London-based Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Upcast Social has announced global expansion, opening an office in Singapore to help the company establish a better presence in the Asia/Pacific region.

Upcast Social also plans to open two more offices in the APAC region later this year.

Grant Muckle, Managing Partner, commented on the expansion in a press release:

We’re confident that our extensive experience working with international media agencies, Facebook and Twitter as well as major brands is a great fit with meeting the needs of marketers in this region, and we look forward to working with them.

Joining the Singapore office is Philip Diamond, Business Development Manager.

The most iconic brand in whiskey, Jack Daniel’s, drives amazing engagement worldwide.

, they show different content than they do in the United States.

And it rocks (no pun intended).

There are now 86 million people in Brazil on Facebook — triple what we saw two years ago.

Compare that to 178 million people in the United States on Facebook, who we can target with ads.

We see there are 600,000 folks in Brazil of minimum drinking age that like scotch whiskey or whiskey.

Plenty big audience to target.

Normally we’d advise adding a  to increase social proof and engagement rates.

Yet, the engagement rate is so high that the cost per engagement is showing is barely noticeable.

Part of this is the low CPM, especially when you mix in RHS (Right Hand Side) with News Feed placements.

And using the ever-improved , Facebook does a lot of the work for us.

Not all engagement is the same.

Comments and shares are worth more than a post like.

And photo views don’t generate stories in the News Feed of friends.

The team at Brown-Forman (parent company of Jack Daniel’s) has placed greater focus on engagement, zeroing in on key audiences.

Luke Elliott – Digital Marketing Manager – Latin America at Brown-Forman

“We’re particularly interested in knowing that the content our fans find interesting can be viewed front-and-center. We enjoy a fantastic fan base, and we work to be sure we are delivering to places where folks are engaging with our brands, both online and offline” says Luke Elliott, of the LatAm Digital Marketing Team.

 

Certainly you could use optimized CPM and bid for action types, if you wanted.

Lessons for CPG brands

• Try different photos to see what works best. Time of day matters, too.  Showing a picture of the bottle works great for Jack Daniel’s. What works in one country will be different in another. Spanish and Portuguese posts take 30% more characters than to say the same thing in English.
• Make sure you have a balanced funnel strategy. If you run fan acquisition campaigns, make sure to have engagement campaigns on at the same time to nurture these new fans.
• Optimized CPM works. Just use it. Facebook’s algorithms are so smart that they will automatically find who is most likely to engage. Only certain direct marketers can get away with CPC bidding.
• Keep the pilot light on.  We advocate an “always on” strategy to have steady, lightweight engagement over time. If you have ads that are all on or all off, likely due to product launches and campaign planning cycles, your social relationships will not be as strong.

As more and more small businesses and major brands get into the , competition for News Feed and sidebar space is increasing. As competition rises, bids go up and the total cost of advertising on Facebook rises.

For many companies, that’s enough to look elsewhere. Ted Dhanik, President and CEO of online marketing firm Engage:BDR, says that many of the company’s clients have started increasing their spend elsewhere on the web while shifting focus away from Facebook. Engage:BDR’s ad ecosystem encompasses 253 million unique users per month in 25 countries.

While Facebook ads do still deliver solid results, Dhanik told Inside Facebook that the price is starting to get too high for many businesses, who are looking for the most bang for their buck.

Dhanik explained how many advertisers are starting to look away from Facebook:

Typical display buying strategies enable advertisers to reach their users and targeted audience in a couple of different ways: leveraging third-party (sources) like BlueKai, and there are others like direct targeting for content across thousands of sites across the web and all three channels: display, mobile and web. Typically, depending on the audience that advertisers are trying to reach, we have access to the sites where they live and we place granularly targeted buys placement that is compression curve specific, audience specific, stuff like that.

In the first couple of years, when Facebook caught on fire, a lot of budgets shifted to Facebook and so the price for display and mobile advertising came down quite a bit, and it has come down because saturation isn’t as great as it was before.

