I recently decided to test out facebook’s advertising platform for artweb.com with the goal of increasing the number of fans to our FB page. 

Control Case/Background

Since we launched our FB page last year, after an initial influx of fans the trend seemed to be just over one new fan a day on average. There’s no special activities going on during this period, so I’m confident this serves as a good ‘control case’ of the number of new fans per day.

At the start of these tests we had around 500 fans (all organic).

Case 1: Advert -> FB Landing Page

Our first tactic was to create an highly targeted ad shown to potential cusomers with a ‘like us on facebook’ incentive:

This advert went to a landing page (custom FBML page) with a big graphic saying like us for a 20% discount code. Nice and simple.

Using the advert settings we narrowed down the users to a few very narrow art related group, close to the demographic and interests we see in our typical users, here’s one group:

who live in the United Kingdom, age 21 and older,
who like art, art design, artwork, contemporary art, fine art, illustration, modern art, painting, sculpting or sculpture, who have graduated from university, who studied art design, fine art or fine arts

We ran the ad for a few days with the following results:

And here’s the cost breakdown across 4 different target groups:

Results

So with this short 3 day test we picked up 60 new users at a cost of just under 48GBP, so that works out at around 0.80GBP per new fan.

Case 2 – Sponsored Story

So next up we wanted to see how the ‘social effect’ of sponsored stories would work for us. Sponsored stories seemed quite attractive, because the almost don’t seem like adverts, they only go out to friends (so it’s kind of like the stories on a users wall) and it’s just a little box with no advertising copy:

And just like normal facebook ads we could be very targeted:
who live in one of the countries: United States, New Zealand, Canada, United Kingdom or Australia, age 18 and older, who like art, art design, art history, artwork, contemporary art, digital art, fine art, fine arts, illustration, modern art, painting or sculpting, whose friends are already connected to ArtWeb.com

So we ran this campaign for 7 days with the following results:

And a break down of cost:

Results

We had 351 new fans at just over 63GBP, so that’s about 0.18GBP per new fan which is over 4 times more efficient than the advert case.

Observations and Conclusions

Our results show sponsored stories to have a much better CTR and cost performance with the goal of increasing fans. It’s no surprise to me that the sponsored stories attracted more fans – they have the crucial endorsement from a friend (or friends), plus no advert copy so it hardly even looks like an ad!

I should point out that from a business perspective advertising copy makes an important distinction, it gave us a chance to succinctly mention our commercial services whereas the sponsored story gave less of a chance – someone liking the sponsored story might not immediately understand what we offer as a service even after a quick look at our wall. So one should bear this in mind when doing this type of comparison as it, we may have more fans with the sponsored story but do they really know what we are about?

18pence for a fan!

As a general marketing observation, 0.18GBP for a ‘fan’ seems like incredibly good value – with similar interests/keyword on CPC advertising we’ll often bid many times more than this for a single click but we don’t yet have enough solid conversion data about traffic from our facebook page to draw a real comparison. However even without direct conversions, the long term value (brand awareness, user interaction, friend referal, kudos from having a million fans, potential SEO implications to mention a few) of a fan makes this good value.

Also I note the wall street journal reports $1.07 as a typical cost per fan.

This ‘good value’ won’t last though, it’s still early days. Like with CPC you can bet yo ass it’ll get more expensive.

The post Increase Facebook Fans – Case Study: Sponsored Story vs Advert appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

29/10/2008 Good old facebook has booted a few Tokyo techies off their website (I think it’s just a glitch though). Maybe a sign from the Japanese Gods that we should be using mixi （＊＿＊）

Interesting check as to how much one depends on facebook, please check which apply:

1. How dare you disable my account, do you realise how long it took me to build up a million friends?
2. Bummer, no one can contact me now
3. Good, less procrastination
4. Like I give a shit. I’m used to facebook deleting things e.g. when they deleted the killer app I spent a few weeks working on

Update: Japanese techies affected aswell

Update 2: Word from facebook, they want to verify my identity:

Hi Chris,

Thanks for providing this information. At this time, we cannot verify the ownership of the account. Please send a scanned image of a government issued ID (e.g. driver’s license) to idrequests@facebook.com in order to confirm your ownership of the account. Please black out any personal information that is not needed to verify your identity (e.g. social security number). Rest assured that we will permanently delete your ID from our servers once we have used it to verify the authenticity of your account.

