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Introducing Our Facebook Marketing Dictionary
Nick O'Neill | 2010-09-03T11:34:22-04:00
 As we continue to expand our coverage of ways marketers can leverage Facebook, we wanted to make sure that there was a central resource that people could reference for terms used while discussing Facebook marketing. As such, we’ve decided to create the following Facebook marketing dictionary, which is our attempt at creating a comprehensive list of all the terms that are used by professional Facebook marketers.
This is our first attempt at developing the resource, however we will continuously update the page so that you can have the most up to date information necessary as a Facebook marketer. If you are looking to stay up to date all of the latest Facebook marketing strategies, make sure to register for our Facebook marketing weekly newsletter. In the meantime, make sure that you’re up to date on all the latest Facebook terms by visiting our Facebook marketing dictionary.
Facebook Tests New “Subscribe To” Option for Friends and Pages
Eric Eldon | 2010-09-03T11:30:19-04:00
 Facebook is testing out another way of keeping track of your friends or Pages: an option to “subscribe to” them, then see all of their updates within your notifications list, accessible at the top of the Facebook interface. The feature, at least as it has appeared in the wild, could be especially useful if there’s a few people or Pages you want to keep extra close track of. That’s if Facebook decides to launch it for all users in the same form.
Facebook grew based on the concept of reciprocal “friending.” If you become friends with someone, you’ll start seeing their updates in your news feed; if you really want to track a person or small group of people, you can create a List showing just their shared items. The average Facebook user has 130 friends, and most of them have seemed intent on sharing that information with those friends — and yet, as the service grows, and as competitors like Twitter have emerged, perhaps the communication paradigm is changing? Recognizing a potential competitive threat, Facebook has been dabbling in the Twitter-esque “follow” concept for years. For example, if you “Like” a Page or any object on Facebook’s Open Graph, it can start sharing content to your news feed as well — but it won’t follow you back just because you Liked it, similar to how a Twitter account won’t follow you back automatically. 
We heard in March of 2009, around the time that Facebook was most focused on competing against Twitter, that it was planning to offer an asynchronous follow option for friends as well (others have been hearing about similar projects, too). But the feature has never quite materialized that way. What did emerge, beginning that April, was a way to subscribe to friends’ and Pages’ status updates via SMS, so you could track each one by phone. As with the test today, that feature is most useful for people who want to keep close tabs on a few close friends or interesting Pages. In a sense, “subscribe to” is the new, web-based iteration of those text updates. It’s possible that Facebook will go further with the “subscribe to” concept. Some people have requested both a “friend” and “follow” option for each user, creating a two-tier privacy setting where you could either share information with just friends, or share it with all of your followers — from our understanding, this is basically what Facebook was considering last year, and has so far mostly decided against. However, in general, we do expect Facebook to continue to test different iterations of non-reciprocal subscriptions. [Images via All Facebook] 
Video and Retro TV Lead This Week’s List of Emerging Facebook Apps
Chris Morrison | 2010-09-03T11:23:55-04:00
 Games fill almost every top spot on this week’s AppData list of emerging Facebook apps, defined as those still under a million monthly active users. And of the four non-game apps that made the list, two are related to video.
Here’s the full top 20:
|
Name |
MAU |
Gain |
Gain,% |
|---|
1. |
 Lucky Train |
880,337 |
+189,126 |
+27% |
2. |
 Price Is Right Game (BETA) |
484,610 |
+182,369 |
+60% |
3. |
 Sanal Video |
330,863 |
+150,789 |
+84% |
4. |
 開心魚塘 |
971,098 |
+135,478 |
+16% |
5. |
 Free Flash Games |
652,116 |
+104,118 |
+19% |
6. |
 Bubble Town: Party Planet |
497,770 |
+101,917 |
+26% |
7. |
 Sports Illustrated Fantasy Football |
526,025 |
+98,131 |
+23% |
8. |
 Juega al Truco |
266,426 |
+95,039 |
+55% |
9. |
 Top Eleven Football Manager |
275,817 |
+84,631 |
+44% |
10. |
 Facebook Live |
299,896 |
+83,209 |
+38% |
11. |
 Party Resort |
853,119 |
+80,538 |
+10% |
12. |
 Woozworld |
189,418 |
+78,707 |
+71% |
13. |
 NanoStar Castles |
461,834 |
+75,066 |
+19% |
14. |
 Fantasy La Liga |
505,821 |
+68,074 |
+16% |
15. |
 All My Quotes |
670,231 |
+66,541 |
+11% |
16. |
 神來也朋友村 |
115,701 |
+64,971 |
+128% |
17. |
 Social Park |
264,614 |
+62,605 |
+31% |
18. |
 Lady Popular |
334,042 |
+62,447 |
+23% |
19. |
 Gourmet Ranch |
408,948 |
+56,213 |
+16% |
20. |
 for special friends |
268,963 |
+54,857 |
+26% |
Lucky Train and Price Is Right Game (BETA) come in at the top two slots; they are, respectively, a city-building game based around trains and a social version of the game-show classic. The former is about to pass the important million MAU mark, while the latter appears to have some problems engaging users, but could still turn out to be huge — Family Feud did so before, after all. We’ll cover the rest of the games this morning over at Inside Social Games. The first non-game app is Sanal Video, at number there, with 150,789 new MAU. This is a pretty vanilla video-sharing app, a category that has rarely held up for long on Facebook. But it’s also a Turkish-language app, so we can’t assume that it will necessarily follow in the footsteps of English-language counterparts.  Facebook Live is also for video, but with a rather narrow purpose: this is Facebook’s live stream from its Palo Alto headquarters, intended to give members a look into what happens inside the company. The stream has picked up plenty of MAU, but has only 7,878 daily active users at the moment.
