Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy discusses Parse, Mobile App Install Ads

In his fireside chat at Inside Social Apps today, Facebook Director of Product Management Doug Purdy discussed about mobile app discovery difficulties faced by developers. He discussed how developers can use the platform to drive app installations through mobile app install ads.

Since first launching last October, mobile app install ads have started to be used by more than 3,800 developers. Since sharing this number earlier last month, Purdy today stated that 4,000  developers have started using the ads which have driven over 25 million app installs. He added that one app developer has earned over three times its average ROI from the ads.

Purdy explained that Facebook’s goal is to build its products to complement existing app stores and help developers drive more users toward their applications. He suggests that developers look beyond the install and create a goal for users to engage deeper with their applications. This is done by planning around having users take a specific action after installing the app. He added that with Facebook’s robust targeting options, it is the best way to target and identify which users will take the appropriate action.

He also brought up Parse, a cloud-based platform which provides mobile app developers with tools to seamlessly integrate their apps across multiple platforms, which Facebook acquired last April. Purdy explained that the acquisition was based on Facebook’s goal of helping developers integrate faster and easier.

Mediabistro Event

Get personalized advice from industry insiders at Facebook, Deloitte, Chartboost, Tango, and more at Inside Social Apps, this Thursday and Friday in San Francisco. Newly added speakers include Val Bauduin of Deloitte & Touche, LLP and Doug Purdy, Director of Developer Products at Facebook, so don’t miss the chance to add these valuable contacts to your network. Tickets are available onsite.

View the original article here

Facebook hires: market research, media solutions, PMD management and more

Facebook appears to have made about 20 hires this week based on LinkedIn activity and listings that have been removed from its careers page.

The company gained a former Procter & Gamble analyst to work in monetization and insights. Facebook also seems to have filled a number of positions related to account management and client partnerships.

Helen Crossley, Monetization and Insights – former Manager, Consumer and Market Knowledge at Procter & GambleMichael Oblena, IT Client Platform Engineer – former IT Network Administator at Fry’s ElectronicsEric Giovanola,Software Engineer – title was previously product designer at FacebookLead Recruiter (Dublin)Recruiting Coordinator, Non Tech – Contract (Menlo Park)University Product Management Recruiter (Menlo Park)Oracle Application Developer (Menlo Park)Quantitative Market Researcher (Menlo Park)Quantitative UX Researcher (Menlo Park)Software Engineer Research Tools, University – Contract (Menlo Park)Payment Operations Analyst (Austin)Account Manager, Auto (Los Angeles)Associate Account Manager, Tech/SocialCom (Seattle)Associate, Media Solutions (Hyderabad)Media Solutions (New York)Media Solutions (Sydney)Media Solutions, UK & Ireland (Dublin)Media Solutions (Menlo Park)Director, Online Sales & Operations, South and Latin America (São Paulo)Spanish Partner Manager, Preferred Marketing Developer Program (Dublin)Client Partner, Auto (Los Angeles)Client Partner, Retail (Chicago)Analyst, Partner Measurement – CHI (Chicago)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

View the original article here

Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen leaving company

Facebook Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen announced today that he is leaving Facebook to start something new, though he tells TechCrunch he doesn’t have concrete plans about what that will be.

Sjogreen, who led Facebook’s efforts to create the Open Graph app platform, is another key employee to step down following the company’s initial public offering in May. Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor announced his departure last month, also with entrepreneurial plans. Director of Corporate Communications Barry Schnitt recently left Facebook for Pinterest. It is common for long-time employees to leave a company after it goes public, though for Facebook, it will be especially important to retain leaders who believe in the social network’s mission and vision of the future.

Sjogreen came to Facebook in 2010, through the company’s acquisition of travel startup Nextstop, of which he was a co-founder. Sjogreen soon took on many of Taylor’s product management responsibilities after Taylor was promoted to CTO. Before Facebook, Sjogreen led Google Calendar and helped Google build up its presence in Australia and New Zealand.

In a Facebook post shared with friends and published on TechCrunch, Sjogreen says of his departure, “I’ve always been an entrepreneur at heart and I’m excited to be starting something on my own again, but I will miss all of you at Facebook tremendously.”

