With 400 million users - 50% of which log in the network website every day – increasingly using the site as a tool for sharing stories with their friends, this may not be a surprise. However, we can say this also reflects the continuous implementation of Facebook Connect over the Web – more websites are sharing content into Facebook now than ever before.

These stats show how important Facebook has become for your business. If you want people to be telling their friends about your products or your content, you need to be either in Facebook, or using Facebook Connect!

Get in touch to find out how we can help.

A few weeks later, a team from the Garage will be at the Social Media World Forum to present workshops on successful Facebook campaigns and to handle delegate queries related to the Facebook platform.

2010 is a promising year for Social Media and the Facebook Developer Garage London is on top of that to bring you the most recent platform updates and relevant information for developing for the Facebook platform.

Joshua March, CEO of iPlatform, is Chairman and host of the Facebook Developer Garage London

4.2 In the rules of the promotion, or otherwise, you will not condition entry to the promotion upon taking any action on Facebook, for example, updating a status, posting on a profile or Page, or uploading a photo.  You may, however, condition entry to the promotion upon becoming a fan of a Page.

This will make things much simpler and avoid the verbal wrangling that was going on before Christmas!

The iPlatform Competition Platform allows us to quickly launch fully branded text, photo and video competitions with voting, leaderboards and full fan page integration. Get in touch to find out more.

Facebook has now allowed advertisers to target ads to the friends of their connections. Up until now, they could only target their own connections, which means exclusively the actual fans of their Pages, users of their Applications, members of their Groups and attendees of their Events.

With the new targeting, friends of these connections  who see the ads will receive them with a message saying which of their friends is a fan of that page, for example.

You can even use the targeting for URLs outside Facebook, which could become a powerful way of driving traffic.

If you want to find out more about marketing in Facebook, get in touch now.

With the new rules, it is now not acceptable to use the Facebook features to directly engage in such promotions, and instead they must use a third party application to run the competition (which can be a stand alone application, or an application running inside a fan page), and contact the winners directly, for example by collecting their email address, rather than through the Facebook messages or newsfeeds.

What To Do and Not To Do

Here are the examples given by Facebook on how the new guidelines will impact promotions.

You cannot: Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as making a post on a profile or Page, status comment or photo upload.

You can: Use a third party application to condition entry to the promotion upon a user providing content. For example, you may administer a photo contest whereby a user uploads a photo through a third-party application to enter the contest.

You cannot: Administer a promotion that users automatically enter by becoming a fan of your Page.

You can: Only allow fans of your Page to access the tab that contains the third-party application for the promotion.

You cannot: Notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles or Pages.

You can: Collect an address or email through the third-party application for the promotion in order to contact the winner by email or standard mail.

Almost even more important than all of these though – Facebook now need all promotions to be approved by a Facebook account manager seven days before they launch! So if you want to launch a promotion, you need to be in touch with your local Facebook sales office, or have developers with contacts there.

At iPlatform, we have a competition platform that allows us to quickly set up and launch both simple prize draws and sweepstakes, or full UGC competitions with media upload, user voting, comments in leaderboards, in short time periods with proven and effective methods. It’s in use by multiple major agencies and blue chip brands for running competitions on Facebook  – we’re launching over five full UGC competitions this month. If you want to find out more about how we can help you run competitions on Facebook, get in touch now. We have a good relationship with the Facebook teams in both UK and international and will ensure your promotions are approved.

A few things to watch out for:

• User-to-user messages will be shifted away from notifications and into the inbox. This will use a pop-up similar to the current newsfeed pop-up; this should reduce the number of notifications being sent from apps, decreasing spam. The upside is that messages that are sent are far more likely to be seen and engaged with by users.
• A new dashboard has been launched to make it easier for users to find and keep track of games they’ve been playing – great if your campaign has game elements
• It’s becoming much easier to collect a user’s email address (with their explicit permission) – shifting app-to-user notifications to email instead. This will make them far more engaging and likely to be seen, but will force apps to avoid being spammy to be seen among the sometimes huge amounts of notifications a user receives.
• There is now a live status page for the platform to allow developers to keep track of issues and bugs as well as the general state of the platform in real time.

“These updates are designed to simplify communication for users and developers, improve app discovery and engagement, and provide you with more comprehensive tools for building or expanding your business with Facebook”, wrote Facebook product head Ethan Beard.

Along the announcement, Facebook published a roadmap to help developers “anticipate future changes and opportunities”.  In it, Facebook informs the progress of the planned changes and what they mean for the developers “over the next two quarters”.

Although the Roadmap can be modified, it is useful to know what Facebook is planning. If you have any current applications, it’s important you understand these changes and how they could affect you, and if you’re planning future campaigns they will help you understand what areas to focus on. Get in touch if you need help understanding any of these changes.

Search FAQ

Q: Is there a way to insure that our client’s brand pages show up at the top of search results?

A: No, Facebook Search doesn’t do any promotional ranking but the best way for bands to come to the top of search results today are by having more fans. So in effect all the advertising they do, having a quality page and brand, as well as making sure there are a lot of sources of engagement on their page will be hugely beneficial in search ranking.

Q: Will users that search for a brand and be driven offsite to the client’s external page or will they driven to the client’s Facebook Page?
A: When a user searches for a client’s Page on Facebook and hits enter, they will only see results on Facebook and are therefore likely to get the client’s Page. On the other hand, if the user specifically selects the Web tab or chooses to search the Web in the search drop down list there is a better chance that the user will get the client’s offsite webpage since search engines add more weight to a domain name then we do in search. However, if there are enough links to the client’s Facebook Page located around the rest of the web, there’s a chance that that can over take their actual brand URL.

Q: How can clients best utilize Facebook to improve search results? Is there a section of Facebook that we can optimize for search engines to crawl?
A: Currently pages, applications, and groups are made available for search engines to crawl and we are currently working on getting pages better indexed. In the end though we can’t promise to do anything for brands in SEO but we are making progress on making Faebook perform better in SEO.

Q: Is there any way to delineate between “organic” listings and potentially “paid” listings.
A: No, we currently do not support this feature but it is very likely that someday we’ll have the concept of sponsored results in which companies (or our clients) can pay to have their results show up near the top for given keywords.

Q: How long after a new Page is created does it take it to move up in the search rankings?
A: If a page is new and is getting a lot of activity really fast it can take up to a week for it to start moving up the rankings.

• Every month, more than 70% of users engage with applications developed for the Facebook platform
• There are more than 350,000 active applications currently available on the Facebook Platform
• Over 200 applications maintain an active monthly user base of more than one million
• 15,000, and counting, websites, devices and applications have implemented Facebook Connect since its launch in December 2008

As well as the well known stats that there are 250m+ active users, 50% of which are logging in daily – generating 5 billion minutes on Facebook every single day.

Also interesting is that 8 million users ‘fan’ Facebook fan pages every day – an impressive statistic.

Check out the original post for more information.

Facebook have released a new feature in their advertising platform allowing you to targets users connected to your fan pages, applications, groups or events. This potentially could be powerful as a way of promoting new content to users, maintaining interest, and cross selling. Although we always recommend seeding content, applications and features directly to your fan pages and groups, it’s never advisable to keep spamming your fans – this offers a low nuisance way of maintaining communication, on a performance (pay-per-click) basis.

For targeting new users, this will also allow you to purposefully not target current users, ensuring maximum user acquisition.

Check out Facebook’s note on the new features for more information.