Users part of the initial roll out of the news feed redesign announced yesterday are also receiving several other unannounced changes to Facebook’s interface. These include an expansion of the character limit on posts from 500 to 5,000, a rollout of the floating navigation bar we saw tested last week, the ability to edit bookmarks in the home page’s left navigation bar, and a more convenient way to leave birthday greetings. Over the last few days Facebook has also buried the poke button within a drop down menu, and removed the ability to accompany a friend request with a message.

By launching these interface alterations now rather than amongst other sweeping updates at the f8 developer conference on Thursday, Facebook may be able to reduce the shock to users. The timing will also help the site keep attention focused on Platform-related updates that directly impact developers. Unfortunately, the combination of so many changes with the prompts necessary to explain them gives the home page a foreign look that may turn off some users.

Any update to the core features of the site produces some backlash, and changing the news feed means changing a lot of people’s ingrained behaviors. Still, the merger of the Top News and Most Recent feeds and the addition of the Ticker may be inspiring more complaints than Facebook has seen since it abruptly changed user privacy controls in 2009.  Our commenters were highly critical of the Ticker’s design as Facebook tested it over the last few months, and AllFacebook reports that large volumes of complaints are now being publicly published by the site’s users.

Facebook’s strategy over the years has been to gradually test and roll out changes, but between the last week and f8 the service will have changed dramatically in a short period of time. Newer users already feeling overwhelmed with the site, such as older age groups, may give up if too many features suddenly change. Facebook might consider delaying any changes not directly tied into the major Platform announcements until users adjust.

Today, Facebook shows no signs of slowing down, though, as it has begun rollout of the following additional changes alongside the news feed redesign:

5,000 Character Limit on Posts

Previously, the maximum length for Facebook posts was 500 characters, which was appropriate for most social updates. However, it may have been limiting for those trying to use Facebook as a lightweight blogging platform — something encouraged by the Subscribe asymmetrical follow feature launched last week.

Now Facebook posts can be as long as 5,000 characters and comments have a maximum of 8,000 characters. This will allow deep discussions about complicated topics to take place within the site. If users reach the character limit while posting, Facebook allows them to instantly convert the update into a Note. In the news feed, long posts show just their first 1,200 or so characters.

The change takes another talking point away from Google+, which places no character limit on posts. Long posts could make the news feed look too dense or even boring, especially compared to Twitter’s stream of 140 character updates. Facebook may need to reduce the number of characters shown above the fold in news feed posts to keep the news feed easy to digest.

Floating Navigation Bar

The top navigation bar now floats and remains visible as users scroll down pages, as we saw tested last week. This gives users access to their notifications, Messages, requests, account and privacy settings, search bar, and a home page link at all times. We believe this will increase the average Facebook session time by making it easier for users to return to the news feed or check new notifications when they reach the bottom of a page and might have otherwise left the site.

Facebook has also slightly altered the appearance of the bar, replacing the “Profile” link with a user’s profile picture, and the “Account” link with a small arrow that opens the settings drop-down. This gives the top navigation bar a more minimalist design.

Edit Home Page Bookmarks

Hovering over a bookmark in the home page’s left sidebar now reveals a pencil icon that lets users edit that bookmark or the settings for the thing it represents. Here are the options users receive when clicking the edit icon on different types of bookmarks:

• News feed – Manage who is hidden from the news feed
• Messages and Events – Remove the bookmark from or rearrange its place within the Favorites bookmark section
• Friend Lists – Add to Favorites or hide the bookmark
• Apps – Edit app settings including permissions, add to Favorites, or delete the app
• Groups – Edit Group settings including notifications, add to Favorites, leave Group
• Pages – Add to Favorites

These changes will make it easier to unhide someone from the news feed, remove unwanted apps, and silence noisy Groups.

Streamlined Birthday Geetings

When users click on the birthdays section of the home page’s right sidebar, a popover is revealed with wall post entry fields for the profiles of all friends with birthdays that day. This allows users to quickly post “Happy Birthday” or a more personal greeting to each friend since they don’t have to visit their profiles individually.

Hidden Poke Button

As first spotted by AllFacebook, the Poke button on the profile is no longer visible by default. Instead, it has been buried in a drop-down menu in the top right of the profile along with options to video call, report/block, and suggest friends.

