Facebook Pages could be getting a new analytic metric soon, based on has done over the past few months. , at least some Pages administrators are now able to see the breakdown of who’s viewed specific posts by organic and viral means.

Normally, administrators will see within each of their posts a count of how many people saw a specific post. However, some users are reporting that, by hovering their mouse over it, a pop-up window will appear that will show you how many came directly from your post and how many were from a friend of a friend. In addition, the new metric will show how that specific story ranks against the most popular one of that Page’s existence.

The introduction of this new form of measurement is quite coincidental in light of the recent controversy surrounding what some are claiming to be decreased page reach, allegedly in order to increase most usage of promoted posts. As the social network rolls out more feeds to its network in order to filter and reduce the noise one receives from their News Feed, one might surmise that there needs to be better way to track from where these referrals are coming from.

Since Facebook is a person-referred network, meaning that any source of traffic is going to come from an individual, rather than a webpage, brands and Pages administrators are going to know that someone recommended that particular story. But what they don’t know is the reach of that story. Think of it like the popular game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”: how many degrees of separation can your post go to be viewed and shared? Is it going to go as far as a subscriber or will it go from the subscriber to their friend and to their family and then to their friends? Naturally, each degree will open up a whole new population to discover the content and increase a Page’s audience.

Earlier this month, the social network said that the News Feed was for engaging content while the Pages Feed was for everything else. If this gets rolled out, it has the potential to become invaluable for Page admins that want to know how engaging their content is. One might gather that if a particular story is viewed organically, it’s at least a 50-50 chance that it was viewed in the News Feed. If it was viewed virally, then that might be a start in evaluating that it was an engaging post and therefore was shared in the News Feed of others versus the Pages Feed.

For administrators, simply seeing how many people viewed a story isn’t necessarily sufficient for their tastes. What they probably want to see are metrics that show them the reach of their stories — has it gone beyond their subscription base and if it’s gone to a new set of folks who might be interested in what the Page has to share.

No word yet on whether this new measurement will be rolled out to the masses. We’ve contacted Facebook for comment and will certainly update this if we hear back.

Photo credit: RODRIGO BUENDIA/AFP/Getty Images

Before the Thanksgiving holiday, Facebook announced that it was going to do away with its four-year-old process whereby the service’s 1 billion users could vote on proposed privacy and usage policy changes. With this move, it had hoped to share user data with its affiliates like Instagram. However, before it goes forward with any changes, Facebook should probably read a letter from concerned consumer groups, who are urging it to steer clear from any changes.

Okay, now I know we’ve all heard this before: Facebook makes changes to site, and groups start sprouting up and protest the changes. This happened before with the News Feed, each redesign, and practically every other instance of the company touching the site. But with the privacy policy and data usage changes that the company is recommended, concerned users are claiming that by doing so, it could violate an existing settlement it has with the United States Federal Trade Commission.

As , two groups, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy, have written a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claiming that these changes would “invade the privacy of Facebook users and ‘implicate’ the terms of the privacy settlement Facebook reached with the FTC.” You might remember that in November 2011, it settled over its use of data with advertisers even after reassuring them that it would be kept private. After an eight-count complaint was issued, the social network settled and agreed to independent third-party audits for the next 20 years.

So while the choice is supposedly up to the users of Facebook, one thing that Zuckerberg might want to think about before pulling that switch is the effect it will have on those who are really paying attention to the privacy settlement. Right now, any move that it makes will be well scrutinized — European regulators are going to comb over any policy changes and expect the company to give its citizens the right to opt-in or out. Irish regulators are also examining the impact these proposed changes are going to have.

Both consumer groups state in their letter that the settlement prohibits the social network from “misrepresenting the extent to which it maintains the privacy or security of covered information. Additionally, prior to any sharing of users’ personal information with a third party, Facebook must make a clear and prominent disclosure and obtain the affirmative express consent of its users.”

