Facebook Officially A Mobile Ad Firm With 53% Of Ad Revenue Now Coming From Its 945M Mobile Users

Facebook hit a major milestone with today’s Q4 2013 earnings as it crossed the halfway point and now earns 53% of ad revenue from mobile, or $1.37 billion of its $2.59 billion in revenue this quarter. The small-screen skrilla comes from 556 million daily mobile users up from 507 million in Q3, and 945 million monthly mobile users up from 874 million. Overall, Facebook hit 757 million total daily users and a cool 1.23 billion monthly users up from 1.19 billion in Q3.

Facebook reached 49% of ad revenue from mobile in Q3 2013 up from 41% in Q2 and 30% in Q1. But now 53% of its $2.59 billion in revenue came from mobile. On the earnings call, Facebook said Q4 was its first billion dollar mobile ad revenue quarter, and it made nearly as much on mobile in Q4 2013 as it did from mobile and desktop in Q4 2012.

The boost has been driven by Facebook’s mobile app install ads that help developers get their apps discovered outside of the cluttered app stores. This quarter Facebook also introduced new mobile app re-engagement ads that can get users back into apps they downloaded and forgot about. “This is working even better than we hoped” COO Sheryl Sandberg said on the earnings call.

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While many predicted the mobile era might kill Facebook, the company has made a remarkable shift on the business side to take advantage of the new medium where others have faltered. Because users spend so much time in Facebook’s News Feed and it knows so much about them, it can show well-targeted, relevant, full-screen ads that bring in good rates. That’s helped every geographic region see total revenue increase of 65% or more over the year.

As for user growth, Facebook’s mobile-only user count increased significantly from 254 million in Q3 2013 to 296 million in Q4. That could mean Facebook users are ditching their desktop entirely, or it’s just recruiting more mobile-only users in developing nations where desktops are scarce.

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While Facebook’s total monthly user count increased 3.36% this quarter and 16% year-over-year (172 million), in the US + Canada it only grew 1% from 199 million to 201 million in Q4. That signals Facebook is reaching saturation in those markets and may have begun to lose steam with younger demographics.

On last quarter’s earnings it admitted that it saw “a decrease in daily users specificallyamong younger teens” which caused its share value to drop 15%, erradicating growth it made from strong Q3 financials.

At 4:50pm EST, just before the earnings call, Facebook shares are up 10% to $58.90 in after-hours trading. But as I wrote this morning, teens have the potential to make or break Facebook’s share price today. You can expect all ears to be listening for what Mark Zuckerberg says on the upcoming earnings call about how kids are using Facebook.

Update: Facebook said it didn’t have any new data to share on teens. Without damning evidence to go on, investors have responded favorably to Facebook earning $2.59 billion in revenue.

What was interesting was how Zuckerberg outlined a big new strategy for Facebook: more standalone apps. Read about it in my long-form feature piece “Facebook’s Plot To Conquer Mobile: Shatter Itself Into Pieces“.]

Click below for more on Facebook’s earnings:

Why Advertisers Should Use CPA Bidding on Facebook

Until now, advertisers on Facebook have only been able to bid on campaigns on either a CPC or CPM basis. While this has been an effective way for businesses and brands to bid for ads, there is no guarantee that clicks and impressions actually lead to conversions. To capture more performance marketing spend, Facebook is introducing a new option to bid on a cost-per-action (CPA) basis.

CPA bidding is available today on a global basis through Facebook Ads’ API, and according to Marketing Land will soon be available in the Power Editor and Ads Manager. Currently, marketers are able to do CPA bidding on three types of ads or actions:

• Page Likes
• Offer Claims
• Link Opens/Clicks (specific click-throughs [e.g., to a product profile page] the marketer wants)

This new option to bid on a CPA basis will operate as a maximum bid, but as with all CPA bidding, advertisers may actually pay less than their max bids. Facebook says this benefits marketers by offering more “predictability” in their ad spending. This option is also better than bidding with CPM or CPC, as bidding with CPA guarantees lead generation and facilitates conversions. By paying for an actual action – such as an offer claim, rather than just a click on the offer – advertisers are assured that there is actual value in their campaigns. Despite all the hype of social advertising benefiting “brand awareness,” the bottom line of any campaign should be to produce a positive ROI. With this new CPA option, advertisers on Facebook can now actually see – and only pay for – ads that perform well and lead to a positive ROI.

Of course, if you’re still convinced that CPC and CPM bidding is better for your brand, don’t worry – Facebook isn’t replacing these options with CPA. Advertisers will still be able to choose these options when creating campaigns.

Profitable Learning Curve for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg

In Taking Facebook Public, Reshaping It Around Mobile Phones, Chief Gained Focus on Bottom Line

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Mark Zuckerberg has prioritized increasing Facebook’s ad revenue. Reuters

MENLO PARK, Calif.— Mark Zuckerberg needed help. Facebook Inc. FB +0.38% ‘s initial public offering in May 2012 had been a mess. And after turning a website born in his college dorm room into a company valued at $100 billion, the young chief executive was under pressure to prove he could sell lots of ads on smartphones.