As an example, Engage:BDR notes that a retail fashion client ran a test with the company to test their ROI on Facebook vs. other online venues. The CPA goal was $50 per new customer, since their Facebook advertising CPA was reaching $60 and climbing. Utilizing proprietary online and offline data, Engage:BDR did some A/B testing to single users with gender-specific creative, directing them to appropriate landing pages.

For display advertising, the client was able to lower its eCPA by 50 percent and increase ROI by 200 percent. Because of these results, the client shifted 40 percent of its Facebook ad budget to display advertising for the rest of 2014.

Dhanik explained what many  advertisers are thinking when they compare Facebook to other methods of advertising:

When people are looking for external forces and looking at incremental channels, they’re doing it because the cost is going up. The cost, meaning not necessarily the cost per click or CPM, but their effective cost of the ROI based on their KPIs. … It’s not necessarily profitable as it was before and now we have to try to find channels that are within the range of what’s acceptable for us to operate profitably. As the price goes up, the competition gets deeper, and engagement is less and conversion rates go down.

Readers: Have you shifted ad budget money from Facebook to somewhere else?

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

, a certified nutritionist’s diet solution, has a healthy Facebook following, but the page really took off financially when it teamed up with online advertising agency Quality Score for a Facebook ad campaign using .

Through Partner Categories on the platform of Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Adquant, Beyond Diet experienced a 224 percent higher return on investment, compared to standard targeting options. Beyond Diet also scored a 36 percent lower CPA than standard targeting options, a 134 percent higher conversion rate and a 176 percent higher clickthrough rate than standard targeting options.

How did it happen?

Quality Score and Beyond Diet utilized the data within Facebook to properly target based on interests and demographic, but unfortunately the options didn’t include retail or consumer data, making it more difficult to target ads based on consumer behavior.

Quality Score utilized with Partner Categories to create audiences on Facebook based on shopping history and habits that fit the Beyond Diet profile.

Specifically, they were targeting:

• Consumers who purchased diet foods, low fat foods, and organic foods
• Consumers who on a controlled diet for health reasons
• Consumers who have purchased a diet book
• Consumers who have joined a diet club or organization

The ad was quite successful, giving Beyond Diet a 224 percent higher ROI than ads using traditional targeting techniques.

The case study summed up the major takeaways:

Facebook makes it very easy for advertisers to target potential customers by their demographic profile and their likes and interests. Now with Partner Categories, retailers can reach out to potential customers based on their consumer behavior. Big data that used to only be available to the largest of enterprise companies is now available to retailers of all sizes who can and should expect premium results by leveraging big data.

Readers: How often do you utilize Partner Categories in Facebook advertising?

The term native advertising gets bandied around every now and then. Its popularity has been spurred on by the ad format’s appropriate fit in the appropriate setting and context.

I’ve seen native advertising defined as: “Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form and function of the user experience in which it is placed.” — Share Through. That’s a pretty good definition.

What we at Reqvu have experienced on Facebook by helping our customers harness social word of mouth, however, is that while most brands and businesses can easily copy the form and function part of the definition, where they fall down is in their ability to mimic the user experience of social.

Whether it’s from a lack of understanding of the friend-to-friend tone of conversation on Facebook, or an inability to let go of a corporate voice, or change creative ads to authentic conversations… I just can’t think of many great examples of really well-done native advertisements on Facebook, especially on mobile where some 70 percent of all Facebook users get their social fix. In fact, more often than not, we’re presented with poorly targeted software/app purchase recommendations.

So if mimicking natural user behavior on Facebook is so tough, then why don’t businesses simply let Facebook users (their customers) do it for them? In a world where people take photos of their food, in branded clothes, at colorful events, inside of recognizable restaurants, malls, nightclubs, and businesses in greater and greater numbers than ever before, and share them to their social graph immediately, why are marketers failing to harness and drive this honest-to-goodness native content to their advantage?

