A series of films, TV shows, football (soccer) Pages, musicians and game-related Pages made our list of the fastest growing Pages by Likes this week. There appeared to be a few making the list as a result of Page consolidations on the part of Facebook as well; other Pages included Facebook, YouTube and the Dislike button.

Pages on our list this week required 245,700 and 887,800 Likes to make the top 20 this week. We compile these lists with our PageData tool, which tracks Page growth across Facebook.

	Name	Likes	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1.	Amelie	914,631	+2,040	+887,761
2.	Tyler Perry’s House of Payne	1,399,656	+1,354	+488,663
3.	Titanic	13,486,119	+57,296	+409,479
4.	Best Buy	4,713,507	+16,748	+379,883
5.	Harry Potter	34,378,858	+46,940	+347,620
6.	The Smurfs	4,044,855	+45,818	+336,714
7.	facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake!	445,351	0	+333,025
8.	Neymar Jr. Oficial	1,294,937	+4,872	+330,449
9.	Music	27,524,350	+51,113	+327,684
10.	Facebook	52,423,151	+44,567	+322,175
11.	Rihanna	44,944,006	+39,183	+293,734
12.	Leo Messi	24,655,217	+37,117	+286,251
13.	Cristiano Ronaldo	33,854,205	+37,919	+283,885
14.	Angry Birds	7,176,654	+40,279	+275,940
15.	Eminem	46,801,364	+38,033	+273,049
16.	Texas Hold’em Poker	49,978,274	+3,685	+266,588
17.	YouTube	44,929,018	+34,736	+250,537
18.	Family Guy	37,584,241	+37,407	+248,696
19.	Adele	5,602,289	+36,312	+247,065
20.	FC Barcelona	20,184,504	+31,231	+245,679

Movies on our list this week included “Amelie” with 887,800 Likes to grow to 914,600, although it appears to be a Page consolidation. Then “Titanic” with 409,500 Likes to grow to 13.4 million. “Harry Potter” grew by 347,600 Likes to pass 34.3 million and “The Smurfs” grew to 336,700 to pass a total of 4 million.

TV shows included “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne” with 488,700 Likes to grow to 1.4 million and “Family Guy” with 248,700 Likes to 37.6 million.

Football (soccer) figured prominently on the list this week, too with three players’ Pages and one team on the list. Neymar Jr. Oficial grew by 330,500 Likes to 1.2 million, although it appeared to be a Page consolidation. Then Leo Messi by 286,300 Likes to 24.6 million and Cristiano Ronaldo to 283,900 Likes to 33.8 million. Finally the team FC Barcelona grew by 245,700 Likes to 20.1 million.

Music Pages on the list included the Community Page Music with 327,700 Likes to reach 27.5 million, Rihanna’s Page grew to 293,700 Likes to 44.9 million, Eminem’s Page grew by 273,000 to 46.8 million and Adele’s Page grew to 247,100 Likes 5.6 million.

The rest of the Pages included Best Buy with 379,900 Likes to 4.7 million. Facebook realesed the new Dislike Button™! Add it Now!! not a fake! grew by 333,000 Likes to 445,400 this week while Facebook’s actual Page grew by 322,200 Likes to 52.4 million. Then Angry Birds grew by 275,900 to 7.1 million, Texas Hold’em Poker grew by 266,600 to 49.9 million and, finally, YouTube by 250,500 Likes to 44.9 million.

Marketing, ads, sales and software staff were brought on by a handful of companies this week and Shop.org also named a new board member. 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:

Nanigans

• Katherine Ingalls, Ad Operations Manager – previously worked as a community manager at Communispace Corporation.

Shop.org

• Scott Silverman, Board of Directors – co-founder of Ifeelgoods, VP of Marketing and former executive director of Shop.org.

BranchOut

• Ravi Teja Vadrevu, Software Engineer – previously worked as a software developer at Civic Resource Group and MySpace.

Wildfire

• Adam Requarth, Senior Account Executive – formerly worked as the Director of Sales & Marketing for the Racquet Club of Memphis.

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

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. It will be released on September 20, but is available for discount pre-order now.

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.

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

Facebook just posted to its official Page that is testing new summary emails for users “who are very active on Facebook and receive lots of email notifications”. Rather than sending individual emails, the notifications will be compiled into occasional digests. Those in the test will have their account settings automatically changed to turn off most of their email notifications, which might surprise and annoy some users, though they’ll be able turn them all back on by unchecking the new “Email Frequency” account setting.

Summary emails could help reduce inbox clutter for Facebook power users — ones the site wants to keep happy because their actions drive reengagement for less active users. However, forcibly changing account settings could upset some users even if it they eventually find the summaries valuable.

