Eventbee, an online event management site, has just released a new Facebook Connect integration called Eventbee Network Ticket Selling – Social. Using this new tool, Facebook users can seamlessly connect and tap into their social graph to sell more tickets and be rewarded for each ticket sale.

The innovative feature allows event coordinators to take advantage of the viral effect of Facebook to reach an audience that may not be available through “traditional” methods like email marketing, and offers a way to incentivize friends to get involved in ticket sales.

The Facebook Connect integration is already getting good reviews as companies are realizing how useful it is to leverage Facebook’s powerful network to broadcast an event.  For example, Jenn Shaw of Jnine Media, who is trying to sell tickets to an Obama Inaugural event, says:

We have been using Eventbee for our events including Obama for Change-Organizers and Volunteer Victory Celebration. This new feature that allows passing discounts to Facebook friends is really exciting and a big CHANGE in how we sell tickets online. We are looking forward to tapping this innovative feature in all our events!

If you’re an event coordinator or interested in event marketing through social networks but don’t know what the best way is to integrate your service with Facebook, EventBee is likely a good place to start and may be the perfect solution for your social media event marketing needs!

Managing friends and social networks isn’t exactly convenient these days because there are so many online services and communities to help you stay in touch with and keep track of other people — Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Loopt, Brightkite, GChat…the list just goes on and on.  One thing you can do to make it all a little easier is to sync your Facebook and Twitter accounts so that the status messages you enter on one site show up at the other too. Here’s how to do it:

Syncing Facebook and Twitter from Facebook:

1) Search for “Twitter” in Facebook and add the first “Twitter” application that shows up in the search results. (It’s made by Twitter itself.)

2) Allow Twitter to access your profile.

3) Log into your Twitter account (via the Twitter application inside Facebook).

Now your Facebook messages will also show up in Twitter! But there’s one more step to send information from Twitter back to Facebook…

4)  After you test out the Facebook to Twitter functionality by typing a message and clicking on “Update,” click on “Allow Twitter to Update Your Facebook Status”

5) Allow status updates from Twitter back to Facebook.

6) Check to see if it works, by logging into twitter.com from a different browser window and entering a status…

Well, as you can see below, it worked! If you’re an avid user of Twitter and Facebook and you’re finding it difficult to manage status updates, you might want to think about merging the two utilities…

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

If you were on Facebook around election time just two months ago, you definitely saw the overwhelming response on Facebook towards the election proceedings.  Back in November, 1.7 million Facebook users donated their status to support a candidate, 5.4 million people declared that they had voted, 1.5 million mentioned Obama, McCain, Palin, Biden or Election on their Facebook wall, 2 million people gave election gifts, and 2.4 million joined the Facebook Election Day event!

Media giants like New York Times and CNN had great success with campaigns they ran with Facebook covering the election as well.  The New York Times campaign in particular achieved impressive numbers:

• The home page video was seen by 68.3 million people, and 34,000 comments were shared
• The virtual gift was sent by Facebook users to their friends over 400,000 times
• The number of fans of the NY Times page increased from 49,000 to 164,000 in 24 hours, “far exceeding our 2008 goal of 100,000 fans”

Come tomorrow (Inauguration day), both CNN and the New York Times have decided, again, to create themed applications, events, and polls to turn the news into a conversation with friends.

The Times will run engagement video ads on Facebook similar to the ones they ran during the election.  These ads will also drive users to the New York Times Page, where users will be asked to answer a question: “What should Barack Obama first address as President?” Facebook users will be able to weigh in on how they expect they’ll remember the historic inauguration.

In addition, the Times is doing a virtual gift ad unit at the same time: A Barack Obama virtual stamp, designed by artist Christoph Niemann, that can be shared among Facebook users.

As Inside Facebook recently reported, CNN, too, is seeing a way to capitalize on Facebook’s ability to bring friends together around events, especially because the actual time of the inauguration — the middle of the work day — may not offer working Facebookers an opportunity to watch the events live.

Thanks to Facebook Connect, Facebook users will be able to update their Facebook pages directly from the CNN.com live stream, allowing them to stay on CNN’s page for live coverage and discuss the events with thier Facebook friends without ever leaving the site. A mini-Facebook window on CNN.com will show updates from friends in real time.

