Last month, Facebook drove 160 million visitors and 1.1 billion visits to third-party apps, an increase of 100 million visitors and 780 million visits from the month prior. And that’s just mobile, it doesn’t even account for canvas apps or website integrations. Thanks to the size of its user base, and the increasing power of its funnel, Facebook is now able to, in a sense, play kingmaker, choosing what types of apps and content see traffic from its news feed. As Josh points out, this is true for content of all stripes, whether they be photos, games, or news readers — or the most recent and perhaps most-buzzed-about evidence: Open Graph video apps.
Since integrating with Facebook Timeline, the “Instagram for video” competitors, Viddy and Socialcam, have exploded. Viddy’s “Timeline Bump” saw it surpass some big names in its rise to the top of the App Store rankings. Since integrating, Viddy claims to be seeing 500K new users a day, and last week confirmed that it closed a $30 million Series B round at a reported $370 million valuation. Viddy’s success could be due to the Instagram Effect, a great product, its celebrity backers, or, perhaps more likely, it’s due in large part to its Timeline integration and Facebook promoting its content. Though some would say it’s a combination thereof.
Either way, Viddy and Socialcam are hardly alone. Flixster has seen referral traffic jump to 480,000 hits a day, up 10-fold from the prior month, while BranchOut’s recently launched, Facebook-integrated mobile app saw traffic leap from one million monthly active users to 12.5 million MAU. Unsurprisingly, app developers and websites are eager not to miss the train — the Open Graph/Timeline Lift. The latest additions to the cavalcade of integrators? The cult favorite community-directed Q&A site Quora and the fast-growing, increasingly popular non-profit educational video repository Khan Academy.
In a blog post last week, Quora announced its integration with Facebook Timeline, allowing users to more easily share their Quora activity with their Facebook friends. Users simply go to the homepage or their their Settings page, connect their Facebook account, and enable Timeline.
Once that’s done, Quora-ers can share questions, answers, posts they upvote, and people they follow to Facebook, with that content aggregated by type in a widget on their Facebook profile. In turn, Facebook friends will see the most interesting stories you’ve interacted with on Quora right in their news feed.
Of course, those who might be hesitant to enable this feature for the sake of avoiding spamming their friends’ feeds with every instance Quora activity, however, users will generally only see the five most recent upvotes, questions followed, etc., a cap that’s intended to keep the integration from overwhelming your profile. Generally speaking, the stories that do show up tend to do so because a number of friends all upvoted the same story.
On top of this, Quora also added a bit of granularity to its sharing options, as users can now share to both Facebook and Twitter when creating new questions, answers, and posts. You can choose whether you want to share a particular answer, for example, by checking/unchecking the Facebook and Twitter options.
The more Facebook is able to filter by relevancy to show stuff that’s created, shared by, and popular among your friends, the more addicting the experience — and this integration — becomes. At least that’s the intent anyway.
In terms of Quora, specifically, from my experience, it really can be a nifty enhancement to discovery. Frequently, we don’t have the time to spend hours combing through the database, so Facebook integration provides a great alternative for finding those gems that would otherwise go unseen.
For Facebook, the appeal is transparent. Any mobile app or web platform that has a highly engaged audience becomes a great potential source of ad revenue. Quora, which definitely qualifies in terms of an engaged audience, sends its clickable Q&A content to news feeds and Timelines, whereupon Facebook can serve relevant ads, promoting brands and experiences you and your friends are already interacting with and, as Josh points out, as users move towards mobile, Sponsored Stories can keep the same model and become a big source of revenue.
In turn, Quora just raised $50 million at a reported $400 million valuation, which D’Angelo says will be used to scale and expand its platform. If AppData is to be believed, 20K daily active users and 180K monthly active users log in to the site through Facebook Connect — a small fraction of its total number of users. No doubt with deeper Facebook integration in place, Quora could see this number increase significantly — it’s a win-win for each side.
And considering that, as Josh describes at length, Facebook is controlling the news feed like an editor, curating the content its users see in their feeds and profiles, the close ties Quora’s founders have to Facebook could be a boon for its content on Facebook.
Of course, as mentioned previously, Quora is not alone. Yesterday, Khan Academy joined in on the fun, also announcing via blog post that it has added integration with the new Open Graph protocol to enable users to display their badges on their Facebook profiles.
