Facebook removes ‘unlike page’ option in new News Feed

Facebook has removed the option to unlike pages after hiding stories in newly designed News Feed, introduced last Thursday.

In the old design, if users were to hide a story from a page they Liked, they could then chose to hide all the page’s posts from appearing in their News Feed or unlike the page completely. The new News Feed features a similar flow, but removes the choice to unlike the page. This could help pages retain their fan counts, even if they lose reach when users hide their posts. It also prevents Facebook from losing valuable data about users’ interests.

For users, this change makes it a longer process to unlike a page.  To unlike a page completely, users must either visit the actual page and click “unlike” from the top of the page, or they must go through a complicated process that involves hovering over different links within News Feed.

As for pages, the change could affect page reach in relation to page Likes. If more users are hiding posts but not unliking the page, it would appear as though a page’s reach percentage is decreasing even though Likes stay relatively the same or even increase.

Facebook may have made this change because it wants users to continue to like a page even if they choose to hide it completely. By allowing users to continue to like a page, it is able to index that information for ad targeting, search and recommendations. It also helps to provide page owners with deeper information on a page’s fan demographic. Page Likes provide a more detailed index of audiences, empowering marketers to continue creating hyper-relevant creative for a responsive audience, and gain insights that they can apply to their other marketing efforts.

However, this might also have been an oversight and Facebook could return this option before the new News Feed rolls out more widely. This has happened in the past with the “hide all” option.

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Buddy Media acquisition of Brighter Option results in new BuyBuddy ad platform

Buddy Media today announced its new BuyBuddy platform for managing Facebook advertising campaigns.

BuyBuddy is the result of the social media management software company’s acquisition of Facebook Ads API partner Brighter Option in February. Buddy Media has integrated the advertising product with its page management tools to create the type of unified system that large brands are looking for to make decisions and track success on social platforms.

Facebook has been shifting its advertising model away from traditional display ads toward one where brands promote page posts and user activity. This new emphasis on content is what led Brighter Option to become the first company to combine the Ads API and Insights API so businesses could easily see how posts were performing and create ads accordingly. Ten days later, Buddy Media announced it had acquired the company.

BuyBuddy CEO and founder Peter Goodman says today’s announcement is more than just a name change. (Goodman retained a CEO title in the acquisition.)

“We have integrated [Buddy Media and Brighter Option] products to work more in harmony,” he says. “This also allows us to leverage more information Buddy has on their end and bring in more of Buddy’s proprietary statistics.”

For example, Buddy Media tracks conversions off-Facebook and generates some of its own engagement metrics for the content brands share through the platform. Bringing content marketing and content advertising into a single system will allow advertisers to better optimize their campaigns for different actions.

“What consumers engage with drives a brand’s paid and owned strategy,” Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow says. He adds that online content marketing could also help inform what brands do beyond Facebook, “What becomes a TV ad is an extension of what people respond to in the social sphere.”

Lazerow also shared the following statistics about BuyBuddy:

1,000 clients with users in 91 countries1 million clicks per day (90 million total) in Q1 2012, up from 54.1 million total clicks generated in Q4 2011127 billion impressions in Q1 2012, up from 92 billion in Q4 20111.6 million total ads created in Q1 2012, up from 1.2 million Q4 2011Increased CTR by 90 percent and reduced cost per click by 45 percent for Work the WorldHelped Great British Chefs achieve an average clickthrough rate of .07 percent versus the Facebook benchmark of .02 percent

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Facebook to bring back option to invite all group members to events

Users will once again be able to send event invites to all members of a group, a Facebook spokesperson tells us.

Sometime in the past few weeks, the social network removed the option to directly invite an entire group to an event. Users could only send invitations to users they were connected to as friends. Facebook tells us the reasoning was that creating an event within the group environment generates a notification for users who have group notifications enabled. However, many users were frustrated with the change because their events were no longer getting the same amount of traction among group members.

Facebook says it decided to bring back the feature for all groups as a result of the feedback. The change is expected to go live later today.

