Optimal launches free tool ranking brand pages - Optimal, Inc., the creators of Optim.al, a social media advertising and audience data platform, released its Optimal Index to rank brands on Facebook by a metric besides Likes. The index is calculated by taking a brand page’s engagement rate, multiplied by the weighted-average of Facebook’s cost per click estimate for the page, multiplied by the number of Likes the page has. Walmart is currently the highest-ranked page in the index.

FTC launches investigation into Instagram acquisition - The Federal Trade Commission has begun an investigation into Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram that could delay the closing of the deal. The investigation does not imply any wrongdoing. The agency looks into most mergers valued at more than $66 million. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion.

TBG study shows how Facebook ad CTR varies by industry – Ads for beauty and fitness brands had the highest clickthrough rate on Facebook, according to an analysis of billions of ad impressions from 235 TBG Digital clients in the past year. Finance-related ads had the lowest CTR. Other industries’ average CTRs by day can be seen to the right. This information can help companies benchmark their own success with Facebook ad campaigns.

Facebook releases ad preview tools - Facebook now offers developers an Action Spec Preview Tool to help them preview what Sponsored Stories for their apps will look like using the new action spec ad beta. Facebook also launched an ad preview API for previewing ads for existing ad groups, ad creatives and creative specifications.

Topping our list of emerging applications by monthly active users this week was Etsy, the e-commerce site for vintage and handmade items. There was no common theme among the rest of the apps on our list this week, but a few marketing campaign apps grew enough to be featured here.

We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. This week’s top apps grew from between 20,000 and 220,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Etsy	570,000	+220,000	+ 63%
2.	We Heart It	430,000	+120,000	+ 39%
3.	Domino’s Artisan Pizzas 2012	520,000	+90,000	+ 21%
4.	CNET	150,000	+80,000	+ 114%
5.	Kickstarter	160,000	+60,000	+ 60%
6.	Eventbrite	200,000	+50,000	+ 33%
7.	KAYAK	120,000	+40,000	+ 50%
8.	Marvel XP	220,000	+40,000	+ 22%
9.	nana10	310,000	+40,000	+ 15%
10.	Sorteie.me	840,000	+40,000	+ 5%
11.	Sweepstakes	860,000	+40,000	+ 5%
12.	好康活動 Hot Deals	330,000	+40,000	+ 14%
13.	MapMyRUN.com	300,000	+30,000	+ 11%
14.	Nike	410,000	+30,000	+ 8%
15.	Offerpop	400,000	+30,000	+ 8%
16.	Profile Covers	640,000	+30,000	+ 5%
17.	TuneIn Radio	200,000	+30,000	+ 18%
18.	Vaseline Men’s	150,000	+30,000	+ 25%
19.	Mixcloud	540,000	+20,000	+ 4%
20.	PunchTab	130,000	+20,000	+ 18%

A group of apps revolved around brands. Domino’s Artisan Pizzas 2012 topped this list, Marvel XP is a Disney website requiting login credentials, Nike and Vaseline Men’s also appeared. Then there were a series of apps designed for page administrators. Sorteie.me in Portuguese, Offerpop and PunchTab offer various tools.

News apps included CNET and the Hebrew app nana10. Pinterest-like site, We Heart It, was second on the list. Other services dependent upon Facebook for distribution purposes, like Kickstarter and Eventbrite made the list, too.

There was a running app, MapMyRUN.com, and a few music-related website apps, TuneIn Radio and Mixcloud.

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 added several analytics and media positions this week on its Careers page. The company’s LinkedIn feed showed a few engineering and other positions available.

Posts added this week on Facebook’s Careers Page:

• Operations Analyst
• Analyst, Measurement Solutions (Chicago)
• Analyst, Measurement Solutions (New York)
• Pricing and Yield Analyst, Singapore
• Product Marketing Manager, Ads
• Network Capacity Planner
• Technology Partner, Security
• Technical Recruiter – Contract (Dublin)
• Technical Resourcer (London)
• Analyst, User Operations, Brazilian Portuguese (Dublin)
• Operations Analyst
• Technology Partner, Supply Chain/Logistics
• Ad Operations Specialist, Mid Market Sales (Dublin)
• Client Partner, Korea (Singapore)
• Client Partner, LATAM (Miami)
• Media Solutions (Austin)
• Media Solutions (Buenos Aires)
• Media Solutions (Chicago)
• Media Solutions (Menlo Park)
• Media Solutions (New York)
• Media Solutions (Sao Paulo)
• Media Solutions (Toronto)
• Media Solutions, Norwegian (Dublin)
• Media Solutions, Swedish (Dublin)
• Administrative Assistant – Mobile

Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:

• Oracle Application Developer
• Sr. Linux Systems Engineer
• Manager, Developer Support Engineering (Dublin)
• Manager, User Operations (Austin)
• APAC Gaming Manager (Singapore)

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

Facebook this week expanded its design team with new hires from YouTube, Quora and Rdio, according to its LinkedIn feed.