For a little context for those unfamiliar with Khan, as users work their way through the platform’s repository of 3,200+ micro lecture video tutorials, they can earn badges for becoming proficient in three different skills or by quickly (and correctly) answering five quiz questions in a row, for example.
With its new Facebook integration, users can now click the “Share” button on any badge, and, once permission is granted, the badge will appear on users’ Timelines. (This share functionality also works for Twitter and email.)
After a user shares a couple of badges, just like the Quora Timeline experience, a dedicated section will appear in your Timeline, in this case for Khan “Badges Earned.” Users can, thankfully, edit or remove that view and if you’ve collected and shared more badges than can fit in the view, you can customize which badges appear and change settings for individual badges.
Not unlike Foursquare, if a user clicks on a particular badge (in this case on Facebook), they’ll be taken to a page that describes the steps it takes to earn the badge as well as a complete list of all badges offered by Khan.
Many educational platforms are on a mission to make their content more social and shareable, and this is an action taken by Khan Academy with that goal in mind. The badge experience adds a gamification element to its experience, but what good is collecting badges if you can’t show them off publicly to all your friends? It’s a great way to encourage competition among students, and for Khan, it offers an opportunity for exponentially-increased brand exposure.
Khan’s educational videos have racked up millions of hits on YouTube, but its name still remains relatively unknown outside of tech and educational circles. Now, with users displaying the badges on their Facebook profiles, friends that have no idea what Khan Academy is can click on those totally sweet badges (that’s a bit of snark, Khan definitely needs to work on these) and instantly walk through the process it takes to earn them, and, in turn, they are introduced to the Khan platform.
It would be surprising if content from both Khan and Quora didn’t get big play from Facebook curators. Both sites are fundamentally educational in nature (although perhaps a little more loosely used in Quora’s case), engaging, and have dedicated and active user bases. Badges and Q&A’s may be a little harder for Facebook to monetize that game apps and videos, but they both still provide tons of data on the user’s interests and behaviors during interaction on Facebook, with a peek into those behaviors outside of its network.
All in all, it will be interesting to see how much of a bump Khan and Quora receive from their respective Facebook integrations, and we will try to relay that info if and when they’re willing to share. But if Viddy, Socialcam, BranchOut, Flixster and many more are any indication, the Facebook Lift is coming soon.
For more, find Quora’s blog post here and Khan Academy’s here.
With the switch to Timeline, the team at Pagemodo, the popular do-it-yourself solution for making custom Facebook pages for small businesses, has been king enough to provide us with their top five tips for making the transition.
1. Timeline is much more image oriented. Make sure you utilize the right image sizes to get the best quality. In order for your custom images to render with the best quality possible, utilize the following image sizes in the new Timeline layout:
- Cover photo: 851px wide x 315px high
- Profile picture: 180 px wide x 180 px high
- Thumbnail image for apps: 111 px wide x 74 px high
- Highlighted & milestone images: 843 px wide x 403 px high
It is important to note that Facebook has set out several guidelines for what is and isn’t allowed to be posted as cover images. This new cover image is NOT allowed to have a call to action, meaning no phone number, no email—no contact info; no way to drive users to Like you; no way for someone to purchase your product. This means that users need to take advantage of custom tabs (now known as custom apps)
2. Take advantage of the wider tab space. Custom tabs or pages are now called custom apps. The Timeline layout has provided additional space for custom apps by expanding them from 520 pixels wide to 810 pixels. Utilize the new space wisely by providing vital information about your small business. It is always a good idea to have several custom apps to highlight various segments of your business. For example, if you are a professional photographer, you’ll want a custom app for an “About” page, an app to describe your “Wedding Services” and another one to highlight your “Family Portrait” work.
3. Select tabs that will make the biggest impact for your small business. The Timeline layout has shifted the location of the custom tabs from the left side navigation to the top of the page under the main cover image. By default, Facebook will set fan pages to 4 views. You can change which ones show up by changing the order of your tabs. To change the order of your Tabs:
- Expand the views and apps menu by clicking on the to the right of your Page’s views and apps
- Hover over the position you’d like to put a view or app and click the pencil icon that appears
- Choose the view or app you’d like to swap into that spot from the menu
- To remove a view or app, select Remove from Favorites in step 3. You can’t move the photos view, which will always appear first.
