without worrying about clogging the news feeds of friends with tests. Facebook said it received a high volume of requests for this capability.

When developers create their test accounts, they can now name them to more easily keep track of them and to produce tests that look more authentic than tests using unnatural names. The name of a test account will in part determine what email address it is assigned.

Facebook has also changed how payment options for Facebook Credits are displayed. Now, methods will be ordered depending on which is most commonly used in a user’s country. This way, if a mobile payments are more prevalent than credit cards payments, the mobile payment option will appear higher in the list. This should increase the likelihood that users will complete Credits purchase transactions, thereby increasing the number of users with Credits balances and the amount of Credits they have. This should make it easier for apps to turn users into paying customers.

Last, Facebook is phasing out usage of the API key in app settings to remove redundancy in the developer app. Developers can now use their App ID wherever they previously used their API key. This means there’ll be one less code that developers will need to keep accessible.