Facebook, P&G, UM! Brands, Jordan and others on this week’s top PTAT gainers among product and service pages

Facebook’s company page is this week’s top gaining page in the People Talking About This metric among product and services. The page saw over 1.1 million additional engagements in the last week and continues to grow among with almost 900,000 engagements in the last 24 hours.

Of the top 10 pages this week, six have over 1 million likes. Two have less than 1 million, but more than 30,000 page likes. The Conservative Newsfeed has only 12,000 likes and UM! Brands only has 7,500 likes yet still rank in the top 10 because of their highly engaging, viral posts.

We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

Facebook comes in at number one this week in credit to the introduction of Graph Search. Announced on Jan. 15, the promotional video of Mark Zuckerberg explaining the building of Graph Search continues to draw engagement, growing virally with a large number of shares. Many users do not have access to the feature so uninformed Facebook users may just be finding out about the announcement in their newsfeeds.

Both The Conservative Newsfeed and UM! Brands have a lot fewer total page Likes than the other the pages on the list this week. However, due to some of their page posts going viral by drawing shares, their page’s reach has been amplified for the week. Their posts may have been shared by a big influencer which would lead to the larger PTAT.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about product and service pages as well as other categories.

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Philips, T-Mobile, Disney and others among this week’s top PTAT gainers for company pages

Philips is this week’s top gainer in the People Talking About This metric for company pages. The company page category includes a wide array of company types including, but not limited to electronics, clothing, food and telecommunications.

Of the top 10 pages this week, seven are US based pages, with three in different languages. Philips saw over a million page engagements, but this is likely do to a recent transition to global pages. The next placing company page which translates to Platinum in English, is a Thai-based clothing company.

This list of top gaining company pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook.

To improve their pages discovery, company pages should offer more detail on their page category. For example, Philips can classify themselves as an energy/utility page. A more precise category will make it easier to find via Graph Search. It will also be helpful for using PageData to track against competitors on leader boards.

Of the top ten, T-Mobile would be better fit under the category “product/service,” Skinny Cow would be better suited for “Food/Beverage” and Color Vibe could be classified as an “organization.”

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about games and toys pages as well as other categories. Now only $19.95 a month.

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Starbucks, Taco Bell, Coca-Cola and others among this week’s top PTAT gainers for food and beverage pages

Starbucks is this week’s top gaining page in the People Talking About This metric among food and beverage pages. The page saw a weekly growth of 295,029 engagements, over half its total PTAT.

We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook. Of the top 10 pages this week, five are international pages while the other five are U.S. based.

Starbucks’ Facebook marketing revolves around sharing high quality pictures of coffee and speciality drinks. The page has over 33 million Likes so the engagement number of just over half a million is actually a bit low. It has high potential to raise this number with a few changes.

For example, the page ran a promotion offering a free cup of tea at Teavana stores, a company they have recently acquired. As seen in the post below did this simply by sharing a picture accompanied by a link. A better strategy might have been to create a Facebook offer.

An offer adds some variety to the page posts, which seem to almost all be photo posts. However, it is possible that Starbucks did not want to create an offer since Facebook has begun charging businesses to use this feature.

Taco Bell has taken a similar strategy sharing mostly pictures. It occasionally shares text posts and links, but to a limited degree. The page is mostly focused on the promotion of the company’s newest menu item, the new Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco. Similar to Starbucks, running an offer promotion for a free drink when you buy the taco would be a way to garner larger engagement.

Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about food and beverage pages as well as other categories.

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Pet Rescue Saga reclaims top spot among fastest-growing Facebook games by DAU

King.com’s Pet Rescue Saga is once again the top gainer among the fastest-growing Facebook games by daily active users, bringing in 386,040 DAU for a 7 percent gain.

PopCap’s Bejeweled Blitz also grew by 7 percent with 205,440 DAU, taking the No. 2 spot. Zynga’s Bubble Safari Ocean reappears on the list at No. 3 after a noticeable absence, up 17 percent with 183,293 DAU. Nordeus’s Top Eleven Be a Football Manager is continuing its strong growth trend, gaining 5 percent with 181,951 DAU. Miniclip.com’s 8 Ball Pool completes this week’s top five gainers with 179,300 DAU for a 9 percent gain.

Three titles this week showed traffic gains of 50 percent or greater. CMUNE’s UberStrike was up by 69 percent with 112,803 DAU. 6waves’ Jewel Epic was up by 95,396 DAU for an 80 percent increase. Finally, Qublix’s Bubble Land grew by 51 percent with 84,104 DAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

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Candy Crush Saga continues hot streak among this week’s fastest-growing Facebook games by MAU

King.com’s Candy Crush Saga is once again No. 1 on our list of fastest-growing Facebook games by monthly active users, gaining 2.2 million MAU for a 110 percent increase this week.

Rovio’s Angry Birds added 1 million MAU for a 4 percent gain, securing the No. 2 spot. At No. 3 is King.com’s Bubble Witch Saga with 1 million MAU for a five percent gain.

