From Vitrue: Facebook Insights Improvements

One thing I liked about Facebook was it's simplicity when it started. But after the Facebook boom in 2010, our clients started looking for better metrics to track activity on Facebook pages. Facebook's Insights definitely paled in comparison vs something like Google Analytics and the rest of the paid analytics tools out there.

So, it's a welcome surprise Facebook is stepping up on giving us marketers more data to analyze. Facebook is still pretty much a closed-wall garden, and while Google has been working on getting Facebook content into its search results, it looks like Facebook is doing the same by going out of Facebook to provide analytics outside Facebook, which usually is Google territory.

I just can't wait to see how these developments pan out.

Read below an article describing the new features of Facebook Insights from vitrue.com.

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Santa Came Early This Year - New Facebook Insights Features!

It appears that Facebook was in the holiday spirit this morning and delivered an unexpected gift to the little boys and girls at Vitrue…new Facebook Insights! As an analyst, this Christmas present was almost as good as my pink Hot Wheels Corvette circa 1991…almost.

The new updates make Facebook Insights much easier to interpret. New features, such as “Like Sources” and auto-calculating Weekly Active Users, provide valuable information about where new fans come from. Brands and marketers will now be able to make more educated inferences and utilize Facebook Insights exports in a more manageable fashion.

Filtering by Date Range

Previous functionalities would only allow you to export data by date range, instead of having the ability to view date-constrained metrics within native Facebook Insights. This enhancement packs loads of holiday cheer because the native graphs, charts, and metrics within Insights can be constrained and customized. This new feature affects metrics like Tab Views, geo-centric data, and Stream Posts performance data…in a very merry way. In a red and green nutshell, this feature allows you to use Insights-generated graphs and charts to the fullest extent.

Like Sources

Having a sleigh-full of fans is great and all but where do they even come from? This added feature is invaluable to brands and marketers. Why? Because gaining insight to where new fans are coming from allows admins to execute educated future promotions and understand their new fan base. For instance, if Santa’s fan page received 18,362 new fans in the past week from Search, this would give Old Saint Nick a good idea of the interest in his page.

Media Consumption

This new feature allows admins to see how media is performing on the page. So, if Santa decided he wanted to post more videos in December than he did in November, he could compare the performance of the greater number of videos to the lesser number of videos in the previous month.

Get Insights for your Domain

Facebook appears to be expanding their reach to the North Pole of the internet by allowing Facebook users to use Insights analytics for their own non-Facebook domains. How do you think this will affect use of Google Analytics?

Analytics-inspired Yuletide cheer is spreading all around Vitrue today. Thank you Facebook, your gift is in the mail.

For more information on Insights, visit Facebook’s developer entry here.

From BGR: A Facebook mobile phone?

Ooh! A Facebook-branded phone! How cool is that? Will Facebook now enter into the device race? Will they have a separate track on the Android build? Anything seems possible at this point.

I love how HTC knows who to partner with. I'm so happy with my Google Nexus One phone, it was quite disappointing how Google dropped HTC to partner with Samsung for the next gen Nexus S. Having a pure native device is cool because you get all the firmware updates early. I know it's the Apple model also, but I still don't like Apple for its snobbish stance to the open-source community. Yay to Facebook & HTC, boo to Apple.

[UPDATE] Facebook has denied that the phones will be Facebook-branded. See Mashable's report on this: http://mashable.com/2011/01/27/facebook-denies-facebook-phone/

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Facebook to launch two branded smartphones at MWC, report claims

By: Zach Epstein | Jan 26th, 2011 at 01:21PM

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Filed Under: Mobile, Rumors

Facebook will announce two Facebook-branded smartphones at next month’s Mobile World Congress according to a new report from City A.M. The report contradicts Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s earlier claim that the company was not working on branded cell phones, but was instead working to create a better, more comprehensive Facebook experience across existing mobile platforms. HTC will build the new Facebook phones according to the report, and they will feature branding and coloring in line with Facebook’s website. City A.M.goes on to state that the devices will run a modified build of Google’s Android operating system that will display information from a user’s Facebook account on the home screen. Details pertaining to pricing and availability are not yet available.

