SecondSync, a leading provider of social TV analytics solutions in the U.K., joined forces with Facebook to produce a first of its kind global study tracking TV conversation in the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

The findings provide a view of how people in those areas and engage on Facebook. The statistics were pulled from aggregated and anonymized data to protect privacy:

• Facebook is showing the ability to be a real-time platform, as 60 percent of TV-related Facebook interactions happen during the show airing.
• The scale of TV-related chatter on Facebook corresponds to the reach of the social network.
• 80 percent of TV-related chatter on Facebook is generated from mobile devices
• The study also revealed patterns of engagement and types of interaction on Facebook across TV genres, demographics and geographies – program by program. For example: Dramas generate the highest bookend pattern while films generate the most consistent peaks in engagement.

The study examined how TV audiences engage with shows using four different types of Facebook interaction: posts, comments, likes and shares. Each type exhibited distinct repeating patterns of engagement that were consistent across the TV schedules.

Julie DeTraglia, Senior Vice President, Digital and Broadcast Marketing Research, at NBCUniversal, said in a press release::

In recent years, tracking TV-related social media conversations has become an important component of our audience research. However, up until now we had no visibility into the ways people were engaging with our shows on Facebook, a broad social platform with tremendous scale. Having access to this new data will allow us to plan our social strategy more effectively and potentially help us understand how social conversations may affect ratings.

Demographics and minute level data generated in this study came from a sample of high profile, predominantly prime-time shows, which aired between September 2013 and January 2014 in the UK, US and Australia. Chatter distribution statistics came from a study of 1,500 prime-time U.K. TV shows, broadcast between Sept.1, 2013 and Sept. 15, 2013.

The number of individuals engaging with shows in real-time on Facebook accounted for a significant proportion of the TV audience when compared with ratings data. In some cases, this was almost a quarter of the TV audience. For example:

• The Breaking Bad finale saw 24 percent of its audience interacting on Facebook, with nearly 4.5 million Facebook interactions.
• The Walking Dead saw nearly 6.7 million interactions, 67 percent of which came from likes.

Fred Leach, Facebook’s Head of Measurement R&D and Partnerships, said this in a press release:

This has valuable marketing implications, demonstrating trends by demographic and how mobile has become the key method of engagement.

Access the .

Top image courtesy of the .

Only 20 percent of people open your emails, and 5 percent click. That’s 95 percent of your email subscribers who are not going to your landing page that you spent so much time optimizing!

So what are you going to do? Just let those subscribers (read: sales leads) go to waste? Well, read on. In this article I’ll show you how (and why) to reach and convert that 95 percent using Facebook ads.

I know that you may still have reservations. A lot of marketers think that spending their ad budget targeting people they have already acquired as subscribers is just throwing their money away. You may have already spent money on ads to acquire them in the first place. So why should you do it again?

Let me explain four reasons why you should target your subscribers with ads on Facebook:

1. Increase Your Click-Through Rate

Targeting people who already know you, and have shown enough interest in you to opt-in to giving you their email address, will give you a much higher conversion rate than converting people who don’t possess either quality.

You can utilize this recognition and trust by using your logo as (or in) the ad image, your company name in the ad copy, and your website URL, which appears automatically if you are running an ad that clicks-through to a page on your own website.

2. Lower Your Ad Spend

As your click-through rate increases (which we learned about above) you will need to show your ad to a much smaller number of people to get your desired amount of clicks and conversions.

Facebook allows you to bid for your ads on a CPM model, meaning you pay based on the number of people who see your ad (more specifically per thousand ad impressions). Using this bid model, as opposed to CPC, you’ll see your total spend drop to reach the amount of clicks (and conversions) you want to obtain.

3. Increase Landing Page Conversion Rate

Similar to an increase in ad CTR, the previous recognition and trust in your business will boost conversion rates on your landing page (which users are taken to after they click on your ad).

Visitors won’t be worrying about what your company is or if you can be trusted because they will have already gained that trust before they opted-in to your email subscriber list the first time.

4. Save Time

If you’re like me, you’ve spent hours, days even fine-tuning your Target Audiences for each campaign and landing page you’ve created. No interest category, demographic grouping or connection goes untested.

But what if you didn’t have to spend all that time? What if there was an easier way to find a great Target Audience?

