Moontoast, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, announced today that 5 of the company’s campaigns have been nominated for Facebook Studio Awards. The awards showcase the brands and agencies making the best advertising work on the social network.

Award winners will be announced next quarter. Moontoast’s award-nominated campaigns included work for five major brands: Toyota Boys & Girls Club, Toyota Tundra Instagram, Nissan October Car Care, VEVO Latin Music and Nestlé Häagen-Dazs.

Carol Glennon, Vice President of Customer Experience for Moontoast, commented on the news in a press release:

Facebook’s Studio Awards shine a light on brands that have mastered techniques in compelling art direction, creative storytelling and engaging user content, and we are excited to have so many of our campaigns recognized for the 2014 Awards. … Every day, for every client, Moontoast pushes the creative and technical limits of Facebook’s digital platform to turn content into storytelling opportunities. Our campaigns all focus on driving business, on driving conversation, and becoming embedded in the way people use social media which, when it works, highlight the power of Facebook.

Here’s a look at the campaigns that earned nominations:

• Toyota Boys & Girls Club: Moontoast was tasked with raising $200,000 for the Boys & Girls Club of America through social giving. In partnership with Saatchi & Saatchi LA, Moontoast created a mobile optimized rich media unit with a very clear call to action: inspire Toyota fans across multiple social channels to spread awareness and make donations. By featuring Toyota’s Winter Event campaign spokesperson reaching out to users and requesting donations, along with a map of the U.S. featuring Shares ‘hotspots,” Toyota’s $200K goal was achieved within four weeks, with 4.57 million impressions, 18K Facebook ‘Likes,’ 14.6K ad unit click-throughs and 21K Likes, Shares and Comments.
• Toyota Tundra Instagram: Moontoast’s goals were to increase brand awareness and product education by driving Likes and Shares around the Toyota Tundra through a hosted Instagram video gallery. A first for Instagram, Moontoast custom designed a Social Rich Media ad allowing fans to fluidly move through the best Instagram videos of the 2014 Toyota Tundra, and tell a fuller story via micro-insta-video content. The fully mobile supported ad took advantage of consumer’s browsing behavior on mobile devices, and resulted in approximately 4,000 ad click-throughs, 15,601 interactions, 3.9 interactions per open and 1,610 Facebook Likes, Shares and Comments.
• Nissan October Car Care: For Nissan, Moontoast was tasked with driving awareness of a sweepstakes campaign and service bookings to convert registrants to Maintenance for Life members, locate ‘orphaned’ VINs and match them to new contacts. A mobile optimized ‘countdown’ Social Rich Media ad was built linked to Book Service and a Facebook Event asking fans to RSVP, plus geo-targeting of U.S. Nissan owners. The results: 744 Facebook registrants (surpassing ALL registrants captured in 2012 from all channels); 91% conversion rate on mobile; 135 orphaned VINs identified; 18:1 ROI and contributions to approximately $35 million in aftersales service revenue.
• VEVO Hottest Latino Music Videos of Summer: Moontoast was tasked with engaging social audiences – spreading awareness, driving click-throughs and voting conversions – for the voting campaign of 10 popular artist videos, to ultimately name the Hottest Latino Music Video of Summer. Moontoast created a voting social rich media unit for the campaign with mobile-first quality visuals to maintain the brank look and feel for VEVO, and allow users to deeply interact with artist galleries, without ever having to leave Facebook. The campaign gave consumers and brands real-time results, and drove approximately 88,000 ad expansion, a 13.69% click-through rate, 44.8% voting conversion and a total of 30,000 votes.
• Nestlé Häagen-Dazs® Vote For Your Favorite Treat: Designed to engage Häagen-Dazs social fans and drive top-of-mind awareness while promoting a new partnership with Momofuku Milk Bar chef, Christina Tosi, Moontoast build a mobile-optimized social rich media unit delivered in Facebook’s News Feed. Featuring five unique recipes, the campaign encouraged fans to browse the gallery and vote for their favorite. A “thank you” page then drove users to the Häagen-Dazs Tumblr page to download recipes. The campaign reached 1.2 million users with 90% of its traffic coming from mobile.

 

The Ideas section of Facebook’s iPhone application will be the home to exclusive content from TED 2014 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday through Thursday as part of a collaboration between the social network and the nonprofit conference series.