The poke is a relic of the earliest versions of Facebook, when users had few other means of communicating with friends or strangers. Since then, “poke wars” have become running jokes between friends. However, the feature is also often used by men to try to flirt with women they don’t know, which can create an offensive atmosphere for some women. Rather than suddenly removing the option, which could anger some users, Facebook appears to have chosen to make it less prominent in hopes of weening users off it.

No More Friend Request Messages

Previously, users could include some text when sending a friend request to greet a potential new friend and explain how they know each other. This option is no longer available, forcing users to send a separate Message. This might reduce the likelihood users will send an accompanying Message, which could increase the volume of rejected friend requests.

[Thanks to Dian Rosanti for the tip on birthdays]

2011 will be remembered as the year that Zynga filed for its IPO, Google launched Google+, and Facebook executed the Credits transition. With the first potential social gaming IPO, Zynga plans to raise up to $2 billion to fund its continued global expansion. Meanwhile, Google is putting its weight behind what appears to have the potential to be the most serious competitor to Facebook as a social gaming platform in North America since the demise of MySpace. And at the same time, developers are still navigating through the Facebook Credits migration, while many are also expanding substantially onto mobile platforms to increase growth and expand reach.

Inside Network is proud to announce a new original research report by Justin Smith and Charles Hudson that is exclusively focused on the future of the social gaming market, entitled Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2012. This is Inside Network’s third annual edition of the Future of Social Gaming report. The big picture? The social gaming market will reach $1.6 billion overall in 2012.

How big is the market, and where will social gaming go in 2012? How will existing players fare as Facebook Credits shifts the social gaming landscape and continued changes to the platform? Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2012 provides deeper insight into social game monetization, development, customer acquisition, and the key questions facing the space in 2012 than you’ll find anywhere else.

About the Report

Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2012 gives you an inside view of the future at this critical juncture in the intersection of social networking and online games.

We have compiled months of original research from dozens of top executives and entrepreneurs from all parts of the social gaming ecosystem to produce eye-opening source data and analysis that is not available anywhere else. Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010 takes the closest look at the present state of social games and the future of this strong but still rapidly changing industry.

What We Cover

1. Facebook Credits and the New Monetization Landscape: Early Results - Now that the transition to Facebook Credits was completed on July 1, what are the early results that developers are reporting? We take an in depth look at metrics and trends.
2. Will 2012 (Finally) be the Year of Mobile Social Games? – Now that mobile games monetizing through the virtual goods model are becoming a bigger market in the US and around the world, many social game developers have expanded their efforts to tap these new platforms as well.  Will 2012 finally be the year that social games take significant root on mobile?
   
3. Social Game Development and Design – How do small, medium, and large developers organize their teams? What do development cycle times for original titles and “expansion packs” look like? What is the role of testing and metrics in the development process? A few key game genres with proven mechanics and monetization have spawned dozens of fast followers. Understand how publishers are continuing to innovate as we head into 2012.
4. Monetization Data and Payment Trends– Now that developers have proven the virtual goods model, what are ARPUs, ARPPUs, and LTVs really like for different game genres? What is the lifetime value of users, and how long do players stick around? We take an in depth look at monetization methods and rates, and shed light on where payments are headed in the coming quarters.
5. Customer Acquisition and Marketing Trends – As the social gaming landscape has evolved over the past four years, so have the ways that developers acquire and retain new users. How have user acquisition costs changed, and what do Facebook’s changes spell for the future of the marketing funnel? We take an in depth look at data and trends.
6. Facebook’s Platform Changes, and What’s In Store for the Future – Facebook has continued to change Platform communication channels and functionality over the last year, significantly altering the way social games reach users through Facebook. Continued change is likely – what will it be, and how will it impact the industry? Finally, will we see another platform (like Google+) emerge? Our overview covers these developments, their impact on the industry, and what else is in store.

What you get

In addition to our deep dive into key aspects of the social gaming ecosystem, the report also offers extended coverage on:

• A brief history on the evolution and growth of this space in the US, including a description of all key players and how they rose to the top.
• Total social gaming market size estimates for 2012.
• Our take on the key issues facing the growth of social gaming, including our outlook and projections for 2012.