Additionally, you should make sure to copy and paste all of our previous correspondence into your message when you reply. Once we have received this information, we will reevaluate the status of the account. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Daisy
User Operations
Facebook

The post Facebook account disabled appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

• Fallon Trend
• Facebook Platform

The post Facebook Presentation at Tokyo 2.0 appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

Facebook ‘hello world’ Public EC2 image

I spotted this public ami for getting started with facebook, shipping with:

1. Facebook Client Libraries
2. HelloWorld Facebook Application that lists the objects in your Amazon S3 bucket
3. Footprints Facebook Application that is shipped with Facebook Client Libraries

New Large and Extra Large Instance Types

I mentioned previously about setting up a cluster of servers to deal with the potential high traffic for facebook apps, however amazon have released some more beefy images that could absorb a lot more traffic before showing the strain.
They now have 3 types of instance small, large, extra large:

Small Instance (default) (1)

1.7 GB memory, 32-bit platform
1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit)
160 GB instance storage (150 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
Instance Type name: m1.small (used in EC2 APIs)
Price: $0.10 per instance hour

Large Instance

7.5 GB memory, 64-bit platform
4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
850 GB instance storage (2 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
Instance Type name: m1.large (used in EC2 APIs)
Price: $0.40 per instance hour

Extra Large Instance

15 GB memory, 64-bit platform
8 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each)
1,690 GB instance storage (4 x 420 GB plus 10 GB root partition)
Instance Type name: m1.xlarge (used in EC2 APIs)
Price: $0.80 per instance hour

So potentially you could quickly shift from a small instance to large, then to extra large as required.
NB There are still great benefits to going down the cluster route rather than single server though, particular if you’re doing anything with a database (of course you are!) then you’ll really want to have replication onto a separate machine to ensure minimum data loss in the event of failure.

The post Facebook Apps on EC2 update appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

Facebook attracts developers — and controversy
Third-party developers must balance social-networking giant’s generous money-making opportunities with communications and administrative pitfalls

By Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service
August 31, 2007

Many Web developers these days feel a sleep-depriving mix of unbridled enthusiasm and nagging concern over Facebook’s social-networking platform.

………..

Facebook’s user experience has traditionally been considered significantly more elegant, controlled, and organized than the one from key rival and social-networking leader MySpace.

Although MySpace remains more popular, Facebook has been gaining momentum for the past 12 months. Its user ranks have ballooned to 37 million active users today from 12 million in December. More than half of its active members return to the site daily.

A company called Slide, which creates “widget” applications for social-networking sites and is big on MySpace, jumped on the chance to set up shop on Facebook, which has quickly become one of its most important platforms.

Although Slide has created some of the most popular Facebook applications, its detractors have criticized it for engaging in some of the inappropriate tactics flagged by Morin.

But Slide’s CFO Kevin Freedman said that Slide is as interested as anyone else in providing a good user experience on Facebook and elsewhere.

“We listen to our users’ feedback first and foremost. Regarding some of those [critical] comments, we haven’t necessarily seen the same response from our users and that’s really what drives us,” Freedman said.

Chris Kirkland, CEO of MrKirkland.com, a Web design and development firm, has created three applications for Facebook, but has been unimpressed with the developer program. “I very much consider Facebook to be ‘learning on the job’ with the development platform,” Kirkland wrote in an e-mail.

The tools and resources Facebook provides to developers could be better, he wrote. “Overall we have been extremely disappointed. The documentation is reasonable, though sometimes inaccurate, but by far our main complaint is the diabolically poor level of communication. We have a feeling that we are dealing with a bunch of overbusy college kids,” Kirkland wrote.

He blames this lack of communication for a situation that led Facebook to yank one of his company’s applications from the site with, he says, nary an explanation and, in his view, without justification.