So if the user behavior is already popular, and growing rapidly … the only thing that is missing is how to change native content into a native ad. Basically align the motive for the user making the post to that of an advertiser (promotional purposes) and that’s where incentives and creative tools play a big role in aiding the native to do a great job of it.

Facebook friends don’t consider your movie recommendations, favorite music choices and selfies of your cute, new jacket as ads. And that’s what makes them the perfect native ads, because they’re made by the natives themselves in their own unique and personal voices. This is true social word of mouth advertising.

When a friend makes a post of this nature, as a user, I often acknowledge or even truly “like” the post and will also often comment on them, taking advantage of the even further engagement and reach advantage that users updates have over fan page posts. Consider that you’ve already opted in to see your friend’s posts and don’t need to seek out a business’ Fan page, and should that Friend be so savvy and kind as to tag the brand or businesses fan page in their post … well you’ve pretty much got the perfect Facebook ad … natively.

Timothy Brown is a social media marketing veteran developer of multiple apps and web properties covered in publications such as Time, Forbes, GQ and Wired. Presently he is the co-founder of Reqvu, Inc. a company that specializes in social word of mouth.

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

On March 4, Facebook will rework its . Previously, the levels of advertising on Facebook were ad and campaign.

But soon, Facebook will break this up into campaign, ad set, and ads.

Facebook explained this in a :

Campaigns correspond to each of your advertising objectives, like building brand awareness or driving web traffic. They’re designed to help you optimize and measure your results for each objective across multiple ad sets and ads.

Each campaign can feature multiple ad sets, each of which has its own budget and schedule. You can also organize each ad set to represent audience segments, like people who live near your store. This will help you control the amount you spend on each audience, decide when they will see your ads, and measure their response. The ad delivery system will optimize delivery for the best-performing ad in an ad set.

Within each ad set, you can have multiple ads, each of which can feature different images, links, video or text. You’ll still control the creative, targeting and bidding at the ad level.

Click below to learn more.

Facebook explains that with the new structure, an advertiser can start with a campaign for each objective — such as in-store sales or post engagement. Then, ad sets can be created to represent the audiences that will be reached. Lastly, ads can be created within each ad set.

When will this be available?

The new campaign structure will be reflected worldwide across all ad interfaces, including the Ads Create Tool, Ads Manager and Power Editor, as well as third-party ad interfaces built by Preferred Marketing Developers. Though these updates won’t begin rolling out until March 4, we want to make sure all our advertisers and partners know in advance that this helpful change is coming.

When the new structure is rolled out to your ad account, all your campaigns will be migrated automatically to the new structure. The migration will not impact the delivery, spend or performance of your existing ads, and you’ll still have access to historical data for any of your existing campaigns and ads.

Readers: What do you think of this new flow?

Top image courtesy of Shutterstock.

While users have had the ability to  for a few months, more pages are now being allowed to edit their posts. As noticed by Or Fialkov of Fialkov Digital, Facebook is rolling out the ability for pages to go back and correct mistakes or update information in their posts.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed to Inside Facebook that all verified pages can do this, and that it is being tested for some non-verified pages:

We started rolling out post editing capabilities for verified Pages earlier this month. All verified Pages now have this capability, and we’re in the process of testing it with a small group of non-verified Pages.

There’s no date yet for a global rollout, but verified pages started to have this capability earlier this month.

Readers: Do you have this capability?

On January 19, Break.com crossed a million fans. Two years ago, they only had 193,000 fans. What is behind this nearly five-fold increase? How have they adapted to the many Facebook algorithmic changes? How does paid media most effectively

is the social guru behind Break.com. He was courteous enough to give us a peek at the numbers. You can .

We know that . Break.com has been averaging 97,000 for , also known as storytellers. They hit 1.8 million active users when they reached a million fans.

This is a 612% increase if we look at daily storytellers (people who like, share, comment, or check-in). What was behind this increase?

IS THE CULPRIT ADS?

 Break.com ran only half a million paid impressions in January. There was no correlation between engagement rate and paid efforts since the impressions represented only 0.28% of total impressions.