See the full table of contents below:

Table of Contents

More Data, More Actionable Insights

In 2011, social games continued to show what kind of value can be created on top of social networks. 2012 will be an even more important year.

Social gaming, powered by virtual goods, continues to expand. If you’re involved, or are considering jumping in, Inside Virtual Goods will be one of your most important tools.

One year of original data and exclusive in-depth reports delivered on a quarterly basis is $2,495 and contains:

• A detailed overview of the current state of the industry
• Specific estimates on market size by segment
• Diagnosis of key opportunities and issues by segment

The Wall Street Journal today launched its news reader Facebook app WSJ Social. It lets users view streams of stories sorted by the newspaper’s staff, their friends, or a Facebook news feed-style algorithm that shows stories with the most Likes. Stories can be instantly shared with Facebook friends using Like buttons, and users can  reach a leaderboard by getting the most subscribers.

The release of the canvas app shows that the WSJ sees potential in Facebook beyond driving referral traffic. Rather than complicate its website with tacked on plugins of stories Liked by friends, it has created an entire experience around customization and recommendations. By hosting the app within Facebook, WSJ may also be hoping to suck up some of the social network’s massive time on site, and make users feel more comfortable sharing links to the publication.

The WSJ.com does currently display Facebook’s Like button and Comments box on its website, though these don’t help organize the site’s content by relevancy to the viewer. However, Facebook’s news feed has revealed the stickiness of an algorithmically sorted stream of content chosen by friends. WSJ Social will allow the publication to experiment with personalization similar to the news feed without disturbing the traditional, lightweight, professionally-curated news reading experience its core audience expects from WSJ.com.

When users read articles within the app, they’ll see the Facebook Comments box prominently displayed in the sidebar rather than buried at the bottom of the page. They’ll also only see the Facebook Like button — no Twitter, Google, or other sharing plugins. In this way, the proliferation of WSJ Social-style apps within Facebook, such as the app “Editions” reportedly being developed by CNN and The Washington Post, a could threaten other social platforms populated by usage of their sharing buttons on websites.

WSJ Social’s “My Latest News Feed” makes it unique from other sites such as Twitter and Facebook that let users subscribe to updates from thought leaders. This default view of the home page holds the app’s true value — combining recommendations by friends, thought leaders, and the wisdom of the crowd via the Like button with the picks of WSJ’s entire editorial staff as well as the editors of particular sections. This feed shows the articles picked by the editors a user has followed but that also have high Like counts, and is likely to present highly relevant content.

To provide suggestions of WSJ and peer editors to follow and encourage users to engage, the app offers a leaderboard of the day’s most popular editors. By Liking stories and getting friends to follow them, users can rise to this list and be subscribed to by strangers. Vanity and feeling of obligation to one’s existing subscribers could push users to frequently return to the app and share WSJ stories, driving traffic for the publication.

The presence of additional curation controls does mean less room for content. The panels representing stories in WSJ Social aren’t large enough to show blurbs or in some cases even photos that make choosing what to read easier. At the same time, the cleaner interface may be less exhausting to casual readers. Living within the Facebook chrome may also give WSJ Social advantages as Facebook moves to itself becoming a media hub with a “Read” button to help users tell friends they’ve consumed and enjoyed an article.

For the first month after launch, sponsorships from Dell and Intel will make all WSJ content available to WSJ Social users. After that, though, the app will mirror the website and requires users to pay to access premium content such as expanded coverage and article archives. The more time users spend reading the WSJ, whether on the app or the website, the more likely they are to pay for unlimited access. And with users spending so much time on Facebook, the exposure generated through WSJ could aid the publication’s bottom line as print dies out.

Facebook just announced that it is redesigning the home page’s news feed to combine the Top News and Most Recent feeds. Rather than having to choose between tabs, users will automatically see Top News content first if highly relevant updates have been published since they last checked Facebook, and see Most Recent content first if they’ve been visiting frequently. A Ticker in the right sidebar will display a firehose of real-time updates that users can click to expand and engage with.

Taking the burden of choice off of users by showing them both relevancy filtered and a raw stream of updates at the same time will ensure there is always something compelling waiting on the home page. This could help Facebook turn quick visits to check for new messages or notifications into longer sessions. The merger of the feeds will also keep users from missing important updates or being bored by seeing identical updates in both feeds.

