facebook application development

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

English is still by far the most-used language on Facebook, with some 231 million users. However, Facebook just crossed the 500 million user milestone — which means that over half of all users are accessing the site in another language. With an increasingly international audience, where should marketers and application developers focus their attention?

Earlier this week, we detailed the growth of Facebook’s top 10 languages. In a sense, our findings provided an easy answer to the above question. Spanish, with 68 million users, is Facebook’s second-largest language; that’s roughly the population of France. In turn, French is third-largest, with 26 million users. These user groups are easily large enough to warrant attention.

However, large groups of foreign-language users can also be a double-edged sword. On the positive side, people in a particular language group are now together on one platform in a way that they never before have been.

The negative, at least for some purposes, is that the geographic distribution of these users is extremely wide. Very few Spanish-language users are in the United States; meanwhile, even the top five countries for the language only represent about 50 million of the total group:

It’s easy to imagine scenarios in which it would be desirable to reach all of the users of a particular language; educational products, for instance, know no borders. However, a company that can only effectively distribute its product in a certain region — continental Europe, for example — may find it more worthwhile to focus on a concentrated language group like Turkish, in which all but handful of the 23 million users are in Turkey itself.

For application developers and others who want to maintain an online-only contact with their audience, Facebook’s language stats still present some challenges. For instance, Indonesian is now the fifth-largest language on Facebook with 21 million users. Appealingly, the country’s population is known for a willingness to spend online, albeit in smaller amounts than people in richer countries.

However, in an interview on Inside Social Games, Wooga CEO Jens Begemann told us his gaming company has stopped targeting Indonesians, among other Asian groups, in part because the Indonesians who are online are likely to have basic fluency in English anyway, obviating the need for his company to do extra translation work.

Wooga’s plan is to add other language groups in the future, including Portuguese, which grew 11.8 percent over the past month due to new Brazilian users, but for the moment still has only 7.2 million users — not quite enough for the company to invest in the market.

In the end, the decision of which market to invest in should mainly balance the number of potential users, their likelihood to monetize well, and the unique situation of the company planning to localize its product or application. But there are many more potential considerations, including the average age and sex of users in each language group; those metrics are available as part of an Inside Facebook Gold subscription.

Global brands joined a band of celebrities and musicians on this week’s list of Top 20 Facebook Pages, compiled by our PageData tool, counting the number of fans joining a Page on any given day. In order to make the list this week Pages had to acquire between 1.1 million and 518,300 new Likes.

Top Gainers This Week

Name	Fans	Gain	Gain, %
1.	YouTube	9,105,143	+1,127,486	+14.13
2.	Facebook	14,234,219	+888,703	+6.66
3.	Lady Gaga	13,690,189	+817,782	+6.35
4.	Family Guy	13,451,027	+793,141	+6.27
5.	Coca-Cola	8,664,011	+785,276	+9.97
6.	Bob Marley	7,381,216	+766,719	+11.59
7.	House	10,824,937	+714,771	+7.07
8.	Eminem	8,262,643	+699,808	+9.25
9.	Linkin Park	8,994,938	+641,159	+7.68
10.	Vin Diesel	12,309,003	+630,930	+5.40
11.	South Park	8,914,566	+621,207	+7.49
12.	The Twilight Saga	10,257,766	+605,544	+6.27
13.	Starbucks	11,056,832	+597,424	+5.71
14.	Cristiano Ronaldo	8,911,429	+586,248	+7.04
15.	Shakira	5,591,895	+579,678	+11.57
16.	Michael Jackson	17,058,493	+550,254	+3.33
17.	Red Bull	7,021,774	+544,560	+8.41
18.	Oreo	7,202,917	+539,091	+8.09
19.	Lil Wayne	8,563,543	+538,582	+6.71
20.	Katy Perry	5,617,561	+518,320	+10.16

First was YouTube, adding 1.1 million fans to pass a total of 9.1 million Likes. Overall, the growth seemed pretty steady, although there appeared to be some official Page consolidation last week that affected many of the Pages on our list this week.