Facebook has seen its shares rise and revenue from mobile ads jump up. How did CEO Mark Zuckerberg turn the company around after its ill-starred IPO? Evelyn Rusli joins digits. Photo: AP.

So he went for a long walk a few weeks later through the center of Facebook’s corporate campus here with Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a top engineer at Facebook and friend who once was Mr. Zuckerberg’s teaching assistant at Harvard University.

“Wouldn’t it be fun to build a billion-dollar business in six months?” Mr. Zuckerberg asked. He wanted Mr. Bosworth to help lead the company’s shaky mobile-ad business, then bringing in almost nothing. Another part of the job: figure out all the ways Facebook could make money.

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Ads didn’t sound like fun to Mr. Bosworth, but his boss persisted. Soon, the engineer was filling in the blanks of a spreadsheet that grew to about 80 pages long. The entries became the manifesto of an in-house project that Mr. Zuckerberg called “Prioritization.”

Interviews for this article with the CEO, Facebook directors and executives, and dozens of other engineers, friends and former employees laid out how Mr. Zuckerberg’s growing attention to the bottom line was part of a sea change by the often-stubborn, idealistic 29-year-old chief executive once called “toddler CEO” in Silicon Valley. Taking Facebook public and reshaping it around mobile phones forced him to grow up.

“It’s a story of a vertical learning curve,” says venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a Facebook director and longtime adviser to Mr. Zuckerberg.

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Mr. Zuckerberg still wears jeans and a T-shirt to work, drives a black, stick-shift Volkswagen GTI and keeps the temperature in his glass meeting room, known as the “aquarium,” near 68 degrees to keep everyone alert. As a holiday gift, friends of Mr. Zuckerberg got socks decorated with the image of Beast, his white, woolly Hungarian shepherd.

Yet Mr. Zuckerberg has learned to embrace—or at least accept—the reality that he now is in charge of what might be bluntly described as the most visible advertising business in the world. It is a big leap for the college dropout who wrote in a letter to potential investors just before the initial public offering: “Facebook was not originally created to be a company.”

He embraced the idea in 2012 of selling more ads in Facebook’s prized “news feed,” the center of the screen where the social-networking site’s 1.2 billion members spend most of their time. The news feed is a constantly updated list of stories from people and pages followed by a Facebook user.

The intensified focus on advertising, long shunned as less important than the photos and status updates posted by users, generated a surge in new revenue from corporate giants such as McDonald’s Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. WMT -0.79% Analysts expect Facebook to announce later this month that its revenue jumped more than 40% in 2013 compared with a year earlier. About $3 billion of the company’s revenue—or more than one-third of the overall total—likely came from mobile advertising.

Facebook shares jumped 105% last year, compared with the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite’s rise of 38%. On August 2, the stock climbed back above its IPO price of $38, erasing a $50 billion slide in stock-market value. Facebook closed Friday at $54.56 a share.

Still four months away from his thirtieth birthday, Mr. Zuckerberg is worth about $20 billion. Last month, he pocketed about $1 billion in his first stock sale since Facebook went public, and separately he donated about $1 billion in stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

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Facebook’s CEO is putting new focus on the bottom line. Reuters

Mr. Zuckerberg bristles at the view of some people close to him that he has changed as a CEO. His primary mission still is to connect the world digitally with Facebook. “It drives me crazy when people write stuff and assert that we’re doing something because the goal is to make a lot of money,” he says.

Even in his most self-reflective moments, what Mr. Zuckerberg sees is a series of logical moves and adaptations that are part of what he calls a “continuous trajectory.” In an interview, he paused abruptly after saying the words “business review.”

“Uh, I’ve never used that term before,” he said with a smile.

Despite all the improvements, Mr. Zuckerberg must show that Facebook can out-innovate a steady stream of upstarts. Investors were rattled in October when Facebook reported a decline in use among young teenagers, some of whom are migrating to newer mobile-phone apps such as Snapchat. Snapchat messages automatically disappear in 10 seconds or less.

Last fall, Mr. Zuckerberg approached Snapchat with a takeover offer for more than $3 billion. Snapchat’s 23-year-old chief executive said no. Facebook previously tried to create a similar app called Poke, with Mr. Zuckerberg even contributing some computer code, but the project flopped.

A secret project called Firefly included a “social” phone that was to be created with HTC Ltd. of Taiwan—but was killed by Mr. Zuckerberg in mid-2012 because of glitches, according to people who worked on the project. An app for Google Inc. GOOG +0.21% ‘s Android operating-system mobile phones, known as Home, has failed to gain momentum since last spring’s debut, despite a big publicity push by Facebook. And a smartphone released by HTC and based largely on Firefly’s design has been a dud.

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Mark Zuckerberg has prioritized increasing Facebook’s ad revenue. Shown, an employee at the Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters. Associated Press

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Nasdaq’s board in Times Square in New York on Facebook’s trading debut Associated Press

Just a few years ago, Mr. Zuckerberg paid little attention to many of the numbers that are obsessions to shareholders. In 2010, he said there was “no point right now in having a massive profit.” He boasted that the ad business “factors in, like, not at all” to decisions about Facebook’s operating platform and user services. His No. 1 goal: increase the company’s total membership to one billion users.