Facebook product manager Keith Schacht tells us “This about seeing the most important content no matter how frequently you check Facebook.” He explains that the improved news feed is akin to a newspaper that shows you the biggest news that broke since you last read rather than just the headlines from the last day. Some users will ge the updated home page today, and Facebook will be fully rolling it out in the coming weeks.

A Single, Dynamic News Feed

When users return to the redesigned home page, they won’t simply see the same feed they were last viewing. Instead, they’ll see a Top News segment at the top of the feed displaying important stories by close friends or those with lots of Likes and comments that they haven’t seen yet, followed by Most Recent-style content.

If nothing critical has been published since their last visit, they’ll immediately see “Recent Stories”. Those with lots of friends or especially active networks might see Top News if they haven’t visited in as little as 15 minutes, though it may take hours for less connected users.

Facebook’s EdgeRank news feed sorting algorithm can be taught a user’s preferences with in-line controls. Clicking ‘X’ next to a story brings up options to mark or unmark an update as top news. Along with the recently added Subscribe options for managing the frequency and types of posts in the feed, these controls will allow power users to refine their news feed. The wide variety of news feed options might overwhelm novice users, but Schacht says they were designed so they could be ignored if users don’t need them.

To further enrich the home page, photos posted to the news feed will appear larger than before. For instance, a post about new photos being added to an album will show the most popular photo from the album at roughly four times the standard news feed photo size. This may get users to open more photos from the feed and begin sifting through albums — an activity that generates tons of time-on-site for Facebook.

Real-Time Ticker

To replace the separate Most Recent feed, Facebook has added a real-time firehose of all updates by all of a user’s friends to the right sidebar. The Ticker is even more comprehensive than the old Most Recent feed that would still filter out minor updates about some friends.

To make it small enough to fit beside the primary news feed, the Ticker shows activity stories in plain text such as “Kate O’Neill added a new photo to the album Mobile Uploads”, rather than actually showing the photo. Users can hover over a Ticker update to view a popover of the full story it describes, and click to add Likes or comments. For screens of adequate size, the Ticker snaps to the right sidebar above the Chat buddy list, and users can use a sliding divider to choose to see more Ticker updates or more online friends.

While the old separate feeds did update in real-time, Schacht tells us it wasn’t fast enough to inspire conversation. The Ticker is designed to surface currently occurring activity. For instance, Schacht says ”maybe mutual friends are have a conversation shown in the Ticker. You join in and have the serendipitous moment of a shared conversation in real-time.” In this way, users can have an ad hoc online meetup, like a Google+ Hangout that occurs in the feed rather than video.

Simplicity for New Users, Hidden Options for Veterans

With the average Facebook user having less than 200 friends but some having over 1000, Facebook’s design must accomodate a wide variety of use cases. Smart Lists, Subscribe, the rumored Read, Watched, and Listend buttons, and today’s news feed changes all seem to promoting an interface where users don’t have to make any choices or do any work by default, but can opt to refine their experience.

In this case, novice users who visits the home page will immediately see popular stories first, recent stories if they’ve read all the popular ones, and real-time stories in the periphery without a single click. Power users can then apply Friend Lists filters, mark or unmark stories as Top News, and dial up or down the presence of specific friends to customize the news feed.

Facebook tells us tests of the redesign have received “positive reactions” from users. However, when we spotted the single news feed and Ticker last month, the response from those seeing it was almost universally negative. Though Facebook users are always resistant to change, some had valid points about the Ticker being too cumbersome and requiring too many clicks to scan large volumes of updates.

It may take some getting used to, and Facebook will need strike the right balance between Top News and Recent Stories in the primary feed, but the redesign could make Facebook a more relaxing experience. Rather than having to click multiple tabs, worry major updates have slipped by, and miss content Facebook hasn’t deemed important enough, all this content will be immediately available from the home page.

Over the past week and a half, Facebook has posted to the Developers Blog announcing several new tools, protocols and capabilities for developers. These include

• Better ways to submit bugs and track the API heath of the Platform,
• Changes to the DealSpot and Games Dashboard Featured Status incentives for developers who have integrated Facebook Credits
• A migration system where breaking changes are only pushed on the first day of the month
• Support for OAuth 2.0 with XMPP
• The deprecation of Auth 1.0 and the FB.Data call
• The ability to manage Events and upload high-resolution photos via the Graph API
• A more direct way for games to handle link clicks on the canvas page
• The option to detect and control flash object visibility in apps

New Platform Tools

High Level Changes

On October 14th, Facebook will open to all Facebook Credits developers several of the special incentive features that were initially used to encourage early adoption of Credits as a currency and payment method.