Facebook said in an email to Inside Facebook that the Ideas section of Paper provides a daily, in-depth look at a single idea, event, or personality, and in the past, it has been devoted to topics including International Women’s Day, the State of the Union address, and .

The exclusive content from TED 2014 will include status updates, photos, and presentations from TED fellows, as well as posts from attendees, blog posts, TED Talks videos, and posts from journalists and other public figures attending or covering the event.

Facebook said of TED in its email:

TED is a natural fit for this experiment, as they care deeply about design, innovation, and high-quality content. We’re looking forward to bringing the experience of the 2014 TED conference to Paper.

Readers: Would you like to see more exclusive content of this type on Paper?

AppData announced recently that, according to its figures, King looks like it’s here to stay on Facebook. Although we called into question the sustainability of the developer and its most popular game, the data indicates that .

According to the announcement, the company now has the top three Facebook apps ranked by Monthly Active Users (MAUs): “King has been the most successful developer to leverage the Facebook app ecosystem to build its business across all platforms.”

Here are the top five apps on AppData’s MAU leaderboard:

Farm Heroes Saga was launched in April of 2013, making its climb to No. 2 particularly notable. Pet Rescue Saga was launched in October of 2012. Together, the three games represent almost 22 percent of MAUs in the top 100 apps that AppData is tracking. King has four more games that appear in the top 100 apps: Papa Pear Saga, Pepper Panic Saga, Bubble Witch Saga and Pyramid Solitaire Saga. With all seven taken into consideration, King’s games alone represent over 25 percent of MAUs in the top 100 apps.

For more information about AppData click here, or call .

Do you think King’s business is sustainable?

Facebook has a new general manager for , as The Jerusalem Post reported that Adi Soffer Teeni, chairman of English grammar and spelling tool Ginger, will assume the post at the social network’s office in Ramat Gan.

According to the Post, Teeni will work closely with Facebook’s European headquarters in to help expand its team in Israel.

Prior to Ginger, she served as managing director of gaming site 888.com and CEO of private education company Kidum Group.

Facebook Regional Director for Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Diego Oliva said in the announcement of Teeni’s hire, as reported by the Post:

Facebook already enjoys a close relationship with many Israeli companies and startups. The recent acquisition of , the opening of our Israel office, and now the appointment of Adi as GM shows that our commitment to the country is stronger than ever.

Teeni added:

Having spent so much of my life working with consumer-facing companies, I have seen first-hand the positive impact that Facebook can have on growth, enabling them to reach precisely the audience they need to target whether that is at home or abroad.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

As Head of Diversity with Facebook, Sara Sperling plays a major role in the shaping of the company. She’s in charge of Facebook’s efforts to become a more demographically diverse company and refers to herself more as a Dean of Students than a Facebook executive.

Sperling, who has been with Facebook for four years, recently spoke at the first Lesbians Who Tech summit, an event that helps build awareness of queer women in the tech industry and the opportunities that are available for them.

She took some time to sit down with Inside Facebook to examine how having such a diverse workforce has helped Facebook not only in the tech world, but as an internationally-renowned company.

Inside Facebook: Tell me a little bit about what Facebook was like, in terms of diversity, when you signed on here.

Sara Sperling: When I came on board, we were a little over 1,000 employees and we’re now over 6,000 — quite a big jump. For me, when I chose to come to Facebook, I was such an out lesbian. There was no hiding it with me. I needed to go work somewhere where I could be completely me. That was already there at Facebook. They were like, “We love you! We love that you have tattoos. We love that you’re a mom. We love all of that!” So diversity was already important to Facebook. It was just because we were a small company that we weren’t necessarily focusing on it.

All of that base bone was always there, so it was nice to be able to build on that. I started not as diversity, but as learning & development. I had a passion for diversity. I helped revive one of the employee resource groups. From that, the company kept going to me and asking me questions about diversity and I’d answer it. At some point, one of the leaders, the head of HR, saw something in me. … I think that’s really freaking cool that executives of the company would say, “We see something in you,” and trust you enough to build it.

IF: Before you came to Facebook, what were you doing?

SS: I was doing learning & development at Yahoo. Right before that, I was in academia. I was teaching at Berkeley and Santa Clara and I was doing student affairs. Funny enough, I always wanted to be the Dean of Students at a university. So now, I have literally met my goal. I was totally academic, and made that transition from academic to corporate. It was hard, though.

IF: One of the things that has always impressed me about Facebook is the company is very, very dedicated to diversity. They’re finding new employees from groups who are underrepresented in the tech world. Can you tell me how Facebook goes about finding talent from other underrepresented groups?

