Sparrow Records (EMI) artist Matthew West has had a great year! With one of the year’s most popular Christian singles (Motions), a Grammy Nomination and a successful “Give This Christmas Away” tour has landed Matthew in new headlines (USA Today, FOX News, i.e.).  Shortly before Thanksgiving, we were tapped by Matthew’s social media savvy manager (Method Management) to help better communicate his message (and boost his presence) on Facebook.  You can checkout Matthew’s Christmas 2009 custom Facebook page here. The page features sound, video, and a free download (which “encourages” who aren’t already fans to become fans!)

Creating a marketing presence on Facebook is more than a good idea! It’s essential! Consider this – fans spend a lot more time on Facebook than they do on any artist website! In fact, users spend more on time on Facebook than any other site on the web! According to Mashables, Nielsen Online reports that in August users spent an average of 5 hours, 46 minutes on Facebook! That’s triple the amount of time they spent on Google! Additionally Facebook has long past MySpace, yet artist continue to invest in their MySpace pages?

Given these facts, why are so many artist’s Facebook fan page lacking in any real content (other than a simple iLike music page). New changes to the Facebook API coming this month will make marketing on Facebook easier and more effective! The new posting API’s, the ability for apps to send messages to your inbox, the ability to get user’s email address and other important API changes will continue to make Facebook the platform of choice for music artists and labels!

A couple of things of things that developers and marketers should be aware in regards to changes on Facebook.

1. Vanity URL for Facebook
   Since June 13, existing Facebook users ahve been able to claim a personalized vanity Uniform Resource Locator (URL) pointing to their regular existing profile page. Millions of users have already registered vanity URL’s. Page owners can do the same, with the caveat that (currently) only pages with 1000 or more fans are allowed to register vanity URL’s in this way.
2. Brand Owners Get to Register their Trademarks
   To prevent URL squatters and the legal mess that quickly follows. Facebook is allowing owners of existing registered trademarks to protect them. Rights holders interested in protecting the use of their existing registered trademarks may visit: http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=username_rights
3. Facebook User ID’s have Changed
   Preparing for continued growth, Facebook is issuing larger ID’s to certain new users. In the past most Facebook ID’s were 10 or less digits (easily handled by an INT field in your database). This week as part of our testing for a new game we helped developed, we noticed 15 digit ID’s (100000027051821), which CANNOT be handled well by an INT field and require a BIGINT field. Developers who are noticing odd behavior (users not being able to save preferences or the creating of duplicate records in your user table), will need to modify their databases.

I mentioned last week, but we have been busy building a Page-only, Tab-only application for Facebook that allows marketers to deploy and manage dynamic content on their Facebook pages. Inspired by the new Facebook page redesign, which I talked about last week(see Facebook Page Design – Best Practices), the Tab Manager for Facebook allows administrator to setup Metablocks managed and powered tabs on their Facebook page and pull the content on those dynamically (from common feed sources) or through the application’s own content management system.

Supported content source include:

• RSS (and RSS variants)
• XML/XSL
• Cut and paste HTML content
• File-based HTML content
• Blog feeds
• Web-based content
• Custom data sources (databases, i.e.)
• Enterprise CMS (Content Management Systems) – Vignette, Documentum, Alfresco
• Web CMS – Drupal, Wordpress, Metablocks CMS

The Tab Mangaer has the following features:

• Multi-language support: ability to show different content depending on a user’s preferred language
• Caching: content is optionally cached for improved performance
• Tracking: for Google analytics, Statcounter, Omniture, i.e.
• Content Sharing: ability to share content between multiple pages

Benefits include reduced time and cost of managing and updating Facebook pages, better control of your brand presence on Facebook, the ability to dynamically synchronize content automatically across one or more Facebook pages, while taking advantage of content reuse and centralized management. The Tab manager is idea for media and news organizations, film studios and music labels that have to create, manage and update multiple pages on Facebook. The Tab manager allows them to have better control of their page, reuse existing content and new feeds, enable dynamic content is is constantly being updated, all at a fraction of the price it would cost to do manually.