Developers will gain the ability to target specific demographics with DealSpot, a TrialPay-developed system that shows in-game icons leading to offers users can complete to earn Facebook Credits. DealSpot presents offers to users that might not have visited the offer wall, so developers looking to augment sales of virtual goods with another revenue stream should strongly consider activating the feature.

All developers will also gain access to broad category targeting, which lets them target Facebook Ads to users based on their interest in anything related to a selected topic. Facebook actually began testing this feature in April as an alternative to targeting specific keywords. The ability to target all social gamers rather than just fans or the Pages of certain games, Broad Category Interest targeting could help developers attain more new customers with less effort spent on ad targeting.

Facebook’s free marketing system known as Games Dashboard Featured Status and Social Placements will also become available to developers of games integrated with Credits. Games eligible for the promotions are “evaluated on a case by case basis, such as for game quality, genre and new functionality”. The system will be especially helpful to developers that are building great games but that don’t have big marketing budgets.

Recently, Facebook announced that developers would have a minimum of 90 days between the announcement of a breaking change and its implementation. To make adapting to these changes more predictable, Facebook now says it will only push breaking changes on the first day of any given month. This will reduce stress for developers, since they won’t have to worry that they may have missed an announcement about a breaking change that could suddenly take their app down.

For example, Facebook announced on September 16th that the FB.Data calls for waiting until specific queries were completed to perform an action will be deprecated. As such, the FB.Data calls will be deprecated on the first day of the month following the minimum 90 day period, January 1st, 2012.

Developers of XMPP Facebook Chat clients can now begin migrating to OAuth 2.0. They can use access tokens over SSL rather than sig and session_key parameters. As such, Facebook will deprecate Auth.promotesession on October 1st. The move to OAuth 2.0 will protect Chat clients from some types of data leaks.

A reminder, mandatory migration to OAuth 2.0 is coming on October 1st. Developers will need to have switched to the new JavaScript and PHP SDKs by then.

Specific Changes

Developers can now manage invite lists and check RSVP status for Events using the Graph API in addition to creating and deleting Events. This could help developers create powerful interfaces for professional event managers, or create an Events dashboard for users.

Facebook improved its Photos product last month, increasing the maximum photo size from 760 to 920 pixels. Photos uploaded through the Graph API can now have a maximum size of 920 pixels as well. However, photos returned through the API will still have a maximum size of 720 pixels, so there are no actual changes to what’s received from the API or FQL. The change will keep users from abandoning photo upload and editing apps when they want to upload high resolution photos.

By using FB.Canvas.SetUrlHandler, developers can now select to have clicks of links related to their apps from ticker stories, bookmarks, bookmark drop-down Requests and Request Notification stories be handled in-line in the apps. Previously, these clicks would needlessly redirect a user when they were already viewing the app the link led to.

For example, if an app employs FB.Canvas.SetUrlHandler, a user who clicks on a ‘your move’ Request or an achievement story while already viewing the app that published the Request or story wouldn’t be sent to the corresponding URL, but would be brought to the corresponding screen within the app. This should decrease load times and bounces from users clicking links on the Canvas page.

Flash applications using wmode=”window” rather than the recommended wmode=”opaque” can now pass a callback function to hideFlashCallback to FB.init to customize the visibility of flash elements when popups are shown. Previously, Flash objects could become hidden when popups were shown.

A good number of the Pages on our list of the fastest growing by Facebook Likes seem to have made the list this week as the result of Page consolidations. For example, several grew by a few million or hundreds of thousands of Likes in the span of one day. Most of the Pages revolved around movies, music, or other media-type Pages.