4. Upload attention grabbing custom icons to your tab. Site owners will now have complete control over the imagery for their custom apps. To upload custom icons:
- Go to your timeline and click on the “Admin Panel”
- Click on the “Manage” button and then “Edit Page”
- Click on the “Apps” tab on the left
- Find the tab you want to update and click on “Edit Settings”
- Click on “Change” to upload a new Tab Icon
5. Optimize About section and Add milestones. The About section in the new Timeline layout has expanded from 70 characters to 140 characters. This gives you more space to describe your business’ products or services. Add milestones, or major events, to be highlighted on fan pages. Learn how to add milestones to your business fan page:
http://www.pagemodo.com/blog/facebook-milestones-add-milestones-business-fan-page/
Timeline has already gone into effect for business pages, and hopefully these great tips from Pagemodo will help you to get your page converted and looking great!
Facebook today revealed statistics from a variety of video apps that have integrated with the new Timeline interface through the Open Graph API. According to the performance numbers out of the likes of VEVO, Viddy, and DailyMotion, video apps are getting tons of traction from integrating with Facebook’s newest look and feel.
Some highlights from Facebook’s blog post on video app growth on Timeline:
- Video sharing iPhone app Viddy has doubled its average daily sign-ups since launching its Timeline app in February. Most impressively, its monthly active users have boomed from 60,000 to more than 920,000. We’re hearing separately that at the moment, fully 90 percent of new Viddy users sign up for the app through Facebook.
- VEVO has seen “exponential growth” since it deepened its Facebook integration across its web and mobile apps. Fully 60 percent of its traffic now comes from Timeline posts on Facebook. The company has seen its daily user registrations grow by 200 percent since turning on Facebook-only registration.
- Izlesene, a Turkish video site, has seen its monthly active users grow to 6.5 million from 250,000 since it made its debut on Timeline in September 2011.
- Social video site Dailymotion has had more than 9 million people add their app to their Facebook Timelines in the past two months alone.
The popularity of online videos often grows “virally,” passing from person to person, so it makes sense that a massively popular social network like Facebook would be a boon to services that host videos. It really is just the beginning when it comes to seeing how well video can do in this format — Ustream and Magisto, for example, just launched their own respective Facebook Timeline integrations this week. It’ll be exciting to see how the numbers progress in the weeks and months ahead, and if the engagement grows or wanes as more services become available on the platform.
Live video streaming website Ustream today is launching an integration with Facebook’s new Timeline user interface. This means that users will be able to share the live videos they’re watching on Ustream with their Facebook friends in real-time.
The Ustream launch is one of the first video app integrations with Timeline. Thus far, Facebook’s Timeline has been populated with other types of media: Journalism publications such as Yahoo News and the Washington Post, music through services such as Spotify, and social and lifestyle apps such as Foodspotting and Pose.
Of course, just like the articles you read and the songs you listen to, your tastes in video viewing are very personal — and not always something you’re willing to share with your entire social network of friends and acquaintances. Ustream says it has been very careful to implement strong privacy controls with the Timeline integration to make it completely clear to users what they’re sharing and when. “We have definitely made an effort to increase privacy controls, and make it very transparent to users what is being shared and what is not,” Ustream product manager Brian Mayer said in an interview this week.
For now, though, you still can’t watch Ustream videos at the same time as your friends within either Facebook or Ustream connected to Facebook (similar to how Google+ Hangouts lets you watch YouTube videos with friends at the same time and talk about it, but without the webcam aspect.) That capability is being worked on by the people at Ustream, I’m told, and should make its debut sometime in the weeks ahead: “Features that we are working on currently will let you see what your friends are watching and communicate with your friends live via our Social Stream,” a Ustream rep says.
On March 1st Facebook let the world feast its eyes on Timeline for Pages, and tomorrow after a month of voluntary migration it will force all Pages to switch to the redesign. But don’t worry, it doesn’t significantly impact the rate of new Page Likes, and 95% of Pages who’ve switched have seen more Likes of their posts and people talking about them according to a study that social marketing platform Wildfire gave TechCrunch an early look at. Only megabrands with over 10 million Likes have seen reduced engagement, but this was in part due to a lull following press exposure during the Timeline launch. Note that these are early results and it will take a while for the exact impact of Timeline to be clear. We’ll be following up as data emerges.