Well, you already know that your email subscribers are interested in your business. In fact, they have already converted on one of your landing pages or web forms. So you know they’ll be a high-converting audience.

Simply using your email subscribers for your Target Audience will save you a ton of time both choosing audiences and testing different ones to find out who your business really resonates with. You will have even more information about them, from their form field responses on what they’re interests are or industry they’re in. This will help you save time thinking about the type of offer/gated content to use as the ‘bribe” to get them to click your Ad, as well as in writing the Ad copy itself.

How Do You Target Email Subscribers With Facebook Ads?

Targeting your email subscribers is done through Facebook’s Custom Audience targeting option. This option is accessible through Facebook’s Power Editor and 3rd party platforms like Wishpond’s Facebook Ads Manager tool.

With Facebook’s Power Editor rool you can use this option by following these steps:

1. In the top-left corner, click on “Create Audience” > “Custom Audience”

2. Next, a modal window will appear. In it there are three options for uploading your email list (including directly through Mailchimp). For this walkthrough, we’ll go with “Data File Custom Audience.”

3. This will open a new modal window, where you add some information about your list, and then upload the file itself, which must be in .csv or .txt format.

4. Once your Custom Audience is created, you will see it in your Power Editor (below) and have the option to “Create Ad Using Audience”.

This can also be done within the Ad Creation Wizard of Wishpond’s Facebook Ads Manager. All you need to do is copy & paste a single-column list of email addresses into the box provided (below). Soon you will be able to upload lists directly from email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, AWeber and Constant Contact.

How Does Facebook Target Your Email Subscribers?

When you upload your list of email addresses (either through Facebook’s Power Editor or a 3rd party platform) Facebook goes through its user base (yes over a billion accounts) to match the email addresses to Facebook accounts. As you may have guessed, this can take some time on their end (generally a few hours). Once the matching is complete, your subscribers are automatically shown your ad on Facebook.

One thing to note is that the email address you upload must be the same as the email address the person uses to login to their Facebook account. This means that you won’t be able to target certain subscribers on your list.

Nick Steeves is a Product Manager for Wishpond, a social marketing firm.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook — a move reminiscent to the trending topics on Twitter — to the right side of News Feed. It shows popular topics buzzing on Facebook right now, and users can click to see the posts by friends, celebrities and pubic profiles.

Now it appears that Facebook’s trending feature is getting some prime News Feed real estate. Some users are seeing stories from publishers about popular topics, such as Bob Costas, as illustrated above. also saw instances where trending hashtags are getting into the News Feed. When a user clicks on the trending topic above the story, a lightbox pops up with posts from friends, pages and public profiles about the topic.

We’ve reached out to Facebook about this and will update the story when we hear back.

Readers: How do you feel about Facebook’s trending feature getting into the News Feed?

As more and more brands launch cross-platform campaigns, allowing fans to get involved via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer Friend2Friend announced today the SocialFusion Hashtag Gallery. This allows brands to easily track conversation around a hashtag on several platforms, and also showcases hashtagged fan posts in a visually appealing manner.

Friend2Friend counted a total of 38 commercials this year that utilized hashtags, compared to 20 in last year’s game. The company launched the SocialFusion Hashtag Gallery to give brands a way to show the conversation around a specific hashtag.

announced the platform in a press release:

So far, brands have failed to fully leverage the treasure trove of fan-generated social content to inspire new and more meaningful connections. We’re delighted to see our brand and agency partners enjoy this new solution and better utilize social content across platforms in ways that were never possible before.

Friend2Friend’s SocialFusion Hashtag Gallery offers brands and agencies the ability to design and configure galleries feeding in content from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and/or YouTube. The brand can also customize the design to fit their needs and configure the gallery for sweepstakes, contests and voting campaigns. Marketers can then deploy the campaign onto a website or through Facebook.

SmartWool has already been using the SocialFusion Hashtag Gallery in beta. Steve Metcalf, Global Director of Strategic Communications for SmartWool was very pleased with the platform’s performance:

We’re very fortunate to have passionate fans who routinely tag their favorite SmartWool products in photos, tweets, and posts, and love to share their adventures. What Friend2Friend has created is more than sentiment monitoring. They’ve given us the ability to aggregate, review and then celebrate that fan interaction — all in one place — and then tie it directly to our online store. It’s an incredibly powerful tool for our business and for our fans.