CNN’s LiveStream event already has an audience of 800,000 people and the New York Times Facebook page now has more than 200,000 fans!  If you’re planning on watching the inauguration and you want to know what your friends are saying about it, you might want to check out either the New York Times or CNN on Facebook!

Interested in creating a Facebook app but don’t want to worry about hosting plans, marketing your app, or even writing the code?  A new service funded and developed by Sun Microsystems might be a solution for you.

Zembly is a new tool that allows anyone to easily create and host social applications that target the most popular social platforms like Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial, iPhone, and Google Gadgets.  By reusing UI and back-end code and encouraging the crowd-sourcing of app components, Zembly markets itself as a sort of free library for social applications — live and editable code that can grow as users decide to contribute. For those who need a really simple solution, Zembly could be well worth the few minutes it takes to look around.

To start, there’s no downloading or learning of a new language – just go to Zembly’s website and you can start creating an app in your browser immediately.  Zembly already shows results from component providers like Amazon, Flickr, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo as well as pieces of code created by other Zembly users.  All you have to do is click to add one of these elements.

If you’re worried that Zembly may not be robust enough for your needs, try out a sample app called Capital Punishment that shows how Zembly apps look when published. Zembly and its hosting services are free for now and invitations for the private Beta can be found here.

New Year’s just passed and it’s likely that a popular resolution in 2009 is, unsurprisingly, to lose weight.  Well, this year, there is a Facebook app that might make keeping your resolution a little easier.

New Facebook application WeightView allows users to upload a picture of themselves and visualize what they might look like at a new weight.  A “digital photo enhancement” process requires a full body photo and a desired weight loss goal of up to fifty pounds.  WeightView returns a customized photo at the goal weight free of charge.  The idea, of course, is that seeing a thinner, healthier you will motivate you to realize your weight loss goals.

By leveraging Facebook’s social graph, WeightView also provides the same support structure that’s available in traditional weight loss programs like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers.  It allows its users to meet other group members, earn points towards valuable prizes, and discuss weight loss-related topics with the WeightView community and health care experts.

With over 120k users since its launch, WeightView has already become the most-used weight loss app on Facebook.  One of the company’s founders, Dr. Doran Katz, attributes WeightView’s success to the visualization feature that isn’t offered by most other similar programs, online or offline.

If you’re an avid Facebook user and you’re interested in losing weight in 2009, or, alternatively, if you’re trying to market a weight loss product by piggy-backing on a successful Facebook app, you should check out WeightView.

According to a social media study released recently by Rosetta, 59% of 100 leading retailers are now using Facebook Pages to market their companies and products.  Some of the retailers included in the survey were Best Buy, Toys “R” Us, Kohl’s, and Wal-Mart.  Inside Facebook recently took a look at some of these pages to gain insights into the social media marketing strategies of these online and offline stores.

Here’s what we found: despite the fact that retailers’ Facebook Pages are informative, it quickly becomes obvious that there is a lot of room for growth.  For starters, the Pages are rather bland, and it is clear that the retailers usually fail to make full use of Facebook’s social capabilities.  Simply put, most of the retailers’ Facebook Pages ignore the bells and whistles that other Pages take advantage of to draw Facebook users in the first place and keep them engaged over time.

It seems like Rosetta agrees.  According to Adam Cohen, a partner at the marketing firm:

It’s important that retailers don’t just slap up a page because everyone is talking about Facebook. An effective Facebook presence requires that you carefully consider what your customers are looking for, what you would like to communicate, and what role a fan page should play in your overall online strategy. If you take all of these into account, it can be effective in building customer loyalty.

The first and most intuitive way to improve the weaknesses of the Facebook retail pages may be to take advantage of all the built in features Facebook makes available through Pages.  The Wal-Mart Page, for example, already has a fan base of more than 8,000 users, but the only utility these users are provided is a discussion board where there can post Wal-Mart related thoughts and questions.  The page could increase its effectiveness by simply adding rich media like commercials and other Wal-Mart related videos.