We sat down with Sjogreen earlier this year for a fireside chat about the Facebook platform at our Inside Social Apps conference. He told the audience, “What you’ve seen from Open Graph so far is a small part of the vision.”

View the original article here

Wildfire, GraphEffect now provide page management, Facebook ad software in one

Two more social software companies announced integration with Facebook page publishing and ad management tools this week on the heels of news that Buddy Media acquired Brighter Option to offer a platform that combines paid, owned and earned efforts.

Wildfire partnered with Adaptly on Monday to add social advertising capabilities to its suite of page management and promotion applications. Now today GraphEffect launched a new version of its social media management platform to establish more of a link between marketing and advertising, combining the Facebook Ads and Insights APIs.

These changes, like what Buddy Media has done with Brighter Option, allow businesses to see how their Facebook posts are performing and then easily choose which to amplify as paid page post ads. This is likely to encourage brands to begin prioritizing content creation ahead of traditional advertising.

We expect social media software companies to continue to consolidate. As social media marketing efforts become tied with paid advertising campaigns instead of being standalone efforts as they often have for the past few years, companies are going to be looking for a single software solution to help them manage it all. However, we can see how things might get complicated for brands that work with different agencies that use different software. These platforms will have to find ways to differentiate themselves and make it easy for brands and agencies to know which is right for them.

View the original article here

Page Management Industry Interest in Ecommerce Grows as Vitrue Partners with Milyoni

Page management platform developer Vitrue recently announced a partnership with ecommerce app developer Milyoni. The alliance will bring improved shopping and Facebook Credits payment functionality to Page tabs apps available in Vitrue’s app suite.

The partnership continues the growing trend of consolidation between the Page management and ecommerce spaces as brands demand ways to drive direct return on their social media investment. Below, Vitrue CEO Reggie Bradford tells us why the partnership primes his company to sign the next wave of brands joining Facebook.

Over the last few years, brands have concentrated on gaining Likes, but now they’re looking to monetize these fans. This has increased demand for ecommerce apps that permit fans to make purchases without the added friction of being directed away from Facebook to a traditional company website.

Page management companies, previously more focused on publishing, engagement apps, and analytics are now looking for ecommerce partnership and acquisition targets, in lieu of trying to build things they’re less familiar with.

Milyoni is a strong choice for Vitrue, as the San Francisco-based ecommerce developer has been behind some highly innovative Facebook commerce campaigns this year. It powered the movie rental app used by Warner Bros to sell temporary access to The Dark Knight, Inception and other films in exchange for Facebook Credits. It also allowed the Austin City Limits music festival to charge users Credits to stream pay-per-view concerts.

Milyoni raised a $3 million Series A round from ATA ventures and Thomvest Ventures in May to improve its social commerce products. The company has over 50 brands representing over 60 million fans, including the NBA, the clothing label French Connection, and beverage brand Guayaki.

The partnership will strengthen Vitrue’s offering allowing it to attract clients. Vitrue CEO Reggie Bradford tells us Milyoni’s technology will enable it to offer social shopping tab apps such as “flash sales and group discounts” as well as a “full shopping experience within Facebook.” Milyoni will gain distribution to a large set of clients, including some of the world’s biggest brands such as AT&T, Ford, Proctor & Gamble, and McDonalds.

Vitrue has been a major driver of consolidation recently, in part thanks to a $17 million funding round closed in May which helped provide money for acquisitions and partnerships. It bought GamesThatGive so its client Pages can offering games where user’s earn money for charity through their engagement. Last year it partnered with Ads API tool and service provider TBG Digital, sharing clients looking for each other’s advertising or Page management solutions.

Bradford tells us that in the coming year, “you’re going to see substantial consolidation”. He believes this will be centered around Page management companies “as their relationship with brands becomes a key component of a brand or agency’s plan to manage social. Once you have the Page management relationship, you can roll out new features such as commerce, games, Sponsored Stories” by partnering with or acquiring those that develop them.

Virtue’s goal now is to grow through consolidation to offer a ”turnkey solution”. Bradford predicts that “every major brand is going to be using one of these platforms by 2012. Those platforms in the lead now are going to have 100s and 1000s more marketers using their platform.” The partnership with Miyoni for ecommerce is a strong step in this direction.

