Inside Facebook

Some Facebook Page admins are now seeing a new tab called “Per post” in the data exports from Page Insights. Data in the tab includes impressions per post and the total percentage of a Page’s fans that left feedback on the post. Previously, admins could only see daily impressions and feedback data in Insights. Per post data could only be found on a Page’s wall below the posts themselves, forcing admins to manually copy down impression and feedback data.

If rolled out to all Page admins, the addition of per post data to Page Insights will make it easier for brands to track what kinds of posts and timing result in the higher exposure and engagement. For example, admins could determine what hour of the day is the best for publishing. The newly available could also encroach on the business of some Facebook Page analytics providers, though these companies also offer advanced analysis of the data.

Amit Lavi, Social Media Director at Abagada was the first to spot the new data. He tells us that “Now, everyone with knowledge of Excel will be able to find the right time of day and day of week to post content. Also, with a bit of manual categorization, admins will also be able to assess which content works better for their Page.”

Facebook added per post data the admin view of Page walls of authenticated Pages with over 10,000 fans in January. Oddly, it didn’t simultaneously begin showing the same data in the Insights user interface or the .XLS or .CSV data exports. We’ve received information that the per post data in the exports doesn’t always go back as far as requested. This means there’s a chance that that Insights data on post impressions and feedback might not be totally reliable, at least at first.

Page management companies that offer analytics services and dedicated Page analytics providers could lose some of their more budget-conscious customers to Facebook Insights. However, to pull actionable lessons from the Insights data, admins will have to do some legwork in Excel.

Professional analytics providers will likely be able to crunch the data more efficiently, derive more sophisticated best practices, and provide benchmark data aggregated from across their clients. For example PageLever used its own collection of per post impressions data to determine that the average Page receives only 7.49 news feed impressions per post per 100 fans. Buddy Media used per post data to figure out that shorter post receive more engagement and that Thursday is the best day to post when looking across industries.

If Facebook makes per post data more easily accessible to all admins, it could also raise awareness of the need to analyze the data, which could in turn drive business for the providers of enterprise analytics tools and services. Either way, with time the data will help brands improve their Page post strategies. This could lead to more engaging branded content in the news feed, improving the Facebook experience for the average user. The next step will be for Facebook to provide data on clicks per post.

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.

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.

Facebook IPO in Late 2012? – The Financial Times reported this week that Facebook’s IPO is set for the end of next year, with a valuation of what would be at least $66 billion. But The New York Times said Facebook was on track to go public in the first half of next year. Facebook itself hasn’t made any official statements about

FTC Proposes New Privacy Regs – The Federal Trade Commission proposed rules this week that may affect how children under 13 use the Internet. Mobile web apps are now included in the rules, for example, and so may require parental consent for use.

Update on Case Sensitivity of Passwords – ZDnet wrote a piece this week in which Emil Protalinski found that Facebook passwords are not entirely case sensitive. Facebook responded noting that the site accepts three forms of your password: the original, the original with the first letter capitalized (to accommodate mobile devices) and the original password with cases reversed (to accommodate a caps lock being on).

Facebook’s FBAR – Facebook’s Engineering Team wrote a note this week detailing FBAR, or Facebook Automatic Remediation. These are scripts that detect errors or breakage in servers, automatically removing them from the system, determining the problem, alerting a technician to replace the drive, testing it and re-adding to Facebook’s infrastructure. It now manages more than 50% of Facebook’s infrastructure and is doing the work of about 200 system admins. [Image Via Facebook]

Skype, Facebook Integration 5.4 – Skype released its Mac updates recently that includes a Facebook integration that allows you to IM and connect with friends without leaving Facebook, also allowing you to read/update the feed, comment Like and more.

Custom URLs Available to Anyone – Facebook no longer requires users or Pages to need 25 friends to acquire a custom URL.

Fake Facebook Name Not a Felony – Forbes reported this week that, despite an initial concern that a fake Facebook name could be considered a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, an amendment added eliminated this possibility.

App Allows Cross-Platform Posting – If This Then that allows users to cross-post to dozens of programs for content management purposes, such as instant messaging to your blog.

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.

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.

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.

Project Spartan to Include iOS, Android – The scope of Facebook’s HTML5-focused developer project has expanded from mobile Safari to include desktop, Android, iOS and the possibly completed but unlaunched iPad app, TechCrunch reported today. The goal is to extend Facebook’s app platform further into mobile.

Facebook Signs German Privacy Code – Facebook voluntarily signed a code of conduct in Germany to protect user privacy.

German Company Recreates Like Button – Then a German website, Heise, changed Facebook Like buttons to gray versions that must be clicked in order to be activated, underscoring German privacy efforts. [Image via Zdnet]

8th Bridge Releases Social Commerce Report – 8th Bridge released its study, “Social Commerce IQ: Retail” report this week. It includes information about social shopping engagement rates, product sharing, Likes, recommendations and more. About 16% of users are driven to purchase by social recommendations and 35% said more Likes on a product increase the chance of purchase.

Facebook Page Hijacking Easier than Thought – Sophos published a report about Facebook Page hijacking, noting that it’s very simple for a third-party to takeover a Page. Here’s a video and more information.

Ceglia Update: Passwords Leaked – The latest in the Paul Ceglia drama, in which Ceglia claims to own half of Facebook and the company claims he’s a fraud, is that he says his opponent’ lawyers published his email passwords in court papers.