Disney Playdom had two titles place in the top five spots of this week’s list. Marvel: Avengers Alliance snagged the No. 4 spot with an 18 percent gain of 900,000 MAU, and Disney Animal Kingdom Explorers was up by 145 percent with 710,000 MAU. The developer’s newer title, Armies of Magic, also made a strong showing with 610,000 MAU for a 555 percent increase. The only other game with a greater-than-100 percent increase is Cookapps’ bubble shooter Buggle, which picked up 590,000 MAU for 328 percent growth.

The Hunger Games Adventures appears on our list this week for the first time, taking the No. 20 spot with its gain 290,000 MAU gain for a 43 percent increase. The Hunger Games Adventures steady growth since its March launch is undoubtedly helped by the phenomenal success of the movie; currently the game has 960,000 MAU and 150,000 daily active users. The movie’s box office power is (finally) beginning to wane, though, so it won’t be long before the game has to survive solely on its own merits.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the fastest-growing games by daily active users on Wednesday and top emerging apps on Friday.

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Facebook unveils school-specific groups, allows file sharing among users with designated .edu email addresses

Facebook announced a new groups for schools feature that enables users with active school email addresses join online communities related to their college or university.

Groups for schools differ from Facebook’s other groups in that they can be exclusive to students and that members can share documents with each other. The company seems to position these groups as a utility for coordinating schedules, sharing lecture notes and messaging classmates. But university-specific groups might also increase engagement among college users who don’t feel comfortable using the social network the way students did before their teachers, parents and bosses joined.

Not all schools are eligible for groups yet. Users can check the groups for schools page or wait to see a message appear on the left side of their home page when the feature is available to them. Once users join their school community, they are able to create subgroups for individual classes, study groups, clubs, teams, dorms or friends. Users can join groups for multiple schools as long as they have an active email address for each. This is necessary for study abroad or transfer students.

On group pages there will be a tab for files. Users can share non-copyrighted documents and other files with members of a school group. Anyone in a school group can upload and download files within that group. When users upload a revised version of a file, the previous version of the file remains available. Users can also message any confirmed member of their school community without being friends first.

Facebook began testing school-specific groups in December 2011, among Brown and Vanderbilt students. At the time we wondered whether university groups would be a start to a broader initiative to get more people familiar with Facebook’s offerings around small-group sharing. Since then the social network has redesigned groups a few times and given events more group-like functionality.

The way groups for schools restrict access to users with a designated .edu email address is reminiscent of the way networks operated when Facebook began in 2004. File sharing is another former feature from the social network’s college-only days. Founder Mark Zuckerberg built a peer-to-peer file sharing application called Wirehog on top of the social network, but then-Facebook president Sean Parker encouraged him to shut it down to avoid copyright infringement issues. File sharing would be a useful feature for other non-school groups, but preventing illegal media sharing would certainly be difficult.

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Angry Birds and Empires & Allies this week’s gainer and loser among April’s Top 25 Facebook games

Each week, we take a look at six to seven games from the latest Top 25 Facebook Games and examine how their traffic has been doing since the list was posted, as well as how these changes might affect a title’s position on next month’s chart.

Here’s what we’ve looked at so far this month:

April 5, 2012: Pool Live Tour and Café World this week’s gainer and loser amongst April’s Top 25 Facebook games

This week, we take a look at No. 18 through No. 13 of the Top 25 Facebook Games in April.

Playtika’s Slotomania – Slot Machines is up  by 100,000 DAU to reach the 2 million mark. Casino games are increasing in popularity on Facebook, and the past few months have seen a rise of new slots titles. AppData shows Slotomania is still the most popular slots game on the social network — even though it’s one of the older ones — and it seems unlikely that it’ll start to lose traffic any time soon, but it may not move up more than a spot or two on next month’s chart because of the relatively minor traffic uptick.

Zynga’s Empires & Allies continues to lose traffic, dropping from 2.1 million DAU to 1.8 million over the past two weeks. The game was designed to appeal to mid-core strategy fans, but has had less success retaining players than Zynga’s “Ville” titles. Although Empires & Allies reached an impressive peak of 7.7 million DAU when it launched in June 2011 — thanks to cross promotion from other Zynga games like CityVille — traffic began bleeding out that August and has yet to recover. If Empires & Allies’s DAU continues to drop at this rate, it could be close to the bottom of our Top 25 for May.

Wooga’s Monster World is another title that continues to show slow-but-steady growth, up to 2.3 million DAU from 2.2 million at the start of the month. The game launched in April 2010 and consistently gained DAU since then. In March and April, Monster World showed slight declines in traffic, with the game dropping from No. 15 to No. 16, but this new increase may drive the game back up. The game has seen small bounces like this for extended periods before — last time, from November 2011 to the beginning of January 2012 — before beginning another time of growth. If that pattern holds true, Monster World will probably start to noticeably gain DAU again by the end of April or the beginning of May, but it may stay in the same spot for next month’s Top 25.