People who use Facebook groups for promoting events are likely to appreciate the return in functionality, but they should be mindful of sending invites that members might perceive as spam. The social network often removes features that are abused in this way. For example, Facebook pages can no longer send updates or event invites to fans’ inboxes.

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New moderation option hides user posts until page admins approve them

Facebook pages now have a feature that prevents user posts from appearing publicly until they are reviewed by an admin.

This is another function page owners wished for and Facebook implemented as part of the latest overhaul of the pages product. It gives organizations more control over what appears on their pages and could help keep spam and inappropriate content off the wall.

From the “Edit Page” dashboard under “Manage Permissions,” page owners can select a new option titled, “Only show posts by [your page] and friend activity on your page until reviewed by an admin.” This hides posts made by other users until a page owner indicates “Allow on Timeline” from the new activity log.

This does not seem to affect posts in the “Friend Activity” section of a page, as users always have the ability to view posts that their friends have shared with them. It also does not seem to affect comments on page posts. The option only hides posts users make to the wall.

Pages that address more sensitive topics or that have had issues with spam will want to enable this feature. For pages with less frequent activity, this function might not even be necessary. On the other hand, pages that are very active with fan-to-fan discussions might not want to hide wall posts either so they don’t limit the amount or pace of interaction.

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Brighter Option combines Page Insights, Ads API to improve Facebook ad planning

Facebook Ads API partner Brighter Option announced an update to its Social Ads Manager tool that makes ad creation and optimization more efficient. Most notably, the company now integrates the Page Insights API to help businesses choose effective ad creative for page post ads.

Page post ads are a relatively new offering from Facebook. Instead of developing creative with a headline, body copy and image, businesses can promote posts they already made on their Facebook pages. Brighter Option now shows posts’ engagement metrics within the ad creation section, which gives advertisers more context than Facebook’s self-serve dashboard and other ad tools provide.

Brighter Option CEO Peter Goodman says part of the goal with this feature is to solve some of the problems that result when companies have different agencies doing advertising and page management. Bringing page insights to the ad builder increases efficiency and we imagine it will encourage advertisers to rethink what type of content works best in Facebook ads.

The Social Ad Manager has come a long way since we profiled the tool in 2010. The London-based company has introduced several features that make Facebook ad planning and campaign management less onerous. We liked the easy navigation between analytics and scheduling, the find-and-replace feature for making copy changes across multiples ads, the ZIP code area map and shortcuts in the creative builder. For advertisers seeking a software solution rather than managed services for Facebook advertising, Brighter Option is worth testing. The company offers a free trial of its tool.

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Facebook gives users option to hide Ticker

Some Facebook users are seeing a new option to hide Ticker, the real-time activity feed in the right sidebar of the homepage.

Although the feature can be distracting, it is a key component of the new Open Graph ecosystem that lets apps continuously publish lightweight stories to Ticker and larger aggregate stories to News Feed and Timeline. Facebook may have found that users are rarely clicking on Ticker stories, but by seeing if users hide the module completely, the company can determine what improvements might be necessary.

Currently Ticker includes many of the same stories that end up in News Feed, giving the feature little value (see image below). The social network found that the ticker on canvas app pages was not driving significant traffic to games or apps so it has removed it for now.

Ideally when more users are using Open Graph apps, Ticker will be filled with actions like “watch,” “run,” or “cook.” The module will show what your friends are doing and News Feed will be for posts they actively share or aggregate stories like “10 of your friends posted about the Super Bowl.” The social network might also consider a layout change to make the page feel less cluttered. News Feed could ultimately appear more like Timeline, with two columns of content and different boxes for different types of activity. Either way, Facebook will need to find a solution to provide the discovery channels apps and pages need to reach their audiences.

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New Facebook platform industry hires: Brighter Option, Wildfire and Banyan Branch

Banyan Branch hired a new Senior Vice President of Client Services, and Brighter Option and Wildfire hired account staff this week in our look at Facebook platform hires.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into our next post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

Banyan Branch

Jennifer Blank Hecht, Senior Vice President of Client Services – formerly the Seattle Program Director for Social Media for Wunderman.Erik Arpe, Account Director - previously Account Director at Visible Technologies.Stephanie Camp, Account Director – was a Global Account Manager working with Microsoft in Seattle and Ridley Bikes brand in Belgium, as well as Kirkwood Mountain Resort, Boston Medical Center and Allied Feather and Down, and Starbucks Germany.