SS: We’re very similar to most of the tech companies. We want diverse teams. The research shows that diverse teams are going to build better products. We don’t have a simple product — we have a complex product. Because of that, we need diverse perspectives and diverse journeys and what that equals is people of different ethnicities and different paths. That’s what we like.

Our consumer base, the people who use Facebook, . So we need to look as close to that as we possibly can. We still have all the challenges that all the other tech companies have, finding people who are from diverse perspectives and diverse paths. But we’re very committed to that and we have a team that’s committed to that. Our employees are committed to this — it’s not just executives or recruiting, our employees are too.

IF: What was the reception or the feedback from the Lesbians Who Tech conference?

SS: People really enjoyed it. I didn’t want to focus me and Facebook. I wanted to focus on what I learned and how I got from being a math major to building diversity at a company like Facebook. It was definitely a path I never would’ve ever anticipated taking. It’s a job that doesn’t feel like a job. When I reflected on how I got there — I’m very much into improv — and there’s principles of improv that I used to help me go. (The response) was really positive. There were some principles that everybody could relate to.

I talked about saying “Yes,” to things that you’d normally say “No,” to. I talked about being fully present, which I think also in this world of Facebook and Twitter is a challenge. When you are fully present to people, paths will open up. I talked about failing gloriously. We all fail and we don’t know success until we’ve failed, but do fail gloriously and be like, “Yup, that was my failure.” The final one was telling people to tell their own unique stories to people. So I think that one of those four things resonated with people.

I loved it. It was the first year they had this summit and we were all kind of hoping for maybe 300 people. Almost 800 people showed up and the speakers who were there … I wanted to stay! It was just phenomenal women. … Leann Pittsford was the one who ran this, her and her fiancée Leah. It was a top-notch job.

IF: What are some of your goals for Facebook?

SS: At Facebook, we always like to say we’re 1 percent finished and I really feel that way with diversity. We definitely have the foundation and we’re set up for huge success. I really want us to be the company that others look at when they look at who is doing the most amazing, trailblazing things in diversity. I want to be that company.

What I really want to focus on, at least for this year, is my culture and really focusing on the inclusion. Our employee resource groups are made up of 20 to 30 percent not-that-group. 20 percent of the black group doesn’t identify with being a part of that community, but because they’re part of this group, they’re learning and exploring. I actually think our pride group is 30 to 40 percent just allies.

What’s been so phenomenal — when you look at our Pride Parade presence, we’ve only been there three years. I will put it down that we will hit over 1,000 people and that’s just unheard of. People feel a part of the community — not just certain communities, but the whole community.

IF: Can you tell me a little more about the outreach that Facebook does to attract employees from different backgrounds?

SS: We definitely do a lot of the conferences that all the companies do. We have a very strong presence at Grace Hopper, and we like to do things with them outside of the conference. There are quite a bit of partnerships that we do. We have a really strong partnership with Year Up. We’ve had some people who have gotten positions here from that organization. We have a strong partnership with MLT — Management Leadership for Tomorrow. We have a partnership with the Hackbright Academy. So there’s things that we’re doing that will not only get us employees — and that’s important — but we also want to be there to help inspire and be there as mentors for people, if they need that. Yes, we’re focused on getting more employees, but it’s more than that for us. We want the give-and-take.

IF: Thinking about the tech industry in general, what are some things you’d like to see more of?

SS: I want to see more women. I was a math major back when I was in college. Back then, there was not support for me. I get it that there’s not many of us that are in our 40s that are in the sciences. But I want to see more women in the sciences. But I also want to see more women being leaders, stepping up and talking more. does a great job, but we need more Sheryls.

In Silicon Valley, we need that from other groups — we need more Latinos talking and speaking, somebody from the black community, the differently-abled community, the veteran community. We need to see more of them and speaking what it’s like to be mentors, so that people who might be differently-abled can see someone who looks like them and has the same background and experience as them would want to come and work in technology.

Tech is where it’s at, so we need more diverse perspectives.

IF: Have you seen more women go into the field because of what Sheryl has done and because of Marissa Mayer, and because there are more women leaders in tech then there were 3 or 4 or 5 years ago?