If it wasn’t ads, then it must be organic engagement.

THE ENGAGEMENT FUNNEL BROKEN DOWN

We know that there is a direct linkage between fans and storytellers, the model works like this: Fans x News Feed Reach x Engagement Rate x Percent of Storytellers x stories per storyteller = stories.

The spike in PTAT was on the 19th, evidence by the green bars in the diagram above for News Feed reach. Of course, an active user base is predicated by a higher newsfeed reach often because of additional reach driven by actions that fans take.

In other words, Facebook allocates every page when the page first posts, but then, as fans interact if the engagement rate is high enough, the additional reach can be an order of magnitude more than the initial reach.

For the data geeks out there we simply downloaded the page and post level .CSV insights files. Then we calculated each of these ratios above and put conditional formatting on the cells to visually draw out trends. if you are interested in getting a copy of the Excel workbook.

Facebook has been reporting this additional reach (viral) as part of your organic reach in the web-based insights. However, they do separate in the .CSV download and the API.

Let’s take a look.

We overlaid viral reach against daily storytellers and find they match nearly perfectly. In fact, the correlation is 0.98. Our data scientist friends know that 1.0 is a perfect data correlation.

Here are the raw numbers. At their peak, Break.com had a whopping viral reach of over 14.6 million. On that day, they drove almost 697K stories via 598K people. So, the average storyteller told 1.17 stories on that day.

A SURPRISING DISCOVERY

We plotted stories per storyteller against viral reach and found a -0.66 correlation. In other words, the fewer stories per storyteller, the greater the viral reach.

This seems highly counter-intuitive, but what is really going on is that when content spreads beyond the core fan base, we are activating less passionate, more infrequent fans. And it’s the weighted average of these fair weather fans that pulls down stories per storyteller.

BUT HOW ABOUT CONTENT EFFECTIVENESS?

The median average of their News Feed reach is 1.39 times their fan base. But on their million fan celebration day, they hit 14.9, which is 11 times higher.

Was it an amazing piece of content or perhaps an increase in post frequency?

Below we plotted posts per day against viral reach. There is a clear relationship between these two factors evidenced by a correlation of 0.38.

We know that since January of this year brands especially in media and entertainment have had to increase their post frequency to replace News Feed reach. News stations often post 30-40 times per day with no increase in negative feedback or News Feed burnout.

We see that is the case here as well. They are averaging 46 negative feedbacks per day on 770K daily consumptions. That rounds to zero.

Only one of the top posts from January 19th were in their top 20 posts from the month. It goes to show that media companies cannot be as reliant on home runs, as opposed to a steady stream of singles and doubles. It is just too hard to predict if you are going to have a winner.

Break.com You should watch it!

Here is their top post by the way.

It drove 72K likes and 48K shares. It had a viral reach of 8.1 million with zero paid impressions.

Net-net, Break.com is showing that viral power is still possible without heavy ad spend, if your content is good enough. But of course, not everyone has a Chris Strickland!

Break is part of the DEFY Media network that was formed when Break Media and Alloy Digital merged in November 2013. DEFY reaches 125MM unique monthly viewers across owned and operated YouTube channels.

When Facebook acquired internationally-popular messenger for a total of $19 billion, the tech world was abuzz with reaction, jubilation and speculation.

We talked with several analysts and experts to get their take on if WhatsApp was the right purchase for Facebook — and at the right price.

Thorsten Trapp, CTO of Tyntec, gave some insight into WhatsApp’s international dominance. He noted that WhatsApp has forced mobile operators to lose billions of dollars in lost SMS fees:

The fact that WhatsApp in Europe has a huge penetration in users opens it up to this huge userbase. Internationally, they are very big as well, and the reason is they are a substitute for SMS. WhatsApp cannibalizes SMS. In Europe, SMS messages are paid per SMS. It’s just within the last year or half year that they were included into phone plans, but way too late. In the U.S., this situation is very different. SMS messages were included into the plan very early on. The dominant reason of using WhatsApp isn’t there (in the U.S.). So this explains why it’s weak in the U.S. International messages were ridiculously expensive, and in Europe, you have a lot of borders.