The application, designed to let members track visits to their profiles, received initial approval from Facebook, but then the company turned around and banned it because it lacked a feature Kirkland says they never told him would be required.

He’s fuming that a similar application from a competitor continues on the site. “We were given no opportunity to alter the application, no warnings that they would do this, and my attempts at discussing the erroneous TOS reports with Facebook merely received generic replies,” he wrote.

The post Facebook Controversy Interview appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

So you need to think ahead, particularly about your hosting requirements, you should plan an infrastucture where you can quickly plug in a few extra load balanced servers, and keep plugging more in as your app grows. This involves a set of skills beyond the scope of basic php/mysql app development and with a standard dedicated server setup, a significant increase in cost.

Amazons Webservices is one possible solution, in particular their “Elastic Compute Cloud” – EC2 service. EC2 essentially provides unlimited computing power through virtual servers – nodes, you can clone nodes and start up a new instance of a node within a couple of minutes and the beauty is you are billed by the hour not the month with no start up fees. Additionally you can easily update and save an image of your node so you can continue to tweak your virtual server, save it as an image and then use that image to create more nodes.

How To Set Up A Facebook Application On EC2

So I’ll give a rough outline to how you could host your application on EC2.

1. Create An AWS account
2. Go through the get started tutorial to get the idea of how it works.
   This basically gets you familliar with the command line tools for setting up a node. Once a node is started you get an IP address and just log into it like you would any other unix server.
3. Plan your infrastructure.
   • A typical set up would be Webservers serving the application, Database Master Server, Database Slave Servers.
     To get you started, amazon has some good starting points, there is a nice apache webserver image and a separate mysql server image.
   • Additionally you’ll need to partition your application
   • At the very least separate database reads and writes, so all reads are sent to the slaves and all writes to the master
   • Consider how multiple webservers can distribute the load, they could all be clones or you could farm of different tasks to different servers
   • Think about backup. Again the good thing about amazon EC2 is the fact you can save an snapshot of your node, this is especially nice if all your data is in a database as all you need to do is keep an up to date image of your webserver and do regular database backups, then you could in theory recover from anything in a few minutes (depending on database size). For live database backups you will need to be using replication and you can then safely perform backups of a slave. And you should back up the data to S3 (the snapshot images of nodes are pushed onto s3 automatically).
4. Think about DNS, you’ll need a way of farming the requests to different servers and facebook (at time of writing) only gives one callback url. Fortunately this is fairly easy to get round with round robin DNS which is easy for transparently spreading requests accross your webservers. You will probably prefer to have your DNS separate from EC2 as IP addresses change if a node is shut down.
5. Once you have thought through these points, you can now bear them in mind for planning/modifying your app, so next you should start up an EC2 instance (review the getting started tutorial) and start coding

Caveats

• This biggest caveat is ‘no persistant storage’ – if you terminate an instance all data is lost forever. However in the context of such a specific environment as a facebook app, this should not be a big problem, you just need to make sure you have planned a regular offsite data backup and take regular snapshots of your nodes.
• IP Address change, you IP address will change if you terminate an instance so you’ll need to have a low TTL on your DNS servers so IP addresses will never be cached for too long

The post Using EC2 and Amazon Webservices for Hosting Facebook Applications appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

So after an exciting start with our tracker application reaching 8000 users within 3 days after launch facebook have deleted it without warning.

Admittedly we recieved a number of ‘Facebook TOS reports’, but they were all from users that had misunderstood what the application did and were essentially false alarms. Moreover our application had been reviewed and accepted into the facebook directoty and we even had recieved direct confirmation that our idea was okay:

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your cooperation with our policies. To answer your question,
yes, anonymously tracking ‘hits’ would be fine (as long as the user cannot
tell who specifically has been visiting their profile).

Please let me know if you have any further questions.

So you can imagine just how pleased we were with the reply after I had questioned the reason for the disappearance of Tracker:

Hi Chris,

Upon further review of your application we found that it violates our Terms
of Service. You asked me if tracking the number of hits anonymously would
be within our Terms of Service. This would be, but it should only be
possible if the other user visiting the site has also installed the
application. I apologize if my answer to your initial inquiry was unclear.
Thank you for letting us know about this other application. We’ll be
reviewing its functionality as well.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

So we were given no opportunity to alter the application, no warnings that they would do this, and my attempts at discussing the erronous User TOS reports with facebook merely recieved generic replies.