“If you brought up revenue in an argument with Zuck, you would lose automatically,” says one former senior employee. He recalls being chided for mentioning revenue while discussing a new product. Mr. Zuckerberg says such comments are a reminder that Facebook was designed to care more about its mission than money.

At the time, most Facebook users looked at the site on a desktop computer. Ads usually were banished to the right-side gutter of the screen, the Facebook equivalent of Siberia.

By the end of 2011, though, the surging popularity of smartphones was causing Facebook users to spend less time on computers. “The IPO process surfaced how fast the mobile shift was happening,” says Facebook director Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal and one of Facebook’s earliest investors. Executives worried that Facebook was falling behind at an alarming rate.

Internal data showed that many users were so frustrated by Facebook’s mobile software that they would quit the app and use their tedious mobile Web browsers to reach the social-networking site instead.

The smartphone shift also was a problem for Facebook’s ad business. There was no easy way for the company to relegate ads to the side of small screens, and Facebook had no mobile ads to sell anyway. Meanwhile, efforts to sell older types of ads on desktop computers were starting to lose their punch as more users embraced mobile devices.

“We pulled the lever, but this time, it didn’t work,” recalls one senior employee about 2012’s first quarter.

Just before Facebook went public in May 2012, Mr. Zuckerberg walked into the “aquarium” and did something that surprised everyone.

A group of Facebook engineers presented the latest mock-ups of ads for Facebook’s iPad app. The ads were marooned on a separate screen—and to the right of the news feed.

The CEO quietly studied them. “Why don’t we just explore ads in news feed?” he said, according to people at the meeting. Mr. Zuckerberg indicated that he would be open to the possibility of more types of ads there, including ones not tied to “likes.”

“Oh, my gosh, he’s actually open to it,” one executive present at the meeting remembers thinking. No one in the room asked Mr. Zuckerberg why. They were too worried he would change his mind.

“It’s not like I just decided to get more involved in ads,” he says now. “I needed to because basically the ad product had to be more integrated.” He adds: “And that created all these hard decisions that we needed to do well.”

Mr. Zuckerberg’s willingness to upend even what some people close to him describe as sacrosanct beliefs took on more urgency after Facebook’s bungled IPO, which subtracted more than 25% from the share price in its first 10 days of trading.

In public, he tried to play down the importance of the stock price. Mr. Thiel now says the CEO was more worried than he let on, citing the risk that Facebook employees who owned stock might get discouraged and quit. “I care about this because I want to retain my people,” Mr. Zuckerberg told senior executives in a private meeting.

Facebook’s first earnings report, which hit analysts’ targets but disappointed investors who wanted even more, sent the stock into another tailspin. The mood of some employees darkened.

A worried Mr. Zuckerberg asked Facebook executive Mike Schroepfer, one of his most trusted lieutenants, to interview engineers about morale. They were frustrated about the plummeting stock price and worried that top management couldn’t relate to their financial stress because those executives owned so many Facebook shares that they were rich despite the stock’s slide.

Mr. Schroepfer, usually an unemotional software engineer, choked up when he presented the results to a room full of engineers. “I know you are fathers, parents. I am, too, and I know that you have to think about putting your kids through school,” he said, according to someone at the meeting.

Mr. Bosworth, the Facebook engineer who agreed to help Mr. Zuckerberg hunt for new revenue, worked on his spreadsheet for about 1½ months, quizzing scores of employees. Around the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg began assigning revenue targets to certain product teams. Previously, he resisted the idea because he worried managers would become too fixated on money.

Over the next several months, Mr. Zuckerberg also grew to fully embrace putting “nonsocial” ads, or those that aren’t tied to a user’s “likes” or other signals, in the news feed. The shift came after Chris Cox, Facebook’s vice president of product, showed the CEO internal data that suggested his previous resistance to nonsocial ads was hurting Facebook’s business.

Tests by the company showed that adding nonsocial ads improved the overall quality of Facebook’s advertising for users. “At the time, it kind of struck me as a crazy idea,” Mr. Zuckerberg says, since those ads veered away from Facebook’s traditional word-of-mouth-based pitches.

The CEO even compromised on a subject where he had rarely budged before: user experience.

Mr. Zuckerberg told Mr. Cox that some decline in usage would be an acceptable trade-off for higher ad sales, as long as Facebook made improvements elsewhere that more than offset the decline. The first test showed that more ads reduced user activity by 2%, below a target of a low single-digit percentage, while overall “engagement” rose by a much bigger percentage. Engagement is a broad gauge of user activity.

Facebook’s sales gain of 53% to $1.81 billion in the second quarter was the company’s largest jump ever. In July, a beaming Mr. Zuckerberg addressed most of the company’s more than 5,000 employees. “We did a good job,” he said. “We’re figuring this out.” A few days later, Facebook shares drifted above their IPO price.

Mr. Zuckerberg now meets often with Facebook’s biggest advertising clients, often spending hours with them. He has told customers to message him with ideas, which he will consider incorporating into product decisions.

At a visit last summer to the headquarters of Facebook ad client McDonald’s in Oak Brook, Ill., he learned how to cook an egg-white breakfast sandwich and asked the head of french fry taste tests why one batch he tasted looked a few shades lighter than fries served in McDonald’s restaurants.