Kevin Scott, Co-Founder of the Addo Institute, feels that this is a gutsy move for Facebook:

They’re trying to attract younger people, and they’re trying to attract people in the developing world. We did a high school leadership program last fall. Just like so many businesses, they’re trying to get their customer constituencies to share. We tried to get them to share on three platforms — Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. When we said Twitter, kind of a neutral response. When we said Instagram, they cheered wildly. When we said Facebook, there was either silence or they booed. This younger generation is increasingly tough to reach and Facebook knows that WhatsApp is a way to get into that market.

Arnie Chaudhuri, the co-founder of Chaatz, and a former Facebook mobile developer, feels that the price is right for the social network:

There’s no doubt that one of Facebook’s primary objectives is to connect the world and acquiring WhatsApp is key to their strategy. There are still billions of people out there using feature phones that they can ultimately connect, driving incredibly user engagement numbers. There are multiple companies trying to reach them, ours included, but no one has truly been able to do this yet. WhatsApp gives them a huge opportunity in terms of penetrating markets where they’re not currently and makes the $19 billion a worthy investment if they can eventually connect even half of those billions.

There are a few aspects that make messaging apps so valuable. The high level of engagement and active returning consumer base helps to make them very appealing. From a product and human psychology point of view, messaging apps have a high pull factor drawing the user in. Usually when there is a notification, the user immediately drops everything else to turn their attention to the message. Additionally, the time a user spends per day on these messaging apps is more quality than simply browsing . And finally, there’s the cost factor. WhatsApp and plenty of other messaging apps are free and allow people to connect with others from all over the world, vs. the limitations that traditional SMS might have.

Keith Trivitt, Director of Corporate Communications, Matomy Media Group, is also a fan of the acquisition:

Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp sends a clear message of where Mark Zuckerberg views the company’s path to sustained success: mobile, mobile and mobile. The fact that WhatsApp is a mobile-only service, and that 70% of its users are active on the service daily, aligns well with Facebook’s mobile push, which requires a highly engaged, active user base accessing the social network across multiple devices all day long. For advertisers and marketers, the WhatsApp acquisition makes a lot of sense. Facebook has been steadily introducing innovative ad-targeting solutions that have turned the social network into a hybrid engagement plus direct-response ad platform. With its acquisition of WhatsApp, Facebook should be able to provide advertisers with even more targeted and real-time mobile-only ad solutions.

Molly McCarty, the Social Account Manger for 3Q Digital, discussed with Inside Facebook what this move means for the mobile ad industry:

Facebook is very clearly the dominant social network, and they will do whatever needs to be done to maintain that presence. Their most recent demonstration of this, is their recent acquisition of WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars. Currently,WhatsApp does not have any sort of advertising on its platform and only costs its users $1 to use. Zuckerberg made it clear that advertising is not his primary focus with WhatsApp. He does not plan on immediately testing ads, like was done with Instagram. Instead, the goal is to grow WhatsApp and once it becomes more widely used, Zuckerberg and Team will possibly shift their focus to monetizing the platform. Until then, the goal is to continue to increase the connectivity of the world.

Readers: How do you feel about Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp?

In a similar move to , Facebook will bring into the News Feed. For instance, if a page you haven’t like tags a page you have, that post could appear in your News Feed.

Facebook Product Manager Andrew Song explained this :

When we tested adding this feature for Pages we found that people liked seeing this type of content in their News Feeds and gave these stories high scores in surveys.

We look at many factors to make sure the most relevant stories appear in News Feed, including which posts are getting the most engagement (such as likes, comments, shares and clicks) across all of Facebook. We also consider which posts are getting the most engagement from people who like both the Page that posted and the Page that was tagged.