However, retailers could go further to provide utility to Facebook users by integrating deeper functionality through applications. For example, in the case of Wal-Mart, adding a price comparison tool so users can make sure that they’re getting the low prices that Wal-Mart famously markets itself for.  Even a tool that allows users to browse Wal-Mart goods and share their purchases with friends might be useful.  The Page could be made more interactive by adding a feature that enables integration with other popular services – like perhaps an iPhone application so that Facebook users at a Wal-Mart store can share the purchase of an especially low-priced sale item with their Facebook friends as soon as they find it.

By implementing some of these changes, these retailers will not only improve the presence of their brands on Facebook, but also make their Pages more relevant. Once retailers update their Pages to provide the best and most relevant content, their next step should be to promote their Pages both inside Facebook and through other channels.

Learn more about building your brand and growing your audience with our comprehensive guide to marketing on Facebook. The Facebook Marketing Bible is available at FacebookMarketingBible.com

On January 5th, Virtual Greats launched a new branded marketing program to sell premium virtual goods in RockYou‘s Super Pets app, which allows users on social networks to adopt, train and battle pets of other users.

Virtual Greats has already been working with online communities like Gaia Online, WeeWorld, Whyville, and vSide to sell its licensed virtual goods.  By expanding to Super Pets, Virtual Greats increased its audience by 417k monthly users on Facebook and close to 4.5 million users on MySpace.

According to the Virtual Greats blog:

One of the challenges brands had in being sucessful in Second Life was that while the monthly active population was large (and the time per user, enormous), there was no good way to get in front of all those users.  Well, in Facebook with Superpets we’re now in front of an audience half as large as Second Life, and in Myspace, in front of one 4.5 times bigger than Second Life.

Here’s how it works: Virtual Greats first licenses products from celebrities and luxury brands and then offers these virtual goods for purchase in various virtual worlds and games. In essence they act as middle men for brands who don’t have the resources to create and market their own virtual products (think Elvis Presley) and virtual worlds and games which stand to profit from a cut of the sales inside their online communities.

With the introduction of Virtual Great’s licensed goods, Super Pets users can now purchase branded apparel, accessories, and even catchphrases from their favorite celebrities like Elvis, Justin Timberlake, or Snoop Dogg.  The apparel can allegedly sell for up to $3 per item.

It has only been one month since Facebook officially launched Facebook Connect. On December 4th, the social network decided to allow its users to carry their credentials and their community of friends with them across the web. Already having an immensely popular platform for developers to build applications, Facebook has now seen hundreds of sites adopt Facebook Connect to allow users to log in, share information with friends, and report some of this activity back to Facebook.

Interestingly, two of the most trafficked Facebook Connect integrations to date are from video sites Joost (at 18,500 MAU) and Vimeo (7,500 MAU). (Hulu has announced Facebook Connect support, but has not yet launched it. YouTube, which is owned by Google, is unlikely to implement Facebook Connectin the near future.)

While these numbers may seem small in comparison to many on-Facebook apps, Facebook Connect’s adoption on video sites shows that many users are choosing Facebook Connect to more easily login and share videos with friends.

Using Facebook’s technology, these video sharing communities will grow more quickly. What is not yet certain is how much of these video sites’ traffic will come through sharing on Facebook in the future. Media companies are always concerned with growing their audience as much as possible — though Facebook Connect, could Facebook replace Digg and other social sharing sites as the top traffic referrer?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook Connect grows, especially in video sharing sites (and blogs) which already have a focus on building communities.

In a continuing Q&A series with the winners of fbFund’s $250k second round of funding, Inside Facebook recently talked with Victoria Ransom, creator of the WildFire application.

Victoria shed light on WildFire’s strategies for success and highlighted the rise of advertising on Facebook. See our recent coverage for more background on changes in brand marketing inside social applications on Facebook.

Below, Victoria discusses how WildFire grew its business and handled marketing campaigns for giants like Pepsi, Amazon, and RedBull.

Q:  What problem does Wildfire Promotion Builder solve and what inspired you to start this business?