The two remaining non-game apps are pretty standard. All My Quotes, at number 15, allows users to collect and display their favorite quotes. And in the last position, number 20, for special friends is a gifting app that shares sweet pictures between friends. 
A Beginner’s Guide to Facebook Insights
Ekaterina Walter | 2010-09-03T10:27:58-04:00
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href="http://www.ekaterinawalter.com/" target="_blank">Ekaterina Walter is a social media strategist at Intel. She is a part of Intel’s Social Media Center of Excellence and is responsible for company-wide social media enablement and corporate social networking strategy.You have created a href="http://www.mashable.com/category/facebook">Facebook Fan Page. Now what? I bet these questions come to mind: “Is my page a success?” “Who is engaging with us?” “Is our engagement effective?” “Does our content strategy work?” The href="http://mashable.com/2010/06/07/facebook-insights-dashboard/">Facebook Insights dashboard will help you answer some of these questions. As defined by Facebook, “Insights provides Facebook Page owners … with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners … are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.” So what’s the best way to use this relatively new tool? We’ve outlined some steps below that should have you measuring Facebook engagement in no time. Note that only page administrators can view Insights data for the properties they own or administer. />Examine a Wide Range of Data/>There are two types of Facebook insights: - User Insights: Total page Likes, or a number of fans, daily active users, new Likes/Unlikes, Like sources, demographics, page views and unique page views, tab views, external referrers, media consumption.
- Interactions Insights: Daily story feedback (post Likes, post comments, per post impressions), daily page activity (mentions, discussions, reviews, wall posts, video posts).
The question then becomes: “What do you want to track and measure?” There is a lot of data offered, but you want to sort through it and identify what information is meaningful and will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy. If that data is not readily available, you might want to do some manual calculations to derive the numbers you’re looking for. Below are the insights I recommend you pay attention to and track. - Monthly fan size growth: Record the number of fans (or “Likers”) you have on the first of every month to see what your growth looks like. I’d say if you are growing organically and you have 10 to 13% monthly growth, you are doing extremely well. That is probably the highest organic growth number anyone can achieve. You can even go more granular and calculate weekly growth. Whatever you decide to do, make sure to watch for the spikes in fan growth and try to identify what contributes to those spikes.
src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/total-likes.jpg" alt="" title="total likes" width="640" height="200" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-369736" />- The average number of Likes or comments: These are your engagement measures. If you know the average number of times fans interacted with you for every single post, you will be able to identify which discussions are of more interest to your fans. Watch for unusual spikes or drops in this number. I love this metric because it is extremely helpful in making immediate decisions in your content strategy and changes to your editorial calendar. Increase the number of posts around the topic your fans are more engaged with and decrease the number of posts around topics they are not interested in.
Unlikes and attrition rate: The fact is that you will always have some unsubscribes, no mater how great your engagement is, but hopefully it is just a small number. I usually just watch for spikes in the unlike numbers. You want to try and correlate them with the activity on your page and understand why people are leaving your page. It is rather hard to nail down the exact reason, but if there is an unusual spike, you will usually have a pretty good idea. The simple attrition rate formula is: Daily Unlikes / Daily Fan Count This metric will tell you how many of your fans are leaving your site. It is normal to have small constant attrition over time. - Demographics: No matter what your objectives are, you can always find the demographics data useful: the gender of your fans, their ages and where they are from.