For example, if many people who like Dwight Howard also like the Bleacher Report, it suggests that these two Pages are connected. If we see that people who like both the Bleacher Report and Dwight Howard are liking the post above, that’s an indication that it may be relevant for people who only like Dwight Howard.

Readers: What do you think of this?

Shareaholic, a content discovery and sharing platform, found in a recent report that 51 percent of Facebook referrals come from mobile.

The new findings are a follow-up to Shareaholic’s October report, which includes four extra months of data. What they found is that Facebook mobile is sending more referrals, meaning the mobile base continues to grow along with Facebook’s overall user base.

They also found:

1. Since September, the share of visits from Facebook mobile increased 197 percent.
2. Overall, Facebook mobile drove 8.25 percent of the visits Shareaholic’s network of 200,000+ sites reaching 250+ million uniques received in January.
3. Since Facebook’s total share of visits was 16.21 percent, mobile made up more than half (nearly 51 percent) of Facebook referrals.

What does this mean for and ? Danny Wong, Shareaholic’s marketing manager, told Inside Facebook:

It’s amazing that Facebook mobile has such a dynamic number in traffic. It really shows where Facebook is headed. If you look at Paper, it’s beautiful for reading long-form content. Users are now spending more time online reading what’s sourced from Facebook. A lot of credit is due to the algorithm recommending which friends to interact with and what stories to read.

Wong added that Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp shows that the social network is very much a mobile business and predicts that the app may soon serve Facebook ads. WhatsApp noted in late 2012, ‘,’ and said it wouldn’t happen in their .

Will they renege and become a platform for Facebook to shell out its ever-profitable mobile ads? Who knows? Your guess is probably as good as mine.

So, if your business or blog isn’t very mobile friendly, Wong said you’ll want to invest more resources into building a mobile experience your visitors can’t get enough of — or at least one they won’t hate.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook is doing away with its email service, the company announced Monday. Previously, an “” email address as a Facebook user’s default email address. Emails sent to that address would go to the user’s message box.

But now, Facebook is phasing this out — because of a lack of participation.

A Facebook spokesperson explained to Inside Facebook what will happen:

Over the next few weeks we’re notifying people who use their email that the feature is changing. When someone sends you an email to your address, it will no longer go to your Messages on Facebook. Instead, the email will be forwarded to the primary email address on your account. (People will have the option to turn forwarding off.)

We’re making this change because most people haven’t been using their Facebook email address, and we can focus on improving our mobile messaging experience for everyone.

The spokesperson said the transition should be complete in early March.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

AdRoll, a Facebook Exchange partner, recently unveiled AdRoll Retargeting for Mobile, a new offering that allows marketers to effectively advertise to customers and prospects across devices.

According to AdRoll, their expanded mobile retargeting is currently the only unified solution for advertisers to target segments of desktop site visitors across both Facebook’s mobile apps. Now advertisers can identify high-intent desktop users and target them across mobile devices to drive app installs and conversions through Facebook Custom Audiences and Twitter tailored audiences, all from one unified dashboard. AdRoll is currently accepting signups in limited private beta.

Adam Berke, AdRoll president, announced the news in a press release:

AdRoll is committed to providing marketers with the tools and insights to create campaigns that drive high ROI and solve for their real world advertising objectives. We’ve built deep expertise in retargeting, and we’re now excited to extend our platform to address our customers’ need to reach people across a range of devices.

AdRoll says it’s dedicated to developing a performance marketing platform that extends across devices to address a range of marketing objectives. This first release is unique in solving key challenges:

• Driving app installs: AdRoll’s solution promotes mobile apps by retargeting desktop audiences on mobile devices with app install ads that drive users to the iTunes App Store and Google Play.

• Driving conversions on mobile-optimized sites: Increase mobile sales and lead conversions by driving desktop and mobile visitors to mobile sites and landing pages.

• Providing a unified experience for advertisers to reach users across Facebook and Twitter: AdRoll provides a single platform for data collection, segmentation, optimization, and transparent reporting.