While the company says it wishes to share the data with its affiliates, it’s pretty naive of us to think that this wouldn’t be used to better target advertisements at the users. And I’m sure that any opt-out policy will be located in the settings section of Facebook — now the trick is to find it.

Photo credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

CityVille 2 again takes the No. 1 spot on our list of top Facebook apps growing by monthly active users this week with 72 percent gain.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 240,000 and 9.6 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain % 1.  CityVille 2 23,000,000 +9,600,000  + 72% 2.  TripAdvisor™ 51,600,000 +8,700,000  + 20% 3.  Birthdays 22,300,000 +2,800,000  + 14% 4.  Pet Rescue Saga 5,900,000 +2,300,000  + 64% 5.  Candy Crush Saga 18,500,000 +1,100,000  + 8% 6.  Instagram 39,400,000 +800,000  + 2% 7.  FarmVille 16,400,000 +800,000  + 5% 8.  Dragon City 15,300,000 +600,000  + 4% 9.  Are You Interested? 5,100,000 +500,000  + 11% 10.  Texas HoldEm Poker 34,500,000 +500,000  + 1% 11.  Subway Surfers 4,400,000 +400,000  + 10% 12.  Bike Race 2,700,000 +300,000  + 13% 13.  Stormfall: Age of War 1,100,000 +300,000  + 38% 14.  Snapchat 1,400,000 +300,000  + 27% 15.  Ruby Blast Adventures 18,500,000 +300,000  + 2% 16.  Custom Tab 5,100,000 +300,000  + 6% 17.  Horóscopo Diário 3,200,000 +300,000  + 10% 18.  Bubble Island 8,100,000 +300,000  + 5% 19.  Twitter 6,400,000 +300,000  + 7% 20.  Full Bloom 590,000 +240,000  + 69%

 

Games dominated our list this week, along with a few apps that are regular top gainers, such as No. 2 TripAdvisor™, No. 6 Instagram and No. 9 Are You Interested?.

No. 14 Snapchat is a notable addition this week. The mobile app allows users to take photos and share them with friends for a limited amount of time, usually just a few seconds. Users are notified when their friends view their photos or if they try to save the image by taking a screenshot. It’s a unique type of chat app that has taken off among some groups of friends. Since releasing an Android version of the app at the end of October, growth has taken off. Last week Snapchat passed 1 million Facebook-connected users, though it’s likely the app has a large percentage of users that do not connect with their social network account.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Thursday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Twitter and Facebook usually aren’t the last click before an ecommerce buy, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t inspire or influence the purchase. Yet IBM’s Black Friday report says Twitter delivered 0 percent of referral traffic and Facebook sent just 0.68 percent. To lure advertisers and ecommerce integrations, they have to show its not Google driving every sale.

Last year IBM said Twitter generated 0.02 percent of traffic, but now the microblogging platform supposedly drove no measurable amount of traffic. If you factored in downstream visits and conversions, that percentage might not be huge, but I doubt it’s zero. As a whole IBM says social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube generated 0.34 percent of all online sales on Black Friday, down 35 percent from 2011. The lack of sales attribution, especially for paid ads, is a problem for the entire industry.

[One major caveat: IBM did not readily disclose the methodology for this study, so numbers should be taken with heavy salt, and this article isn't trying to say Twitter doesn't drive referral traffic or influence purchases. Twitter's role in demand generation is very important, but the issue is tracking this to show businesses they get a return on their ads and effort spent on the social network.]

These last few months, Facebook has been making a major push to get credited for downstream purchases. It’s rolled out both a self-serve User ID matching system and cookie-dropping ads. These let advertisers tell if someone who bought something on their site saw an ad for them on Facebook in the previous weeks or months – not just if an ad click-through led straight to the shopping cart.

However, these don’t tally purchases inspired by owned (Page posts) or earned (word of mouth) media on Facebook. Those are huge. Facebook tells me the top 25 most talked about Pages this week were all retailers. Walmart, Toys’R'Us, and Macy’s had the most PTAT (Likes/comments/shares). User mentions of the word “shopping” spiked 586 percent last week, and many of those probably cited where people were shopping.

