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Facebook Quietly Launches Ads API for ALL Developers

Posted on March 26, 2015 by jessestay

Some amazing things have been announced at Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8, going on yesterday and today in San Francisco. From new apps for Facebook Messenger, to a platform for Internet of Things, to one of the most amazing explanations of the value of virtual reality I’ve ever seen, Facebook has by far made up for last year’s F8, which I suggested was a bit uninteresting. But one thing went unannounced that I think bears merit, and I discovered it within their “Developers Garage” here at the conference as I was talking to people working for Facebook at the various booths. That was the launch of Facebook’s advertising API to all developers, making the entire API public.

Up until “recently”, as Facebook reps weren’t able to give me a specific date that it went live, you used to have to apply to access Facebook’s ads API through a very hard-to-find form on the Facebook Developers website. Now, in a very prominent location, Facebook has released a “Marketing APIs” section of their developers website, allowing any developer that needs it to access Insights data, custom audience creation and access, access to a business’s pages and assets, along with the ability to create and access ads on behalf of a business. According to Facebook they released them recently but there is no blog post or official announcement about the release.

To get started with the Facebook Ads API, developers just need to create an app and under “Advanced” within the app settings, set an ad account ID to associate ads with. Then, developers have access to a slew of API calls they can use to retrieve an ad account’s ads, create and modify custom audiences, and even create and target new ads to new audiences in very custom ways. I often use this for my clients to integrate and custom target ads to very specific users that are visiting certain parts of their websites or mobile apps.

Typically, while a developer may be able to code an app like this, they likely won’t know how beneficial this feature can be to a business, which may be why Facebook did not make a big announcement about the feature. Knowing these things can be automated is something critical for marketing organizations to get to know and understand, and one reason I always suggest the more technical elements of marketing orgs visit conferences like F8. These tools Facebook just launched are extremely valuable and can be the key to, with a small update, allowing orgs to have that extra edge against their competitors.

So if you haven’t tried it out yet hop on over to Facebook’s Marketing APIs in their developer documentation and start learning what you can do. To me, this is one of the most valuable and most major announcements to come out of the Facebook F8 developer conference and it wasn’t even announced from the stage. I’m kind of okay with being one of the “few” that knows about it though!

How to Protect Your Online Social Media Presence Using Facebook Business Manager

Posted on August 4, 2014 by jessestay

Facebook’s recently released Business Manager is a God-send for any social media manager or strategist or even security department desiring to manage multiple Facebook Page admins among dozens (to even hundreds or thousands) of Facebook Pages and Ad accounts. With just a few clicks you can know exactly who has access to your Facebook Pages and Ad accounts, and remove that access within just a click. As an agency, this is a dream come true! But there’s one element of security marketers and businesses need to be aware of, and it could compromise their entire Business Manager access if they’re not careful.

The problem I’m referring to is social engineering. The fact is it’s pretty easy to duplicate or copy another person’s Facebook account. I saw it happen just today – a fraudster finds the friend of someone influential, copies the account of that friend, and starts friending the same people the original person was friends with. If they can make it far enough, the account can look pretty authentic! And if you’re onto them they’ll just block you so you can’t report them (more on that later).

So what happens when a Facebook Page admin, or Business Manager admin is the target? The fraudster just needs to send a request from Facebook Business Manager to one of the owners of the Facebook Page as someone that looks like a legit admin of that account, and if that admin is not paying attention, before they know it, they’ve been removed from the Page, and the new owner is posting on their behalf with basically whatever they want. It could be a Social Media manager’s nightmare!