src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/demographics1.jpg" alt="" title="demographics1" width="640" height="217" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-369746" />- Page views: I like this metric because it helps you identify the number of returned fans. If you take the number of page views and subtract the number of unique page views, you will see how many of your fans are actually coming back to your page. You can also look at the Daily Active Users metric.
src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/page-views.jpg" alt="" title="page views" width="640" height="175" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-369750" />- Mentions: This is the number of times someone tagged you in their post. The reason why this metric is important is because it is the easiest way for your fans’ friends to click through to your page. Every time someone tags you, the name of your Page appears as a link. It is much easier for someone to click on that link and learn more than to search for your Page manually. One of your goals should be to increase the number of mentions by your fans.
src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/mentions.jpg" alt="" title="mentions" width="640" height="162" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-369752" />- Tab views: This is the new metric Facebook implemented a couple of months ago. If you have multiple tabs on your page, it will tell you which tab gets what percentage of traffic. This metric will help you decide on whether you would want to keep or maybe get rid of some of your tabs. This is especially helpful as you can only have six tabs visible on your page at one time, and this data will help you prioritize accordingly.
- Referrers: Another new metric that tells you where the traffic to your page comes from. You want to increase exposure to your page on the sites that bring you the most traffic.
- Impressions: If your page is over 10,000 fans, you will see the number of times your post was viewed –- impressions. This metric is not exact since every time someone’s page refreshes, it counts as an impression. This number is usually a little overblown, but can show you how many times your post has been seen.
Some of these metrics require constant manual tracking and analysis, which is a big downside. However, the above metrics will help you make decisions about your engagement and content strategy that would allow more effective interactions with your customers. />More Social Media Resources from Mashable:/> - href="http://mashable.com/2010/08/26/business-facebook-page/">HOW TO: Get the Most Out of Your Business Facebook Page/> - href="http://mashable.com/2010/08/20/top-5-social-media-trends/">5 Huge Trends in Social Media Right Now/> - href="http://mashable.com/2010/08/20/wikileaks-journalism/">The WikiLeaks Debate: Journalists Weigh In/> - href="http://mashable.com/2010/08/19/facebook-places-guide/">A Field Guide to Using Facebook Places/> - href="http://mashable.com/2010/08/18/facebook-search-services/">5 Useful Facebook Trend and Search Services
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Facebook Testing a "Stalker Button"
Jolie O'Dell | 2010-09-02T19:11:28-04:00
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Facebook is apparently testing a new subscription feature that would allow users to receive alerts any time a specific friend takes certain actions on the social network.href="http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-subscribe-to-2010-09" target="_blank">AllFacebook reports that it has noticed the new feature popping up on friends’ profiles. Facebook told the blog, “This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person they’ve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links or notes).” In other words, when you click to subscribe to a user, you’ll get a new Facebook notification in your notifications bar at the top of the site or on the mobile device of your choosing any time that other user posts content. We’re not sure yet if you can subscribe to someone who’s not a friend, which is much more stalker-like, or if notifications include likes and comments (right now, it sounds like they won’t). src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/facebook-subscribe-profile-1.jpg" alt="" title="facebook-subscribe-profile-1" width="522" height="487" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-372872" />/>src="http://cdn.mashable.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/facebook-subscribe-profile-2.jpg" alt="" title="facebook-subscribe-profile-2" width="570" height="397" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-372874" />/>We at Mashable are hoping this is an opt-in (or at least an opt-out) feature. If Facebook thinks subscriptions are a useful for the majority of average users, people who might want to get special notifications for family members’ or loved ones’ activities, they’re also potentially damaging if rolled out to jealous “frenemies,” vindictive exes or nosy bosses. What do you think of the “subscribe” button? Is there anyone in your life you’d subscribe to? What about others subscribing to you — would you like or dislike that feature? Let us know your thoughts in the comments. [img credits: AllFacebook and href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jvk/" target="_blank">jvk] More about : href="http://mashable.com/tag/facebook/">facebook, href="http://mashable.com/tag/subscribe/">Subscribe style="margin-top:10px;">For more href="http://mashable.com/social-media/">Social Media coverage:style="margin-top:0;">href="http://twitter.com/mashsocialmedia" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitterhref="http://www.facebook.com/mashable.socialmedia" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Become a Fan on Facebookhref="http://feeds.mashable.com/mashable/social-media" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Subscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable/id356202138?mt=8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">iPhone and href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable-for-ipad/id370097986?mt=8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">iPad
REMINDER: Free Catfish Screening Today In San Francisco
Nick O'Neill | 2010-09-02T18:47:55-04:00
 A quick reminder for those of you who are based in San Francisco. There will be a free screening of Catfish for all readers of AllFacebook today at 7 PM at the Metreon. If you are around and have a chance to make it, I couldn’t recommend the movie more highly. It’s really a fun film and best of all, the filmmakers behind this movie will be answering questions during a panel immediately following the screening.