That’s a ton of viral marketing that could be driving downstream conversions but isn’t being counted. Facebook may need to extend these attribution systems so ecommerce sites can tell whether a buyer is one of their fans, saw a particular post promoting what they bought, or saw a link to the product that was shared by a friend.

Twitter seems to be way behind on this. I haven’t heard of any downstream conversion attribution systems connected to Twitter accounts or ads. Sure, to their site from one of their Promoted Tweets. But what if minutes, hours, or days later they remember the ad or account, search for it on Google, and end up making a purchase?

Twitter has confirmed with me that it doesn’t have any downstream conversion tracking right now, which means it isn’t getting the credit it deserves. I think correcting that will be a big focus for Twitter in 2013.

It’s critical that these social networks beef up their attribution systems because advertisers only want to plop down their dollars where they can see clear return on investment. If you spend $50,000 on Twitter ads, but all your holiday sales come from Google, you might shift that budget to search ads.

Alternatively, if Facebook and Twitter really push their attribution systems, they could claim credit for driving purchases they only lightly influenced, or for delivering buyers that didn’t even notice they saw an ad for what they bought. That might not be the most honest business tactic, but right now search engines are scoring touchdowns without giving credit to who threw the ball.

[Image Credit: Inc.]

Enterprise marketing technology company Unified today released the latest version of its Social Operating Platform, which includes a new ad monitoring application, improved insights and a self-serve version of its app suite that helps companies amplify their messages by integrating social features.

Unified says it wants to bring transparency to social advertising through its new adMonitor where users can see a record of campaigns by any Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer or Ads API provider. Agencies Horizon Media and Deutsche have been using the tool to bring together data from a number of vendors so they can monitor and compare results.

Unified Chief Product Officer and co-founder Jason Beckerman compares adMonitor to advertising software like Doubleclick, MediaMind or Atlas. He says that although some of the dynamics have changed with the rise of social advertising, the fundamental needs are similar to traditional digital advertising. Brands and agencies are looking for infrastructure to simplify the complex ecosystem of platforms and vendors that have arisen.

Rather than being another ad provider in that mix, Unified wants to serve as a technology platform. Again, Beckerman draws the comparison with DoubleClick, which started as an ad network competing with others but then began selling software that has become the system of record for much of the industry. Unified hopes its system can do the same for social.

In addition to adMonitor, Unified today released upgraded insights and a new “Brand ROI Timeline.” Users can import any third-party data set and assign dollar values to different actions in order to understand the earned media impact of their social efforts over time.

Also released today is the “Amplet Builder,” a self-serve version of through which marketers can integrate social sharing features and proper tracking framework so that they can see how their messages are being amplified across different channels.

Unified launched and has been releasing updates quarterly. The company, which raised $14 million in June, now has more than 40 employees with offices in San Francisco, New York and Chicago.

President Barack Obama had three times as many as his Republican rival Mitt Romney on Election Day, and increased his share of Facebook friends 15 times over from 2008, according to a new list of data that examines the 2012 presidential race by the numbers.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook today that it is now selling iTunes digital gift cards through its . The feature includes iTunes catalogue integration so users can search for music, movies, apps and other content through Facebook and then send recommendations along with the gift cards they buy for friends.

The addition comes just at the start of the holiday shopping season, which will be an early test for Facebook Gifts. The social network added new retail partners, such as babyGAP, Fab, Brookstone and Lindt. Users can also gift subscriptions to television and music services like Hulu Plus, Pandora and Rdio. These digital gifts, especially iTunes credits, could be big sellers since they are low cost and nearly universal in appeal.

Users can purchase iTunes cards worth $10, $15, $25 or $50. There is an option to search and recommend specific content for a friend, but there is no way to buy a particular album or movie, for example. We’d like to see Facebook and Apple offer the option for users to give even smaller gifts, such as a single song, iOS app or movie rental. Users might be more likely to send each other these gifts for everyday occasions.