SS: I think it’s not only that, but I think there’s more inspirational teachers out there. I think we see a lot more female teachers who are teaching science. When I was a math major, it was a male professor who told me there wouldn’t be any support for women in this field. Now, we’re seeing more male professors and teachers who are very supportive of women going into these fields. I think it’s actually changing on a more granular level in the school systems. It helps to have people who are speaking out here in tech, but it’s our school systems. Women and people who are from diverse backgrounds see that if they want to do engineering and they love it, then they should do it no matter what background they’re from.

Images courtesy of Facebook.

As the world celebrates St. Patrick’s Day, let’s take a look at the pages most-liked by Facebook users in .

According to PageData, Mediabistro’s database of Facebook page metrics, Irish Facebookers love Primark (known in Ireland as Pennys and unrelated to JC Penney), Rihanna and Eminem.

Find out what else Facebook users in Ireland love by clicking below.

# Name Total Likes  % of Likes Daily Growth 1    Penneys 424,247 79 +173 2    Rihanna 394,902 0 +202 3    Eminem 370,685 0 +245 4    The Simpsons 335,144 0 +235 5    Family Guy 335,060 1 +45 6    Lidl Ireland 333,695 91 +10 7    Amazon UK 331,538 7 +97 8    The X Factor 292,239 4 +102 9    YouTube 288,558 0 +41 10    Katy Perry 287,950 0 +243 11    Father Ted 283,741 28 +17 12    The Script 276,552 5 +615 13    Beyoncé 259,047 0 +173 14    Lady Gaga 253,883 0 +64 15    Lyons Tea 253,213 93 +51 16    The Inbetweeners 235,390 5 +34 17    Two and a Half Men 234,498 1 +7 18    boohoo.com 234,055 12 +275 19    Rubberbandits 233,000 83 +17 20    Adam Sandler 229,151 0 +171 21    Cheryl Cole 229,003 4 +34 22    David Guetta 227,982 0 +149 23    TheJournal.ie 227,403 84 +43 24    Mr. Tayto 226,812 84 +76 25    Coca-Cola 223,472 0 +72

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Want to be among the first to get the new ? Facebook is now notifying some page admins to join a waitlist to have their page converted to the new design, according to .

When a page admin clicks that they want to be added to the waitlist, giving them earlier access to the , they receive the following message:

 

Top screenshot courtesy of  Founder . Bottom screenshot courtesy of  of VisualCommU.

One of the best way to gain new fans and find out who your are is through a Facebook contest.

However, contests aren’t for everyone.

How can you determine that your fanbase is ripe for a contest — and then how can you pull it off right? Shortstack created an infographic to guide Facebook marketers and page admins through this process.

Click below to see the infographic.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

 

Auto-play video ads are making their way to the mobile News Feed. Facebook on Thursday announced that a select group of advertisers will have , which will play automatically without sound. The user can then tap the ad to play sound and see the video in full-screen mode.

Each ad will last 15 seconds and will stop if scrolled past.

This may not happen immediately — Facebook notes that these video ads will be rolled out slowly over the next few months. Facebook will also be keeping close tabs on how users interact with these auto-play video ads. Facebook has been testing ads already on desktop and auto-play it is a key video feature of Facebook’s popular photo and video-sharing app Instagram. Previously, Facebook ad tested with the movie Divergent, but now a few more advertisers will have access to this.

Facebook announced this ad unit :

Premium Video Ads are bought and measured in a way that’s similar to how advertisers already buy and measure ads on TV. The ads are bought based on Targeted Gross Rating Points to reach a specific audience over a short period of time. Delivery is measured by an independent third party, Nielsen Online Campaign Ratings (OCR), and advertisers only pay based on what Nielsen OCR measures.

To make sure Premium Video Ads are as good as other content people see in their News Feeds, we’re working with a company called Ace Metrix to help us review and assess how engaging the creative is for each ad — before it appears on Facebook. Ace Metrix will allow us to objectively measure the creative quality of the video in the Facebook environment, and highlight performance indicators for advertisers such as watchability, meaningfulness and emotional resonance. We’re taking this step in order to maintain high-quality ads on Facebook and help advertisers understand what’s working to maximize their return on investment.

Readers: What do you think?

After Facebook released plans to redesign pages, at the lack of tabs in the design.

However, it appears that tabs (with images) have returned to Facebook’s page design — on the left sidebar.

Readers, what do you think?

(Hat tip to Matthew Klein of Nuke Suite and Woobox.)

Liz Heron, currently the Editor of Emerging Media at the Wall Street Journal, to help the company develop better relations with .