Her answer: French fries sold at McDonald’s are cooked in oil that has been through multiple fry cycles. Mr. Zuckerberg said: “You have the greatest job ever.” His own Facebook page has long been peppered with McDonald’s and Chicken McNuggets references.

This year, Mr. Zuckerberg will have to wrestle with how to avoid turning off some Facebook users with too many ads, as some critics have warned. Some investors are antsy for Facebook to wow users with something new.

Mr. Zuckerberg says he is aware of the risks, but notes that user activity still is rising. The company does more than 35,000 surveys a day to monitor user sentiment, and the “driving force behind everything is that we’re trying to build the best experience for mobile,” he says.

Some of the changes at Facebook remind him of walkways at his old high school, Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. As a student, he was befuddled by a meandering path to the campus cafe. The route seemed strange, so Mr. Zuckerberg did some research.

The answer? “Instead of choosing the path up front, they kind of waited and saw where people walked and put a path where people walked,” he says.

—Reed Albergotti contributed to this article.

Write to Evelyn M. Rusli at evelyn.rusli@wsj.com

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The Benefits of Quality Content and Genuine Social Engagement

Keywords: Best Practices, Facebook, Social Media Marketing, Content,Strategy, Community Management, Twitter, Blogging, Community, Engagement, Google,SEO, Social Media, Social Networks

With every algorithm update, Google is making SEO more and more complex. The company has expressed its desire to improve the quality of their search results, filtering out spammers and content of lower relevance — but how that ‘relevance’ is determined is becoming increasingly difficult to understand to a definitive degree. The elements that are regularly highlighted by Google are ‘quality content’ and ‘genuine engagement’.

The issue with quality content is that it’s less scientific. Less certainty in the process means more research, more work and, ultimately, more investment to ensure best results for your online presence. This can be a frightening prospect for companies — you can’t just go to Google Adwords and ensure all the relevant search terms are included on your webpage, you need people to be actually reading your content to up that relevance rating. Real people and real engagement.

The one metric that is totally clear is the need for social engagement. How many ‘Likes’, ‘re-Tweets’, webpage links — these elements are being weighted more heavily by search engines. The social media aspect, which used to only form a part of the SEO puzzle, is becoming more influential. The idealistic result of this is that users get a better quality experience all round, but the underlying motivator is that, over time, organic results will be diluted to the point that brands will have to pay to get best ROI. The only way to combat this is to create great, sharable, engaging content and become an active participant on social platforms. But what’s the best way do you do it? How do you know that the content you’re investing in will give your company the best results? Here are a couple of points to keep in mind:

1. Quality content is what your clients want to read, not what you want to tell them. You can’t just load up your company website with a heap of updates on what the company’s doing, how you’re helping clients, etc. These are all sales pitches and, in the majority, these won’t be widely read. You’re caught up in the corporate culture and the internal wins and losses, so the temptation is to write about them, show the people how good the company is, sell them on that culture that you, yourself are invested in, but you need to take a step back and think about what the clients want to know. What are the articles you’re reading each day? What is of interest to you, as an industry expert? What are the things clients need your services for? If you are not an industry expert, not following all the relevant influencers in your field, then you need to be and you need to be viewing their insights from the client’s point of view. Inform clients of industry trends and updates, write about positive stories in which your brand has had an influence, but always be wary of the sales angle. Social media is about building relationships, rather than booking sales. The more you’re able to establish the first, the easier the second will become.
2. Content that gets highly shared is content with heart. Real stories, real storytelling, actually getting to the humanity of something, rather than corporate messaging. All businesses affect the lives of real people, many in very positive ways, and these stories are gold. They are not only great to tell, but they show the genuine passion of your brand. If you can express that passion in an engaging way, you can create strong, shareable stories that will help expand the reach of your business, which has benefits across all aspects. Take time to think about different angles to your corporate stories, try and find the heart and humanity in what you do as a company and where your brand is able to help. And again, make it story first, corporate messaging second. You don’t need to sell to your clients straight up, you’re working to establish a connection, to communicate on a deeper level.
3. Take time to engage in your online community. It’s one thing to use Twitter to respond to client concerns and queries, but you shouldn’t stop there. Look to have a presence on all social media platforms and in their respective communities, become part of them, participate where you can. You’ll often see a company representative drop into a conversation on Twitter or Facebook with no real introduction, saying ‘give me a call at *** and we can help you out’. This is not real engagement. You’re likely to build better customer relationships if you talk to people on a human level, offer advice and links to online articles (not necessarily your own company content) and show them that you’re the expert in your field. The opportunity to convert these contacts into clients will come, you don’t need to rush it. By being present and being a trusted part of the conversation, you will establish better relationships for ongoing business. And be honest and positive, at all times. Going online and trashing your opposition, using a half-truth to initiate a business conversation — these tactics do not benefit the establishment of ongoing partnerships.

As with anything, the approach you take will vary dependent on the industry, but the way to solidify your online presence, making your company more resilient to SEO algorithmic changes and enabling you to make best use of social media, is through the creation of engaging content and the establishment of trusted networks. It takes time and investment, but it will pay off, over and over again.

What Becomes of Facebook in 2014?