Image courtesy of Friend2Friend.

Facebook measurement partner adeven announced that the company is rebranding itself as adjust, after the company’s popular mobile app tracking and analytics platform. Adjust launched several new features in its flagship product:

• granular tracking of reattribution of users to re-engagement campaigns
• support for all networks currently providing re-engagement (including Facebook)
• deeplinking support for dynamic links to either open the targeted apps or redirect user to an app store install when app is not present on the device

Adjust CEO Christian Henschel described why the company made this shift:

No one cares about app download numbers any more. In 2014 it is far more important for publishers to understand what users do after download, and that is what our new features provide in crystal-clear detail. … With our new cohort analysis capabilities, publishers will be able to track exactly what works in marketing to, or engaging with, tightly defined groups. We have already seen this drive significant increases in monetization and improvements in user acquisition efficiency during beta trials with publishers.

In the past year adjust integrated roughly 10 new SDKs daily, as well as more than 150 mobile advertising networks. Adjust also logged more than 3 billion tracked sessions in January 2014 alone.

Facebook is allowing page admins to keep deeper tabs on their competition by integrating into its page insights.

Previously, page admins could choose up to 5 pages to see updates about page popularity and activity, so marketers can easily check how competing or similar pages are doing. Or Fialkov of Fialkov Digital noticed that deeper data about pages tracked in this manner is now available in insights.

Through this, Facebook page admins can see how their own page compares to others they’ve tracked, in terms of new likes, posts and engagement.

Readers: Do you use the Pages to Watch feature?

Even though marketers the world over have pinned their praises to Pinterest, touting its massive growth, its Facebook daily active users are down by nearly 2 percent from last year. On Feb. 6, 2014, AppData reported an estimated 4.85 million DAUs and on the same date in 2013, it reported 4.94 million DAUs. That equals a decrease of nearly 85,000 DAUs, according to AppData estimates.

Do you think this trend will continue or are Pinterest users finally leveling off? We’d love to hear from you.

For more information, visit AppData or call us at

As in Sochi, Russia is underway, you can follow your favorite athletes and teams through Facebook. The social network put together a list of key U.S.  teams and athletes who have a Facebook page.

Sochi 2014 Winter Games Page: 

NBC Olympics: 

Association/Teams:

• U.S. Freestyle Ski Team: 
• U.S. Luge Team: 
• U.S. Olympic Team:  
• U.S. Paralympics Team: 
• U.S. Ski Team: 
• U.S Snowboarding: 

Alpine Skiing

• Stacey Cook: 

Skeleton

• Noelle Pikus-Pace: 

Snowboarding

• Shaun White: 
• Chas Guldemond: 
• Kelly Clark: 
• Jamie Anderson: 
• Arielle Gold: 
• Sage Kotsenburg: 
• Ty Walker: 

Speed Skating

• Shani Davis: 
• Joey Mantia: 
• Alyson Dudek: 
•  Julia Mancuso: 

Figure Skating

• Gracie Gold: 
• Jeremy Abbott: 
• Meryl Davis and Charlie White: 
• Maia and Alex Shibutani: 

Bobsled

• Lolo Jones: 
• Jamie Gruebel 
• Aja Evans 
• Lauryn Williams 
• Dallas Robinson: 
• Johnny Quinn: 

Luge

• Erin Hamlin: 

Hashtags:

Image courtesy of the .

Many times, the most powerful messages in Facebook marketing don’t come from an agency or a brand — . Many brands are realizing the power of the share or the recommendation in Facebook marketing and are recognizing brand advocates who not only love the product but are willing to tell their friends how awesome it is.

But how can you figure out who would be willing to share the message? We talked with Greg Shove, the CEO of SocialChorus, a marketing firm specializing in advocate marketing, about how brands on Facebook can identify and cater to these special fans. Shove noted that on average, 375 advocates over the course of one year can be as popular as 1 million fans.

Inside Facebook: What’s the first step in identifying a brand advocate through Facebook?

Greg Shove: I think there’s been too much concern in trying to identify the advocates. I think that different customers will have different levels of influence. Instead of trying to pre-screen them for their influence, our idea is that you can invite them to participate and you’ll find out who’s willing to be an advocate.