In the global brands category, Facebook came in second place, adding 888,700 Likes to reach a total of 14.2 million, perhaps in part to news of the hitting the half billion user mark. Coca-Cola came in fifth place, adding 785,300 fans to grow to surpass 8.6 million inw aht seemed to be partly due to Page consolidation.

Starbucks took the number 13 spot, adding 597,400 fans, growing to 11 million. Red Bull was at number 17, adding 544,600 fans, pulling in a total of 7 million Likes by promoting sporting events. Next was Oreo at number 18, adding 539,100 fans to pass 7.2 million Likes; the company continues to promote a contest for international fans to become the Page’s profile picture.

Celebrity, in several forms, made up a chunk of this list this week, too; this includes television shows, movies and stars.

In fourth place was television show “Family Guy,” adding 793,100 Likes to grow the Page to 13.4 million; the makers of the show made appearances at the recent Comic-Con event in California this week. Medical drama “House” was seventh, adding 714,800 fans to reach 10.8 million total; the show had big growth this week and won big at an awards show.

Action star Vin Diesel’s Page added 630,900 fans to grow to 12.3 million this week. Next, “South Park” took the number 11 spot, adding 621,200 Likes to a total of 8.9 million. “The Twilight Saga” followed in twelfth place, adding 605,500 fans, passing 10.2 million total, and also putting in an appearance at Comic-Con. Finally, Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo added 586,200 fans to his 8.9 million total to take fourtheenth place.

The rest of the list was occupied by musicians.

Lady Gaga was third, adding 817,800 fans to her 13.6 million. Bob Marley’s Page took sixth, adding 766,700 fans to a 7.3 million total, though there wasn’t much happening on the Page. Rapper Eminem was eighth, added 699,800 fans now with 8.2 million Likes; he’s promoting his new album. Linkin Park was ninth, adding 641,200 fans to come in just under 9 million fans; the Page is promoting the band’s new album in various ways, including by offering a pre-order on the Page.

Shakira added 579,700 fans to take number 15, coming out with a total of 5.5 million Likes; her Page has been promoting her award nominations, merchandise and tour dates. Next was Michael Jackson at number 16, adding 550,300 fans to pass 17 million total Likes. Rapper Lil Wayne was at number 19, added 538,600 fans, grew to 8.5 million in part by releasing a new music video and sharing another letter from prison. Finally, Katy Perry came in at number 20, adding 518,300 LIkes to now boast 5.6 million; she’s also promoting a new single.

When Dave Kerpen and his wife Carrie founded TheKBuzz in New York back in 2007, the idea was to build a company around word of mouth marketing, he tells us. Then Facebook came into the picture. Since, the company has expanded to Boston and Chicago without any outside funding, changed its name to Likeable earlier this year and set its sights on providing brands with customer service solutions on Facebook.

We spoke to Kerpen as part of our ongoing series of Page mangement profiles. Earlier this year the company changed its name to Likeable. The name change came partly as a result of Facebook’s new Like button, but mostly because Kerpen tells us he wanted the name to reflect global brands.

The Like button goes beyond Facebook, he says, “The way Google organized the web around links, Facebook is reorganizing the entire web around Like. So, to me, Likeable is not just literal, it’s also figurative: Companies need to be more likeable to win.”

Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach?

Dave Kerpen: We are a truly a full service social media company – part consulting firm, part marketing agency, and part tech startup – providing Facebook strategy, consulting, training and execution. (This includes) fan Page, tab, and application design and execution, and Facebook ad creative, buying, and reporting. I believe that the best way to communicate with our fans is to update the stream, we are making sure our clients are communicating with their fans at least once a day. The service I’m most excited about is our Facebook Stream Management for which we develop and distribute engaging content for our clients and respond to comments and questions from fans. We work with a very wide variety of clients, from big brands such as 1-800-Flowers.com, Verizon FiOS and Neutrogena to categories such as consumer products, retailers, credit unions, travel bureaus, hospitals, nonprofits, government agencies and authors.

IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook?