Keywords: Best Practices, Facebook, Social Media Marketing, Content,Strategy, Metrics, Advertising, News, Engagement, Marketing, Sales, Search, SEO, Social Media, Social Networks, Tools & Apps, 2014 predictions, Facebook news feed

It’s interesting reading the many discussions on what Facebook will be in 2014. The social network has become an integral part of people’s lives, personal and business, and the latest changes to its NewsFeed, filter algorithms and advertising models have many nervous about what to expect. It’s hard to say whether the changes will have a positive or negative effect on the user experience – which is what the company is touting as the main focus of their changes – though it is clear that Facebook is riding a very fine line between necessary profit growth and ongoing user demand. Here are a few of the major changes and their potential impacts:

1. The addition of play-now video ads in your NewsFeed. This one is being flagged as a major concern from regular, non-business users. The addition of play-now video ads has already begun, with a number of users now seeing these come up. You scroll past them and they mute out and you can go on with what you’re doing, but the potential annoyance factor is high. Annoying enough to turn users away from Facebook? Not likely, but definitely one which would seem to have more impact on the user experience than benefit. This addition opens up a whole new revenue stream for Facebook, so it makes perfect sense that they would be going down this path, but it could be the beginning of the end, depending on how it’s adopted. Possibly.

2. Changes to the NewsFeed algorithms to improve ‘quality’ of user experience. This has been an extremely contentious issue, though one not all regular users are fully aware of. Facebook’sEdgeRank algorithm weights the relevance of all updates that appear in people’s NewsFeeds. This may mean that status update you just posted will not be seen by all your friends, which somewhat goes against the ethos of Facebook in the first place (though the impacts of updates from ‘Friends’ is relatively minimal). Facebook has expressed its intention to create an online newspaper type feel to the site, with the content tailored to you, but a part of that is the addition of, effectively, an editorial process and the rules governing what appears and what does not are tricky. The underlying motivation is that Facebook wants to push businesses towards paying to reach their followers and fans by diluting their ability to connect to those who’ve ‘Liked’ their brand-page organically. This is likely to become more prevalent in 2014, which will drive more businesses to funnel users towards their own websites and away from Facebook. The impact of this is impossible to determine, but it really highlights that fine line Facebook is tip-toeing.

3. The focus on targeted advertising. As with the changes to the NewsFeed, Facebook is hoping more users will interact more with ads to give them more data on what they want, enabling them to improve their individual experience by ensuring the ads they see are of relevance to them. The problem is, most regular users don’t see Facebook as an advertising medium – they want to connect with their friends, not be confronted with sales pitches. Advertising is a necessary part of the business, and as Facebook grows, so does the impetus for increased revenue generation. The underlying idea of targeted ads makes sense, that Facebook wants to ensure they’re not spamming users with stuff their not interested in, but the practical roll-out of this model is problematic. The other potential impact is for small businesses – Facebook has announced that it will focus on small business advertising to capitalise on the millions of small business pages it’s currently hosting – which they, of course, need to do, but as they push towards a paid advertising model, how will those small businesses compete against bigger players for space? And if all of them want to pay for targeted ads, will there be enough room for users to share content with their friends?

No doubt Facebook has some of the answers to these questions, while others will be causing the executives headaches every day. It would seem way too early to be predicting the demise of the largest social network in the world, but some have suggested the writing is on the wall. While the changes will introduce a raft of new challenges for business, they also bring new opportunities which, if utilised well, will remain a key part of any brand strategy. But they also highlight the need to remain active on other social networks and monitor the progress of user migrations, staying in touch with more audience share whilst also leveraging against potential fall-out from ongoing Facebook updates.

Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

Two users say Facebook is too vague about how it uses private message data.

With all the pieces of my master plan falling into place, Ars will soon be silly with Likes.

Facebook is being sued by two users for intercepting the “content of the users’ communications,” including private messages, with the intent to “mine user data and profit from those data by sharing them with third parties—namely, advertisers, marketers, and other data aggregators.” The plaintiffs argue in a December 30 class action complaint that Facebook’s use of the word “private” in relation to its messaging system is misleading, given the way the company treats the info contained within those messages.

Many of the allegations in this case are based on research done in 2012 by the Wall Street Journal for a series of articles about digital privacy. Facebook is far from the first company to use private messages to mint money. Gmail continues to be dinged for creating text ads based off of the content of e-mails ten years after the ads were first introduced. (And Gmail has been sued for that, too.)

This is from 2010, but without the “with” that is no doubt just beyond the crop, it’s still relevant.

MoneyBlogNewz

Facebook goes to lengths to clearly distinguish its messaging feature as “private,” even calling it “unprecedented” in terms of the privacy controls, the filing alleges. “Facebook never intended to provide this level of confidentiality. Instead, Facebook mines any and all transmissions… in order to gather any and all morsels of information it can about its users.”

Facebook’s privacy policies have been going through data aggregation creep for the last few years. The site was discovered to be handing over user data to advertisers in 2010, including names and user IDs.

The company overhauled its privacy policy 18 months ago to describe the liberties it takes with the information it collects—most user interactions are logged, aggregated, and shared (with anonymizing) to third parties, including data brokers and advertisers. Facebook also pointed out it would share anything users ever made publicly available with apps, games, or partner websites, and deleting that information from Facebook would not remove it from those partner databases.