Heron has also worked at The Washington Post and The New York Times.

Heron announced the news in a Facebook post:

I’m thrilled to announce that I’m taking a new job at Facebook centered around the news. In this new role, I’ll have the opportunity to work directly on how Facebook partners with journalists and media organizations, at a time when Facebook is putting a big emphasis on news and mobile, two things close to my professional heart. From The Washington Post to NYTimes to my current job at WSJ, I’ve been working in journalism for a long time, and seen social media and the web transform it completely. It will be fascinating for me to approach news-gathering and storytelling from a new vantage point.

Facebook is this incredible, vast database of human experience, as my friend Allison likes to say. There’s so much news to be found here, sources to be developed, meaningful communities for journalists to build and experiments to be tried. Journalists — feel free to hit me up with your ideas!

Photo courtesy of .

According to Socialbakers, a social media analytics platform, the top 20 brands on Facebook possessed an average of 14,481,490 fans at the end of February, or the population of a small country.

The top 5 brands on Facebook at the end of February were:

• Walmart with 32,134,392 fans;
• Amazon with 21,847,918 fans;
• Target with 21,580,619 fans;
• Samsung Mobile with 19,363,658 fans; and
• Subway with 19,318,831 fans.

Socialbakers also found that the top brands by engagement rate were:

• Evolution Fresh with 7.05 percent, a 34 percent increase;
• Sheraton Waikiki with 3.81 percent, a 5 percent increase;
• DeKuyper USA with 3.38 percent, a 55 percent increase;
• Patron XO Cafe with 3.31 percent, a 261 percent increase; and
• Ameriprise Financial with 3.01 percent a 72 percent increase.

The average post engagement rate for all brands was 0.16 percent with an average response rate of 59 percent.

Trying to find some way to build your Facebook fanbase, but don’t have a bunch of money for page like ads?

Here are some tips and tricks to get more likes, courtesy of Who Is Hosting This?

Click below for the infographic.

Facebook for its F8 conference — a mecca for developers. Previously, Facebook has launched innovations such as Open Graph technology and timeline at .

A Facebook spokesperson told Inside Facebook, “We’ll be unveiling some exciting updates for our developer community at the event.”

The event will be held April 30 at the San Francisco Design Concourse.

How can you register?

Registration is done through the F8 website. Spaces are limited for the conference, so not everyone who applies will be able to attend. If the registration is processed, the attendee will then be charged the $495 fee for a conference ticket.

Zynga is introducing some of its most-popular games to iOS and Android in a few select markets before officially launching them at the end of June. The social gaming developer is playing catch up with competitor King, which got into the mobile space sooner.

“Did the company miss a beat with the transition to mobile? Absolutely. Are we fixing that? Yes, we are,” CEO of Zynga Don Mattrick told Reuters.

The company’s acquisition of NaturalMotion earlier this year also signals a new focus for the company on mobile.

Even though Zynga has focused on Facebook, King has been outperforming the company there, too. This year alone, King’s Facebook DAU/MAU engagement has increased by 17.1 percent, while Zynga’s DAU/MAU is up only 0.7 percent, according to research from AppData.

Candy Crush Saga, King’s most popular game, is up 5 percent in DAU/MAU engagement this year. FarmVille 2, Zynga’s most popular game, has grown 1.6 percent in DAU/MAU engagement in the same time period. Check out a comparison of each developer’s most-popular games, courtesy of AppData:

Do you think Zynga’s increased focus on mobile will help it catch up to King?

Ampush, a Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer, announced recently that the company has named Rick Cotton as Chief Revenue Officer. Cotton comes to Ampush from Sequoia-backed TuneIn, a digital radio app, where he was the company’s head of global advertising. Prior to that, he was a Senior Vice President/General Manager at Monster, where he launched and grew the company’s consumer advertising business while managing strategic operations.

With Ampush, Cotton will expand the company’s national sales team and ensure top-quality customer service as the company grows. He will help develop and execute Ampush’s go-to-market strategy and collect market feedback.

Ampush CEO Jesse Pujji welcomed Rick Cotton to the company in a press release:

We’re thrilled to have Rick join our executive team and drive our strategic client relationships as well as go-to-market and product strategy. He brings a rare combination of leadership, analytical rigor and client-first focus that is a perfect fit for Ampush’s DNA. His deep experience in marketing software and technology will take Ampush to the next level in the native ad space.