A:  Wildfire Promotion Builder provides a turnkey solution for companies (both big and small) to easily create and distribute their own branded interactive promotions (e.g. sweepstakes, user-generated contests, coupons and giveaways), and to simultaneously publish them on their website and throughout the social web. Interactive promotions are one of the most effective ways for companies to engage social network users (according to Jupiter Research, companies that run contests have twice as many social network fans as those that don’t) yet the majority of companies that advertise sweepstakes and contests on Facebook drive users outside of Facebook to engage with their promotion and thus fail to take advantage of the true power of Facebook – the social features like friend invites, activity feeds and notifications that can spread the word about promotions and companies virally.

Currently, companies wishing to integrate a promotion with Facebook’s social features need to create their own custom Facebook application – something that is beyond the resources and expertise of most companies. Wildfire Promotion Builder solves this problem by enabling companies to create their own branded interactive promotions within a matter of minutes and at a cost that’s affordable for even the smallest businesses.

Our inspiration for Wildfire Promotion Builder came from our own need. Looking for a way to promote our adventure travel company, Access Travel Ltd, to social network users, we decided to give away a free trip on Facebook. But when we searched for a way to run a sweepstakes that tapped into Facebook’s viral features we found that no easy solution existed and that we would have to build our own sweepstakes application. When other companies expressed interest in using our application, we realized that an opportunity existed to help organizations run interactive promotions on social networks and Wildfire Promotion Builder was born.

Q: A lot of the fbFund entrepreneurs that we’ve been talking with have MBAs.  Do you think that the knowledge that you and your cofounder have gained from business school has been critical?

A:  The knowledge we gained from our MBAs has certainly helped us with the development of our business, particularly with regard to developing our business model, pricing, and go-to-market strategy. The credibility and contacts we gained from our MBAs have also been helpful. Nevertheless, I do not think that having an MBA is critical to building a successful app company.

Q: What do you think made your app successful in the fbFund competition?

A:  The variety of ideas and depth of talent represented by the 25 finalists was really impressive; we were honored to be among them. In the end, I think our app stood out because we’ve focused on developing tools that will help businesses connect with Facebook users in a way that’s entertaining and beneficial to users. Despite the fact that thousands of businesses have created Facebook pages, very few app developers have focused on building apps that can be useful to businesses. I think this, coupled with our strong team, proven business model and track of record of delivering results for our clients helped us to be successful.

Q: What methods did you employ to gain traction among Facebook users and to market your app?  Is this what you would recommend to the next generation of fbFund applicants?

A:  Marketing our app requires quite a different approach than that taken by most app developers because our main focus is to attract businesses rather than consumers. We’ve used a combination of partnerships, PR, and direct sales to reach out to businesses. So far, word of mouth is proving to be one of the most effective ways for us to get the word out.

Q: Finally, Inside Facebook has written recently about the growing number of international Facebook users as well as international Platform growth.  We’ve also seen comments on the developer forum asking about advertising and metrics in other countries.  What is Wildfire Promotion Builder doing to help brands engage with the international community on Facebook?

A:  A number of the promotions that have run via our apps have targeted non-US audiences (including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Canada and New Zealand). To facilitate this, we enable companies to limit eligibility to their promotions according to geography. We’ve also translated our apps into French, Spanish and German and have more languages on the way.

Thanks Victoria, and good luck!

Inside Facebook recently wrote about up-and-coming Facebook apps that have seen the most growth this past week.

Although the PixFix app had been rising slowly and steadily throughout December, it topped the list, growing in the past few days from 20k users to 164k users — almost 650% growth! As you can see from the AppData graph below, there is a spike that occurred on January 30th that lasted through the 1st, allowing the app to gain 135k users in only two days – most likely the result of an ad campaign to drive traffic to the app.

PixFix is a branded app sponsored by Clearasil that allows Facebook users to edit blemishes in photos using the online tool, aptly named after Clearasil’s Ultra Treatment Cream, and then share those photos with friends. Facebook Photos is a perfect fit for a brand like Clearasil, as Facebook is the most popular photo sharing site in the world.

One parenthetical line at the bottom is the only advertisement in the entire app:

“If you used Clearasil in real life, you probably wouldn’t be in this situation.”

Clever.