FURTHER READING

DATA BROKERS WON’T EVEN TELL THE GOVERNMENT HOW IT USES, SELLS YOUR DATA

They do disclose consumer types like “credit reliant” and “resilient renter.”

The plaintiffs describe how Facebook effectively “clicks” on links within Facebook messages, an activity that it doesn’t explicitly disclose to users. The lawsuit claims Facebook crawls the linked page to see if it contains one of Facebook’s “Like” buttons. If so, Facebook registers that private-message link as a “Like” on the relevant site’s Facebook page—a strange example of turning a private communication public. The lawsuit also claims that Facebook “uses a combination of software and human screening to comb through private messages” to mine for user data for broader uses, including selling to third parties.

The plaintiffs do cite the section of Facebook’s data use policy where the company explains what information it “receives” about a user as they interact with the site, including sending and receiving messages, searching, or clicking on things. But they argue that Facebook’s data use policy doesn’t make clear that Facebook “scans, mines, and manipulates the content of its users’ private messages… in direct conflict with the assurances it provides to its users regarding the privacy and control they should expect.” Likewise, the data use policy does not make clear that “Facebook will register the fact that a URL is communicated privately… as a ‘Like’ for a particular web page,” reads the filing.

For Facebook’s alleged transgressions, the plaintiffs are seeking more than $100 for each day of violation or $10,000 per class member of the lawsuit, as well as statutory damages of either $5,000 per class member or three times the amount of actual damages, whichever is greater.

The lawsuit is based on an older anti-wiretapping law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, as well as California state laws. Civil lawsuits over privacy issues have proliferated in recent years. Many of those lawsuits have settled, but it’s not clear whether pre-Internet privacy laws would be successful at trial in barring the data gathering of modern companies.

MINISTRY OF INNOVATION / BUSINESS OF TECHNOLOGY

Facebook sued for allegedly making private messages into public “likes”

Two users say Facebook is too vague about how it uses private message data.

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Everything is Ephemeral: Facebook, Popularity, and the Creation of the Social Self

Profile shown on Thefacebook in 2005 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For two years, maybe more, I’ve helped real estate agents, writers, and entrepreneurs create strategies for using Facebook for business. I’ve read countless stories and books on the subject, I’ve discussed editorial calendars, the benefits of photos, links, videos, private pages, Facebook groups etc. I’ve been to seminars, I’ve spoken at conferences. I’ve immersed myself in this platform but I’ve never liked it. Perhaps it was its emergence from a college networking program that made it always seem sort of clique-ish and invasive to me but more often I think it was because I had become accustomed to having a blog (or in my case, a series of websites, and blogs over the years) to codify my thoughts and journal. Facebook just seemed less interesting to me and to be fair, I never really got MySpace either.

Now I’m in the position of advising people that social media is more than Facebook and pivoting my own social strategy.  There are a few reasons for this. The first is, as I always tell people, invest most of your time in the platforms you have control over (your website) and use the others to serve the hub. Social media is about distribution and communication and it’s always evolving.  The second is that Facebook itself is being more and more restrictive with its algorithms for business pages. It was always bad but the latest changes make it nearly impossible for businesses to show up in feeds without paying for it. The feed itself is supposed to serve you more of what you like but instead what really happens is the filter bubble effect that cuts people off from things that they might like intermittently but not consistently.  The third is of course, that people are moving on. For teens, Facebook is where their parents hang out. For early adopters, Facebook is mostly passé.  It is terrible on mobile, which is where most of us are now, on phones and tablets. It’s beginning to feel dated.

So, I tell people, there’s more to life than Facebook and you have to explore. I hear a lot of groans from people over this. They don’t want to learn a new platform with new rules, invest time and energy and then suddenly see everyone decamp to somewhere else. I’m noticing this with Instagram, it’s growing in popularity, it’s mostly mobile and visual, it’s highly appealing, nearly addictive. I’m having a great time playing with it. I also know that it too will fade away.  And remember, Facebook owns Instagram so algorithms of restriction are always an issue. I add content to the platform but I also save my pictures elsewhere knowing that Instagram isn’t going to last forever.

But this is life, ebb and flow with change as the only constant.  From platform to platform we are increasingly able to bring friends from other platforms but we are also bringing a new version of the self. Each new platform is a fresh chance to refine and hone the social self.  The social self is a constant of sorts, we take our personal brands with us. If you encounter me on Instagram or Twitter you will find the same obsessions, the same ones I write about on websites and talk about in classes. The “me” is always a work in progress but not radically different from place to place.

Still, change is tough, especially when we are doing well somewhere. This morning I finished reading Commander Hadfield’s book An Astronaut’s Guide To Live On Earth and one of the most interesting parts for me, weren’t the space stuff, which is fascinating, but how he dealt with the extreme changes in his life. He spent two decades in pursuit of his dream, training, learning new languages, spending time in uncomfortable situations, being examined and re-examined, testing and training. All for those few moments of glory. All now past him. And yet he is remarkably sanguine about it, about the spotlight and the disappearance of it. How does he deal with it? He knows who he is. Who he is remains constant , what happens to him is out of his control. Even the massive viral social media success he has experienced is temporary, he knows this. He’s smart enough to not be consumed by it. Sure, a few million Twitter followers is nice but virality has a shelf-life.