Cotton says he is excited to get started:

Ampush is aggressively innovating to drive results across native platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The company is developing a premium brand that offers leading technology and top-tier customer service to meet the needs of world-class partners like MasterCard and HotelTonight. I am excited to join the Ampush leadership team while helping to scale what I believe to be the premiere native ad solution on the market.

Gallop Labs, a social marketing and analytics firm, announced that it has hired former Facebook Client Partner Andrew Peebles as the company’s Director of Sales. Gallop Labs is a part of BNOTIONS, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer.

Peebles will help Gallop Labs manage its sales strategy and brand presence throughout North America. He will work with clients to identify high-value mobile users and achieve business goals through Facebook engagement on Gallop Labs’ mobile media buying ad platform.

Peebles joined Facebook in 2009 and was primarily responsible for growing the social network’s Canadian business presence.

Karthik Ramakrishnan, CEO of Gallop Labs, welcomed Peebles to the company:

We’re thrilled Andrew has joined our team. He embodies the qualities we look for in building a world class team. He shares our passion for disrupting the digital advertising space and empowering advertisers to accelerate their growth. As his success at Facebook has proven, he will be an advocate for our clients and our product.

Peebles said in a press release that he’s happy to start with Gallop Labs:

I’m really excited to be a part of this growing team. Mobile is such a big part of our daily lives, and I think it’s an amazing opportunity to contribute hands­on to the growing ecosystem. Gallop Labs is thinking differently about how to identify and engage high value mobile users, and I look forward to helping our clients get the most out of their mobile investment.

Facebook on Monday introduced a , making things such as key performance indicators more easily visible for managers, and location info easier to find for fans.

However, this move also signals that Facebook is moving away from tabs — which have been a popular tool for many Facebook marketers to draw attention to contests as well as get users to visit other entities such as an Instagram feed or website. Page admins can still draw users to the company website, a contest, or anything else, but it’s becoming clear that this will have to be done through News Feed posts and not direct visits to a page’s timeline.

When many page admins and marketers saw the new design, they wondered, “Where did the tabs go?”

Tabs will still be supported, but they will be tucked into the “More” module and without images. Here’s a preview:

The redesign makes the page timeline look a little more :

While some marketers will see this is a ploy by Facebook to get pages to invest more in advertising, this move could be evidence that users aren’t that likely to visit a page’s timeline and would rather engage with a brand by seeing content in their News Feed. Does this mean more advertising to get into more users’ News Feeds? Well, that’s up to the individual pages. Facebook may be free for users, but much like any other platform, it’s going to cost either time or money (or both) if you’re looking to grow your business or generate sales through Facebook.

Facebook offers companies and marketers several ways to get a message out to their fans. While it’s important to have all pertinent (and fresh) information on the page’s timeline, most fans likely won’t click to view the page after they like it. If they do come back, it will be a rare instance. The most efficient and predictable way to get a brand’s message in front of a fan (or potential fan) through Facebook is through the News Feed — whether that means organic or paid. The redesign de-emphasizes tabs by placing them into the “More” box, prompting page admins to find other ways to let fans know what’s out there.

It’s not a malicious move to get more ad revenue; it’s Facebook trying to get pages to post better content and calls to action in the News Feed, where fans eyeballs are most likely to be.

However, Facebook PMD Woobox doesn’t think this is a death knell for tabs. In a recent blog post, the company gave their take on how marketers can still use Facebook tabs in light of this redesign:

Page Admins are concerned that their page tabs will no longer be relevant, and won’t be visible to their fans. However, when you look at a side-by-side comparison, you will notice that the new tab links are much closer in proximity to the News Feed – the old timeline had a whole lot of real estate between page tabs and page posts, which is where engagement occurs. The new layout places the tab links directly above the News Feed and the simple, non-cluttered layout grabs your attention!

Readers: What do you think this will mean for tabs on Facebook pages?

There has been a buzz around the interwebs about Facebook ads not being very effective. Veritasium released mechanism. Derek Muller, owner of Veritasium’s YouTube channel, experimented with Facebook’s ads on a random page about cats.

Derek argues that since there are a lot of fake accounts on Facebook, thanks to click farms around the world, when Facebook sends out ads to your chosen audience, most of these sponsored stories end up in the News Feed of fake accounts. As the number of spamming fans grows on your page, your engagement rate slows down, forcing you to buy another ad campaign from Facebook to increase interaction with users.