Facebook takes a percentage of sales — varying by partner or item — and in exchange helps promote the goods, photographing the products, writing copy and displaying them on site. Facebook and Apple haven’t revealed their arrangement, but AllThingsD sources say retailers that sell iTunes gift cards typically take 13 percent of those sales. The two companies have partnered in new ways this year, including with Apple’s mobile and desktop operating systems. In the past, Facebook and Apple have had a more difficult time cooperating. Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs called Facebook’s terms “onerous” after an integration with the Ping social network fell through. Now, either through leadership changes or growing necessity, the companies are apparently able to work together.

Facebook Gifts are still rolling out to users in the U.S. The company hasn’t said when all U.S. users will have the feature, but it’s possible for users to get access sooner if they receive a gift from a friend.

For physical goods, Facebook provides merchants with packaging materials and helps with tracking shipping and customer service. A benefit of Facebook Gifts is that users don’t have to know a friend’s address to send them something. They can choose a gift, send their friend a message and a preview of the gift, and then the recipient can enter where they want the item shipped. Users receive notifications throughout the process so they can track the status of the gift.

Facebook on Monday  of iTunes credit to its  service. Users can now give iTunes digital gift cards accompanied by recommendations on content that their friends can purchase.

iTunes gifts can be purchased in the following amounts: $10, $15, $25 or $50. Recommendations can include songs, albums, apps and movies.

Facebook first announced the current iteration of Gifts back in September and has been moving fast with updates. Earlier this month, it enabled purchases from its iOS app. The company is also testing charitable contributions that can be made on behalf of friends.

Partners include both digital services, like Hulu Plus and Rdio, as well as physical goods from retailers like Baby Gap and Brookstone.

Apple and Facebook have shared a hot-and-cold relationship in recent years, so today’s collaboration could be taken as a sign of an improving relationship. The two famously had a disagreement over Apple’s Ping social music service, but patched things over with the release of iOS 6, which includes deep integration with Facebook. Given the number of Apple devices that kids are hoping for this holiday season, Facebook’s iTunes gifting support is well-timed.

Apple brought in a record $2.1 billion in revenue from the iTunes Store last quarter. It’s gearing up to revamp the store with a new interface in the soon-to-be-released iTunes 11.

Image credit: Wong Mei Teng

Facebook usage can , but a study from the University of Edinburgh Business School shows that it can also lead to higher levels of stress, as users add more people. The simple reason is that as more people are added to a user’s social circle — friends, relatives, co-workers, classmates — there’s more of a chance for embarrassment or some other kind of faux pas.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook and Apple deepened their alliance today, as Facebook Gifts is iTunes digital gift certificates. Upon purchase, Facebook users can suggest what music, video, or apps their friends should spend their $10, $15, $25, or $50 credit on. By adding one of the world’s most popular presents to its Gifts store, Facebook Gifts could boost sales and split the 30% margins with Apple.

What the actual revenue split is remains a secret. We do know there’s no shipping costs for either partner to pay for, and Apple typically taxes content and app creators a 30% to be sold in iTunes.

This is the latest move tying Facebook and Apple together after the social network was baked into iOS 6, and Facebook sharing buttons and social context (friends’ faces next to things they bought) were added to iTunes. If today’s integration is a success, it could create a virtuous loop where Facebookers buy iTunes credits for friends, who buy media or apps and share news of their purchases back to Facebook.

It’s a big day for Facebook Gifts, as iTunes is likely its most well-known partner other than Starbucks. Facebook unveiledits entrance into ecommerce in late September. It began in beta available to just a small percentage of US users, but earlier this month Facebook rolled out the product to tens of millions of people and added tons of new gift vendors. It’s also started showing you friends birthdays and a call to buy them Gifts atop the the mobile news feed.

The iTunes gift purchase process is a breeze. You pick a friend to buy for, select the dollar amount of the gift certificate, and then add an optional suggestion for what friends should buy. Gifters can browse categories like Top Albums, or use a search box to find the media they want to recommend. Once completed the gift will appear wrapped on a the recipient’s Timeline until they open it.