What I advise people is to think about the social self independent of the platform. Each platform has its own rules, strengths, weaknesses. Any social media nerd (myself included) can teach you basic rules of use (profile pic sizes, recommended frequency of posting, hashtags etc.). What we can’t really teach is the creation of the social self, that is something that shouldn’t be outsourced lest it lose its authentic sense. You may be tempted to have someone else run your social profile and that is okay as long as you control the overall sense/direction of the content.  Build the self first. I use these prompts to guide people:

I am—(this is the bio, but deeper than that, it’s the essential self).

I see—(what do you see most of the time in your life? Is it food, books, houses, your kids, your pets, crafts). Many social accounts these days are related to your daily viewpoint, often from the lens of your mobile phone, so it’s important to think on these terms.

I produce—What do you make or do? Do you have a business or service you create? Are you going to use social to promote this and if so how does (or doesn’t) it dovetail with your personal life.

I share—(what is the bulk of your content? There should be 3 or 4 basic themes, some related to what you do for work, some related to your hobbies/interests/personal life).

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EdgeRank

 

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

 

EdgeRank is the name commonly given to the algorithm that Facebook uses to determine what articles should be displayed in a user’s News Feed.

An older definition of EdgeRank is as follows:

where:

 is user affinity

 is how the content is weighted

 is a time-based decay parameter

According to Techcrunch, some of the methods that Facebook uses to adjust the parameters are proprietary and not available to the public.[1]

According to Marketing Land, Facebook stopped referring to its feed prioritisation algorithm as EdgeRank internally in 2010/2011,[2] and so the term may be considered obsolete now – other than as a useful shorthand for “Facebook’s feed prioritisation algorithm”.

See also[edit]

• PageRank

References[edit]

1. Jump up^ “EdgeRank: The Secret Sauce That Makes Facebook’s News Feed Tick”. Techcrunch. 2010-04-22. Retrieved 2012-12-08.
2. Jump up^ http://marketingland.com/edgerank-is-dead-facebooks-news-feed-algorithm-now-has-close-to-100k-weight-factors-55908

External links[edit]

• edgerank.net
• What is EdgeRank?
• Facebook – How News Feed Works

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• 5 Tips To Increase Your Band’s Reach On Facebook Despite Recent EdgeRank Changes (hypebot.com)
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• Facebook Hashtags Aren’t Very Effective, Study Says (socialtimes.com)
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Still on Facebook, but Finding Less to Like

Image by None via CrunchBase

facebook (Photo credit: sitmonkeysupreme)

Chris B. Murray

• FACEBOOK
• TWITTER
• GOOGLE+
• SAVE
• EMAIL
• SHARE
• PRINT

Just a few years ago, most of my online social activity revolved aroundFacebook. I was an active member of several Facebook groups, including one that helped me and others find apartments and sell used items. Another group was wonderful for organizing midnight movie screenings. And I used Facebook to stay up-to-date on the latest achievements of my sisters and their children, and the many members of my extended family.

But lately, my formerly hyperactive Facebook life has slowed to a crawl. I’ve found that most of my younger relatives have graduated from high school and have deleted their accounts or whittled them down until there is barely any personal information left. As for my own account, I rarely add photographs or post updates about what I’ve been doing. Often, the only interesting thing on the site is the latest Buzzfeed article that my friends are reading — and I can go directly to Buzzfeed for that.

Is it just me, or is Facebook fading?

The company has long denied that public interest in it may be waning — or that social upstarts may be luring away users. But this month, during a quarterly earnings call, David A. Ebersman, Facebook’s chief financial officer, made a startling acknowledgment. Facebook had noticed “a decrease in daily users, specifically among younger teens,” he said. Those teenagers, mostly American and likely around 13 or 14, weren’t deleting their accounts, he said, but they were checking the site less often.

The comment confirmed what many of us had suspected but were never able to prove — that the service had become less appealing for at least some of its users. And though Facebook is still the default social network for many people, perhaps it is no longer as crucial as it once was for social survival.

One explanation is that Facebook’s function may now be different from what it was in its earlier days.

Nathan Jurgenson, a sociologist who studies the Internet and was recently hired as a researcher by Snapchat, a mobile messaging app that is rapidly growing in popularity, described mainstream social networking sites as “kind of like the mall.” People mill about, peeking through windows into one another’s lives, for lack of something better to do online. That is especially true for teenagers, he said.

“It’s very clean and highly policed,” he said of that mainstream “mall.” In other words, he said, it is not really a playground, where youngsters can have fun and enjoy themselves and truly be themselves. It is a place for preening and performing and checking out others who are doing the same thing.

Mr. Jurgenson also said mainstream sites had evolved into a kind of “decoy social media.” In his view, it has become akin to a yearbook or yellow pages — a static home on the web that offers proof of someone’s existence, and perhaps little else. That might explain in part the popularity of a wave of new services like his company, Snapchat, as well as Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and even Vine. They have taken root, particularly among teenagers.