Brighter Option

Marc Judlin, Account Executive – a recent graduate from the University of Sussex.Louisa Matheson, Account Executive – a recent graduate from the University of Bristol.

Wildfire

Katie Mulligan, Account Executive – formerly an Associate Director, Social Entrepreneurship at Miami University.Aaron Landman, Small Business Executive – was previously a Sales Associate at Wildfire.

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

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Facebook Adds “Subscribe Via RSS” Option to Pages

Facebook appears to have added a “Subscribe via RSS” option to Pages. The link, found at the bottom left side of Pages beneath the profile picture, leads to an Atom feed of wall posts by the Page that can be auto-discovered by clients.

The RSS option will assist users that want to stay up to date with news distributed from specific Pages without constantly having to check Facebook. Some people that might find this especially useful include those tasked with industry or corporate communications policy compliance, researchers, or those whose access to Facebook is blocked by an employer, educator, or government.

This link joins RSS links on Notes as evidence that RSS is not dead on Facebook, despite the site more actively supporting JSON-based API feeds. In the past, Pages could sometimes be subscribed to via SMS, but now most Pages show both RSS and SMS options. Some clients have also had limited access to RSS feeds of Pages in the past, but there was no official option for this on Pages.

Before, some thought Twitter’s API and RSS options made it a better choice for producing content to be received by certain types of clients. Though Facebook’s Graph API still doesn’t support subscriptions, Page wall RSS subscriptions bring it closer to parity with Twitter. They will also permit some experimental users of Facebook, where certain types of posts can trigger actions in controlled by clients.

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Zynga adds FarmVille Instant Grow per plot option, not exactly worth it

by Joe Osborne, Posted May 12th 2011 3:00PM

Think of it as ... reverse DDT. Yeah, that might help you forget about the chemicals in your digital food! Zynga has added an option to FarmVIlle (sans digital chemicals ... whatever that means) that allows players to apply Instant Grow to individual plots of farmland. FarmVille Freak found that, when you mouse over freshly planted plots, text appears reading, "Click to Apply Instant Grow." Doing so, if you have the item, will apply the effect to a single plot for a smaller amount of Farm Cash.

Here are the prices for applying Instant Grow to a single crop or tree, but keep in mind that they vary depending upon how ready the crops or plants in question are:

Instant Grow Crop – 3 Farm CashInstant Grow Tree – 7 Farm Cash
Now, this is the cost for a freshly planted or harvested crop or tree. However, the option to apply the effect to all crops and trees still exists for just 15 Farm Cash for each category. (Note: However, this is could easily be a bug in which the true switch has yet to take place for all players.) Just applying Instant Grow to five individual crops would cost the same as applying it to them all. In other words, this isn't really a good deal. If you're going to apply Instant Grow to a single crop, you may as well do it for the whole bunch.

Have you seen this feature appear in your game yet? Are you a fan of the Instant Grow, or would you rather play old-fashioned (i.e. not spend money)? Sound off in the comments. Add Comment.

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Tags: click+to+apply+instant+grow, clicktoapplyinstantgrow, farm cash, farmville, FarmVille English Countryside, farmville farm cash, farmville freak, farmville instant grow, farmville+apply+instant+grow, farmvilleapplyinstantgrow, instant grow, instant+grow+farmville, instantgrowfarmville, zynga

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New Facebook Platform Industry Hires: Wildfire, Vitrue, BranchOut, Brighter Option and More

Among the top hires this week among platform companies on Facebook, professional networking application BranchOut lured Chris Merritt away from his position as vice president of global advertiser partnerships at Yahoo. Similarly, ad software provider Brighter Option brought on Randall Lloyd from his previous post as senior vice president of sales at Rock You.

If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we’ll get it into next week’s post. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes directly from company updates from LinkedIn.

Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry.