Conclusion

If you are developing a facebook app, watch out it might suddenly dissappear!

The post Attention Developers: Facebook Delete Applications Without Warning appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

For our second application we thought we’d try something more practical, a “who’s been on my profile” application. We have dubbed this application “tracker“. However this app had a slightly controversial birth, namely we had to axe the ‘who’ part of the tracking. Despite a careful review of the Terms and Privacy we couldn’t find unambiguous langauge indicating whether an application recording who has visited your profile would contravene these terms.

So we decided to release the application and wait and see what happened – we’d found the developer help email responses a little slow, so we figured facebook would come to us faster this way! Well sure enough within a few hours of submitting the app to the application directory we received a refusal. However the refusal was rather vague:

Thanks for your submission of “Tracker” to the Facebook Platform’s Product Directory. We have reviewed your application, and unfortunately cannot yet add it to the directory because it violates the Facebook developer terms of service (stores user data beyond the context user session or specified timeout). Please fix this problem and resubmit the application.

So after reviewing the terms, we concluded we were violating the condition relating storing non-permantently storable data for more than 24hours, so our solution was to make only the last 24 hours of ‘who’ available.

We submitted the app a second time and were again refused. Thankfully though we recieved an email specifically indicating our goof:

Thanks for your application submission. Unfortunately we cannot approve
your application “Tracker” at this time because it is in violation of our
Terms of Service. Your application is tracking users who have visited
another user’s profile, even if the users have not opted into the
application. This is a serious violation of our users’ privacy. Please
correct this as soon as possible.

A pity perhaps as without even being in the directory the app had attracted almost 1000 users – seems that this is a popular feature! Anyway, we still felt a profile ‘hit counter’ would be worth having, especially as it seems no one had offered this application yet.

So now the tracker application has just been accepted into the directory, and has made a good start – close to 1000 new users within 12 hours of being listed, that’s about 5 times better than the sentence game!

The post Viral Facebook Applications Part 2 appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

I admit this title is a bit presumptious, but I can’t help but get excited at the progess so far of the application I just realeased onto facebook. The application is The Sentence Game which is basically a ‘plug in’ to an existing website www.sentence-game.com and since I realesed it (3 days ago at the time of writing) there is now over 650 people who have it installed, only about 10 of my friends. 650 is a small number really but compared to the other apps released around the same time that’s pretty good.

Key Ingredients

Whether or not The Sentence Game takes off, in no particular order here’s what I consider to be some of the key ingredients:

• Good Logo – not essential but will help encourge people to install when your app is new
• Use the social graph – if your app is not making use of the facebook community e.g. it is a standalone app where all the interaction is on the app canvas, then it’s going to be a real struggle to spread the word. Make sure your app has a useful/informative/entertaining prescense on the user’s profile and posting items into their feed when they perform key actions will greatly assist in spreading the word.
• Don’t spam – don’t post too to user feeds much, or post pointless/repeat messages – you might have your account disabled
• Simple is best – if you’re looking for viral then it needs to be simple so new users can ‘get’ it easily

If you’re interested, here’s The Sentence Game’s progress graph:

Total Users

Change in users per hour

The post How to make a viral facebook application appeared first on Mr Kirkland.

So it took me a while to figure this one out, therefore thought it would be worth posting here…

Facebook currently allows only one url type declaration per style block. So if you have multiple url declarations in your style, you get this error. The solution is to simply seperate the url declarations into separate style blocks:

<style type="text/css">
#div1 { background: url(http://www.imageserver.com/img1.jpg); }
#div2 { background: url(http://www.imageserver.com/img2.jpg); }
</style>

To become:

<style type="text/css">
#div1 { background: url(http://www.imageserver.com/img1.jpg); }
</style>
<style type="text/css">
#div2 { background: url(http://www.imageserver.com/img2.jpg); }
</style>


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