So how do you protect yourself? Here are a couple tips:

Email or call the person sending you a request. This is probably the easiest way to protect yourself. Don’t trust their Facebook account, as it could be hacked. However, sending them a separate email or even better a phone call or walking over to their desk, ensures that you’re messaging them at a guaranteed communication channel. If they respond and say it was them, you’re good to approve the request!
Also, don’t trust an email from someone that says they sent you a request – it’s easy to spoof the “from” line of an email. Always make sure you directly email them (not in a reply), and ask them if you must use email.
Turn the management of your Facebook Page and Ad Account access over to your security team. Marketing teams may hate me for this one, but it truly is the safest means. Your security team is trained to watch for stuff like this (and if they aren’t, have them contact me and I can get them trained!). A good security team will both watch out for your security, ensure only those that need access to your accounts have access to them, and also empower you as a marketing team to get as much done as you need to get done. A good security team will never be a hinderance, but also protect your online presence as a company.
Only give the requesting party the access they truly need to your page or ad account. This is important. It’s so easy to just give “admin” access to just anyone, which means that individual can completely remove other admins making it a nightmare to recover your Facebook Page. Some times if it’s an agency, and you don’t have the experience to manage your page, admin access is appropriate. But make sure your agency (such as Fit Marketing, the company I work for – your security is something we have experience with, and are good at) understands how to keep your account safe, and make sure you email them to know it’s them sending the request. Beyond that, ONLY give access to people what they need! Hopefully your agency is following this as well (many agencies don’t, so be careful).
Develop a contingency plan. Most companies don’t have one of these. A contingency plan can help your organization prepare in the event someone does compromise your Business Manager access. It can also ensure employees are educated and following best practices to make your company as secure as possible. Companies such as Fit Marketing and myself can help you develop a solid contingency plan for your business.

Facebook Business Manager is an incredible tool – I’ll be posting more about it on the Fit Marketing blog shortly. It can actually make your organization safer if used right. However, if business owners and marketers aren’t careful, your social media presence could easily, and quickly be compromised. Hopefully these tips can help secure your social media presence using the tool.

Growth Hacking: How to Know Who Has Viewed Your Facebook Profile

Posted on January 2, 2014 by jessestay

I shared earlier a method I came up with that allows you to target the subscribers (now called just “followers”) of a public profile on Facebook (you know, the profiles with the “follow” button like mine at facebook.com/stay – not to be confused with a business page). It turns out that you can also use this to not just target ads to, but learn about the subscribers of those profiles as well. For instance, I can tell the approximate salary ranges of my followers on Facebook. Let me share how.

If you go to my previous article on the topic, I show you how to create a list of the subscribers of a profile. The same can be done for the friends of a profile, the attendees of an event, members of a group, and many more “groups” of people if you know what you’re doing – do some research of what data is available (I have a book that can help), if you want to dive deeper. Go ahead and create this list, and then go to Facebook’s Power Editor where you would have created your ad targeting these people.

Previously I only talked about targeting ads to these people. You can actually get very specific in targeting only sub-groups of these followers, allowing for much more targeted ads in the process. But you can also use Facebook’s Power Editor to just learn more about your audience. This can be a great way to know what types of things the audiences of individual profiles in your brand are interested in.

For instance, if I go the Partner Categories (under “Audience” when creating or editing a new ad in Power Editor), and select “Acxiom”, then “Personal Finance”, and then “Income”, I can select any income range. If I select the $100,000-$125,000 range, in the right column it tells me an approximate number of people amongst my followers that are in that range. As you can see, the majority of my audience makes less than $100,000! If I were representing a brand, this would tell me how to price any products I sell to my audience of followers.

You can segment it any way you want at this point, just as you would a typical Facebook Page. Find out how many of a public profile’s followers/friends buy baby products. Find out how many of a public profile’s followers/friends are Republican/Democrat/Independent/etc. Then if you follow the advice in my previous article you can target ads to these individuals!

Okay, I fooled you a bit with the title and you can’t really tell who’s viewed the profile, but you can tell at least anonymously those viewers that have clicked the “subscribe” button on your profile, or learn more information about the friends of any profile on Facebook. For brands with influencers representing them as public Facebook profiles, this can be a very useful way for those brands to allow those influencers to keep a personal profile without having to have a duplicate Facebook Page.