Facebook defaults to sending users individual email notifications for over 70 different actions on the site. If users are admins of Pages, join noisy Groups, are frequently invited to Events, or play games, these notifications can quickly overrun their inboxes and lead them to ignore rather than read the alerts.

While users will still see red counters on the site’s top navigation bar when they return, getting them to actually click through email notifications is important to the site maintaining its high daily active user count. Often the actions users take in response to notifications, such as replying to posts on their wall, generate notifications for other users and create a loop that helps Facebook attain its massive engagement rates.

Solving the problem of excessive email notification frequency therefore seems somewhat obvious, but Facebook’s solution may be too aggressive. Though the end result of a cleaner inbox may benefit users, some may object on principle to having their account settings changed without their permissions.

Facebook should certainly look to address the issue, but its opt out test may do more harm than good. It should consider emailing those receiving too many email notifications with the choice to opt in to email summaries, or using a sidebar prompt to promote the feature. The perception that Facebook can change a user’s privacy or account settings at will already pushes potential users away from the service, and this change won’t help.

Update 9/20/2011: To inform users who’ve had their notifications settings changed, Facebook is sending the email below. By explicitly alerting users to the change, Facebook may be able to reduce the risk of backlash.

The following is an excerpt of entry in our Facebook Marketing Bible. The full version contains walk-throughs and strategies  for hiding comments and banning users.

As your Facebook Page grows in size and stature and begins to attract a healthy number of fans, so too will the level at which those same fans interact with your Page. Highly engaging Pages can quickly blossom into a valuable community, but the messages posted to your Wall by fans will not always be positive.

Here we’ll provide walk-throughs of Facebook’s native Page moderation tools, and explain how to execute a moderation strategy that protects your brand but doesn’t silence discussion.

Moderation Strategy

Popular Pages can and should expect customer complaints and criticism, irrespective of the quality of product or service being provided. Examples of situations that could lead to customers submitting negative posts or comments to your Page’s Wall include:

• Delays in shipping a product
• Faulty or damaged products
• Poor service or perceived rudeness
• A public relations crisis

Complaints beget complaints, with customers who might previously have said nothing now speaking up when they realize that other people are suffering the same problems. This behavioral cycle will quickly repeat itself, and a Page Wall can move from positive to negative in a matter of moments.

Overall, you need to remember that the medium is social: customers expect to be able to have an open and honest conversation about your company and the service they experience. Any action you take, from hiding comments, to replying in public, to banning users, is going to be judged as representative of your company. You must balance the natural desire to keep your Page as positive as possible with maintaining credibility among your fans. This can sometimes mean leaving negative comments public.

Page Permissions

Facebook allows Admins to change the permissions on their pages, giving them control over a number of different aspects such as country restriction, age restriction and the posting ability of users, plus word and profanity blocklists.

To edit your Page’s permissions, select Edit Page and then click on the Manage permissions tab on the left sidebar.

Admins managing very popular pages should consider the use of certain keywords in the Moderation blocklist – for example, the names of competitors or overly negative words. When users try to include blacklisted words in their posts these will automatically be marked as spam and moved to the Hidden part of your Page’s wall (more on this in a moment). The Profanity blocklist works in the same way (although Facebook doesn’t list which words it is looking for) and should also be adjusted accordingly.

Hidden Posts – Your Page’s Secret Wall

Facebook will analyze posts made to your Page’s Wall and automatically filter out spam (or what it perceives to be spam), which you can view in the Hidden Posts link on the left sidebar of your Page.

Admins can also move posts to the Hidden part of the Wall by selecting the Hide Post option from the drop-down menu accessible via the options cog on each post.

Popular pages therefore can expect to manage two different Walls – the public and freely-readable main Wall, and the private and (mostly) Admin-only Hidden Wall. Posts can be moved freely between each wall.

Hidden posts will no longer be visible to users reading your Page’s Wall, and the original poster will not be aware that their post has been hidden so they don’t think to immediately repost.

It also important to be aware that Facebook’s spam filter is a little inconsistent, and will trigger a number of false positives that will need to be moved back to the main part of the Wall. It’s good practice to regularly peruse your Hidden posts and unhide any posts that have been mistakenly labelled as spam by Facebook.

The full version of this article, complete with walk-throughs of the comment hiding and user banning tools can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s complete guide to marketing and advertising through Facebook.

If you’re going to be in San Francisco for Facebook’s f8 developer conference next Thursday, then stop by the night before for the Inside Network Happy Hour at Mercury Lounge.

Inside Network Happy Hours bring together app developers to connect and reconnect over drinks and casual conversation.

All are welcome, and drinks are on us with your RSVP.

Note: we’re expecting the event to be full, so please do RSVP to make sure that you can join, and come early if you can!