Facebook has attempted to remove fake accounts and continues to monitor the social network for spammers but Derek highlights that Facebook does not delete the fake likes even if the account gets deleted.

He goes on to explain why he thinks the likes he received on his cat page were fake:

“OK, here’s the thing. The global average “likes” per person is 40. For most countries it looks like 20 and below. Virtually everyone who liked my page liked in excess of 900 things (I say virtually because I could only spot-check random profiles and then the number of likes is not easy to ascertain – you have to scroll for miles through their likes and then count using a query of the code). These are clearly not typical accounts.”

So Derek argues that with paid advertising, you can’t be sure that you’re reaching out to genuine fans. And if you’re not, it can be a big problem since it weighs on your standing within the News Feed algorithm.

Here are a few tips we have for marketers with Facebook pages:

1. Building Your Brand

Many people confuse the function of Facebook by using it to create a brand. Facebook is a great tool for helping you get the word out and develop your brand, but you must realize that your branding and marketing strategy should be the source for your Facebook strategy. To build your brand on Facebook, start with campaigns. Instead of throwing out a status update or a random photo every day, begin a one-month campaign to test out the productivity of Facebook’s marketing.

Running a campaign with one clear message would ensure that your brand remains on track online, as well as that it targets customers who really want to hear from you.

2. Organic Reach

Initially, start off without paid advertising. Don’t ask your friends to like your Facebook page if they are not interested in your brand. These uninterested likes will only create problems for you later. Keep it genuine from day one so that Facebook can deliver the right Insights to you and so that Facebook’s Insights can help you shape your future strategies.

Instead of nagging your peers to “like” your page and posts, target the right people, right when they are ready to hear and understand you.

3. Monitor Engagement Rate

Keep a watchful eye on your page statistics. Add fast-growing pages in your “Pages to Watch” tab so you can benchmark your page’s performance. Note any suspicious activity or like. If someone has liked your page, but hasn’t interacted in quite a long time, reach out to them.

For a Facebook page that has millions of fans, it gets very unpractical, so make sure that you start with genuine fans from the get-go.

Be Proactive:

Facebook is undoubtedly the largest social network there ever was and is growing day by day through new features and acquisitions. Since most of our customers are now checking their Facebook accounts more than once a day, it has become a go-to medium for digital marketers. However, if you think there are problems with Facebook’s paid advertising, you need to have checks and balances in place to ensure that you keep your customers engaged – genuinely.

What do you think? Is Facebook paid advertising worth your money?

Nabiha Zeeshan is a curious social media addict who loves to explore the human nature. She watches movies to learn and enjoys TEDx talks and Seth Godin’s blog posts. She is currently working as a social media strategist at at Globus, Dubai UAE. You can tweet to her @NabihaZeeshan.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers Kenshoo, and Nanigans announced at South By Southwest that they will integrate their technology with the Oracle Social Cloud. The news comes as part of Oracle’s new API-based paid social media solution.

SHIFT CEO James Borow commented on what this means for both his company and Oracle:

We are proud to work with Oracle for the launch of its new paid media solution. We believe paid media is the most important element in any marketing strategy, as it enables marketers to reach customers with a tailored and targeted message. This integration will provide Oracle customers the ability to execute large-scale advertising campaigns across social platforms efficiently and effectively. We look forward to working with current and future Oracle customers to help maximize their brand marketing ROI.

Kenshoo Senior Vice President of Business Development Sivan Metzger commented on this partnership in a press release:

Savvy marketers understand the complementary nature of engaging content and paid social media, as well as the need to employ a diverse set of tactics to achieve their specific goals. Kenshoo’s advanced tracking and attribution capabilities, bidding algorithms, and workflow automation, can provide advertisers with the ability to quickly and easily create, manage and optimize their social media marketing campaigns while intelligently leveraging content they create to boost results. Collaborating with a well-respected brand like Oracle offers us a unique opportunity to share these tools with best-of-breed clientele and help marketers achieve their business goals through holistic social optimization.

Nanigans CEO Ric Calvillo discussed how Nanigans technology can perfectly complement Oracle’s:

Working with Oracle Social Cloud is another clear illustration of our growth and focus to provide in-house performance marketers and agencies with the most advanced SaaS platform across the social and mobile landscape. Oracle is perfectly aligned with Nanigans at the enterprise level and we look forward to further solidifying our position within the market through this partnership.

Image courtesy of .