Previously, I showed you how to create ads using this method. The cool thing with Facebook ads is you don’t have to create ads to get benefit. The ads interface itself, and in particular Facebook’s Power Editor, is a great learning tool to get approximations of an audience, and to learn more about who you should be targeting and how to target better – use this to your advantage as a brand as you engage your employees to use Facebook more as ambassadors for your company (through tools such as EveryoneSocial). Then use ads, and your own products to prove those theories.

Have another good use of this? Share in the comments!

Let me help your brand! These little “Growth Hacks” are the core of our business, and how we excel against other marketers and firms in this space. If you want to get an advantage against your competition that other marketers can’t touch, send an email to jesse@staynalive.com!

Oh, and like what you see here? Did it help your marketing strategy? Please consider sending donations to paypal@staynalive.com (Paypal), or send me Bitcoin!:

Address: 19AdCAbjshRuEFhx4py1Ny7i48s1d6RFi

Growth Hacking: How to Target Ads to the Followers of a Public ("Follow") Profile on Facebook

Posted on December 9, 2013 by jessestay

I shared earlier on this blog the benefit of using a personal, “Public Profile” on Facebook over a Fan Page on Facebook to personalize the experience and grow your network. I encourage each of my clients to, when they have the choice, choose the public profile over the Fan Page for personalities in the company for the reasons I shared earlier. It personalizes the company better, and I think the opportunities to grow organically are stronger.

There has always been one downside though – you can’t advertise to the followers of public profiles. It turns out there is actually a way to finally advertise to the followers of a traditional profile on Facebook with a “follow” button. It involves just a little Graph API knowledge (see my book to learn!), use of Graph Explorer, and a Facebook Page for your brand that you can use to create the ad. Here’s how you do it – let me know if I can help your company or brand do the same!:

Using Graph API to Get the User’s Followers

The trick involves just a little Graph API (the Facebook developer platform used to get data out of Facebook). To start, open up Graph Explorer from the developers.facebook.com “Tools” section.

Give your user the “user_subscriptions” permission by clicking on the “Get Access Token” button and checking the box under “User Data Permissions”.

Now, type in the following path next to the “GET” drop-down:

jessestay/subscribers?fields=id&limit=5000

You can replace “jessestay” with the id of any public user. The limit=5000 lets you traverse through the more subscribers at a time. Hit “Submit”, and a bunch of data will be returned.

Now is the part you need to figure out, and where a little programming knowledge might help (I may upload this as a tool on SocialToo.com at some point if it makes sense). Each page has only 5,000 subscribers listed, but there is a “next” link at the bottom that takes you to the next 5,000 subscribers. Your job is to traverse through this list, follow all the “next” links until there are no more, and extract a list of facebook ids in a text file (csv or txt). You can do this either manually or through an automated script that you create

This script took me about 15 minutes to write on my own, so it’s not too difficult a task if you have a little programming knowledge. Of course, this is also a service I provide to my clients so let me know if I can help! Once you have this file, you’re ready for the next step!

Uploading the Followers to Ad Manager

Now that you have your file, you need to upload it to Ad Manager as a “custom audience”. This used to only be available to Facebook’s Power Editor, but it’s now a native piece of the Facebook Ad management experience.

Start by going to http://facebook.com/ads/manage and make sure the account you’re using is selected (for those that might manage multiple accounts like me). On the left is a link that says “Audiences”. Click on that.

Now, click on “Create Audience”. A dialog box will appear – select “Data File” from the dialog box.

Now name your audience whatever you like, and choose the file you just created in the above section. If it’s a text file that has a Facebook ID on each line of the file it should work. Also, make sure you select “advanced options” and “user ids” so it recognizes your ids as Facebook ids and doesn’t try to read them as email addresses. Click “Create Audience”, and now your custom audience should be created! Pretty quickly you’ll start seeing the number of potential people you can target show up next to the audience stats on this page.