If Facebook is smart, it will use its data on which devices people use and their Likes to recommend who to buy iTunes gifts for and what they should buy. For example, Facebook should highlight iTunes credits in the array of purchase choices if you’re buying for a friend who uses Facebook’s iPhone or iPad apps. A Starbucks digital gift card might be a better suggestion for Facebook’s Android app users.

The next step would be tailoring what it tells you to suggest a friend buy to their Likes and app use. If they Like Taylor Swift, it could make it easy to recommend her new album Red. If someone shares to Facebook from the classic Angry Birds app, it might say you should recommend they spend their credit on Bad Piggies or Angry Birds Space.

This is the real potential of Facebook Gifts — taking the guess work and decision making out of shopping. It’s focus should be smoothing out all the friction of giving presents to friends until the only pain is the price. Then it won’t just be capture more of the gifting market, it will enlarge it all together and turn non-shoppers into ecommerce addicts.

Some Facebook users have been posting status updates that include legal language they believe will protect their copyright and privacy. The meme is a hoax that began in May and is going viral again.

Facebook’s actual governing documents, including its “Data Use Policy” and “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” are in fact , but users’ status updates will not have an effect on the outcome or even on their own protection. By creating a Facebook account, users agree to the terms in the Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. They cannot deny these terms with a status update. Further, the meme going around now includes erroneous references to the Berne Convention, Uniform Commercial Code and the Rome Statute, as seen below.

It’s likely that most people posting these updates are not aware that they can view Facebook’s latest policies and offer feedback . This is not surprising, but it should be concerning to Facebook. Despite its efforts, the social network is still not well-trusted by users and misinformation spreads faster than ever because of the features it developed. [Update 11/26/12 10:52 a.m. PST - Facebook responded with a "fact check" on its Newsroom site .]

On , Facebook proposed changes to its governing documents, including revisions that will allow the company to share information with affiliates like Instagram and put an end to site governance voting, among other more minor changes. The documents also include new language to help users understand their privacy settings and how Facebook advertising works. Users have until 9 a.m. PST on Nov. 28 to comment on the changes .

More than 16,000 comments have already been made on the , though most of them are variations of “I oppose the changes and want a vote about the demands on www.our-policy.org.” A number of users are also commenting with a variation of the bogus copyright notice.

Under Facebook’s current policy, when more than 7,000 comments are made on a proposal, the changes will be put to a vote. This is why so many users are copy-pasting the same comment repeatedly. However, results of the vote are only binding if at least 30 percent of users participate. Facebook is looking to eliminate this entire process in its latest revisions, saying it promotes quantity over quality feedback. The company will continue to put policy changes up for a review period when users can comment and ask questions, but there will no longer be a vote.

Visit Facebook’s  for more information about the proposed changes and to leave your feedback.

Facebook filled a post that has been open since February, tapping Google Asia-Pacific Head of Mobile and Social William Easton to lead its operations in and , based in Sydney.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook changed the icon that appears next to friends’ on users’ homepages into one resembling a birthday cake.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook appears to be testing a feature that provides on posts by Facebook users who link to posts by .

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) regularly checks social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, for insider trading, according to two top agents, April Brooks and David Chaves, who oversee what the FBI calls Operation Perfect Hedge. The initiative has resulted in more than 60 convictions of hedge fund traders, analysts, and industry consultants.

The duo says while it is hard to predict the next wave of securities fraud, advances in technology and monitoring social media have significantly helped. “I will tell you technology will play a huge part, social media, Twitter. Any kind of technology that is new and doesn’t exist today, if there is any way to exploit it, these individuals will exploit it,” Brooks told Reuters. “Some view insider trading as reaching this crescendo, and we have reached a top. I would suggest we have not,” Chaves said.