Pre-f8 Inside Network Happy Hour – San Francisco
Wednesday September 21, 2011
5:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Mercury Lounge SF
1582 Folsom Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
Click to View Map
Let us know you’re coming, here.

See you there!

SurveyMonkey today launched a new Facebook Page tab application that helps admins collect surveys from their fans. Once the free app has been added to a Page, admins can select to display any of their pre-made SurveyMonkey along with a Facebook Share button for getting users to distribute a questionnaire to friends. Though its display to existing fans means those using the app will be collecting biased data, it can still be useful for attaining user feedback and market research.

Facebook’s own Questions product offers Pages the ability to query their fans. However, admins can only ask one question at a time, there are no advanced answer analysis tools like the those provided by SurveyMonkey. Businesses and marketers looking to identify the best and worst parts of their product or service, and those wanting a deep look at what attracts their fans to competitors may find significant value in the SurveyMonkey Page tab app.

A basic, free plan gives Page admins access to survey templates, and distribution via weblink, Facebook, Twitter, email, and website embed. The are limits on the number of survey questions that can be asked, the number of responses that can be collected, and branding, though, which are waived with SurveyMonkey’s premium plans.

The popular online survey platform helps clients collect responses from 25 million users a month. It has 8.5 million registered users who create roughly 280,000 surveys a month, and it is rumored to pull in $50 million a year in revenue.

Helmed by CEO David Goldberg, husband of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, SurveyMonkey closed a $100 million round of senior debt financing last year to pay off old debt and fund acquisitions. With feedback crucial to business success, the space has heated up as Techlightenment launched a service for quickly attaining survey responses through Facebook ads in April.

SurveyMonkey already offered an option to share a specially formatted news feed link to survey in order to solicit responses, but this directed users away from Facebook to SurveyMonkey’s website. Page admins may be able to use the new app to attain a higher completion rate on their surveys by keeping respondents within the social network’s chrome.

Oddly, the Facebook Share button within the Page tab app sends users to the SurveyMonkey website rather than back to the app itself. [Update 9/21/2011: This bug has been fixed and the in-app Share button now publishes a link back to the app.] There’s also no easy way for admins to share the app the news feed, as copy and pasting its URL into the Facebook publisher creates an awkward feed story that doesn’t preview the survey or app.

SurveyMonkey needs to redirect the Share button to the app (which it now has) and add an app publishing function so admins can take advantage of the reduced friction of on-site response collection. If it does, it could use the app’s ability to turn fans into focus groups to sell businesses on premium plans.

Badgeville, developers of an embeddable gamification platform that helps websites increase audience engagement, has just launched several new features it calls Social Fabric. Clients can now pay more to add personalized activity streams and a notification system to their websites.

Similar to Facebook’s news feed and notifications, the features show users relevant suggestions about what webpages to visit based on the behaviors of their friends and people similar to them, and alert them to actions such as other replying to their comments. To make these suggestions more compelling, Badgeville augments the activity stream entries with Facebook Open Graph protocol meta data that sites have added to their pages, and identifies a user’s friends and interests by piggybacking on Facebook registration.

Through Social Fabric, Badgeville lets websites integrate of the most engaging mechanics used by Facebook to drive more page views, conversions, and time-on-site. With more flexibility for data collection and display, Badgeville is now a competitor as well a complement to some of Facebook’s social plugins.

In just a year since launching, Badgeville has found success in assisting web publishers with increasing traffic. It now has 85 customers including NBC, Universal Music Group, and Orange telecom, has done $5-10 million in sales. Its team numbers 35 and it raised a $12.2 million Series B round in July bringing it to $15 million in total funding. The company says it clients experience a 25% or greater increase in user behavior.

Badgeville founder Kris Duggan tells us his company “isn’t walking from gamification” that formed the core of the product we reviewed last year. The Badgeville platform still allows sites to reward points, reputation, spots on leaderboards, and badges to loyal users. Instead, its layering the social graph over gamification such that users stay engaged not just because they’re formally rewarded, but because it’s easy to discover content vetted by their friends and people with similar behavior patterns to them while they earn these rewards.

Duggan explains that currently, sites that integrate Facebook plugins are focusing too much on the interest graph and not enough on what he calls the “behavior graph” — what people are actually doing rather than what they say they’re interested in. Badgeville lets sites track and/or display what visitors read, review, or purchase, “not just that a friend Liked a site’s Page three years ago, not just that they shared something.”

In this way, Badgeville is looking to replace Facebook’s Activity Feed and Recommendations social plugins that only report explicit behaviors of users. With 2.5 million sites having already integrated Facebook’s free plugins, its logical to assume there’s a premium market waiting to be addressed.