Creating Your Ad

Now that you’ve created your custom audience out of the user’s subscribers, you just need to create an ad that targets this custom audience. This is where you’ll need an existing Facebook Page for your brand (Not the user themselves – to me Facebook Pages are for brands. Facebook Profiles are for users!) if you want to do a promoted post. If you don’t want to use another Facebook Page you can just do a right-nav ad that targets a URL and that will work too.

Start by creating a promoted post using Ad Manager, or on the Page itself (don’t use the “boost” option!). You can make this visible or invisible to your fans – it’s up to you. Include a link if you like, just text, or whatever you want. Maybe even put the image of that user in the post so it’s recognizable to the fans of that user. Another option is to have your Facebook Fan Page share a post of that user, and then you can promote that!

Then in your targeting options, select the custom audience you just created. You can further refine the audience if you like, should the post be needed to target a specific subgroup of that audience (allowing for much stronger micro-targeting and perhaps even better results for less cost). Set all your bidding options, submit the ad, and now you have an ad targeting all the followers of a specific user on Facebook!

The great thing about this is you don’t have to limit it to subscriptions – it works with any data your user has access to. You can access your friends, your friends’ friends. You can target the attendees of an event you’re going to. Or members of a group you participate in. You also don’t need to limit it to your own user if you’re targeting just followers. Because public profiles are public, you can target the followers of any user that has their profile marked as public!

Just a side-note: I did notice a bug in Facebook’s Graph API that doesn’t return all of the subscribers. I think it excludes subscribers that are subscribing to you through Facebook lists. It will return most though, which makes an ad campaign totally worth it!

So when you think you have to use a Fan Page because you can’t advertise on a public profile, think again! You indeed can target subscribers of public profiles on Facebook, making the use of a public profile even more powerful, and something every brand should consider!

The Perfect Use of Custom Audiences Through Facebook Ads

Posted on October 17, 2013 by jessestay

Custom Audiences are a terrific way to build Facebook ads that convert and bring strong traffic back to a site. The way they work is this:

You have an email list
You import that email list into Facebook’s Power Editor
Facebook matches those emails with Facebook users that also use those emails
You target ads to that email list or exclude the people in that email list from your targeted ad campaigns

I’ve been encouraging my clients for awhile now to look inside their existing user databases and find ways to segment users to better target ads back towards those existing users to get new sales. One way to do that is to look at users that have not completed a full transaction, and remind them to do so through a simple non-intrusive Facebook ad. The potential for the completed sale goes up significantly when brands do this.

I saw this in action today as I went through the process of adding flower bulbs to my Shopping Cart at Brecks.com, but not completing the purchase. Within minutes, I was seeing ads on Facebook reminding me that I had not completed my purchase, and even offering a further discount to get me back.

Having worked at a few e-commerce companies in the past (my college minor was e-business), I can attest that it’s difficult to get customers all the way through the sales process. Previously there were few ways, without outright spamming them and driving them further away, to get those customers that never completed their purchase.

Now, with custom audiences on Facebook businesses can remind the user very quickly after-the-fact, when they’re still in purchasing mode, further increasing the likelihood of the sale. This, to me, is the perfect use of custom audiences on Facebook. Well done Brecks!

Wanna learn more about Facebook ads? I just finished a course you can take to learn about my own secrets to success with Facebook ads. I promise you’ll learn something new in this course. If not, let me know and I’ll refund your money, 100% – go get the course here!

YOU Get a Free Book! And YOU Get a Free Book! How to Use and Make Money Using Facebook Ads

Posted on September 30, 2013 by jessestay

I mentioned last week that I was launching a new webinar on Facebook ads. In this webinar I’m going to be showing you one of the biggest questions I get in my consulting and coaching for my clients – how you can MAKE money instead of SPEND it on Facebook ads! From my experience, so many business owners are afraid of Facebook ads, or seeing little success because they’re focusing solely on fans and traffic and not revenue. In this already successful, pitch-free course I’m going to show you how to focus on revenue, and increasing that revenue by thousands to tens or even hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars by utilizing a strong Facebook ad campaign. And if you order this week I’m giving you a few perks – FREE stuff!

