Facebook

Ever since Facebook first applied the reply function to comments on pages, many admins were a little frustrated that the comments weren’t in chronological order. Now it appears Facebook has given page managers the chance to choose if they want to see comments to their posts in the order they were posted, or by a Reddit-style sorting with the most popular comments on top. Social media expert Mari Smith noticed this and posted about it on her Facebook page. This is what Facebook told Smith about this new feature, which is enabled starting today for all pages with the replies feature turend on: Replies are shown below the comments, so it’s clear who’s responding to which comment. The most active conversations are shown at the top, and comments marked as spam are moved to the bottom. To view the most recent conversations at the top, click Top Comments and select Recent Activity from the dropdown. Readers: What do you think about this new feature?

Playstation is this week’s top gaining page in the People Talking About This metric for product and service pages. Highlighting its new Playstation 4 console at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last week, the page generated a large buzz from the console gaming community. This list of top gaining product and service pages is compiled with PageData, which tracks page growth and engagement across Facebook. # Name People Talking About Daily Growth Weekly Growth  1    PlayStation 1,217,897 -17,797 +874,125 2    Samsung Mobile 1,684,227 0 +674,282 3    Intel 937,069 +229,436 +502,516 4    Visa 728,030 0 +223,825 5    Carmen Steffens 174,674 +34,990 +149,625 6    Ne-Cap 119,304 0 +118,524 7    Mozilla Firefox 158,140 +22,389 +95,102 8    GoPro 295,036 +35,603 +94,171 9    Congrats Books 88,586 +16,470 +88,382 10    Nike Corre 100,891 +21,704 +86,709 Surprisingly, the Playstation page does not publish an update every day. With a large weekly growth, it would normally seem that the Playstation page regularly schedules posts to maintain its large PTAT. According to this chart from PageData, the page saw a large increase in page likes at the beginning of the month, but did not see increased engagements until recently. The numbers on the chart indicate when a page post was published on the page, showing the page has not spread apart its content. It has only started to submit more updates recently. In this case, these posts were about the new PS4 console. In contrast to number 2 on this week’s list, Samsung Mobile, the Playstation page’s activity is mostly sporadic, lacking consistent updates. From this chart, it can be seen that Samsung is running Page Like advertisements to increase its total fan base. The steady average increase in Page Likes helps to bolster its PTAT across all of its global pages. The page also spreads out is updates more than the Playstation page. Because of this, it is likely that the Samsung Mobile page will continue to see more engagement week to week, while the Playstation page falls after the buzz around the PS4 dies down. Visit PageData to see more about the top talked about product and service pages as well as other categories. Now only $19.95 a month. Playstation banner image courtesy of Playstation’s Facebook page.

Facebook’s push to remove redundancies and confusion from advertising took another big step Wednesday, as the company announced some changes to insights to make them easier to understand. The company has clearly defined metrics such as people talking about this (PTAT) and virality, and made it much simpler to see how a post is performing. Now, page admins can see not just likes, comments, and shares, but also specifically how many clicks a post received. Facebook has been trying to find ways to make it easier for page admins to understand when a post is gaining popularity (through highlighting it in the admin panel), but now marketers can see how many times a post has been clicked on, as well as negative engagement such as hides and indications of spam. Page admins also have deeper insights into the demographic makeup of their Facebook fanbase. These improvements will start today, but will be gradually rolled out, so not everyone will have these new tools at first. Facebook explained these changes in a blog post: Facebook News Feed rewards quality posts with greater reach. One major consideration in gauging post quality is the relationship between positive interactions (likes, comments, shares and clicks) and negative interactions (hide post, hide all posts, report as spam, unlike page). Historically, Page Insights has reported on posts’ performance, reach, and engagement in three distinct places. In the new Page Insights, we aggregate all these metrics into a post-specific score card, so marketers can evaluate positive and negative metrics together. This will help Page admins better identify content people interact with, produce more of it, and enjoy increased reach and impact on Facebook. Here’s a preview of what page admins will see when they drill down to post-level metrics: Additionally, Facebook will give page admins more data about people who not only comprise their fan base, but who is interacting with posts. This way, marketers can see the demographic breakdown of the people who actually care and engage with the page’s posts. Facebook says that this will roll out globally and gradually. Page admins will be notified that they’ll gain access to these tools. Right now, Facebook will not change the insights export or application programming interface. Readers: How do you feel about these changes?