View the original article here

Facebook Ads API Tool Efficient Frontier Acquires Page Management Tool Context Optional

Efficient Frontier, an established search and display advertising platform that offers a self-serve Facebook Ads API tool, has just acquired one of the oldest Page management companies, Context Optional. The reportedly $50 million deal will allow Efficient Frontier to help its existing advertising clients customize the Facebook Pages that their ads sometimes point towards, as well as secure advertising contracts with Context Optional’s clients.

Facebook ad spend is growing, Page management being commodified as free products are released, and the connection between advertising and Page management is deepening due to Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad unit. These factors could inspire a trend where cash-flush Ads API companies purchase or partner with Page management companies.

Efficient Frontier is primarily a search and display ad company, but seeing the shift in spend towards social, it developed an Ads API tool so clients wouldn’t have to look elsewhere for a way to run their own large scale ad campaigns on Facebook. The tool’s multi-channel interface helps advertisers balance spend between search, display, and social to maximize returns.

However, by being rooted in slower evolving ad channels, Efficient Frontier is slightly less agile in responding to Facebook’s changes. For instance, Justin Merickel, the company’s VP of Marketing told us it added API access to Facebook’s social ad unit Sponsored Stories on April 16th, a month after private beta access to the Sponsored Stories API opened on March 8th. Other Ads API companies that don’t handle search or display reportedly only took a few weeks to include Sponsored Stories in their services, with TBG Digital reporting that it started running Sponsored Stories through the API as soon as March 16th, though we are awaiting confirmation on these dates from Facebook.

Some consider Efficient Frontier to be relatively weak Facebook advertising solution since the tool has social tacked on rather than as core of its targeting and optimization technologies. The need for more social expertise may have contributed to the company’s decision to make its first acquisition a dedicated social engagement tool.

Efficient Frontier CEO David Karnstedt acknowledged that it needed to close the social gap, saying “Our heritage is that we were early in optimizing search engine advertising for clients, so we wanted to expand our efforts exponentially with Context Optional, since social is different than search.”

Context Optional has been helping brands market themselves through Facebook since its launch in 2006. Its suite of apps, analytics tools, and viral marketing services for Facebook,Twitter, and LinkedIn have helped many Fortune 500 companies grow their fan bases, including Allstate, Ford, Microsoft, AT&T, eBay, and CNN.

Page management services were crucial to brands in the early days of Facebook because they didn’t understand how to get started, create apps, or derive value from the social network. However, with time, marketers have learned the ropes of the Platform and many small companies now offer cheap or free ways to create promotional apps. As core Page management services become commodified, the industry needs to find new sources of revenue — namely advertising.

There’s great potential for synergy between companies from the two industries. For instance, Context Optional’s team could create a new branded app for a client, which would then be promoted with ads purchased through Efficient Frontier. Page management companies also hold demographic and engagement data on users that can help improve ad targeting.

The acquisition is a smart move for Efficient Frontier. Context Optional’s Co-Founder and CEO Kevin Barenblat says the acquisition makes sense because”[it and Efficient Frontier's] respective clients are asking us for a comprehensive solution to both acquire and build relationships with their customers.”

This is probably the case with other Ads API and Page management companies too, so expect more acquisitions and partnerships in the space to emerge over the coming year. As we predicted in February, acquisitions of Page management companies are becoming more common as companies lacking them don’t want to fall further behind by taking months to develop their own.

Some Page management companies like Buddy Media, Syncapse and Vitrue have grown quite large and raised over $30 million, but still may be viable acquisition targets for the largest search and display ad services providers, or Ads API companies including TBG Digital, Blinq Media, AdParlor, and Spruce Media. There are also a host of medium-size companies such as Involver, and smaller companies such as Fan Appz, Brand Glue, Likeable Media, and iPlatform that could be acquired more cheaply to bring social tools and expertise to companies looking to break into social or expand their offering.

More information on the Page management and Ads API companies operating in the Facebook ecosystem can be found in the the Facebook Marketing Bible’s Facebook Marketing Service Provider Directory. It includes the areas of expertise, verticals covered, client lists, portfolio samples, news updates and contact information of organizations of all sizes who are marketing and advertising on Facebook.

View the original article here