I’ve spent my career learning how to build massive audiences for multi-national organizations and growing some of the top presences on Facebook. I’ve learned a lot over that time, and it turns out you don’t have to spend much to build an audience on Facebook. And even more – you can use Facebook to actually MAKE money instead of just grow audiences through ad spend. I’d like to show you how.

I don’t want to do it like just any other webinar out there though. In many of the webinars I’ve seen, you pay $200, $300, or some times more to get a little information only to get a big pitch at the end for more information, asking you to spend more to get the full picture! This webinar is going to have NO PITCH. I’ll add you to my list and you can learn about future events, but I want this webinar to be 100% CONTENT. The focus of this webinar is VALUE, and MAKING YOU MONEY through the use of Facebook ads, not pitching you on other products! Not just that, but I’m only charging $150 for what could be THOUSANDS of dollars in revenue you generate from Facebook ads!

This week I’m adding a few more perks though. First, for every person that registers for the webinar by end of this Saturday (Mountain time), YOU GET A FREE COPY OF MY MOST RECENT BOOK with Jason Alba and Rachel Melia, “I’m on Facebook–Now What???” 2nd Edition! On top of that, for all those that register by the end of this week I’ll WAVE THE WEBINAR DOWNLOAD! For those that already purchased the download and would like to upgrade to the live webinar let me know and I’ll arrange an upgrade for you to get both at the $150 price. For those that purchased the download and webinar together I’ll refund your download immediately!

LARGE GROUPS – I can give you a group rate if you contact me. Just contact me at jesse@staynalive.com and I can arrange a group rate for your organization.

There’s ONE MORE THING. I want to let everyone have a chance at hearing this message – it’s important to me. I know there are individuals and businesses that can’t afford this course right now. Or, maybe you know someone in this situation. For that reason I want to choose 5 individuals to give the webinar and download, and a digital copy of I’m on Facebook–Now What??? FREE OF CHARGE. All you need to do is pitch why you think you, your business, or your friend needs to take this course, and post it somewhere that I can see. Post in the comments of this blog post. Post in the comments on my Facebook posts. Write a blog post and tag me in it. I want to hear your stories! Consider this seed money, a gift, to get you going in making THOUSANDS in revenue from the knowledge you’ll learn off this course! So let me know your story!!! This will expire the Wednesday before the webinar.

This webinar is the best way I know to impart knowledge to as many people as possible and get the word out to as many as I can. I want all of you to learn what I’ve learned. I truly believe that ANYONE can be a Marketer! I want you to learn too, so GO SIGN UP NOW! (and share this and tell your friends!) I need your help to make this a success!

How to Optimize Your Facebook Ads for Event Conversions on Eventbrite

Posted on September 25, 2013 by jessestay

In preparation for my upcoming webinar on Facebook ads, I felt I would be a hypocrite if I did not use some of the strategies I’m teaching in the webinar on my own event for the webinar. In searching Google, I couldn’t find any good solution listed, but I did figure out a way to optimize your Facebook ad campaigns for when people buy, or sign up for your events on Eventbrite. That means Facebook will do its best to only charge you for your Facebook ads when people purchase your event!

The secret is simple. At the end of the Eventbrite event registration process, there is a confirmation page each attendee is taken to. You can actually edit this page, and it takes HTML. So all you need to do is get your Facebook conversion pixel in there and you’re good to go. Here are the steps:

First, get your Facebook conversion pixel

To start off, go to your Facebook Ads Manager. I’m not going to go into fine detail on how to do that – you can go buy my book, I’m on Facebook–Now What??? (the 2nd Edition) to learn how to set up a Facebook ad. Or register for my webinar that takes place in 3 weeks and I’ll even show you some really valuable techniques, just like this one, that will take your ads to the next level! (if you’re reading this after the webinar, you can also purchase downloads at that link)

In Facebook Ads Manager, on the left side column, there is a link that says “Conversion Tracking”. Click on that.