Some brands do want to identify first, which might be more frequent customers or more frequent customers who have worked with product review. If you think of an ecommerce site, they’ve got the data showing who’s written a review on their site and who’s also a customer. That’s one way they can have a filter. Generally, for a typical consumer brand, I would invite everybody to the party and see who comes.

IF: How can a brand be successful in doing this through Facebook?

GS: We think Facebook is a place to recruit advocates from a fanbase, or targeting people who could be customers and targeting them with ads on Facebook. What we’ve seen success with is brands building super-fan communities within their Facebook page. They’re basically inviting their fans into a smaller community.

What they’re initially using is a research survey, the chance to test a new product, the chance to participate in an event or brand experience — something like that as the initial ask or the way to reach out to a fan and have them collaborate with the brand and request a product sample. What they can participate in is joining a super-fan community, which is distinct from Facebook. Now the brand is talking directly to an advocate.

Another way to do it is to recruit through Facebook or by email targeting or by targeting in terms of similar people who are already advocates and invite them to join through that message.

The way you think about it is 1 to 3 percent of your fans are really the most valuable ones. Our point of view is our customers should have a different experience than the other fans. What we’ve done here is created a different experience, that is branded, that is for the 1 to 3 percent of your fans or customers that are truly willing to be your active advocates.

IF: For that 1 to 3 percent, what can brands do to treat them differently or reward them?

GS: You might repost the advocates’ content, if they’ve shared something — recognizing their content as an advocate and republishing it, sort of recognizing on a monthly basis your top advocates. It could be offering them something, like access to a product, or a tangible reward. It could be an invitation to a concert or an event. Maybe even have one advocate come into the office — that’s a very hand-curated way to do it.

Most of it is recognition and what I like to call lightweight reward. It’s usually done with surprise and delight. They’re rewarded based on how active they’ve been. It’s not like they’re chosen because they’ve earned 10,000 points and 10,000 points converts to a prize. We don’t believe in that kind of model.

IF: What mistakes are you seeing? What are brands still getting wrong with identifying brand advocates?

GS: There’s this whole fad about using social influence, using things such as Klout scores, to figure out if someone is worth having a relationship with. Our point is that most people have a following and as a customer they’re valuable. They’ve got their own small network that they can influence. Brands filtering fans based on Klout score or influence or perceived or potential power, I think is a mistake. Everybody’s got some degree of influence over their own network and I think brands should consider that.

The second would be brands still try to control what advocates say. Brands need to hav faith in their advocates that they’ll say the right thing. They’re advocates and they need to say something the way they say it, not the way the brand wants them to say it and what’s effective for their audience. Some brands and some agencies don’t trust enough their advocates.

Readers: How do you identify and reward brand advocates?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer Nanigans, based in Boston, announced that the company has opened an office in Singapore and also appointed Cyrille Even as Managing Director.

Marc Grabowski, Nanigans COO, commented on both actions in a press release:

Expanding our global reach to Singapore was a natural progression as we continue to focus on in-house performance marketing across verticals such as e-commerce. Adding Cyrille as Managing Director, who has a successful track record of building teams and developing go-to-market strategy plans specifically in Asia is a great first step for us in the region, with many more to follow.

Prior to joining Nanigans, Even has been CEO of Boonty Asia Pte Ltd, CEO of Café.com Asia as well as COO of Mobileway. He has extensive experience in media, advertising, multinational gaming, social networking and telecommunication.

The company expanded on their Singapore plans, noting that the initial focus will be to grow its staff, as well as cultivate efforts with Facebook advertising and business relations.

As many people say Facebook is dying for , the site is apparently testing a new way for advertisers to target college students. As found by Andrea Warner of Marketer’s Braintrust, Facebook is giving some users the ability to target based on college undergrad graduation year.

This would allow marketers to target current college students based on their graduation years, or just users of all grad years.

Readers: Have you seen this in Power Editor?

Owning a Ferrari is not the same thing as liking Ferrari on Facebook. Rob Schermerhorn tunes Ferraris for a living.

As you can see, 51% of Ferrari’s Facebook fans are kids. So to hit real Ferrari owners, Rob targeted members of the Sports Car Club of America, those who participate in the FerrariChat forum (where owners hang out), and similar interests.

In fact, he set up multiple ads to target the Ferrari community, ensuring his message gets into their News Feeds.

His targeting is so precise that he gets between 5 and 9% CTR on his ads, which is nearly 50 times the average on Facebook.