• Wilson Miner, Designer – former lead designer at Rdio.
• Margaret Stewart, Designer – formerly worked at YouTube.
• Elizabath Windram, Designer – formerly worked at Quora.
• Soham Mazumdar, Software Engineer – former staff software engineer at Google.
• Subhro Kar, Operations Engineer – former information systems architect at iXiGO.com.
• Vinay Emani, Software Engineer – former student.
• Carla Coll, User Operations Content Analyst – former student.
• Vinay Satish Kumar, Quant – former student.
• Nicol Wilson, Platform Marketing Events Operations Manager – former research administrator.
• Virginia Vanga, Purchasing – former senior purchasing manager at Electronic Arts.

Socialcam topped our list of growing Facebook applications by daily active users with 4.4 million new DAU. There were a few other video apps, dating app Zoosk, website integrations, Pinterest, and several games, horoscopes and more.

The titles below grew between 300,000 and 4.4 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	DAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Socialcam	8,300,000	+4,400,000	+ 113%
2.	Zoosk	3,900,000	+3,120,000	+ 400%
3.	Click Video	2,800,000	+2,060,000	+ 278%
4.	Yahoo! Social Bar	4,500,000	+1,700,000	+ 61%
5.	Horóscopo Diário	1,700,000	+1,640,000	+ 2,733%
6.	9GAG	1,600,000	+1,470,000	+ 1,131%
7.	Pinterest	2,500,000	+1,400,000	+ 127%
8.	Chill	1,300,000	+990,000	+ 319%
9.	Norton Safe Web	850,000	+820,000	+ 2,733%
10.	Zynga Game Bar	840,000	+820,000	+ 4,100%
11.	Horóscopo do Dia	550,000	+520,000	+ 1,733%
12.	Candy Crush Saga	1,800,000	+500,000	+ 38%
13.	Mynet	800,000	+500,000	+ 167%
14.	Scribd	1,000,000	+440,000	+ 79%
15.	Bubble Witch Saga	6,400,000	+400,000	+ 7%
16.	Zapkolik	1,200,000	+350,000	+ 41%
17.	Mystic Ice Blast	350,000	+320,000	+ 1,067%
18.	Daily Horoscope	320,000	+310,000	+ 3,100%
19.	Marvel: Avengers Alliance	1,500,000	+300,000	+ 25%
20.	Skype	2,700,000	+300,000	+ 13%

Socialcam beat out the next-highest app, dating service Zoosk, by more than 1 million DAU. Other video apps, Click Video and Chill, also made the list.

The Yahoo! Social Bar is picking up daily active users again after a temporary dip. The comedic site 9GAG is also growing after a period of decline. A pair of Turkish sites, Mynet and Zapkolik made the list. Then there were three different horoscope apps, in Spanish, Portuguese and English. These apps usually post automatically to the feed once used.

Games were led by the Zynga Game Bar, followed by Candy Crush Saga. Then the Timeline Pinterest app made the list, in addition to a computer security app and file sharing site.

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

Unified made a big hire bringing on Brian Murphy as VP of Sales this week. Other companies attained new creative, business and other staff.

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 our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or 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:

Unified

• Brian Murphy, Vice President of Sales – formerly worked at Google, AdMob and DoubleClick.

TBG Digital

• Kirk Mechen, Digital Creative Producer – former digital producer at MTV Networks.

Kontagent

• Michael Duvall, Business Development – former inside sales representative at Autonomy.

Buddy Media

• Avrom Bangiev, Revenue Recognition Analyst – former contracts manager at BTQ Financial.
• Ann-Marie Flores, Facilities Manager – former small works project manager at Macquarie Bank.