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From Mashable: Faebook Stories -- A New Social Ad Format Uses User-Generated Content

As a digital marketer, I've seen how user-generated content has become a more compelling way to tell a brand story, vis-a-vis just the plain old marketing message from advertising. This new ad format created from Facebook could very well be able to operationalize that to an advertiser's advantage.

I do think there will be an initial backlash to this due to privacy issues, but I really think Facebook's principles with the Open Graph has revolutionizes social computing and privacy options will more and more be the responsibility of the user rather than the platform. Agree that Facebook needs to inform its users of the privacy issues and that it should give easy options for users to keep their information private. But the openness of the Facebook architecture has driven this social change that has created the socially-enabled experience of the Web that we see today.

Here's Ben Parr's story on Mashable on Facebook Stories

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Facebook Turns Friend Activity Into New Ad Format

1 day ago by Ben ParrView Comments

Facebook is rolling out Sponsored Stories, a new ad format that turns your friends’ actions into promoted content.

Sponsored Stories is “a way for marketers to sponsor activities that happen throughout the News Feed,” Facebook Product Marketing Lead Jim Squires told Mashable. Companies can choose to take certain user actions — such as checkins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in the column on the right side of the News Feed.

For example, if you’re Whole Foods and you’re looking to increase your exposure on Facebook, you can pay to have a percentage of all checkins to Whole Foods featured in a Sponsored Stories slot in the right-side column. Your content wouldn’t be shown directly, but the actions of a user’s friends would appear. Users seeing their friends “liking” or checking in to Whole Foods will drive increased trust and increased traffic.

“The advertiser is not controlling the message; it’s about actions,” Squires said.

Here’s an example of an action that could potentially be sponsored:

And here’s what it might look like as a Sponsored Story:

Starting today, four specific types of user actions can be turned into featured stories: likes, checkins, actions within custom applications and Page posts. If a company has a custom app (e.g. Starbucks Card or evenFarmVille), it can promote the actions users take within them. The same is true of users posting on the walls of their favorite brands.

Facebook’s roster of launch partners includes Coke, Levi’s, Anheuser Busch and Playfish. Also, the social network is partnering with a slew of nonprofits for Sponsored Stories, including Donors Choose, Girl Up!, Malaria No More, Amnesty International, Women for Women, Autism Speaks, (RED), Alzheimer’s Association and UNICEF. However, anybody will be able to bid on Sponsored Story slots (by a per-impression and/or a per-click basis) starting January 25.

We haven’t seen Facebook play with new ad formats for a while — most of its revenue comes from the targeted advertising that appears on most Facebook pages. It has been timid about new ad formats after the spectacular failure of Beacon. Sponsored Stories seems like a simple and logical way to introduce new forms of advertising into Facebook’s system, though.

Sponsored Stories has a lot of similarities to Twitter Promoted Tweets. Both are trying to use content from within their networks and turn them into advertising dollars. There is one key difference between Sponsored Stories and Promoted Tweets, though: The user defines the advertised content in Facebook’s format, not the advertiser.

It’s that one little difference Facebook hopes will turn into big bucks.

Tapping Blogs for Online Campaigns [VIDEO]: An interview by Janette Toral

It's been a while since I posted on this blog. But I'm happy to say, I'm back!

Let me begin with this video of Janette Toral interviewing me for DigitalFilipino.com.

I don't like seeing myself on video, but I'd like to think I'm comfortable enough being in front of the camera... well maybe not yet as comfortable as I should look on cam.

Thanks, Janette, for the opportunity.

http://digitalfilipinocom.ning.com/video/tapping-blogs-for-online

Tapping Blogs for Online Campaigns from Janette Toral on Vimeo.