You can register for free if you haven’t already by clicking this link and filling in your information. I hope to see you there!!
Facebook Beefs Up Security with Remote Logout Feature
Ben Parr | 2010-09-02T18:20:27-04:00
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href="http://mashable.com/category/facebook">Facebook is bolstering the security of user accounts through the launch of a new feature that gives users the ability to see their overall account activity and remotely log out of active sessions.Have you ever logged into your Facebook at a public computer, but forgot to log out when you left? What if you left your Facebook account open at home with a snooping brother, sister or spouse? They would have access to sensitive personal information or could wreak havoc by posing as you. These are the problems that Facebook is attempting to address with the gradual rollout of remote logout. The new feature appears under the “Account Security” section of Account Settings. Account Security displays the most recent activity related to your account, including location, device name, time and device type/browser. This should give you a clue as to whether you left Facebook open at a public computer or just left it running at the office PC. That’s not all, though. To the right of any active account is a link for remotely logging out of your Facebook account. “In the unlikely case that someone accesses your account without your permission, you can shut down the unauthorized login before resetting your password and taking other steps to secure your account and computer,” the Facebook team explained in href="http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/forget-to-log-out-help-is-on-the-way/425136200765" target="_blank">blog post published earlier today. This is a welcome security update from the world’s largest social network. For many, Facebook accounts hold information as sensitive as e-mail (and href="httP://mashable.com/tag/gmail">Gmail has had href="http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/remote-sign-out-and-info-to-help-you.html" target="_blank">remote logout since 2008). Anything that provides more control over a user’s security is a win in our books. Have you ever wanted a remote logout feature for your Facebook account? Let us know in the comments. More about : href="http://mashable.com/tag/facebook/">facebook, href="http://mashable.com/tag/security/">security style="margin-top:10px;">For more href="http://mashable.com/tech/">Tech coverage:style="margin-top:0;">href="http://twitter.com/mashabletech" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Follow Mashable Tech on Twitterhref="http://www.facebook.com/mashable.tech" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Become a Fan on Facebookhref="http://feeds.mashable.com/mashable/tech" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Subscribe to the Tech channelDownload our free apps for href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable/id356202138?mt=8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">iPhone and href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable-for-ipad/id370097986?mt=8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">iPad
Facebook Connect Disappears from iTunes Ping
Christina Warren | 2010-09-02T18:04:53-04:00
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Late last evening, Apple released href="http://mashable.com/2010/09/01/apple-ping-itunes-10/">iTunes 10 and its new href="http://mashable.com/2010/09/01/ping-myspace/">Ping social network to the public. Assuming you were able to href="http://mashable.com/2010/09/02/ping-not-available-for-you/">access the service, you may have noticed the ability to add friends via Facebook Connect, a feature we mentioned in our href="http://mashable.com/2010/09/01/itunes-ping/">first-impressions post last night.That feature disappeared earlier this morning, as first noted by href="http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/20100902/social-music-mystery-what-happened-to-apples-pingfacebook-connection/?mod=ATD_rss&mod=ATD_sphere" target="_blank">Peter Kafka. So where did the feature go and why did it disappear?/> id="more-372774">/> According to href="http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100902/facebook-blocked-api-access-to-ping-after-failure-to-strike-agreement-so-apple-removed-feature-after-launch/" target="_blank">AllThingsD, Facebook was responsible for turning off Apple’s access to its href="http://mashable.com/category/facebook">Facebook Connect API. Typically this API is open to just about any application developer. However, with higher-volume apps (think social games and services with lots and lots of users), Facebook apparently requires a special agreement for these kinds of connections. According to AllThingsD’s sources, an agreement between href="http://mashable.com/category/apple">Apple and Facebook couldn’t be reached, so Facebook cut off access. Apple subsequently removed the feature from its service. Users can still be added by searching by name or via e-mail address. However, it’s important to note that the e-mail address is the one associated with a user’s iTunes account. I have a special iTunes-only address in place, which means that anyone who wants to follow me will have to use my name. This isn’t the first time Facebook has turned off its data hose to another company. Twitter briefly introduced a href="http://mashable.com/2010/06/23/huge-twitter-lets-you-automatically-follow-your-facebook-friends/">Facebook follow feature before Facebook shut off access. Apple and Facebook have worked together in the past, most notably with the Share via Facebook option first introduced in iTunes 9 and the href="http://mashable.com/2010/03/29/app-store-facebook/">App Store Facebook Page. As it stands, if you did manage to use Facebook Connect with iTunes Ping last night, the app itself is still