DK: Last year we drove over 100,000 fans to a 50% increase in sales on “Free Chill Zone Day,” an event created entirely on Facebook. 1-800-Flowers.com has over 10 times as many fans as their competitors and was the first company to sell products directly on the Facebook platform. We’ve helped many thousands of New Yorkers quit smoking (5,300 Likes and 1,300 e-patches sent) and have safer sex using Facebook (12,800 Likes). And The Pampered Chef launched on July 14; it’s organic, no advertisements and the virtual gift app already has about 2,000 users and the Page has 49,000.

IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business?

DK: We were the first marcom agency in the world to have 10,000 fans on Facebook, a goal we accomplished recently. Since our founding in 2007, we have had solid triple-digit growth for three straight years. I believe that the [ed. third-party Facebook] brand business can grow over time to a $50 million business and the local business can grow to a $500 million business.

IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign?

DK: Every client has different objectives, so it’s really important to define the metrics of success at the outset of work in conjunction with their objectives. Some clients care most about fans, others web traffic, others sales data, and others awareness and buzz.

IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there?

DK: The biggest challenges are definitely how quickly Facebook changes and grows – because this affects planning significantly. For instance, when we saw that tab widths were due to change, we began designing narrower tabs for clients, and when those widths didn’t actually change for many months, a few clients were disappointed. We’ve learned to be very flexible and fast-moving, to keep up with Facebook – a worthy challenge for sure. We haven’t focused as much on tech as other players and, because of that, it’s not easy to fail.

IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company?

DK: The number one change that helped was when Facebook introduced its current Page product in 2008 – which is a million times better than the original Page product for business they had, which didn’t even feed into streams. Before the Page product the way to promote a brand on Facebook was really just apps. The Page allowed brands, and those helping brands like Likeable, to really focus on building the fan base and communicating with customers. Their self-serve advertising platform has also gotten better and better, and we’ve been able to leverage its keyword targeting for clients of all sizes.

IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company?

DK: The addition of Community Pages. It’s definitely made my clients very concerned, without a way yet for brands to manage or respond. You can imagine that if a client of mine spends big money on their Facebook presence, one thing we do is respond to every complaint on behalf of our clients on their fan Pages, so to then know that the Community Pages are potentially an aggregation of customer complains, the brand has no power to respond. It’s a frustrating situation but I’m sure Facebook will have a solution to this in the near future.

IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be?

DK: I’d like Pages and the people who represent them to be able to respond to posts on Community Pages. I’d also like to see the homepage ad buying process and value derived from homepage ads more closely resemble that of the self-serve ad platform. I’m confident that a Facebook team that includes Sheryl Sandberg, the woman behind Google’s genius AdWords product, will make that happen.

IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms?

DK: We are a full-service social media agency. So while Facebook, now with over 500 million users, is the obvious first part of any solution, we often work with Twitter, Foursquare, YouTube, LinkedIn, niche social networks and blogs to meet our clients’ goals. We will work on whatever platform the client needs and usually integrate our clients’ Facebook presence with whatever other social networks we’re using. It has to be all about each individual client’s objectives , so sometimes, smaller niche social networks will come into play, too. Twitter is currently the best tool for customer service, for example; if Facebook changes their own Community Pages, who knows, but for now customer service is best handled on Twitter. I am trying to build a company that meets its clients’ needs in terms of using social media to create more likeable organizations. I don’t want to just rely on Facebook, but the truth is Facebook is not going anywhere, so it’s a large part of what we do.

IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share?

DK: We’re currently building Likeable Index, a measurement of how socially active, responsive and likeable brands are online, and also the Likeable Local Platform, a scalable education, training and execution solution for small businesses to leverage Facebook and other social networks. Those are the biggies – but in the meantime, we want to continue providing our clients on Facebook with the best service in the business each day.

[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]

Facebook privacy is a big issue — at least to some people. In our latest user survey, we set out to research whether ordinary Facebook users are concerned about the social network’s changing privacy policies.

A quick recap on the issue: Facebook has repeatedly run into criticism over user privacy following various product launches, including news feeds, Connect, and the ill-fated ad platform Beacon. This May, public anger at Facebook appeared to reach a fever pitch as the company released new features that would bring up user information on external websites like Yelp and Pandora.