This is the page where you set up your conversion pixel. In the upper-right, you’ll see a big green button that says “Create Conversion Pixel”. Click on that.

A popover will appear, asking you to name your conversion pixel, and select a type. I called my “Eventbrite Ticket Sales”. You can name this whatever you want though. I also choose the “Checkouts” option, since I’m tracking sales. This is just to allow you to categorize different types of conversion pixels you might use. Here’s what mine looks like:

On the following screen/popover you’ll now be given code you can copy and paste into your Eventbrite page. This is what mine looks like:

Do NOT follow the instructions on this page. Instead, all you want for Eventbrite is the piece between the and the tag. In the above example, I would just copy the text, (the image tag) and nothing else. The reason for this is Eventbrite strips out all JavaScript from the code you put on their page, but they do support image tags! The image tag will be all you need. Click “Close”, and your conversion pixel will be set up. You’ll note that right now it says “Unverified” – this means no one has hit a page with your conversion pixel on it. That’s okay. Now we need to add this code to Eventbrite.

Add your conversion pixel code to your Eventbrite Event

To add the code you just created (again, just the image tag!), go to the “Manage” section of your event. This will take you to the Event Dashboard. On the left side of the Event Dashboard, you’re going to want to click the “Order Confirmation” link. You’ll be taken to a page that looks like this:

On this page, scroll down to the text area at the bottom that says “Message to be displayed on confirmation webpage:” (below “Customize order confirmation webpage”). This is the area you want to add your code. Below any confirmation message you add, copy, and paste the conversion pixel image tag you copied above. It will look like this when you’re done:

Now, click “Save”, but there’s one more thing you need to do. You want your conversion pixel to be verified. Once saved, click on the link, “View your current order confirmation page” below the final text area where you entered your conversion pixel code. This will take you to what looks like the order confirmation page. Don’t worry – your conversion pixel is invisible, so you won’t actually see it on this page, but you did want this page to load at least once!

Now that you’ve loaded your page, go back to your Facebook Ads Manager, look at the “Conversion Tracking” page again, and next to your conversion tracking link you just set up, it will now have a big, green “active” next to it if all worked well! This means your conversion pixel now works, and will load every time someone buys one of your event options!

So now you just need to add the conversion pixel to your Facebook ad.

Set up your Facebook Ad with your conversion pixel

In the Facebook Ad you created, at the bottom, you can set optimization options. You should have the option to “optimize for conversion”. Select this, and a drop-down will appear with your new conversion pixel listed in it. Select that conversion pixel. Now, Facebook will do its best to make what you pay only occur when an actual conversion occurs! This means real sales, for a fraction of what you’re paying in Facebook ads. That should be how every one of your Facebook ad campaigns runs.

Want to focus more of your ad campaigns on conversions? I’ve got a webinar coming up where I’ll share how to build audiences on your Facebook Pages that you can optimize for conversions. My techniques aren’t well known in the industry, so you’ll be learning very unique strategies, just like this one, that can help take your Facebook ad campaigns to the next level! You don’t want to miss this – go sign up here!

ANYONE Can (and Should) be a Marketer! My New Business and Focus

Posted on September 23, 2013 by jessestay

About 7 years ago I was sitting in a full-time job, developing software as a senior engineer for UnitedHealth Group. I loved writing software, and began writing a few tools on the side just for the fun of it. I couldn’t build an audience though! I was stuck – great software, with nowhere to go. I’ve heard this over and over again from other software developers, small business owners, executives, product managers, and the like, all lacking the proper skills they need to grow an audience successfully and do it without paying an expensive marketer or social media professional. I feel your pain!

