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 W3i, Kubra, Acquinity Interactive, Natural Motion Games, Social Point, 50 Cubes and 24MAS Group.

• Ad Sales for Facebook/Social Apps

• Manager- Regional Sales- US West

• Sales Executive – Online Marketing

• Product Lead

• Executive Producer/Product Manager

• Senior Game Designer / Producer

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.

California Facebook Ad Lawsuit Proceeds -  A U.S. District Judge in California has rejected Facebook’s request to dismiss a lawsuit from people claiming the site’s social advertisements count as unauthorized use of their names and likenesses.

Facebook the Top Searched Term in U.S. -  Experian reported this week that Facebook topped its list of the most search terms in the United States for the third year in a row, making up 3.1% of all searches. [Image Via Experian]

Facebook Completes Move to Menlo Park - The company moved the last of 2,000 employees from its Palo Alto office into a ten-building, 1-million square foot campus in Menlo Park on Monday. Facebook hopes to one day accommodate up to 9,400 employees there.

North Social’s Facebook Page Don’ts -  North Social put together a video montage of the worst things brands can do to gain fans on their Facebook pages.

Modea’s Wisdom Tree App, Find Gifts For Friends - An app from digital agency Modea allows users to select a friend, answer a few questions about them, and then suggests the perfect (gag) gift for this friend.

Most fan growth has slowed among Republican presidential primary candidates since the final debate on December 15th, according to our Inside Facebook 2012 Election Tracker. In recent days, though, Newt Gingrich has seen a small increase in daily new fans and Michele Bachmann has gone into the negative.

There was an uptick in Gingrich’s fan growth today, which could be related to his recent denouncement of attack ads from Mitt Romney and other Republican candidates. A post on Gingrich’s Facebook page Thursday evening — which included a quote from his appearance on The Laura Ingraham Show — has far gotten more likes, comments and shares than any post since December 11th.

Ron Paul saw more than 6,000 new fans the day after the debate and then again after an appearance on Jay Leno. Paul has not been able to maintain that sort of momentum, but he continues to see more daily growth than any other candidate.

Bachmann has lost fans over the last two days, though she is still ahead of where she was a week ago. Her page is graphed below:

Some users are seeing a “Suggested Events” feature that recommends events based on pages they like and places they’ve been, as first reported by TechCrunch. This replaces and expands upon the “Friends’ Events” section that listed events to which others had RSVP’d.

[Update 12/23/11 10:45 a.m. PST: We have learned Suggested Events also includes recommendations based on artists users have listened to.]

Suggested Events is an example of how Facebook can leverage data beyond the social graph, connecting users to things based on interest and location as well. As users like more pages, add location to their photos and status updates and use new Open Graph applications, the social network can provide more interesting and relevant recommendations for events and other items.

For example, in the past users might have been shown an event listing for a concert that their friend is attending. Now with Suggested Events, users might be shown upcoming concerts at venues they’ve checked into or from bands whose pages they like. In the future, Facebook could display events based on artists people have listened to on Spotify or other Open Graph apps. [Update 12/23/11 10:45 a.m. PST: Facebook has confirmed this is already happening.] This will help users discover things to do and help event promoters reach potential attendees.

The problem with Suggested Events in its current iteration is that users are unlikely to find it on their own. As a submenu item under the main Events tab, it could be just as invisible as the “Other” folder within Messages that many users are unaware of. Suggested Events, however, could be something Facebook occasionally decides to display on the right hand side of the page to let people know it exists. This space has previously shown users their unread updates and prompted people to take actions such as adding location to photo albums.

We’ve seen the social network making other changes to Events in the past two months to make the product more relevant to users. This includes changing language to make events seem less formal and possibly adding the ability to create events from the publisher. Unlike Messages and Photos, Events is not something most people use daily. These latest improvements could lead to more regular use.

Christmas continued to feature prominently on our list this week, as evidenced by several apps used to send greeting cards amongst friends. Calendars were also popular, however, as well as apps that cull profile data for 2011 retrospectives and publish corresponding photos to the feed.

The apps on our list grew from between 124,400 and 609,200 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Simify App	980,000	+609,187	+ 164%
2.	Birthday Cards	900,000	+533,851	+ 146%
3.	ปฏิทินของฉัน	510,000	+509,873	+ 401,475%
4.	Galaxy Life	920,000	+427,181	+ 87%
5.	내 캘린더	850,000	+378,685	+ 80%
6.	Men vs Women	850,000	+327,747	+ 63%
7.	マイカレンダー	500,000	+283,180	+ 131%
8.	Bayou Blast	580,000	+268,915	+ 86%
9.	ΗμερολόγιόΜου	760,000	+249,604	+ 49%
10.	Static HTML	590,000	+227,102	+ 63%
11.	Hola Leo Messi	740,000	+202,558	+ 38%
12.	Fun Cards – Christmas & More!	550,000	+197,532	+ 56%
13.	My Year In Status	220,000	+144,844	+ 193%
14.	Slots Farm – Slot Machines	970,000	+140,000	+ 17%
15.	Mission Impossible	360,000	+135,383	+ 60%
16.	Animal Land	200,000	+133,025	+ 199%
17.	2011 Complete Statistics	210,000	+129,258	+ 160%
18.	MinKalender (Svenska)	290,000	+126,225	+ 77%
19.	GodsWar: El Mejor 3D Juego De Fantasía	140,000	+125,804	+ 886%
20.	Storage Wars: The Game	590,000	+124,365	+ 27%