The new Facebook page redesign actually holds a lot of promise for artists, bands, and brands who are using Facebook to promote their products, services or simply themselves.  Here is why:

• Tab-Based Design: The new design allows you to use applications as Tabs. Although most Facebook applications don’t support pages, some do. For those that do, you an add the application (if it supports pages AND supports Facebook application tabs). A new product (from Metablocks) called the Tab Manager for Facebook allows users to bring in dynamic or static content (such as RSS or XML feed, pictures/images and Flash, content from another web page or link, or static cut-and-paste content) or even content from a web or enterprise content management system (ECM/CMS) such as Drupal and Wordpress, or a Vignette, Documentum or Alfresco solution. If you are interested in beta testing the Metablocks Tab Manager for Facebook, let us know. Will share more about the the Tab Content Manager tomorrow.
• Ability to Set a Default Tab: This feature is key! Users have the ability to set the default tab for their Facebook fan page to any of the available tabs. You can also remove (except for the Wall and Info tabs) and reposition any of your tabs!
• A Better Wall: Posts on the new wall are more dynamic and seem more active and the new design allows updates to your Facebook page to have better news feed distribution – this means information can more quickly get to page fans (increasing traffic to your page). Admins can also allow fans to to post to their page Wall, a very cool feature – plus users can filter posts to show only the posts by the Admin or by fans.
  
• Forget Boxes: Boxes are not so great after the new Facebook page redesign. You can’t change the title of the non-intuitive “Boxes” tab . We suggest that if possible you dump boxes in favor of more intuitive content tabs. As I mentioned we have started designing tab-only page-only Facebook applications specifically for fan pages and we expect others to follow.
• Status Updates Comes to Pages: This is a fantastic feature (since status updates make it immediately to fans feeds) but it is very well hidden! Previous reports by folks like InsideFacebook placed it in the wall posting tool but as is the case with the every changing Facebook UI, it has since moved (see below). Probably one of the most powerful Facebook marketing tools in a page administrator’s arsenal.
  

Other Resources:

• How to Brace for the Facebook Page Redesign
  
• Facebook redesign tries to clear the social smog
• Facebook to Launch Redesigned Pages for Businesses
• Facebook Pages Redesign Coming

A lot of readers enjoy our widget news and trends weekly posting and some have asked why we don’t do something similar for Facebook, so here it is:

• Facebook Demographic is Getting Even “Older”
  Facebook and other social networks has been skewing older for a while, but according to InsideFacebook.com in the past two months alone the number of new members over 35 has doubled. Good news for marketers: the median age is now over 25, and the largest single group 35 to 44.
• Facebook to Offer Virtual Currency
  Facebook’s Gareth Davis mentioned at the GamesBeat conference in San Francisco that Facebook is “looking at” offering a virtual currency to developers. Note to marketers: the virtual goods industry is a $1.5 billion market!
• Facebook Privacy Still Lacking But Will Improve
  Facebook is reassuring users about the security and privacy of its service, claiming that its automated systems spot and take down thousands of fake or malicious accounts every week. The company also hired ACLU lawyer Timothy Sparapani to be its first public policy director!
• Facebook Users Revolt on new Redesign
  PCWorld reports that 1.7 million Facebook users have joined the “Petition Against the New Facebook”  group and are pleading with Facebook to “make small changes and make the transition easier to deal with.”

What language to use when developing Facebook applications is surprisingly another one of those questions that comes up often. In the early days everyone, Facebook had official APIs for a handful of different languages including PHP, Java, ASP.NET and Javascript. The open source community was quick to create unofficial APIs for popular (and not so popular) programming languages like Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl, Lisp, ASP (VBScript), Cocoa, ColdFusion, C++, C# and the list goes on!

The cost of maintaining multiple APIs is expensive and today Facebook only two officially support API: PHP and Javascript. A majority of the Facebook applications we develop are written in PHP, but every once in a while we are asked to build on the ASP.NET and Ruby platforms. We generally try and persuade clients to stick with the official support PHP.  There are number of reasons for this:

• Building on a Supported Platform is Less Expensive
  As the Facebook API rapidly evolves, its becoming difficult for third party offerings packages to keep up! As a result, many lack support for new features or have bugs that need to be fixed. Open source Facebook APIs are free, and you get what you pay for! If the volunteers/developers behind the project don’t keep it up to the day, you will have to – and this can be expensive! Finding development resources that will built applications on an unsupported platform is more expensive. Many developers charge a premium for developing on more “exotic” platforms.
• Supported Platforms are Less Risky
  Related to my previous point, not only is using an unofficial API more expensive, its also more risky. The chances of your application running into trouble the next time Facebook updates their API is much greater on an unofficial platform and if your API is part of an open source project, there is no real (financial) pressure for the developers to keep up with changes to the Facebook API.