	Name	Likes	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1.	Manga	3,616,265	+1,248,535	+3,392,767
2.	Transformers	8,652,304	+21,626	+1,750,700
3.	Saving Private Ryan	1,308,781	+142	+1,306,606
4.	Back to the Future Trilogy	1,329,403	+1,539	+732,669
5.	The Godfather	5,611,292	+6,191	+612,465
6.	NatGeo	3,080,243	+71,990	+466,494
7.	The Miami HEAT	4,063,727	+4,504	+445,725
8.	Titanic	13,486,119	+57,296	+409,479
9.	Girl With The Dragon Tattoo	420,131	+314	+408,975
10.	facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake!	445,351	0	+333,025
11.	Music	27,848,019	+47,330	+326,669
12.	Facebook	52,727,244	+49,186	+313,866
13.	Angry Birds	7,492,940	+56,829	+308,560
14.	Harry Potter	34,680,412	+46,970	+307,580
15.	Banda Sinaloense MS	383,725	+1,801	+283,108
16.	The Smurfs	4,316,318	+40,000	+280,756
17.	Rihanna	45,205,913	+45,566	+273,532
18.	FOX Deportes	322,720	+251	+271,943
19.	Fidel Rueda Oficial	403,507	+1,645	+270,123
20.	Leo Messi	24,887,445	+41,047	+269,339

Manga, a Community Page revolving around the Japanese comic books, grew by 3.3 million this week to most of its 3.6 million; it appeared to be a Page consolidation. Similarly, Girl With The Dragon Tattoo grew by 409,000 Likes to 420,100 in a period of two days.

“Transformers” grew by 1.7 million, mostly in a few days, to 8.6 million and has been promoting the Blu ray version of the film. “Saving Private Ryan” grew 1.3 million, most of its Likes this week. The Back to the Future Trilogy grew by 732,700 Likes to 1.3 million in a span of a few days. “The Godfather” grew by 612,500 Likes to 5.6 million, mostly in one day, and has been promoting the new game in Beta from Kabam. Then there was the “Titanic” Page with 409,500 Likes to 13.5 million, “Harry Potter” with 307,600 Likes to 34.6 million and “The Smurfs” with 280,800 Likes to 4.2 million; this last Page has been actively promoting film-related products and Pages very actively.

TV-related Pages included NatGeo with 466,500 Likes to pass 3 million; the Page has actively promoted new shows and seen steady growth. Then there was FOX Deportes with 272,000 Likes, growing to 322,700 Likes, in what seemed to be a Page consolidation.

Music Pages included the Music Community Page with 326,700 Likes to reach 27.8 million. Then there were two Mexican musicians’ Pages, Banda Sinaloense MS with 283,100 Likes to reach 383,700 and Fidel Rueda Oficial with 270,100 likes to reach 403,500, that seemed due to Page consolidations. Finally, Rihanna’s Page reached 45.2 million with 273,500 additional Likes this week; she’s been promoting her appearances and products on the Page.

The rest of the Pages were a mixed bunch. The Miami HEAT’s Page grew by 445,700 Likes to pass 4 million, partly from consolidation. The  facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake! Page grew by 333,000 to 445,400 Likes. Facebook’s Page grew by 313,900 to 52.7 million. Angry Birds grew by 308,600 Likes to 7.4 million and soccer star Leo Messi’s Page has been recruiting visitors to Like it, resulting in growth of 269,300 Likes to 24.8 million.

Companies on our list of hires this week sought several engineers, as well as account managers, sales staff and marketing personnel.

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

• John Ledbetter, Software Engineer – formerly a Software Engineer at Cisco Systems.
• Xinjiang Lu, Software Engineer – previously an R&D Scientist at Quality Vision International.

TBG Digital

• Agnieszka Langford, Display and Social Media Analyst – formerly worked as an Account Handling Intern at BEC.
• Alex Abowd, Client Services Manager – previously worked a similar job, Senior Account Manager, at Millward Brown.

Brighter Option

• Maria Sical, Web Analyst – formerly Web Analyst at ABC Television.
• Abi Tucker, Account Executive

Context Optional (part of Efficient Frontier)

• Jordan Baines, Inside Sales Associate – formerly a student.

Wildfire

• Greg Sanford, Sales Associate – formerly a student.
• Mona Hadidi, Sales Associate – formerly a student and Launch Ambassador at Bling Nation.

Efficient Frontier

• Sean Kelaghan, Associate Account Manager – formerly a Brand Strategist at The James Group.

BranchOut

• Matthew Feldman, Marketing Associate – formerly a Production Intern at Warner Chappell Music.