Now, sites who license Social Fabric can select which user behaviors they track for internal analysis, and which the surface through the activity stream and notifications. For example, it could show an activity story whenever a friend visits a URL on the site. That Page’s title or headline can be determined by crawling its Open Graph protocol meta data, which Duggan says 80% clients already have in place. Clients can also decide what actions trigger notifcations, such as comment replies or that a friend commented on the same page.

There are some privacy issues Badgeville will need to be careful with. Surfacing explicit actions such as shares or comments isn’t a big deal, but users might not want what they read or purchase shown to their friends or strangers. Duggan says that Badgeville advises clients, but doesn’t have an privacy messaging set up to accompany its widgets with disclaimers that inform users as to what will be published.

He says he doesn’t see privacy flare-ups harming Badgeville’s reputation as “we’re just the infrastructure”. But if a client gets slammed for publishing to a user’s friends that they bought an embarrassing product or read a controversial article similar to Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon, you can expect some backlash and dropped contracts for Badgeville. Therefore, the ability to display privacy warnings should be a high priority for the company.

Facebook is known for its massive time-on-site and reengagement metrics, which in part stem from the engrossing nature of the news feed and notifications, but the social plugins it currently offers can’t track or report as much data as sites might want. Using Badgeville’s flexible platform to inject the social graph alongside these mechanics into their own content-rich websites, clients may be able to inspire similar engagement by ensuring users always have relevant suggestions of where to click next.

Several of the campaigns featured in our post this week incorporated games into the ways they highlighted products. Car and Driver magazine began a long-term partnership with the Facebook game Car Town that makes the magazine’s content a central part of its print product and brings its print products directly into the game. Then Einstein Bros Bagels and Maybelline ran some interesting contests. Finally, Best Buy’s CityVille integration seemed successful enough that the company is going to bring it back in November.

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.

Car and Driver’s Car Town Integration

Goal: Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty, Product Purchase

Core Mechanic: Car and Driver, a car magazine, will be featured in Car Town, a game about cars on Facebook. The partnership started last week and will continue into 2012.

Game: Within the Car Town game, users will see new car releases, announcements and other information in the form of the magazine’s cover. Plus, users who create virtual car and garage designs within the game will be awarded Car and Driver magazine’s 10Best award.

Every month winners will have a chance to be featured in the magazine, as well as in the magazine’s website and social media channels. Then, Car Town news updates will be featured in the magazine with the latest tips from the game.

Method: This partnership seems to be very extensive, leveraging both the game’s and the magazine’s audiences and their interests to intertwine in seemingly sensible and effective ways. It takes something that happens in real life— new cars being featured on the cover of Car and Driver magazine — and translates it into a social game. Brands should consider where their products would appropriately fit into social games and seek to partner with the developers of those games as Car and Driver has done here.

Impact: The Car and Driver Page’s Likes have seen an uptick by a few thousand in the past week, according to PageData; currently the total is 92,500. It’s not clear if this comes directly from the game integration, though, especially since most of the Page’s activity is related to cars and not the game.

Einstein Bros Bagels’ Darn Good Coffee Motto Contest

Goal: Page Growth, Engagement, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty

Core Mechanic: The contest invites users to Like the Page, then enter their choice motto that could end up on the company’s coffee t-shirts.

Method: Users who enter the contest are eligible to win free coffee and bagels for a year, in addition to smaller prizes of $100 gift cards.

Impact: The Page currently stands at 678,600 Likes and PageData shows that, as the contest began on September 5, the Page experienced moderate growth during the past week. A longer contest entry period may have helped promote momentum for the contest.  By publishing to the stream a fun feed story about a user’s entry, the contest could have attracted more participants.

Inside Games’ AJ Glasser contributed to this report.

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.

Non-game applications growing by monthly active users on our list this week included mostly Page tab apps, a few Phrases apps (not available in the United States) and then an assortment of other types of apps. The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 427,000 and 8.3 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Welcome Tab grew by 1.9 million MAU this week, other Page tab apps on the list included: Static Iframe Tab with 989,500 MAU, iwipa: HTML + iframe + FBML with 834,300 MAU and PM Custom Welcome Tab with 454,800 MAU.

A pair of Phrases apps on the list included: Phrases (new) with 1.3 million MAU and Phrases (new) with 434,900 MAU. These apps basically let users select from a series of quotes and share to the stream.

The rest of the list included quiz app 21 questions with 1.3 million MAU; the app asks users questions about their friends, then publishes the answers to the stream. Are YOU Interested? the dating app grew by 681,400 MAU. Te Atrevez A Kontesta..! is another quiz app publishing answers about friends to the stream with 441,300 MAU this week. Finally the Twitter app grew by 430,300 MAU; the app allows users to stream Twitter content to Facebook.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.