The other day I noticed that some of our applications that used Facebook FBJS AJAX calls were not working properly.  One or two clients made mention of it so I decided to research further.

AJAX calls that once worked on Facebook where now returning a “not so descriptive” error message:

There was an uncaught Ajax error. Please attach on onerror handler to properly handle failures.

After some research I discovered that suddenly the Facebook AJAX call was no longer accepting URLs to CANVAS pages. In the past the thinking was simple, make an AJAX call to a canvas page  and the page receiving the call has access to the Facebook API (user object, datastore, messaging, notification, i.e.)

The “fix” is simple, where ever you make a AJAX call to a canvas page URL that looks like this:

ajax.post(“http://apps.facebook.com/MYAPP/ajax.php”)

You need to change it to point to a page that hangs off your call back URL, so something like this:

ajax.post(“http://my.call-back-url.com/appdirectory/ajax.php”)

The real problem is you many need to rewrite the page you were making the call to since the previously used technique of accessing the Facebook API via an AJAX call no longer seems to be working! Here are some thoughts and recommendations:

• If you are associated user data in your database using a user’s Facebook ID (which you should), you will need to send that with your AJAX call (appending as part of a query string)
• User preferences that need to be changed using AJAX should be moved from the Facebook database to your database (ouch!)
• Example all your ajax calls (hopefully you have them organized seperated) to make sure none of them require that the Facebook API be included. “Silent calls” that are used to trigger notifications or updates may have stopped working without your knowledge. (versus more visible UI calls that may simply ‘break the app’)

Metablocks Clients: By now, all your Facebook applications should have been updated to address this change to the API. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact your account manager.

Techrunch and others are reporting that Facebook is in the process of revamping their Fan Pages. According to Techcrunch Facebook Pages will feature a more streamlined look next week though, with a multitab interface that defaults ot the the Wall. Unfortunately, all custom Facebook apps will be pushed to a second Boxes tab (similar to the new Profile). Inside Facebook reports that according to information provided to advertisers, the new look will include:

• The Wall tab, containing all the latest updates and Wall posts
• The Info tab will contain most static information
• The Photos tab will contain photos
• The Boxes tab will contain most custom content and application boxes, though some narrow boxes can remain on the “Wall” tab
• Page admins willl be able to add more application tabs to their Facebook Page if they choose it

I was on the phone today with a client explaining the many benefits of Facebook pages and was asked if I had any good Facebook page example.  Surprisingly I didn’t so I decided to put together and share a list of some well designed, ambitious or fairly interactive Facebook Fan Pages. Here they are:

Music Artists:

• Rihanna
• Chris Brown
• Jonas Brothers

Music and Film Industry

• TicketMaster
• Warner Bros Nashville
• Paramount Pictures
• Ministry of Sound
• History Channel

Films and Television Shows

• Kung Fu Panda
• Batman: The Dark Knight
• Star Trek

Food

• Pizza Hut
• McDonald’s
• Starbucks Coffee

Fashion and Retail

• Target
• Victoria’s Secret PINK
• Louis Vuitton

Technology

• Apple Students
• Livescribe
• Nokia

Sports

• Nike Women
• Michael Phelps
• Adidas Originals

Politics and Government

• Barack Obama
• Sarah Palin

Other Facebook Fan Page Resources

• Destinations vs. Colloration
• Best Practices for Facebook Fan Pages
• 50 Largest Facebook Fan Pages
• Facebook Fan Page Statistics

Sometimes I use my blog posts as a note to myself or clients. This way I can organize answers to frequently asked client questions in one place (thus eliminating unnecessary emails).

Common question:
What statistics/analytics does Facebook provide on application usage?

Answer:
Note: This should serve as a high level summary for business/marketing users of Facebook applications

Summary Information

• Monthly Active Users
• Total users

Usage (Over Time) – how many people use your application

• Active Users
• Canvas Page Views (Total and Uniques)
• Blocks and Unblocks
• API Calls Usage (and other non-marketing details)

HTTP Requests (Per Period) – specifcs information on what calls are being made to your app

User Reponses (Past 7 Days) – stats on how feature metrics compare to those of other apps

Application Features (Over Time) – how people use your application

• Canvas Page Views
• Emails Sent
• Request Processing (Accept/Ignore/Block)
• Feed, Bookmarking and Tag activies

About Page Statistics (Over Time) – who are your fans

• User demographics (sex/age)
• About page activity (views, uniques, posts, reviews, photos, i.e.)