This is certainly not the first time we’ve heard of the FBI, or another government organization, monitoring social networks, and it definitely won’t be the last. Earlier this year, the bureau was looking to develop a Web app that could continuously monitor social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, as well as various news feeds. The goal was simple: improve real-time intelligence for current and emerging security threats.

An FBI document from earlier this year included this paragraph:

Intelligence analysis will often use social media to receive the first tip-off that a crisis has occurred, collect details of the crisis on scene through eyewitnesses, detect probably directions and timeframes the crisis is taking and can even serve as evidence for investigation, thus, it is an integral part of intelligence operations at SIOC.

It’s therefore not too big of a jump to go from monitoring for security threats to watching for financial threats.

See also – As of today, the FBI is working 24/7 to investigate hackers and network attacks

Image credit: Elvis Santana

Even if your business doesn’t have the marketing budget of brands such as , Zappos, and , you can still make an impression on Facebook by studying their tactics for success. Mike Maghsoudi, , pointed out the things that five brands have done that can be repeated by smaller brands looking to connect with users.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook had fever during the week of Nov. 16 through 23, as the top 25 scores went to retailers, with gigantic jumps in mentions of Black Friday (1,450 percent), shopping (586 percent), mall (304 percent), and sales (162 percent) during that time period.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook has hit back at a lawsuit, filed by CVG-SAB last month, which claims that the social network has copied its “Want” button idea.

According to a report published by MLive earlier today, Facebook is arguing that the word “want” is a common term that people use frequently in everyday life. As a result, CVG-SAB shouldn’t be able to claim any ownership of it as an idea or product on the Internet.

As part of its counterclaim, Facebook has reportedly said: “In this particular case, ‘want’ allows a consumer to express his or her need or desire for a retail product or service.”

Facebook is rumoured to be testing a “Want” button on its social network at the moment, which will supplement the “Like” button which has become almost synonymous with the company in recent years.

Businesses will therefore be able to use the “Want” button to direct consumers to a website, entirely independent of Facebook, where they can purchase their products or services. The concept is likely to be included as part of its Collections feature, which takes after Pinterest but was taken down last month.

Businesses who are thought to have taken part in Facebook’s trial of the “Want” button include Neiman Marcus, Wayfair and Victoria’s Secret, among others.

CVG-SAB, a company based in Michigan, filed a lawsuit against Facebook last month, claiming that the new feature closely resembled one of its own products, wantbutton.com.

The company also runs a social network, simply called Want, which helps shoppers find and promote the products they want to own. This website also incorporates a “Want” button underneath each item.

As a result, CVG-SAB claims that existence of the “Want” button on Facebook is causing confusion online – even though it technically doesn’t exist yet.

“Facebook’s unauthorized use of Plaintiff’s WANT mark has already caused confusion in the marketplace, to Plaintiff’s substantial and irreparable harm,” the lawsuit said. “Facebook’s conduct is intentional, as it had prior knowledge of Plaintiff’s use off, and superior rights in, Plaintiff’s WANT mark. Despite such knowledge, Facebook forged ahead in disregard of Plaintiff’s trademark rights.”

CVG-SAB is now asking for a temporary, preliminary, and permanent injunction against the “Want” button being developed by Facebook, as well as any damages that may have occured as a result of the button’s existence.

Facebook, however, is now reportedly asking the court to rule that it is not violating any trademark rights, and that CVG-SAB should not be allowed any trademarks for its “Want” button.

Zuckerberg’s empire clearly doesn’t plan on rolling over in regards to CVG-SAB’s claims. The right to trademark a button with the word “want” on it does seem a bit unfair, but we’ll be following this case to find out the court’s final decision.

Image Credit: Ed Jones/AFP/Getty Images

Facebook struck back in a lawsuit over its filed by Farmington Hills, Mich.-based CVG-SAB, which claimed that it holds patents and trademarks for its own product, launched in September 2010.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook has recently been who have access to Gifts, allowing them to give presents to friends through the social network. Just in time for the holidays, the social network is also adding partners, giving users more options. Facebook announced that users who have access to Gifts — through iTunes.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.