BranchOut Creates Vanity URLs – BranchOut announced the creation of vanity URLs for users, such as www.branchout.com/firstname.lastname, that may be changed via the “edit URL” section of their BranchOut profiles.

Oprah Interviewed on Facebook – Facebook COO interviewed Oprah Winfrey on Facebook this week.

Other Announcements:

Votigo Premieres Beta Platform – This week Votigo announced a Beta verion of its self-service platform including sweepstakes, photo/video contests and more.

BranchOut Offers Free Postings – BranchOut told Inside Facebook this week that, responding to President Barack Obama’s job creation push, the company would be offering 5 free job postings to any U.S. company (worth $225).

Booshaka Creates Small, Medium Biz Platform – Booshaka announced the creation of a marketing platform specifically for small-to-medium businesses, brands and agencies this week that includes rewards, newsfeed optimization, targeting options and more.

On Tuesday we published the results of a study indicating that Pages that sync or auto-post their content to Facebook from Twitter or blogs using tools like HootSuite, Twitter, and NetworkedBlogs receive significantly fewer Likes and comments per posts than those that post manually using Facebook’s web and mobile interfaces.

This is partly because Facebook consolidates into a folded thread all posts from across Pages and friends in a user’s news feed that were published through the same tool, displaying a “Show x more posts from [publisher app] link”.

We’ve now learned that Facebook maintains a secret whitelist of companies that are exempt from having content posted through their publishers consolidated across different Pages and clients. This protects them from a reduction in news feed impressions. The whitelist includes some top enterprise Page management tools from the Preferred Developer Consultant program including Buddy Media, Vitrue, Involver, Context Optional and Syncapse. Facebook has forbidden those included from discussing the existence of the whitelist. Facebook has confirmed with us that “trusted partners” are having their posts treated differently.

Since consolidation negatively impacts Page post engagement and other key performance indicators, brands have to consider using whitelisted publishing tools. If they aren’t already, they should out of necessity either ask their Page management solution provider about gaining admission to the whitelist, or switch to a tool protected from consolidation. Overall, the surfacing of the consolidation whitelist may anger developers not on it, and push Facebook to change its policy on whose posts are consolidated.

Here’s some more context on what’s happening. In order to gain the maximum exposure, clicks, and other key performance metrics from publishing to the news feed, Facebook Pages need to optimize their EdgeRank, or prominence in the news feed. To do so, they need to consistently publish compelling and widely seen updates to draw Likes and comment that improve their EdgeRank.

However, Facebook has an automated system in place originally designed to collapse flurries of posts published by users playing spammy social games. That system causes any posts present in a user’s news feed that were published by an API publishing tool with a same App ID, whether from one or many Pages or users, to be consolidated into threads that show one post but require users to click to unfold and view the rest of the posts. Since users don’t always unfold the threads, consolidation reduces the impressions of posts, giving them fewer opportunities to score feedback that helps their EdgeRank.

The study by EdgeRank Checker and another by Momentus Media show reductions in post engagement rates by as much as 70% for Pages using third-party publishing tools that have posts consolidated across Pages. This engagement reduction cannot be entirely attributed to consolidation, as differences in the content of scheduled or syndicated posts, Page size, and the types of companies that pay for third-party tools all impact engagement as well. Still, post consolidation does negatively impact impression rates, and therefore publishing apps that cause posts to be consolidated should not be used by brands.

To insulate some of the world’s biggest brands who are also heavy advertisers on Facebook, as well as some of the biggest third-party Page management companies from its Preferred Developer Consultant program, Facebook quietly offered admission to a post consolidation whitelist to a few Page management developers. Tools whose App IDs are whitelisted do not have their posts consolidated across Pages (though, in some cases, a single client’s Page may have its own posts consolidated together if it posts multiple times in rapid succession).

Brands using tools on the whitelist have an advantage over their competitors, as they can attain more news feed exposure for their posts. Page management companies can use the higher engagement rates afforded them by the whitelist to attract clients. Page management companies left off this whitelist may feel the double standard is unfair, especially if brands using Twitter, HootSuite, TweetDeck, or NetworkedBlogs ditch them for whitelisted tools.

Executives of Page management companies tell us they don’t believe Facebook was intending to penalize any publishing tool developers with the consolidation system, and rather it was a holdover from a spam prevention effort that Facebook has since handled by limiting how much game content appears in the news feed.

[Update: Facebook has responded to our inquiry about the existence of the whitelist saying "We're focused on ensuring that users see the highest quality stories in News Feed. As part of this, related stories are typically aggregated so users can see a consolidated view of stories from one app. In some cases, we work closely with trusted partners, such as Preferred Developer Consultants, to test new ways of surfacing stories, and gather feedback to improve the Platform experience."

Though Facebook calls this a "test", the exemption of certain tools from post consolidation has been going on for many months. The whitelist could therefore be interpreted as favoritism rather than just an attempt to gather data to improve the user experience.]

Exempting trusted publishers from post consolidation may have intended as a temporary solution until a more sophisticated way to keep individual publishers from overrunning the news feed could be developed. But in the meantime, the whitelist has created an uneven playing field where certain publishers and the brands that use them receive much less visibility in the news feed than others.

If Facebook wants to keep the long-tail of third-party developers happy and working on its Platform, it will need to provide more transparency around how the post consolidation system currently works. It will also need to quickly fix it so no publishing tools and their brand clients are penalized for legitimate promotion in an effort to control game spam.

[Thanks to Momentus Media for data that informed this post]