I spent the next 7 years experimenting and trying new methods I learned from friends of mine and other marketing experts to where I finally think I’ve come up with the optimal process in growing audiences and revenue from those audiences. I ended up writing 6 books from my experience. I began to take some of my software development skills to take things I learned writing documentation for Facebook, Inc. and turn that into a concept I call “social design”. I learned perfect methods for Facebook, and Google+ Page growth. I learned ways to advertise on Facebook that many Marketers today still come to me asking about. In all honesty, I don’t share any of this to boast, but to show the learning process I went through.

You’ve probably seen me lately trying to figure out “my next thing”. Do I look for a job? Do I consult? Do I build a product? I’ve been meeting with a lot of people, and received some amazing advice. Today I’d like to announce what that next big thing is!

Today I’m announcing my “Everyone a Marketer” program with a series of webinars, online training curriculum, corporate retreats, and individual coaching all catered to showing anyone from the software developer, to the business executive, to even the marketing department itself how to grow significant audiences, and how to grow revenue from those audiences. The idea is that I want to show you, and every one of you how to become a marketer. I want to show you how to grow audiences. I want to show you how to sell to those audiences. I want to show you how to target to specific audiences. I want to show you how to learn who your audiences are. I want to show businesses how to engage their employees as marketers and social assets for the organization!

I’m kicking it off TODAY with the announcement of my first webinar in the program! I’m calling it, on this same theme, “Everyone can Learn Facebook Ads! How to Build Fans and Revenue With FB Ads”, or “Mad Facebook Ads!”. I’m spending 1, jam-packed hour to show you techniques I’ve learned with the organizations I’ve worked for, and clients of mine that will grow Facebook Pages using Facebook ads at a very low cost. Have you ever seen $.002 (that 2-tenths of a cent folks!) per like in your Facebook ad campaigns? I have! I want to show you how.

Registration is fairly cheap considering the value you’re going to get – for $150 you get access to the webinar and the Q&A for 1/2 hour afterwards (That’s half of what I charge for consulting!). This is potentially thousands of dollars in savings you’ll get from the knowledge you’ll receive in the webinar! My hope is for you to get much, much more out of this than you put in – I’m extremely passionate about this subject, and making YOU successful! If you don’t want to attend the live webinar, you can download for a reduced price the recorded version after the webinar is finished.

YOU CAN REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR HERE! GO NOW! 🙂

It doesn’t stop there! I need your help! If you want to join me in growing this webinar, I have set up a simple affiliate program for you to help me promote the webinar. Each affiliate gets 33% of any ticket sales they refer, which is pretty good for an affiliate program in my experience! Will you please SHARE this webinar with your friends and family? TO SIGN UP AS AN AFFILIATE, CLICK HERE! This is a great opportunity!

I’m limiting this to just 100 people per day (2 different days, same webinar), so act quick – I’m predicting this will sell out quick! Again, GO HERE TO REGISTER! This will sell out soon!

Oh, and STAY tuned for more! I’ve got much, much more planned for this program! I want YOU to learn what I’ve learned! If you want to learn more, GO HERE AND SIGN UP TO RECEIVE UPDATES!

Facebook is Not the Top Social Network in America, Yet

Posted on October 13, 2008 by jessestay

Just yesterday, MySpace announced the release of their myAds Beta self-serve Ads platform. As part of it, similar to Facebook’s self-serve Ads platform, they released an automatic statistics engine, now available to any user that goes through the motions of setting up an Ad. The new engine allows a glimpse into the MySpace userbase. What’s even more interesting is that you can do the same on Facebook, now allowing very accurate comparisons of the two platforms when determining where you should advertise or build an Application. Based on these comparisons, it would appear that, while Facebook traffic seems to be going up and MySpace traffic seems to be going down, Facebook still has far to go before catching up with MySpace in North America, at least in regards to number of users.