There’s more good news for smaller Pages. A study shared with us by enterprise marketing platform Hearsay Social shows local business Pages with fewer fans get 5x more exposure in the news feed, and 8x more of the fans reached will engage with a post. That means big brands with lots of local branches can get 40x the engagement by having a Page for each store.
In the first week after Timeline for Pages launched 8 million Pages voluntarily switched over, but limited early data showed the migration significantly reduced the rate at which big pages were gaining fans. But data from Wildfire’s much more comprehensive study of 43 brands had rosier results.
First, fan growth rate was only down between 0.02% and 0.06%, which is essentially insignificant. That’s no win for Facebook’s design team but at least growth didn’t plummet. Small Pages with under 1 million fans are seeing engagement soar. People Talking About This, a measure of total mentions of a brand, is up 67.4%, comments per post is up 40%, and Likes Per Post is up 60.3%. Middle to large Pages with 1 million to 10 million fans are also doing alright with PTAT up 28.858, Likes per post up 13.56%, though comments per post is down 17.43%. Another study by social marketing platform Vitrue of a dozen mid-size Pages including Harley Davidson showed that their posts received 38% more likes and 3.5% more comments after launching Timeline.
As some of our commenters have noted, the switch to Timeline shouldn’t necessarily have such a big impact on the engagement with posts which are predominantly viewed through the news feed. There are few possible reasons for this. 1. Facebook may have artificially ratcheted up the news feed visibility of Pages who’ve switched. 2. The launch of Timeline for Pages may have led businesses to concentrate more on Facebook marketing and publish higher quality posts. 3. Those users visiting Page Timelines may be leaving significantly more Likes and remember the Page more leading to additional mentions.
Megabrand Pages with over 10 million fans (think Michael Jackson, Coca Cola, Disney, and MTV) faired worse after Timeline. PTAT was down 13.72%, comments per post down 16.72%, and Likes per post down 11.57%. This data was confounded, though, as all 7 of these Pages that Wildfire studied were promoted by Facebook in press around the launch of Timeline, and saw rapid returns to pre-press engagement levels that looked like declines. However, we’re also hearing from some other Facebook Page management platforms that some megabrand Pages are seeing engagement increases too, so we’ll need to wait for more data to confirm the impact of Timeline.
So most Pages should be excited about the new Timeline features. You can now also download the full report in exchange for an email address
As for the study commissioned by Hearsay Social from independent researcher Mainstay Salire (Update: now publicly available for download in exchange for an email address and there’s also a blog post of insights and an infographic), the 40x value of local fans should alter the Facebook marketing strategy of brands with locations around the US or the world.
Hearsay Social’s CEO Clara Shih tells me Having a massive, multi-million fan count “might be good bragging rights, but from a fan’s perspective they’re not as special, they’re just one of millions rather than part of a personalized community.” If brands willing to invest the time and money to manage all their local Pages it can give directly boost to their business. That’s because some of that 8x engagement comes from more link clicks to ecommerce sites that drive social marketing ROI.
What should brands with just one big Page do now? Hunt down unofficial Pages that represent their local stores and either claim them or have them shut down, then start official ones. Hearsay’s Rogue Page Finder can help. Then establish local admins for each Page or use a corporate/local-focused Page management software like Hearsay Social to syndicate updates from your main brand Page to that of each store.
Timeline and managing local Pages sure doesn’t make Facebook marketing any easier, but it does make it more effective. For these reasons, expect the Page management software industry and importance of trained community managers to keep growing.
Check out my in-depth guide “How To Use Facebook Timeline For Brand Pages: New Feature Details” to learn how to market using Timeline.
[Note On Updates: This article has received several updates to include additional disclaimers, studies, and context. These updates include a note that these are early and not necessarily conclusive results, the potential reasons the switch to Timeline is impacting news feed post engagement rates, that some social marketing platforms are seeing increased engagement on megabrand Pages that have switched to Timeline, and Vitrue's study which concurs that small and mid-size Pages are seeing benefits after switching to Timeline.]