Of course, interesting content helps.

And he is organizing his campaigns into audience (to drive fans/awareness), engagement (more likes/comments/share) and conversion (inquiries and leads).

It’s costing him just over $20 a day to make sure the right people, not kids who like Ferrari, are seeing his regular posts to Facebook.

And the on-going exposure to Rob’s tips, interesting content, and expertise generates leads such as this.

But not anyone can just set up these ads and expect the same result. They must also:

• Have industry authority, which carries over into Facebook. Rob has been doing this for two decades and is well-known among Ferrari owners as THE guy to squeeze more performance from their vehicles.
• Be willing to post once per day — this is not a set it and forget it strategy. You must keep it up, since word of mouth takes time to build momentum.
• Genuinely care about sharing information freely — it’s this irony that actually drives leads. By tending to his community (watering his garden, to use a different analogy), he reaps long-term benefits.

Developer Social Point is gaining momentum in Facebook monthly active users. In the past week, the developer has gained nearly 1 million MAUs, according to AppData Facebook MAU estimates. With one app, Dragon City, in the MAU Top 10 of Facebook apps, and three more in the MAU Top 100, Social Point could start to give other developers a run for their money.

Do you think Dragon City could creep up and knock Candy Crush out of first place? We’d love to hear from you.

For more information, visit AppData or call us at .

Beginning February 18th, experts in the social media space will share their insight through a series of webcasts and interactive online sessions. Taking place over the course of six weeks, Social Media 201 will help those who are familiar with social media boost their personal or business-related online presence with easy-to-follow sessions.

Each week registrants will be invited to tune into a live webcast, taught by experienced marketing professionals including Geoffrey Colon, Group Marketing Manager, Social Media at Microsoft/Bing Ads, and Kayla Green, Digital Strategy Director at Saatchi & Saatchi. Webcast topics include “10 Habits of Highly Successful Twitter Users”, “Harnessing the Power of Image Driven Platforms” and “Social Media and Mobile”.

For a limited time, Mediabistro is offering 25% OFF the online event with code LOVEMB. Register before 2/14/14 to redeem this offer!

If you’re reading this you’re likely interested in how to get a 30 percent conversion rate on your Facebook contest.

On January 17, Heyo customer and CEO of Out and About Marketing, Milena Regos, launched a Facebook contest for her client, Squaw Valley Ski Resort. Squaw Valley wanted the contest to drive additional likes for the page in addition to capturing fan emails.

Over the first 11 days, the campaign has converted at over 30 percent and helped drive 6,975 new likes. This means for every 100 people that view the campaign, 30 are entering their email.

to check out the live campaign before February 6th and be sure to come back and finish reading if you want to learn why the campaign is doing so well.

If you’re interested in getting more likes, capturing more emails, and driving a 30% conversion on your Facebook contests, keep reading.

Like most people, your landing pages likely convert around 2-5%. So what does Squaw Valley have that us mere mortals don’t?

Squaw Valley used the Heyo Contest Template which incorporates 3 critical features required to run a Facebook campaign that converts at 30%, like a pro :

1. The Incentive

Milena helped Squaw Valley choose a contest incentive that is both relevant to the brand and relevant to current events.

By giving away a pair of skis or a snowboard when the Sochi Olympic games start, Squaw Valley maximizes the potential reach of the campaign by piggy backing off current news.

As you think about incentives to use for Facebook contests you run, think about current events, geography, and your ideal customer.

2. The Urgency

When people are using Facebook, they are constantly being presented with distractions. These distractions include new friend requests, new messages, and new notifications.

At any moment, you could loose this potential visitor (and/or email conversion) to one of these distractions. Urgency is the key to driving action and conversions.

We recommend you run campaigns in 15 day increments.

When a fan lands on the Squaw Valley campaign urgency is immediately created with the countdown. If you’re wondering why your campaign isn’t converting, see if you’ve created any urgency and add the countdown if you don’t have it already.

3. The Viral Coefficient

Squaw Valley’s campaign feeds itself new traffic based off the simple structure of the entry process.

You’ll notice on the left side of the campaign, there are 4 steps fans must go through in order to enter. First users enter their email, then they are asked to click “like”. Lastly fans are asked to share and tweet the campaign.

The last 2 steps turn fans into a marketing force for Squaw Valley because fans share the contest and drive their friends to the Squaw Valley campaign as new traffic.