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

Facebook for Every Phone topped our list of growing Facebook pages this week, followed by movies, TV shows, music and sports pages. Pages on our list this week grew from between 306,200 to 2.8 million Likes. We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

#	Name	Total Likes	People Talking About	Daily Growth	Weekly Growth
1	Facebook for Ever…	83,637,430	3,180,055	+367,086	+2,846,529
2	Titanic	22,892,031	881,644	+91,656	+708,414
3	Adele	27,669,596	705,398	+98,336	+644,644
4	LMFAO	16,697,537	775,245	+67,903	+534,030
5	avast! antivirus	1,446,737	456,587	+33,150	+508,753
6	R. Kelly	1,413,748	11,291	+1,519	+494,669
7	The Simpsons	49,837,267	627,957	+70,376	+477,883
8	Resident Evil 5	655,578	15,711	+177,775	+455,448
9	Jeremy Lin	954,881	552,606	+34,979	+438,508
10	Bruno Mars	22,943,294	483,290	+58,667	+418,369
11	Will Smith	30,644,431	483,394	+56,619	+407,946
12	Shrek	25,376,860	435,245	+55,910	+392,434
13	Pitbull	19,474,502	632,015	+48,650	+366,527
14	Harry Potter	45,517,914	697,066	+54,100	+364,686
15	FC Barcelona	30,490,655	1,112,574	+50,679	+363,069
16	[V] Music – Chann…	592,168	11,932	+805	+357,875
17	Cristiano Ronaldo	43,530,725	1,065,239	+43,141	+341,488
18	Intel	9,664,877	373,855	+43,722	+329,931
19	Real Madrid C.F.	27,754,247	2,129,163	+41,839	+328,538
20	Smiley	1,105,766	513,346	+20,085	+306,159

Facebook for Every Phone, the page for Facebook’s feature phone mobile app, grew significantly this week. This week’s growth could be related to the app’s new release of two filters for mobile photos. Intel‘s page grew, likely because of advertising and by fans sharing photos from the page. There also were a few pages, one for an antivirus software and another for an Australian music website, that appeared to grow as a result of page consolidations, after experiencing one-day jumps.

Movie pages were led by “Titanic.” Shrek made the list, as did movie star Will Smith. Music pages included several artists that are touring and posting lots of photos, such as LMFAO, Pitbull and Adele.

Football (soccer) pages, including FC Barcelona, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Real Madrid C.F., have been posting photos and news items resulting in a lot of engagement. The pages also post in multiple languages, enabling more users to engage.

Video sharing apps Socialcam and Viddy remained popular on our list of growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this month. Interestingly, Instagram continues to slide down the list after being acquired by Facebook. Websites integrations were also very popular.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 570,000 and 19.3 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Socialcam	34,200,000	+19,300,000	+ 130%
2.	Viddy	33,800,000	+13,200,000	+ 64%
3.	Metacafe	16,300,000	+5,500,000	+ 51%
4.	Chill	4,500,000	+4,460,000	+ 11,150%
5.	Zoosk	10,200,000	+3,400,000	+ 50%
6.	Candy Crush Saga	5,400,000	+1,600,000	+ 42%
7.	Daily Horoscope	7,700,000	+1,500,000	+ 24%
8.	Instagram	17,000,000	+1,500,000	+ 10%
9.	9GAG	2,900,000	+1,300,000	+ 81%
10.	Mynet	2,300,000	+1,300,000	+ 130%
11.	Marvel: Avengers Alliance	6,900,000	+1,200,000	+ 21%
12.	Pinterest	9,600,000	+1,200,000	+ 14%
13.	Zynga Game Bar	1,600,000	+1,100,000	+ 220%
14.	Skype	12,500,000	+1,000,000	+ 9%
15.	Mystic Ice Blast	1,000,000	+950,000	+ 1,900%
16.	Photo Love	9,900,000	+900,000	+ 10%
17.	schoolFeed	14,400,000	+800,000	+ 6%
18.	Younews.in	6,600,000	+800,000	+ 14%
19.	Spotify	19,800,000	+700,000	+ 4%
20.	Buggle	1,200,000	+570,000	+ 90%

Socialcam  grew by 19.3 million MAU and Viddy grew by 13.2 million MAU. These two apps grew far more than almost any other app on the list. Viddy began to gain traction especially after the acquisition of Instagram (it’s known as Instagram for video) and Socialcam’s daily video posts and feed stories make the app ubiquitous. While video apps began to displace photo apps, Instagram and Photo Love still made the list. [Editor's note 5/7/12 4:43 p.m. PT: An earlier draft of this story misidentified Chill as a photo app. It is a video application.]