We covered the issues exhaustively on Inside Facebook. However, even our coverage left a question open: do ordinary users care? The loudest voices against Facebook came from the tech community, which one might reasonably expect to have high expectations for being able to customize privacy options. Other users, with less web expertise (and without megaphones) may not feel very strongly.

This question is an important one for brand advertisers, marketers, app developers and other websites that plan to integrate social features. All of these groups are eager for more contact with Facebook’s half-billion users, but they also need to know where the comfort boundaries are.

Below, we focus specifically on survey responses from several dozen female users who are mostly under 25 — an age group one might expect to be fairly tech-savvy.

Our broadest question about Facebook privacy turned up only a small group, 25 percent, that was concerned. A plurality, 39 percent, were neutral, while about an equal number, 36 percent, felt comfortable with the privacy of their information on Facebook.

Interestingly, another question we posed to users (full results are only available on Inside Facebook Gold) shows a change toward a more neutral opinion when we asked specifically about Facebook’s efforts.

Below we asked about user’s confidence levels in using the privacy tools Facebook provides:

Here, a full 50 percent of users have only a moderate level of confidence that they know how to use the tools. This contrasts with another finding, which showed that users were by and large happy with the tools.

This is an area that Facebook could certainly improve upon; many users have been confused about how to add or remove specific information from their pages. Facebook’s regular redesigns likely make this task more difficult.

However, the picture is by and large one of satisfaction. While there is a significant minority, at least of young female users, who feel that privacy is a problem on Facebook, that user group is not currently sizeable enough that it should cause Facebook serious concern — although as we’ve already seen, new problems are only a redesign away.

What does this demographic of users think of privacy on a feature-specific level, and what changes (if any) have they made in how they interact with Facebook? The full results of this survey, as well as extensive demographic data for Facebook’s audiences around the world, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service. To learn more or join, please see gold.insidenetwork.com/facebook

The last time Facebook announced its total worldwide traffic, it said it had 400 million monthly active users. That was February, three months after it said it had reached 350 million. Now, five months later, the company is planning to announce that has gained 100 million new users to reach the half a billion mark.

These traffic announcements may happen irregularly, but we’ve been tracking them all the way back to the company’s founding. As you can see from the graph below, growth has been consistently up and to the right. So is it straight on to 1 billion in the next few years?

That’s possible, especially if the company’s focus on low-penetration countries like Russia, South Korea and Japan work out (it is banned in a fourth, China). It is localizing apps and services for those places, and encouraging third-party developers to do the same.

Meanwhile, as we’ve covered, Facebook’s core markets are starting to look more mature.

Using Facebook’s advertising tool, we’ve been tracking country and demographic data, and we’ve observed rises and dips within countries and regions even as the worldwide traffic total has grown. In places where Facebook grew first — the US, and some European countries, especially — we’ve observed more weak months as the service has penetrated more of the total population. The fact that so many people are on Facebook means that there aren’t many more people left who can join.

Other issues may also play into this, too, like holiday months, Facebook redesigns and heavy media coverage of controversial issues like privacy. For example, the US, which has the largest Facebook population in the world, had a decrease in growth during June, according to our Inside Facebook Gold report. It’s not clear why the US slowed down. One reason is likely its high 41.4% penetration rate — we haven’t seen many countries grow beyond this mark. Another reason could be the company’s May privacy issues, or perhaps summer vacation, given the drops we saw coming from 20-something demographics.

Overall, though, we have yet to see any consistent flattening or declines. Countries with high penetration rates still seem to grow, overall, and privacy issues, redesign concerns, and other brand issues have faded into the background.

So, whether from new countries or old, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said that he thinks the company can reach a billion users. He shared more about that, during a recent talk at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival.

“We know that a country has tipped when local-to-local connections outnumber local to foreign,” he said, as The Financial Times reported. “It is a long-term thing we are probably not going to win in six months, not in a year… things look promising in three to five years out.”

He also explained that while there was “no chance” Facebook would reach 1 billion MAU this year, but “it is almost a guarantee that it will happen,” according to The Guardian. He explained: “If we succeed [in innovating and remaining relevant] there is a good chance of bringing this to a billion people… it will be interesting to see how it plays out.”