href="http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=146879158663523" target="_blank">visible in Facebook and you can see which friends are also connected. We would be surprised if this feature didn’t make a reappearance at some point. That’s a good thing, because Facebook is becoming the de facto social graph for many users and makes the friend discovery process much easier. We’ve reached out to Facebook and Apple for comment on this particular issue. More about : href="http://mashable.com/tag/apple/">apple, href="http://mashable.com/tag/facebook/">facebook, href="http://mashable.com/tag/itunes/">itunes, href="http://mashable.com/tag/itunes-ping/">itunes ping, href="http://mashable.com/tag/ping/">Ping style="margin-top:10px;">For more href="http://mashable.com/social-media/">Social Media coverage:style="margin-top:0;">href="http://twitter.com/mashsocialmedia" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Follow Mashable Social Media on Twitterhref="http://www.facebook.com/mashable.socialmedia" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Become a Fan on Facebookhref="http://feeds.mashable.com/mashable/social-media" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Subscribe to the Social Media channelDownload our free apps for href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable/id356202138?mt=8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">iPhone and href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mashable-for-ipad/id370097986?mt=8" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">iPad
HUGE: Facebook Testing New "Subscribe To" User Feature
Nick O'Neill | 2010-09-02T15:44:50-04:00
 Facebook is in the process of testing a new feature which lets you subscribe to all the actions of a specific user. In other words, you can receive notifications anytime a specific user takes an action on Facebook. It also appears to be Facebook’s answer to Twitter’s follow feature. As a Facebook user who has seen the feature explained to us, “By subscribing you don’t miss any updates from people you subscribe to.”
This could also serve as a new engagement opportunity for Pages if Facebook enabled users to subscribe to their activities as well. The result would be a fan count and a “subscriber” count, which is the number of people who are guaranteed to get all of your updates. For the time being it appears to just be a test, however this would definitely change the communications flow within Facebook. It’s also the ultimate stalking tool!
While I’m not quite sure how advanced this feature will be, you could imagine a system in which you get a mobile notification every time one of your friends that you’ve subscribed to makes an update. I think that stalker aspect of the feature could also result in some backlash. Previously, it was chance if a friend’s information was displayed in your feed, however this will remove chance from the process. As the image below illustrates, you’ll be able to subscribe to the user and then a notification (like the one pictured in the second image) will alert you whenever the person updates their status, posts a photo, or shares a link. However I’m not sure if a notification will also show up if they like things or check in places. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more information about the feature, however we’re not sure if they’ll provide any details as the product is currently in testing. Update
Facebook gave us the following statement: “This feature is being tested with a small percent of users. It lets people subscribe to friends and pages to receive notifications whenever the person theyve subscribed to updates their status or posts new content (photos, videos, links, or notes).”
PayPal to Launch New Simplified Payments Flow for Social Games
Kim-Mai Cutler | 2010-09-02T15:44:02-04:00
 PayPal will launch a new suite of developer tools at the end of October that will make it easier for social gamers to pay as they go, potentially on-boarding millions of new casual gamers who are deterred by the hassle of topping up on virtual currencies.
“Right now, if I’m playing a game, I have to leave the flow, go to a different web site, authenticate myself, authorize a payment and then come back to the game,” said Osama Bedier, the vice president of product development at PayPal. “We’re going to have an inline shopping experience where you can authorize a transaction on the screen right there in the game.” The launch will be paired with a new micropayments feature, which will give players the option to continue the game while paying in increments of just 50 cents or a dollar. Right now, players usually have to top up in bigger increments of $10 or 20 to continue playing games. “It makes sense to alter the point at which browsers become buyers,” he said, adding that PayPal has 87 million customers. The effect will be to have more a “metered” approach to gameplay, almost like the way you’d put an additional quarter or two in to play an arcade game. “What I expect is to have the experience of ‘I want that virtual tractor!’ then I click on it and it automatically pulls from my account,” he said. “It will be like how long-distance phone calls are billed. It gets tallied up and you get billed at some normal interval. It takes all the friction out, allowing you to just enjoy the game.” PayPal is currently testing the new workflow with a handful of gaming companies and will launch the tools at the end of October at its San Francisco-based Innovate conference. As for PayPal’s relationship with Facebook, Bedier only expects it to deepen over the next few years and said he’s not concerned that the social network will at some point encroach on its turf. “It’s hard for us to be concerned about potential competition,” he said. “The mistake most guys make trying going into payments is assuming that it’s just collecting a whole bunch of credit cards and figuring it out later.” 
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