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

Facebook will add new feedback buttons to stories in the news feed, according a TechCrunch source. Starting with “Read”, “Listened”, and “Watched” buttons, users will be able to indicate that they’ve already consumed a piece of content. This will allow them to provide more specific information about how they’re related to different types of content, which could help Facebook refine the news feed to show them more of similar types of content. The tip matches with the tagline “Read, Watch, Listen” which AllThingsD heard will be used for the f8 conference.

The granular feedback could also power the quietly launched Broad Category Interest targeting available in Facebook Ads, which lets advertisers target anyone with interests related to a selected subject rather than targeting those with specific Likes. For example, advertisers could target the category “Literature/Reading”, and Facebook could show their ads to users who frequently click the “Read” button on posts about news articles or books.

Facebook uses the Like button on news feed stories to improve its EdgeRank algorithm for determining what stories are most relevant to a user. Since Facebook currently has relatively little information about the content of news feed posts that aren’t tagged related to Pages, Likes of a friend’s stories result in that friend’s content appearing in the feed more prominently. If Facebook knew if a post was about a news article, band, or movie, it could make similar posts appear more frequently regardless of which friend published them.

The rumored “Read”, “Listened”, and “Watched” buttons fit with what we’ve heard about Facebook planning to provide developers of apps and websites the ability add more meta data or structure to news feed posts users publish about their content. A user could find a book on a review site, publish a post about it that is accompanied by meta data indicating they’re posting about a book, and Facebook could then show a “Read” button beside the story. Those who click the “Read” button would see more stories about books.

With Broad Category Interest targeting, which Facebook rolled out over the last few months but never announced, all this data becomes monetizable. A user wouldn’t have to formally Like the Page of a book for Facebook to know they’re interested in reading, because they often click “Read” on news feed posts. Rather than having to add a long list of popular book to Facebook’s traditional Specific Interest keyword targeting, an advertiser could simply target the “Literature/Reading” category. Then any users who Liked Pages of book or have clicked “Read” on news feed posts might see their ads.

For music and films, Facebook has Broad Category Interest sub-categories for different genres. The meta data provided by publishers might therefore include content genres, or at least titles that Facebook could cross-reference with a genre index. Then it would know to show more pop music news feed stories and ads to users who clicked “Listened” on a Lady Gaga post. Any posts that include content tied to Facebook’s rumored music, video, or news hubs would also receive the appropriate button.

Strengthening Broad Category Interest targeting could produce big revenue gains for Facebook. As we discussed earlier today, the Facebook Ads marketplace is inaccessible to many small businesses because they don’t have the know-how to effectively use the self-serve tool, or big enough budgets to use many of the tools and services built on the Ads API. As Broad Category Interest targeting is far easier to use than Specific Interest targeting, an improvement of the feature thanks to the “Read”, “Listened” and “Watched” buttons could help Facebook recruit this long-tail of advertisers.

Facebook will this week announce a new push to get small businesses using the site for marketing, according to USA Today. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told the newspaper that 200,000 small businesses will receive $50 advertising credits. These can be used with three recently launched tools that make it easier for businesses to reach local and relevant potential customers: zip code targeting, broad interest category targeting, and WildFire’s Storyteller app for Sponsored Stories ads.

Thanks to third-party Ads API tools and services, Facebook has gotten many of the world’s largest brands advertising on the site. However, the high minimum spend required to use these tools and services, and the complicated nature of the self-serve ad tool may have excluded small businesses. By luring SMBs in with ad credits and helping them execute successful campaigns, Facebook may be able to significantly increase revenues by turning the longtail of small businesses into heavy advertisers.

Sandberg said about small businesses and Facebook, “We’re not going to stop until all of them are using it to grow their business.” As the majority of Facebook’s revenue comes from advertising, an influx of new small business advertisers hooked with the $10 million in ad credits could boost revenues. In those experimenting with the ad credit become longterm advertisers, Facebook might be able to lofty projections Goldman Sachs is said to have made when it contributed to a $1.5 billion funding round for the social network in January.

In the past, Facebook has given free advertising credit to those registering for new ad accounts as well as through promotions with Visa Business Network and American Express’ Small Business Saturday and Big Break for Small Businesses. American Express also recently began allowing businesses to buy Facebook ads with Membership Rewards points.