Here are the results I came up with – note that myAds only allows statistics for North America, so I was unable to do a comparison of the countries outside of the region. All these stats are North America-specific:

North America as a Whole:

Facebook: 33,3393,820 users
MySpace: 83,895,693 users

Males:

Facebook: 14,538,700 – 43.5% of total
MySpace: 37,653,707 – 44.88% of total

Females:

Facebook: 18,804,380 – 56.3% of total
MySpace: 46,241,986 – 55.11% of total

25+ Age Range:

Facebook: 12,649,720 – 37.88% of total
MySpace: 30,804,487 – 36.71% of total

24- Age Range:

Facebook: 20,722,540 – 62.05% of total
MySpace: 53,089,687 – 63.28% of total

Based on these statistics, as mentioned, MySpace dominates the North American market. Of the demographic break-up, the two sites seem neck-and-neck, so where you target your marketing and apps may really bring you over to MySpace first, and Facebook second. While minute, Facebook does seemingly have a stronger female to male ratio, as well as a ratio of those 25 and older. That would make sense considering Facebook reports their largest growing customer-base is the 25 and older generation.

What would be an even more interesting study would be why users come to each of the sites. Where Facebook seems to accommodate all businesses with their “Page” business profiles, MySpace seems to be targeting the Band and Movie genre. With categorized demographics, MySpace makes it easy to generate statistics based on these demographics, but Facebook doesn’t seem to make it very easy, relying mostly on keywords that pull from the Info section of a user’s profile. It would be hard to do a comparison in this area.

Now, if you compare actual traffic, it gets even more interesting. According to compete.com, Facebook has been increasing very steadily, while MySpace traffic is decreasing. It’s hard to tell if this is a reflection of the user-base, or of simple engagement within the site. If MySpace’s userbase has been growing, MySpace needs to do some serious consideration of how to increase traffic and PageViews within the site, because in this area in general, Facebook is about to overtake MySpace.

So while Facebook is hot on the tail of MySpace, it would appear that it still has far to go in North America. Facebook still needs to double in size in North America before they get even close. If I were to target Facebook I would target a more global audience for now.

Why You’re Seeing "Those" Facebook Ads

Posted on April 17, 2008 by jessestay

Yesterday I was checking Facebook and noticed an Advertisement on the left for a singles site targeting Homosexual Men. Well, maybe Facebook knows something I don’t, but I do have a wife, and yes, 4 kids – I am far from such! Not only that, but my Facebook Account specifically says I’m interested in WOMEN. I Twittered it and got responses from other people saying they had seen the same ads, and others as well that were definitely not targeted towards what they had entered on Facebook.

Valleywag (I skim it occasionally – yes, they do get some dirt occasionally that is actually news!) today posted an article about a similar situation. I also remember several times seeing an ad for wedding rings when it clearly says I’m married. So why are we seeing these non-targeted ads?

The reason is because there’s a flaw in Facebook’s advertising system. The ads you see on the left are only ads submitted by users, and they are submitted completely by users via a tool on Facebook called, “Social Ads“. So the ads are truly up to the users submitting them as to how targeted an audience they show to.

However, in some of these cases (like the Homosexual ads) I’m afraid it wasn’t the users’ fault the ads weren’t targeted correctly. Right now, when you sign up for a social ad, it gives you the option to filter by Location, Sex, Age, Keywords from your Activities, Favorite Music, Favorite Books, and About Me sections on your Profile, Education Status, Workplaces, and Relationship Status. As you can see there is no “Interested In” field in there. Note, there is no “Religion” field in there either, nor is there a political views field, or field for the IM networks you’re on. Because of this there is no way to target an ad only to homosexuals, or heterosexuals, or catholics, or christians, or Jews, or Muslims, or conservatives.

While Facebook gives great tools to target your advertising in ways you can’t through other venues, their advertising still has holes. To compete I anticipate these things will need to be made available to advertisers, or a better filtering system will have to be in place.

What do you think Facebook can do to improve this process?

(Image courtesy Valleywag)