• Reach across the mobile web: Retarget mobile site visitors as they browse other mobile sites.

Haven’t filled out all of your ? Your Facebook friends can ask you to do so. Some users are seeing prompts on mobile and desktop to ask their friends for information that isn’t present on timeline, such as phone number or address.

When a user visits the “About” section of the , they’ll see a prompt that will allow them to ask their friend (this only works for users with whom people are connected) for information.

Users can then send a note, explaining to their friend why they’re asking for this information:

The friend will then see this request, and can choose to ignore this or add this info to their timeline.

Readers: What do you think about this?

 

 

AdStage, a Facebook ads API partner, announced Monday that the company has raised a $1 million round of funding. The company is also launching a new app partnership program and platform API to allow developers to integrate additional apps into the platform.

The $1 million in funding game from Digital Garage, one of AdStage’s existing investors, bringing the total to more than $2.5 million since AdStage’s launch last year. This new round of funding will allow AdStage to grow from 11 employees to more than 20.

Sahil Jain, the company’s CEO and Co-Founder, announced this news in a press release:

We’ve come a long way since we launched our first product, AdStage Express, on this stage last year. The LAUNCH audience was incredibly receptive to our vision so it’s fitting to return and show extraordinary growth. In the time since, we’ve become a complete campaign management and analytics platform for businesses advertising across Google, Bing, Facebook & LinkedIn and we now offer a full suite of complementary apps under one roof which save advertiser’s time and dramatically improve their performance.

AdStage’s new app partnership program allows developers of complementary marketing apps to integrate products directly into AdStage using the New AdStage Platform API. Like Wordtracker, Unbounce and Optimizely, App Partners are able to manage, market and monetize their apps to thousands of advertisers through the app gallery and co-marketing campaigns. Additional App Partners include ReTargeter, Bigstock, Canned Banners, MixRank and Thinkstock by Getty Images. Developers can apply to the program at www.adstage.io/developers.

Facebook announced recently that the company has made a change in the way that legacy or memorialized accounts of . Previously, when an account was being memorialized, the privacy setting of the account was set to friends-only, regardless of how the person had their profile viewable in the past.

Now, the privacy settings on memorialized Facebook accounts will be left as-is, reflecting the person’s comfort with privacy.

Additionally, those with loved ones who have passed away can request that a can be made from their Facebook profile.

Facebook announced this is :

Based on conversations inspired by these questions, we’ve decided to make an important change to how we preserve legacies on Facebook. Up to now, when a person’s account was memorialized, we restricted its visibility to friends-only. This meant that people could no longer see the account or any of its content unless they were Facebook friends with the person who passed away. Starting today, we will maintain the visibility of a person’s content as-is. This will allow people to see memorialized profiles in a manner consistent with the deceased person’s expectations of privacy. We are respecting the choices a person made in life while giving their extended community of family and friends ongoing visibility to the same content they could always see.

a Look Back video for a Facebook user who has passed away.

Offerpop, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, recently announced a new round of hires — including one from Facebook.

• Andrea Bonner, Sales Director, from Facebook
• Kelsey Lyon, Business Development Representative, from DMA United
• Gabriela Cisneros, Business Development Representative, from Bite
• Adriel Bercow, Business Development Representative, from Experiences Unlimited
• Katie Josephson, Product Marketing Manager, from Zimbra
• Samuel Smith, Business Development Representative, from Melba.co
• Udit Lakhotia, Business Development Representative, graduate of Binghamton
• Steve Sharpe, Business Development Representative, from Microsoft
• Luke Harries, Business Development Representative, from Vocus
• Dac Cherner, Account Executive, from AIMS 360
• Christopher MacMurray, DevOps Lead, from Blip Networks/Maker Studios
• Lauren Barnes, Recruiting Manager, from Talener

Companies who want their new hires included in the post must contact us directly at justin.lafferty (at) insidenetwork.com. Must be a Facebook PMD or Facebook Strategic PMD to be included.