Simify App topped our list this week, growing by 609,200 MAU; the app allows users to transform a photo into a Sims character. Birthday Cards Grew by 533,900 MAU and gives users the chance to potentially send dozens of birthday cards at once by displaying users with upcoming birthdays. Then there was Fun Cards – Christmas & More!, which grew by 197,500 MAU.

Calendar apps, in several languages, included: ปฏิทินของฉัน with 509,900 MAU, 내 캘린더 with 378,700 MAU, マイカレンダー with 283,200 MAU, ΗμερολόγιόΜου with 249,600 MAU and MinKalender (Svenska) with 126,200 MAU.  A few random apps on our list included page tab app, Static HTML with 227,100 MAU and Hola Leo Messi with 202,600 MAU.

The retrospective apps each generated news ticker stories, as well as published photos to the news feed. My Year In Status, Which generates a collage of the users status updates from the year, grew by 144,800 MAU. And, 2011 Complete Statistics, grew by 129,300 MAU  and publishes a photo that includes various Facebook–related stats.

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

Facebook has updated its games platform today to introduce games stories to the mobile news feed, as well as providing developers with updated categories for identifying their games, and marrying the games and apps dashboards.

The mobile news feed is a bold step as it will likely increase engagement for cross-platform games that can be accessed via Facebook’s HTML5-based mobile platform. The stories will appear to both gamers and non-gamers, depending on how frequently the games are played by their friends. Developers can track referrals to games from stories that appear in mobile news feed by looking for ref param “feed_gameplay”. Facebook also recently announced plans to introduce Sponsored Stories to the news feed in 2012. We expect those to end up in the mobile feed soon, too.

The updated game categories addresses the rise of new genres on Facebook in the last year. The all-new categories include “Casino,” “Family,” “Sports,” “Strategy,” and “Word.” Old categories “Role-playing” and “Virtual world” now appear as “Adventure,” and “Simulation,” respectively. This brings Facebook’s total count of game categories to 12.

Lastly, Facebook has combined the the apps and games dashboards into a single dashboard called “Apps and Games.” Facebook explains on its blog that this is intended to “grow the apps and games ecosystem by creating a single place where users can discover and re-engage with [their] apps.” Friend invites appear at the top of the dashboard with a “top apps” section below that showcases what apps a user’s friends are accessing the most.

Facebook has also updated the number of app bookmarks from four to six. The social network reports that an early result of this small change is a 20% increase in referrals from canvas bookmarks to games. Additionally, bookmark counters on the home page now clear automatically when clicked by the user, similar to how notifications behave. Lastly, the platform now features a Games Tutorial for developers just starting out on Facebook.

Facebook was the second most-covered social site of the year with about 45% of all media hits, according to a report by HighBeam Research.

Twitter was the media darling this year, earning nearly half of all the combined social media attention in the press and leading every month except for two when Facebook edged the other network. Facebook often makes headlines for its legal and privacy issues in addition to product changes that affect the social network’s 800 million users. Twitter, on the other hand, gets a lot of mentions in the press because of the celebrities and other notable people breaking news and feeding gossip on the site. Facebook has started to make a push with its Subscribe feature to get high profile people using the site as themselves rather than less personal pages. How this evolves could have implications for the type and frequency of stories that mention Facebook next year.

With the rollout of Timeline, Facebook PR pointed the media to the profiles of Britney Spears, Tim Tebow, Rajon Rondo, Lea Michele and Nicole Richie, who seem to have had early access to Timeline based on the dates associated with some of their posts. We expect the company to continue to build relationships with celebrities as it competes with Twitter.

According to data from HighBeam, Twitter received between 46 and 51% of media attention about social sites each month in 2011. Facebook only led media coverage in February and April. The social network redesigned its pages product in February, giving page owners more tools for managing communities. Also that month, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned amid protests that were widely reported to have been organized through social media sites.

In April, Facebook introduced Deals, which gained some attention for being a Groupon competitor. The social network was also in the news because of legal issues. The Winklevoss twins lost their appeal that month about the size of a settlement they received from Facebook in 2008. Meanwhile, another man Paul Ceglia refiled a case claiming up to 50% ownership of the company.