New Tools Simplify Facebook Advertising for Small Businesses

The ad credits won’t help if businesses can’t attain success with Facebook’s self-serve ad tool, though. Fortunately, the promotion comes soon after Facebook launched two enhancements to its ad marketplace.

Last month Facebook added the ability to target ads to users in specific zip codes, which lets local businesses reach potential customers in their neighborhood. Previously, ads could only be geographically targeted as narrowly as by city, which may have been too broad for local businesses in big cities. Early tests by Ads API partner Blinq Media showed thats ads targeted by zip codes showed double the click-through rate of those  targeted by city.

Broad interest category targeting became available in the self-serve ad tool in April. It allows advertisers to target users who Like anything related to a broad topic, such as food & dining or fashion retail. This is much simpler for novice advertisers than selecting individual keywords to target.

Facebook also tasked WildFire Interactive, a third-party Page management Preferred Developer Consultant, with building an app to simplify use of its social ad unit Sponsored Stories. The ad unit amplifies the reach of news feed stories published by users that mention a business by turning them advertisements in the site’s sidebar. However, businesses have to get users mentioning them first before they can buy the more compelling types of Sponsored Stories, which can be difficult for those without experience building or using applications.

Wildfire’s Storyteller Facebook Page tab app solicits these mentions by allowing businesses to ask questions to their fans. The answers published to the friends of respondents can also be turned into Sponsored Stories. To ensure only positive mentions are promoted, businesses can enter a blacklist of negative words and names of competitors and answers containing these words won’t be published or amplified. Storyteller comes as part of Wildfire’s licensable Page management tool.

The one part missing from the equation is education for small businesses. Facebook’s can’t expect businesses to find and take advantage of these tools on their own, so it will need to pair the ad credits with resources designed specifically for onboarding small businesses to the self-serve ad tool.

With the tools, ad credit to experiment with, and knowledge to run campaigns that bring them new customers, small businesses could be walked through a positive first experience with Facebook ads. Soon they could be spending their own money on the ads, and Sheryl Sandberg could achieve her dream of bringing small businesses onto Facebook as she told USA Today, just as she brought them on to AdSense and AdWords when she worked at Google.

Facebook contests used everything from discounts to cars to photos this week in our featured campaigns. We spoke to the VP of Marketing for Bonobos, looked at Nitto Tires’ car design sweepstakes, Zazzle’s giveaway and visiteurope.com’s photo entry contest.

You can see the full week’s coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.

Bonobos’ 50 for 50 Facebook Campaign

Goal: Page Growth, Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: A Facebook campaign that gives users a higher discount on Bonobos merchandise as more users Like the Page.

Method: Bonobos bills itself as a web-driven men’s apparel brand and e-tailer, that uses heavy Facebook integration. We spoke to the company’s VP of Marketing Richard Mumby, who told us that Facebook ads and its Page were responsible for 50% of the company’s new customers.

This particular campaign, like most of the company’s campaigns, was developed in-house and takes a concept we’ve seen primarily with charities — pegging monetary amounts to the number of Likes a Page receives — and changes it up for retail. Essentially this campaign will provide users with 50% off purchases up to $500 on October 3 from the Bonobos website if the Page reaches 50,000 Likes by September 30. The campaign started at 23% to represent the 23,000 Facebook Likes it had. Mumby said the Facebook ads originally paired with the campaign became irrelevant because the virality of the campaign was taking care of itself. Currently the Page stands at 46,100 Likes.

Bonobos views Facebook as a way to engage customers with the brand, taking customers on a journey using the language and products that are already familiar to them. Facebook helps Bonobos bring the brand to life, as the tone the company uses to engage customers is “the way guys talk,” and then make the transition from knowing the brand to becoming a customer.

“The language we use and the syntax, the style of talking and engagement, is very much guy-to-guy, and so Facebook works very well for us,” he told us. “What we understand is that the more people that become a part of our Facebook community, the easier it will be for us to grow our business.”

Impact: The 50 for 50 campaign began on Sept. 12 and runs until Sept. 30 and already the campaign has already grown the Page to over 46,000 Likes. PageData highlights that in the days after the campaign launched the Page’s growth grew steeply.

How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of hundreds of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.