A quick search for #SochiDailyGiveaway on Twitter shows that fans are eagerly sharing. This is driving incredible exposure and visibility to Squaw Valley’s campaign.

Once you’ve crafted a strong incentive, created urgency, and structured your campaign so that it gets free traffic (self sustaining), you’re well on your way to higher conversions.

You can clone the Squaw Valley campaign here by registering and using the Contest Template under premium templates.

Your Turn

Have you run a Facebook campaign like Squaw Valleys before? Tell us in the comments below.

Nathan Latka is CEO and Founder of Heyo, a drag and drop tool for creating Facebook apps that are mobile optimized. You can find him on Twitter or .

Facebook’s Q4 earnings report revealed that mobile advertising, which Facebook only began offering a year and a half ago, now accounts for 53 percent of the social network’s overall advertising business. With , mobile is set to be a major driver in Facebook’s continued success.

With Facebook’s continued momentum in mobile advertising comes other areas of opportunity for brands and advertisers, including improved Custom Audiences, auto-play videos, and more effective campaign measurement capabilities.

Below, we’ve outlined the five most important takeaways from the Q4 earnings report:

1. Targeting capabilities, namely Custom Audiences, are going to be critical to Facebook’s continued revenue growth moving forward. Custom Audiences remove the dependence on traditional web-based cookies, and help advertisers connect to individuals based on more accurate identifiers (e.g. email address, phone numbers, app IDs, etc.) that are device agnostic. With more users accessing Facebook from mobile devices, we will likely see a greater focus from advertisers on using Custom Audiences to better define and better reach their target groups.

2. The outcome of Facebook’s testing of auto-play videos will have a tremendous effect on advertisers and how they approach campaigns. By promoting videos that auto-play, advertisers will be able to engage even the most passive users directly in Facebook’s News Feed, tell a more complete story through video, and recommend additional content once the video ends. Videos are already high ad performers on Facebook, despite being click-to-play. SHIFT clients that have promoted videos have seen much higher engagements and sentiment. The launch of auto-play videos should only improve performance.

3. A challenge for all advertisers, across all media types, is measuring the tangible results of campaigns. Facebook is investing heavily in improving their measurement capabilities, and continuing to do so will only prove the platform’s impact on sales conversions. Several years ago, Facebook faced a similar challenge with their targeting capabilities. At the time, they invested heavily toward improving that area of their business; today they have a robust set of options that help advertisers reach highly targeted audiences. We expect that their measurement capabilities will follow a similar path.

4. With the recent , Facebook is clearly putting together a strong suite of mobile-focused products and features. At some point in the near future, these advancements will provide a holistic user experience, while offering advertisers a more effective platform to reach their target audiences. Paper will join a stack that includes Messenger, Instagram, Video Calling, app deep linking, and in-app mobile ads, among others. Meanwhile, Facebook is creating an integrated solution for things that are currently done through separate tools, thus creating a more positive experience for users while keeping them on the Facebook platform. This will lead to more time spent on Facebook, more engagements, and enhanced user data; all of which will provide a better environment for advertisers to serve the best ad types to the right audiences.

5. The massive year-over-year growth in Facebook’s mobile usage opens the door to new possibilities for advertisers. One interesting direction that Facebook could go is real-time location-based targeting. There are individual vendors currently providing solutions for micro-granular targeting, but often these require a large initial investment, hardware installations, separate software, and are limited in physical range. If Facebook can begin targeting their 1.23B MAUs based on real-time locations, without requiring check-ins, advertisers could serve even more relevant ads to consumers at scale. For DR advertisers specifically, this means reaching users with a higher than average likelihood of converting.

James Borow is the co-founder and CEO of Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer , the real-time marketing platform of choice for 10 of the top 20 global advertisers.

Photo courtesy of Twin Design / Shutterstock.com.

, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, released a new tool that gives marketers a view into consumer identity. This is done by capturing data from other Gigya products like Social Login, Sharing and Gamification and then visually displaying insights in a dashboard.

Patrick Salyer, Gigya’s CEO, said this in a :

Marketers are tired of hearing companies preach about ‘Big Data’ and the vague ways they should be using it. Consumer Insights finally puts massive amounts modern consumer data — everything from users’ interests, to their Facebook likes, to the articles they’ve commented on — into one dashboard that actually shows marketers what they need to know about their users, complete with the integrations with the marketing platforms they already use.