Wooga’s Bubble Island seems to be holding steady since the beginning of the month: After a slight drop, the game is back up to 2.3 million DAU.  As with other Wooga titles, Bubble Island’s traffic shows steady traffic gains ever since its January 2010 launch. The game dropped three spots to No. 15 this April because it lost 400,000 DAU, but this was following a dramatic traffic surge between January and March that saw a new DAU record of 2.8 million. This was likely due to increased Facebook advertising, and Bubble Island’s DAU gain was approximately six times higher than normal. Now that the ad push seems to be over, it looks like Bubble Island may have leveled out but probably won’t advance any higher on May’s Top 25 list because major DAU differences between games aren’t uncommon at this point on the chart.

Rovio’s Angry Birds is still attracting legions of fans on Facebook, having gained 800,000 DAU since April 1. The game launched in February and it has regularly topped our list of fastest-growing Facebook games since then. During March, Angry Birds went from 930,000 DAU to 2.6 million. Based on this month’s traffic patterns, the game looks like it might be able to double its DAU in time for May’s Top 25, but it’s a little too close to call. Angry Birds does look like it will at least make it to the No. 10 spot next month, since 3.6 million DAU was what Zynga Slingo needed to take that position for April.

Halfquest’s Arabic farm sim Happy Farm continues to creep up the Top 25 charts, moving from No. 13 in March to tying for the No. 12 spot in April. Since April 1, the game lost 100,000 DAU after nearly two weeks of no perceptible growth. Happy Farm showed consistent DAU gains since it launched in July 2011, but it lost a little traffic since its March 25 peak of 3 million DAU. The game gained 400,000 DAU in March, but April doesn’t look like it will see a repeat of this performance. Even if Happy Farm continues to lose DAU, the game may only fall one or two spots for the May Top 25, since it has over 500,000 more DAU than the next biggest games.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for next week’s continuation of our Top 25 gainers and losers, when we look at No. 12 through No. 7 on the list.

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MerchantCircle Survey Indicates Plenty of Runway for Facebook Ads Among Local Businesses

While 66% of small businesses have used Facebook for marketing, only 22% have used Facebook ads, according to MerchantCircle, the largest online network of local business owners. The company released its quarterly Merchant Confidence Index survey of 5,000 local business owners today, and other findings include the following: two thirds of those who’ve used Facebook ads would do so again, location-based marketing is declining, and interest is on the rise for group deals, especially those published by familiar entities including Facebook and Google.

The survey’s results indicate that Facebook’s self-serve advertising business, which account for a very significant portion of its total revenue, has plenty of room to grow. If Facebook can convince more local marketers on the site to advertise, it could fuel big total revenue gains that might improve its standing in the event of a long-anticipated IPO.

While the sample size is relatively low compared to the amount of marketers and advertisers on Facebook, MerchantCircle doesn’t overtly tout an Facebook-related services, so the data shouldn’t be biased.

Here are the core findings of the study:

66% of local businesses use Facebook for marketing94% of local businesses are aware of Facebook Ads, though only 22% use themOf those 22%, 65% said they would use Facebook Ads againReasons cited for repeat use of Facebook Ads were: ease of use (66.5%), ability to pause (64.8%), quality of targeting (53.7%), opportunities for acquiring new customers (49.3%)Reasons cited for not using Facebook Ads again included: not acquiring new customers (69%), cost (34.5%), low click-through rate (28.5%)

The high awareness of Facebook Ads, coupled with the 44% difference between marketers and advertisers shows that there’s great potential for the self-serve ad product to grow. Facebook could increase the percentage of repeat advertisers and counter the biggest reason for not repeating by improving its education efforts and providing advertisers with best practices for targeting, creative, and bid management.

Only 9.4% of local businesses have offered a daily deal, with 8.4% saying they haven’t but plan to in the next six months77% of those who’ve run deals say they’d do so again, up from 50% last quarterCiting familiarity with these big platforms, 52% of of local businesses would choose to run Facebook Deals or Google Offers instead of deals through Groupon, LivingSocial or other deals providersOther reasons for preferring Facebook included bigger audience size (26%), and better local targeting (21%)Other reasons for preferring Google included bigger audience size (42%), and brand reputation (34%)

Facebook’s daily deals service Facebook Deals is off to a shaky start, with anecdotal evidence suggesting few purchases due to weak value and low quality of available deals. However, MerchantCircle’s data indicates businesses are interested in using the service. Facebook needs to consider subsidizing Deals so it can hook users with huge discounts, and should consider improving copy-writing and design to make Deals more compelling.

22% of businesses are using Facebook Places for marketing, down from 32% last quarterOnly 7% are using Foursquare for marketing, down from 9% last quarter18% of local businesses have used mobile marketing or advertising, with 71% citing a lack of understanding as their primary barrier to use.

Facebook’s location-based deals service Checkin Deals that builds on Places hasn’t seen much adoption despite it being a free way to inspire users to promote a business to their friends through checkins. Again, Facebook needs to provide better educational resources, perhaps in the form of webinars or live seminars in key markets to jumpstart business adoption of Checkin Deals.

Overall, the data tells a story of how Facebook holds significant marketing and advertising potential for small and local businesses. However, without large dedicated ads or marketing teams they can’t get a good enough understanding of social to dedicate spend there. While Facebook has purposefully tried to keep its number of employees low to maintain the startup feel, the strategy may be inhibiting it from conducting the education and outreach efforts that could accelerate growth of its business.

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