Here’s this week’s list of hires:

BranchOut

Chris Merritt, VP of Sales and General Manager of Enterprise Products – Now with BranchOut, just left Yahoo as VP of global advertiser partnerships.Dan Arkind, Advisor - Now with BranchOut, co-founder of JobScore and previously a recruitment consultant/coach at Indico Group.

Brighter Option

Randall Lloyd, Managing Director of North America – Now with Brighter Option and formerly senior VP of sales at Rock You.

Wildfire

Noah Weissman, Social Media Marketing Strategist - Now at Wildfire, also co-founder of Zoku & Juice, and formerly an account manager at Faktura Media Agency.Tom Logan, Sales Associate - Working at Wildfire, previously worked as a government relations intern with Del Monte Foods.Scott Hagedorn, Senior Account Executive – Now at Wildfire, last worked as a business development director at Meltwater Group.

Vitrue

Christian Rauh, Product Manager - Now at Vitrue, most recently a manager of international projects and client services at Channel Intelligence.Mikael Kessler, Strategic Services Analyst - At Vitrue, formerly a creative developer at twiredjobs.com.Wesley Barnes, Strategic Services Manager - Now at Vitrue, also CTO/co-founder of aitendant and formerly in program management/software development at Hewlett-Packard.Sarah Vabulas, Strategic Services Analyst – Now working at Vitrue, formerly the social media and public relations coordinator at The Maximus Group.

Work4 Labs

Armando Gallegos, Key Account Executive - Now at Work4 Labs, formerly a key account executive at Yahoo HotJobs and Monster.Kurt Angier, Key Account Executive – previously a key account executive at Yahoo HotJobs.Simon Bouchez, Project Manager Jobs For Me – formerly credit analyst intern at Société Générale (France).

Votigo

James Berry, Director of Product Management – formerly at Yahoo.Jeff Rozic, Director of Marketing – previously worked at Brand Affinity Technologies and Google.Stephanie Pullen, Director of Project Management & Client Services – Now at Votigo, formerly at Isobar and AKQA.Katie White, Account Director - Now with Votigo, frmerly at Martha Stewart/Omnimedia and A&E.Brad Moore, Account Representative – previously worked as retail account manager at Westword Newspaper.

Nanigans

Karen Harris, Consultant - Now at Nanigans, formerly a controller at Incipient, Inc.

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FarmVille Sneak Peek: Option to turn off Pause apparently coming soon

by Brandy Shaul, Posted Mar 28th 2011 8:11PM

Apparently, with enough comments, Zynga's fan base can actually elicit change. According to a lone screenshot, Zynga will apparently start rolling out a Pause update to FarmVille, allowing users to choose whether or not to turn on Pause when switching from your Home Farm to the English Countryside (and vice versa), or to leave it off.

Thanks to a pop-up found by FVMasters, a new "Travel Options" window has apparently been added to the game, allowing you to choose from two options: "Pause one farm" which keeps things they way they are currently, with only one farm being active at once, or "Play both farms" which turns on all timers for both farms.

As we expected, it seems that crop wither is the main reason for the pause feature's inclusion in the first place, as (if this is a true pop-up) you're given a warning that your crops may wither if you forget to come back and check on them in time, but I'm sure many users will agree that we'd much rather run the risk of losing some crops if we're a bit forgetful than losing our entire progress on one farm or another because we didn't have a choice.

Note: It should be noted that currently, there are very few sources that can confirm the validity of this image. It could be that the feature is on such a slow roll-out that even the dedicated FarmVille forums users haven't picked up on it yet, or it could be a "coming soon" addition that just happened to leak via this new picture. We've contacted Zynga asking for official comment, and we'll make sure to update this space when we know more.

Personally, if this does turn out to be a real thing, I only have one thing to say about that.

[Image Credit: FVMasters]

Have you received the Travel Options window while playing FarmVille? If this feature does come to the game, will you turn off Pause, or leave it on? Let us know in the comments.
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Tags: crop wither, farmville, farmville crop wither, farmville england, farmville england expansion, farmville english countryside, farmville pause, farmville sneak peek, farmville unreleased, pause feature, zynga

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