There were a series of website integrations that proved to be very popular this week: Metacafe’s Timeline app, comedy site 9GAG, and Turkish  integrations Mynet and Younews.in. These apps incorporate different types of sharing, but ultimately result in different feed and Ticker stories.

Candy Crush Saga, Marvel: Avengers Alliance and Zynga Game Bar each grew by more than 1 million MAU. Other popular apps included Zoosk, Skype and Spotify.

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.

iOS and Android Messenger app gets update - Facebook’s standalone mobile Messenger app got an update today so users can now see whether their messages were received and more quickly see the location from which a message was sent. Image via Techcrunch

Facebook Messenger for iPad, video chat for iPhone in development - 9to5Mac says a source provided the site with access to an upcoming Facebook Messenger app for iPad and a version of the iPhone app with video chat features.

Facebook introduces Open Rack - Facebook introduced a new open source server design Wednesday called Open Rack. Part of the company’s “Open Compute Project,” Open Rack is meant to increase efficiency in Facebook’s data centers, the entire design of which is open sourced so others can model after it or improve upon it.

Facebook joins GNI with unique status – Facebook has joined the Global Network Initiative as an observer, Fast Company reports. The GNI is a consortium of institutions that monitor Internet firms on issues of free speech and human rights. As an “observer,” the company does not have to submit to auditing. It is the first company to have this special status.

Facebook’s first buy rating – Facebook saw its first buy rating from Wedbush Securities Inc. this week, with a target price of $44. That’s well above the $28 to $35 range Facebook set earlier this week.

Like button is not protected speech – A federal judge in Virginia ruled this week that Liking something on Facebook was not tantamount to speech protected under the First Amendment.

FBI lobbying for Facebook backdoor – Wired reports that the FBI has been lobbying Facebook, as well as other companies like Yahoo and Google, to give them backdoor government access to their platforms for wiretapping.

Googles Ordr.in launches Timeline integration – Google Ventures’ Ordr.in became the first restaurant commerce app to integrate Facebook Open Graph. Users of the app can order from a restaurant and share their activity to Facebook timeline using the new actions “crave” and “eat.”

U.K. bouncers identifying patrons via Facebook – Bouncers in some U.K. bars are asking patrons for their smartphones to compare IDs to Facebook profiles in order to guard against fake IDs.

Roadwire wins Facebook Small Business Boost contest - Roadwire, an automotive aftermarket manufacturer and distributor based in Austin, Texas, won the Facebook Small Business Boost contest that rewarded companies that added the most new fans in a given period. Roadwire added over 125,000 fans in less than three months, and earned $10,000 in Facebook advertising as a prize.

Games dominated our list of emerging Facebook applications by monthly active users this week. Among the other applications were a document sharing service, Ustream’s livestreaming app, the Etsy integration and a French music site.

We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. This week’s top apps grew from between 110,000 and 470,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain,%
1.	Buggle	910,000	+470,000	+ 107%
2.	Docstoc.com	670,000	+390,000	+ 139%
3.	Phrases 4 Fun	610,000	+300,000	+ 97%
4.	Top Shot: The Game	480,000	+220,000	+ 85%
5.	Armies of Magic	760,000	+210,000	+ 38%
6.	Static HTML… [Ninth Tab]	920,000	+190,000	+ 26%
7.	Angry Words (Apalabrados)	870,000	+160,000	+ 23%
8.	Send Gift	160,000	+159,980	+ 799,900%
9.	The Hunger Games Adventures	970,000	+140,000	+ 17%
10.	Mystic Ice Blast	170,000	+130,000	+ 325%
11.	Ustream	880,000	+130,000	+ 17%
12.	Etsy	350,000	+120,000	+ 52%
13.	Hidden Adventures	290,000	+120,000	+ 81%
14.	JumpIt 2: Dockyard Run	290,000	+120,000	+ 71%
15.	Mirrorball Slots	970,000	+120,000	+ 14%
16.	Plumet 2	250,000	+120,000	+ 92%
17.	Tetris Stars	350,000	+120,000	+ 52%
18.	الأبراج اليومية	840,000	+120,000	+ 17%
19.	我的傳奇	900,000	+120,000	+ 18%
20.	Beezik	160,000	+110,000	+ 220%

Buggle by Cookapps topped our list of games, significantly outpacing others includeding Top Shot: The Game, Armies of Magic, The Hunger Games Adventures and Tetris Stars.

As mentioned, the filesharing site Docstoc.com, livestream app Ustream, Etsy app and French music site Beezik were popular; these all integrated Facebook sharing.

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.