It may seem counterintuitive that Facebook would become less interesting and relevant as more people sign up for the service. For its part, said Tucker Bounds, a Facebook spokesman, the company is “fully committed to building engaging products that will appeal to the entire community of people on Facebook.”

But S. Shyam Sundar, a director of the Media Effects Research Lab at Pennsylvania State University, said that Facebook had become a utility, like a phone carrier. People go to Facebook to document the major events in their lives, he said, and keep track of those of others, not unlike a public, community scrapbook.

“It has an identity as a catchall, a repository across generations,” he said. “It’s a place where everyone is, that has a purpose and a place, but doesn’t necessarily represent a place where people will want to go on a frequent basis.”

In other words, as it has become nearly universal, Facebook may have lost some of its edge — or, at the very least, it may no longer feel novel or original to some of its users. It’s possible that it has lost some of the cachet that made it appealing, especially for young users.

Many people have become much more wary of the longer-term implications of sharing on Facebook and on other social media. In recent months, it has become clear that seemingly harmless antics online can lead to serious repercussions in the real world. Young people may be particularly vulnerable.

Those cracks in Facebook’s veneer have provided a market opening for other messaging services among young people in the United States and worldwide. Mr. Sundar calls those services — which include WhatsApp, Line (popular in Japan), Snapchat, WeChat of China and the Korean service KakaoTalk — “mini social media,” because they satisfy one desire among teenagers: keeping in constant communication.

“That is an aspect of being a teen — they love chatting with their friends and they are always on their phones,” he said.

With the lightning speed at which social media is evolving, it is at least possible that Facebook is already entering a midlife crisis. Could we be approaching peak Facebook? The company is certainly paying attention to its footprint in the market — it bought Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service, and Onavo, a mobile analytics company that monitored what services were gaining traction and who their primary users were. Most recently, Facebook offered to acquire Snapchat for $3 billion but the company refused.

Perhaps a better question to ask is whether teenagers are crucial for Facebook to thrive. After all, shares of Twitter soared during the company’s first few days on the public markets. The company’s market capitalization is now almost $25 billion. And it was able to achieve that without a firm grasp on the teenage demographic.

But if teenagers use Facebook less often, youth-oriented advertisers might spend less of their marketing budget on the site. And if teenagers are ultimately spending less time there, other users might follow suit, affecting the company’s overall potential for moneymaking.

Facebook can manage very well without the support of teenagers, Mr. Sundar said. “But the truth is that teens are often the initial adopters,” he said. “The real danger to Facebook might be the companies where they are going.”

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Facebook Is Coming to Town: Ho-Ho…No!

English: Graph of social media activities (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Me and my 542 bestest friends (on Facebook) (Photo credit: tychay)

facebook nonprofits (Photo credit: cambodia4kidsorg)

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Keywords: Facebook, Privacy, Social Media

291

facebook (Photo credit: sitmonkeysupreme)

They know when you’ve been sleeping, 
They know when you’re awake. 
They know when you’ve been good or bad, 
So be good for goodness sake! 

Facebook is, in the height of holiday season, being revealed as at least as big a snoop as the Jolly Old Elf or even the NSA (National Security Agency).

In a story on Slate a few days ago it was revealed that Facebook is … analyzing thoughts that we have intentionally chosen not to share.

That’s right: When you start to write something on Facebook, but change your mind and delete it that material does not just disappear. No, Facebook has been scooping it up and analyzing it to study what two FB researchers call “self-censorship.”

But what’s to stop Facebook from using all this data for other reasons? For example, to serve us even more highly targeted advertising? That would be a fairly benign result.

As the Slate story points out some people might compare this to the FBI’s ability to turn on a computer webcam without the user’s knowledge to monitor for criminal activity. The difference is that the FBI has to get a warrant for that kind of surveillance. In Facebook’s case no warrant is needed.

The Facebook researchers say that decreasing self-censorship is a goal of the social network because such censorship decreases the quantity of content (and thereby the quantity of researchable data) publicly on the platform.

But the bigger question this brings up is: Can Facebook be trusted? History would tend to suggest it cannot.

Under Facebook’s Data Use Policy, there is a section called “Information we receive and how it is used.” This makes clear that the company collects information you choose to share or when you view or otherwise interact with things. But nothing suggests that it collects content you explicitly don’t share.

So what do we, as users, do about this? The likely answer is: Nothing except maybe think twice before typing in anything on Facebook.

Several studies have indicated that any concern about trust may be limited to older users of Facebook.

Data collected by MDG Advertising from the American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research, Anonymizer, Harris Interactive, MSNBC and The Ponemon Institute shows that overall “2 out of 3 active online users do not trust” the social media sites they are using. These numbers are based on users of all ages.

Click on the graphic to see the full report and infographic.

On the other hand a 2012 survey conducted by YouGov in Britain (and finding similar data to older surveys in the United States and elsewhere) found that the younger users of online services such as a social media site are more likely to trust that online service.

Click on the graphic to see the full report and infographic.

All of which underscores that these latest revelations will make older users of Facebook are more likely to be concerned about privacy and it make very little difference for younger users.

What do you think? Should a social media platform be completely transparent about what information it is looking at and how that information is being used?

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