Consumer Insights allows marketers to easily query Gigya’s  database and tie identity information with key performance indicators to understand what psychographic and demographic information is driving meaningful behaviors such as purchases, commenting or sharing.

According to a press release, several Gigya customers will be using the new tool to better understand their users and optimize their marketing efforts by using Consumer Insights to create advanced audience segments.

To showcase the product’s depth, Gigya examined the fan bases of the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos to see how the two audiences differ. They found that the Denver Broncos have a high concentration of fans outside of Colorado, in states such as New York, California and New Mexico, while Seahawks fans are heavily concentrated in the Pacific Northwest. It was also found that Broncos fans are partial to Green Day and Subway, while Seahawks fans still like their Nirvana and Starbucks.

While King continues to reign over the Facebook app world, a game by Social Point — Dragon City — has dropped considerably in the AppData monthly leaderboard. , Dragon City was the fifth-most popular app, in terms of AppData’s Facebook monthly active user (MAU) estimates.

Now, it ranks 9th, as apps such as Spotify, Bing and Pinterest have moved up.

Want to see which Facebook apps are the most popular? Click below to see the top 25 Facebook apps, ranked in terms of AppData’s MAU estimates.

  1.  Candy Crush Saga 152,106,417 2.  Farm Heroes Saga 44,238,966 3.  Pet Rescue Saga 44,238,966 4.  Microsoft Live 31,692,081 5.  TripAdvisor™ 30,754,375 6.  Spotify 29,374,710 7.  Pinterest 28,139,191 8.  Bing 24,196,858 9.  Dragon City 24,092,897 10.  Criminal Case 22,131,470 11.  Give Hearts 21,703,616 12.  FarmVille 2 20,297,597 13.  Papa Pear Saga 20,087,881 14.  Texas HoldEm Poker 19,276,520 15.  Skype 18,842,179 16.  HTC Sense 16,094,360 17.  Bitstrips 15,915,771 18.  Yelp 15,042,438 19.  Yahoo 14,610,399 20.  Samsung Mobile 14,563,630 21.  Diamond Dash 14,073,739 22.  Subway Surfers 13,600,458 23.  Bubble Witch Saga 13,505,230 24.  8 Ball Pool 13,030,841 25.  Nokia 12,791,493

Top image courtesy of .

One of the most interesting parts of Facebook has been Facebook Stories, which show how the social network has connected or impacted people in real life. Today, as of making the world more open and connected, Facebook Stories showed 10 cases from around the world where the site served as a vital link or support system.

In Brazil, Facebook helped give a homeless poet a voice, as a friend started a Facebook page showcasing his poetry. In Kenya, Facebook connected a village’s craftswomen with a boutique owner in New Jersey.

Facebook also kept one California couple — Will and Kimmy — connected as Will was deployed overseas … but also helped Kimmy keep Will’s memory alive after his untimely passing:

Having this archive of our relationship means the world to me. I fully regret not marrying Will when I had the chance, and it bothers me that he will forever only be known my “boyfriend,” when really, he was my entire world.

Sometimes when I’m lonely, I go back and read everything he sent to me. I didn’t think about it much then, but having it all in one place took on a complete new meaning when I lost Will forever.

The social network brought together two strangers who turned out to be twins and gave a Swedish rock group a chance at an encore performance.

Click here to see the rest of the stories.

Readers: Has Facebook had a profound impact on your life? Let us know!

On Feb. 4, 2004, inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Harvard University dorm room with an interface like the one pictured above. What started as a way for Harvard students to make connections has grown into a multi-billion dollar business.

How does Zuckerberg feel about Facebook at 10? He assessed the company in a statement:

It’s been an incredible journey so far, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it. It’s been amazing to see how people have used Facebook to build a real community and help each other in so many ways. In the next decade, we have the opportunity and responsibility to connect everyone and to keep serving the community as best we can.

Facebook took some time to look back at what the company has accomplished in the past decade, but also gave users a way to remember their best moments since joining the site.

On Tuesday, Facebook launched a feature called “,” which will show users their biggest moments since joining Facebook.

The company also put together a timeline showing the dates of key innovations and features, such as photos, the iPhone app and the .

Images courtesy of Facebook.