The HighBeam report also looked at press mentions for LinkedIn, MySpace and Foursquare. LinkedIn earned 3.33% of media attention this year as it filed for IPO in January and became publicly traded in May. MySpace took 1.3% of total press mentions, mostly in stories about its demise. Foursquare is largely off the media’s radar, accounting for 0.71% of press coverage about social media platforms.

The report did not offer data about Google+.

Facebook hired a few engineers this week, according to its LinkedIn feed, and then also looks to have hired some engineers from posts now removed from its Careers Page. Other notable posts included the removal of Lead Security Counsel and Academic Relations Manager.

New hires per LinkedIn and Other Sources:

• John Liang, Software Engineer – formerly Senior Manager R&D at VMware.
• Mark Uyeda, Recruiter Compliance Administrator – previously the Manager at American Multi Cinema.
• Michael Rood, Analyst, Product Analytics – was Data Analyst at Nielsen Online.
• Margaryta Skrypachova, Software Engineer – previously a Software Engineer Intern at Facebook.

Facebook posted some jobs for engineers this week on its Careers Page in addition to account management and communications staff on its LinkedIn feed. Mobile, jobs in Asia, user ops, creative and several other types of jobs were also posted.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Legislative Assistant – Washington, D.C.
• University, Security Engineer, Security Operations (Menlo Park)
• University, Software Engineer (Menlo Park or Seattle)
• Partner Engineer (Singapore)
• Partner Engineer – Games
• Partner Engineer – Mobile, HTML5
• Partner Engineer – Mobile, Native Applications
• Partner Engineer
• User Interface Engineer, Marketing
• Marketing Manager, Japan (Tokyo)
• Marketing Manager, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore (Singapore)
• Partner Engineer – Mobile, Native Applications
• Relationship Manager, Agency Relations (Singapore)
• Compliance Program Manager
• People Analytics Manager
• Technology Partner, Collaboration Tools
• Pricing and Yield Management Lead
• Director of Tax Operations
• Manager, Business Operations – SMB
• Equity Programs Analyst
• Account Manager (Sydney)
• Account Manager UK
• Account Manager, Global Marketing Solutions – Politics (Menlo Park)
• Associate, Ad Operations – Arabic (Dublin)
• Associate, Ad Operations – Danish (Dublin)
• Agency Partner Hamburg
• Client Partner (Toronto)
• International Client Partner (London)
• Sales Manager Sweden
• Agency Account Specialist – US
• Agency Development Lead – US
• Client Partner (New York)
• Analyst, User Operations – Brazilian Portuguese (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – German (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – Indonesian (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – LatAm Spanish (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – Malay (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – Thai (Dublin)
• Analyst, User Operations – Vietnamese (Dublin)
• Technical Account Manager
• Creative Strategist – Chicago
• Creative Strategist – NY
• Head of Creative
• Technical Account Manager

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Client Partner – German (Dublin), Facebook
• Client Partner – Czech (Dublin), Facebook
• Client Partner – Turkish (Dublin), Facebook
• Client Partner – Spanish (Dublin), Facebook
• Online Sales Consultants – Danish (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Vietnamese (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Malay (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Thai (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Indonesian (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Brazilian (Dublin), Facebook
• Analyst, User Operations – Latin American Spanish (Dublin)
• Agency Partner Hamburg
• Agency Marketing Manager
• Head of Marketing Communications, Germany, Austria & Nordics
• Head of Marketing Communications, Germany, Austria & Nordics
• Head of Marketing Communications, France, Benelux & Switzerland

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

When people like pages on Facebook, they expect exclusive offers and timely customer support, but they consider themselves loyal customers and are not as interested in a brand’s content as marketers think they are, according to research from The CMO Council.

More than 1,300 consumers and 132 senior marketers were surveyed to understand how well marketers are embracing social media and why consumers are connecting with brands there. As previous research has suggested, people often come to Facebook pages looking for deals and other exclusive offers. What is interesting about this survey’s findings is the discrepancy between why consumers say they like companies on Facebook and why marketers think they do.

Response from marketers:

Response from consumers:

According to the report, 57% of marketers surveyed believe when a customer likes their page, it means their content is agreeable. Only 30% of consumers indicated they like brands on Facebook because of the content they share. Marketers seem less assured of fans’ loyalty, with only 24% of survey participants believing people like their pages because they are loyal customers. But 49% of consumers surveyed said they liked brands for that same reason.

The study also revealed some expectations people have about interacting with companies through social media. Fans expect to be eligible for exclusive offers, likely because they consider themselves loyal customers. They also expect “great customer support” and answers within 24 hours.

The full findings from the CMO Council can be found here. The survey was conducted in partnership with Lithium, which provides social media monitoring and Facebook app development software.