Facebook has begun to roll out photo comments for all users. The new feature allows users to share images as comments on posts. The feature will be made available for user to user interactions, and will soon be an option to comment on page posts, as well. Previously, Facebook would allow users to share an image as a comment by posting a link. It would then pull the image as a thumbnail for easy viewing. With this update, Facebook removes this middle step and allows users upload their images directly from their computer. These images appear larger than those shared by links and are hosted directly on Facebook. Users will not need to take the time to upload an image through a hosting site such as Imgur, Photobucket or many others. This new feature was built in a hackathon by Facebook engineers and is being rolled out globally for all users today. Facebook engineer Bob Baldwin, who helped build this feature has said, “I hope this will make threads with friends more expressive and engaging.” Currently, photo comments can only be uploaded on the desktop and mobile browser sites, but are currently viewable on the native applications. Readers: Are you going to use photo comments?

Structured status updates, previously only available on mobile web and desktop, have found their way to a Facebook native application. The latest Facebook for iOS update includes the ability to share what you’re eating, watching or reading. Facebook also offered enhanced privacy settings, allowing users to change who sees content they’ve already posted. The fun status updates that have been popping up all over Facebook, saying that a user is watching The Big Bang Theory, listening to Kanye West, eating bacon or playing Xbox are now able to be posted from iPhones and iPads. Additionally, Facebook added a feature currently available on the Android native app — the ability to change privacy on things users have already posted. That means embarrassing photos only meant for college friends (but accidentally posted publicly) can now be changed from mobile. Readers: What other improvements would you like to see on the iOS app? Screenshots courtesy of The Next Web.

Facebook’s June 20 new product announcement is gathering a lot of curiosity by the technology business world. We are all in anticipation over what Facebook will release and how we think it will affect the lives of Facebook users, which now account for 1 in 7 people across the planet. Early indicators based on code released by Facebook point to some form of an RSS tool. From a user functionality point of view, a feature with RSS feed could be a new channel to find information, or track trending topics within Facebook. Similar to how Reddit has built a very successful aggregator of information through user submitted and promoted content, Facebook could potentially optimize its News Feed to include trending topics amongst Facebook users. Recent interface changes would also support this theory. For example, Facebook has added nested comments making it easier to for users to have conversations based on comments as is popular in Reddit. Other changes within the Facebook interface seem to point in the direction that Facebook is working on a much larger goal. It would appear that Facebook has their sights set on becoming a player in the search marketing business. It started with the introduction of the Open Graph, as Facebook opened their walled garden to include objects that exist outside of the Facebook network. Then they rolled out Graph Search, which makes it much easier to search socially for things like “songs my friends like” or “restaurants my friends like.” We’ve also recently seen the addition of interactive hashtags, making it possible to search for trends and other popular topics. From a business standpoint, it begs the question: Who should be worried about these changes? Google and Twitter have the most to lose should Facebook successfully enter the search game. In the short term, Twitter has the most at risk. Hashtags in Facebook are a clone of Twitter’s most popular feature and Facebook already has the larger network of users. If Facebook users quickly adopt hashtags, it could have an immediate impact on those Twitter users who use the service primarily to track trends. In the long term, Google will need to keep an eye on Facebook as advertisers look for digital advertising options. Today, Google still dominates the direct response market, especially in key categories like retail and travel based on implied behavior from keyword intentions. For example, someone who uses the “Samsung Galaxy” is most likely looking to either buy the latest Samsung Galaxy phone or they are looking to research the product. Facebook’s Open Graph Search has the potential to be more accurate than keyword intention. Instead of searching just for a keyword, consumers can tap their social network for purchasing advice via searches like “what smartphones do my friends use” or “where is the best site to buy a smart phone?” Google+ already shows that Google is playing the defensive as they try to build up a social network to supplement keyword data with social demographics. At the end of the day, Facebook, Google, and Twitter all run on the same advertising business model. The company that will succeed will be the one who can deliver the best relevance between consumer and advertiser. If Facebook can put together a search engine that enables a more natural way to find information via searchable web behavior based on Open Graph data, it will attract the big advertising budgets that currently flow primarily to Google.  Joe McCormack has more than a decade of digital marketing experience and currently serves as the CEO of Adotomi, a Facebook PMD. Joe sits on the board of directors at multiple technology companies and is a long-time expert on the advertising technology industry. Adotomi is a Social Advertising Technology company which works with some of the biggest brands, developers and agencies in the world including SodaStream, OMD, Konami, Playtika, and Wix. Main image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Facebook introduced the ability for users to add photos to comments, Product Engineer Bob Baldwin announced in a post on his Timeline. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Select Facebook page administrators will be invited to participate in a test of changes to page insights, which include breaking out the elements that make up the social network’s people talking about this metric. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook and other social networks can be valuable tools for employees seeking to recruit “passive” candidates — those not actively looking for new jobs, but likely to switch for the right opportunity — according to a recently published a white paper on social job sharing by social recruiting company Work4 Labs. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Facebook is targeting businesses in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa that have not yet advertised on the social network with ads directing them to the Facebook Start to Success Program, which offers free support for first-time advertisers, as well as a £25 ($39.15) credit toward advertising. continued… New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.