Groups were a major super star in , as CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that will be a major part of the company in 2014. Changes are apparently starting already, as admins can add tags to a group. While it may not do much for closed/private groups, it’s a way for people to find new groups similar to or regarding similar topics for communities they’re already a part of.

Adam Rosenberg of Edelman Digital noticed that Facebook asked him to add tags to his group.

When a user clicks on the tag, they’re shown similar groups and communities their friends have joined.

 

Readers: Have you seen this?

When you start off on Facebook, they give you a tiny daily budget. This is like training wheels for new accounts — to prevent accidental overspending. And it also is in place to prevent spammers from jacking up huge budgets, since there’s a market for selling new accounts that eventually get disabled.

As you ramp up, your daily budget automatically goes up.

So if you have a big campaign coming up, creating a brand new account with a low spend cap could frustrate you. If you’re an agency, you might just put this campaign in your existing ad account, but still create a new account for the client. Here’s why.

And here’s what Facebook has to say about your daily spend limit:

You could request an increase if you have a rep. Rarely have we seen these ever get denied — why would they?Then you start getting emails like this:

Note, this doesn’t mean that you’re going to spend more money, you just have a larger credit line. You should still be managing your audience sizes at the ad level and daily budgets at the campaign level this way.

And if you have a lot of campaigns in one account, the daily budget for the account overall can be tricky to manage:

We say that boosting posts is evil, since it creates a new campaign each time. Start and end dates are at the campaign level, not ad-level, unfortunately.

As you grow, you get nice email notifications, like this one at $500 per day.

If you’re an agency managing Facebook ad spend for a client, you may want to consider charging partially by percentage of spend, as opposed to purely a monthly retainer. As you ramp up spend, you’d make more.

Of course, this creates an incentive to just spend more, which is why we recommend a mix of retainer plus percentage of spend. Or if you have a direct marketer as a client with strong analytics in place, you can bill by performance (20% of margin above a threshold, for example).

After 3 or 4 days of hitting your daily caps, you get bumped up automatically to the next level:

In this case, we’re looking at the rapid growth of , who have outlined their techniques for B2B lead gen on Facebook.

Once you hit $1,000 a day, you should have an account manager at Facebook — someone who tells you about new features coming out for your vertical.

Facebook organizes their sales team by country and vertical. So, for example, you might be in retail, CPG, automotive, and so forth. Not unexpected, given that Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, had run global online sales for AdWords. They follow a similar structure.

Here’s the email notification you get at $3,000 per day, which puts you at almost $100,000 a month in spend if you hit your caps each day.

At this point, you’re likely to have hundreds of ads in perhaps dozens of campaigns. Each campaign should have ads competing for a particular objective (not multiple) and be aligned with your sales funnel.

We recommend using the audience, engagement, and conversion strategy. You probably also have a group of campaigns with low budget you use to test new ads, with a “production” campaign of high budgets that you promote ads into.

We get a lot of requests from agencies and entrepreneurs who are having problems with their ads accounts.

Maybe they:

• got shut down from too many disapprovals
• are operating in a sensitive area (gambling, health supplements, e-cigarettes)
• are trying to change the name of their page
• had their page hijacked by a rogue employee
• or had some random question

The frank answer is that if you’re spending money on Facebook, they’re more likely to pay attention to your request. It’s no different at Google, twitter, LinkedIn, or any ad-supported company.

So if you’re lucky enough to be one of the guys who is spending $75,000 a day on Facebook ads, then you get special treatment. But if not, figure out how to grow your business profitably to that point.

There’s a great community here on  with people of all walks of life. Go ahead and ask your questions below!   We’d love to hear from you.

King’s Farm Heroes Saga had a great week, up nearly 250 percent in Facebook monthly active users. It had a huge spike on , which could mean singles everywhere logged in for the night — and possibly stayed hooked on the game throughout the week.

Do you think Valentine’s Day caused the spike or something else? Will it sustain its current popularity or fizzle out?

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