Facebook today announced changes to the way it reports user counts for apps that integrate with its platform, providing a ranking and a user tier rather than monthly active and daily active users rounded to the nearest ten-thousand, as it did previously.

Monthly active user tiers are 0, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, up to 10 million. Daily active user tiers are the same but stop at 1 million. These caps mean that an app with 11 million MAU and an app with 45 million MAU will both be reported in the 10 million tier, with only their ranking number to distinguish between them.

Facebook reports these figures in its App Center, within search results and via its API. The insights developers receive about their own apps will not change. This just affects what information is publicly available to other developers and non-developers. The change goes into effect on Jan. 16.

Although Facebook is taking away some transparency, this puts it more at par with how Apple, Amazon and Google display app rankings. Apple and Amazon’s app stores rank apps by category but do not share any download or usage numbers. Google Play ranks apps and offers a range for installs: 1,000-5,000; 5,000-10,000; 10,000-50,000; and so on. However, Google Play seems to go up to 500 million installs, rather than capping its tiers at a lower number to obfuscate the data.
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Facebook today released its Pages Manager application for Android in the U.S. and the U.K., after rolling out to Canada, Australia and New Zealand over the last week, a company spokesperson tells us. The app should now be available in all Google Play Store supported countries.

Pages Manager is a standalone mobile application that gives page owners access to page notifications and insights on the go, and allows them to make posts, respond to comments and reply to direct messages. Although we haven’t had a hands-on trial, Facebook says the Android app allows admins to access all of the same features as the iOS version, which launched in May.

Before this latest release, Android users had to continue to rely on the desktop version of Facebook to manage their pages. With the m.facebook.com and the main Facebook for Android app, page admins can access their pages and write on their Timelines, but there was no ideal way to get notifications or analytics without a third-party service. Direct messages to a page were also exclusive to desktop until now.

Last month, Facebook announced that more than 3 million page owners were using the mobile admin app each month on iOS.

Facebook shares today closed at $30.59, up 5.26 percent, and the first time the stock passed the $30 mark since mid-July 2012.

Facebook has gone as low as $17.73 a share in the past six months, but has been looking up since major IPO lock-up periods passed and new revenue opportunities emerged. The company’s mobile ads and Facebook Exchange programs are generating more revenue than anticipated, and Facebook Gifts presents an entirely new revenue stream. Analysts have been improving their ratings and target prices, as a result.

The latest positive remarks come from Baird Equity Research, which issued a report Tuesday reiterating its “outperform” and raising its price target to $34 per share. The firm now estimates Facebook’s revenue for the end of 2012 to be $1.5 billion instead of $1.45 billion. It also increased its estimates for Facebook’s 2013 revenues, predicting $6.4 billion at 64 cents in earnings per share. The social network will report Q4 2012 earnings on Jan. 30.

Another upcoming event could be fueling investor optimism. On Tuesday, Facebook invited the press to its headquarters for an ambiguous event on Jan. 15. The invitation simply says, “Come and see what we’re building.” This could be an expansion of its platform, including more social commerce features, or possibly a new search product. The company also seems to be working on building premium services for the enterprise. Others continue to speculate about Facebook developing a mobile device, despite the company’s insistence that it isn’t. Of course, Facebook could always introduce something entirely different than anyone predicts.

There’s no word whether CEO Mark Zuckerberg will speak at Tuesday’s event, but his last major public appearance in September gave the stock a significant boost.

Pulp Fiction is this week’s top gainer in the People Talking About This metric for movie pages. The page, maintained by studio producer Miramax, saw 226,289 additional engagements this week. Despite coming in No. 1 at the box office this past weekend, Texas Chainsaw 3D comes in at No. 2 on the PTAT gainers chart.

We compile this list with our PageData tool, which tracks page growth across Facebook.

With some Hollywood executives questioning the value of Facebook fan pages and ads lately, the top 10 PTAT gainers are reflective of some of these studios’ marketing strategies. Out of the top 10 pages, only three of the films are currently in U.S. theaters: Texas Chainsaw 3D, Breaking Dawn and The Hobbit. Only one of the films has not been released yet: Oz The Great and Powerful. The other six are classic movie franchises with large fan communities.
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Even at the overwhelming Consumer Electronics Show, it’s hard to miss the large Salesforce monitors in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s North Hall. Every second the screen is spitting CES stats, ranging from the reactions to certain announcements to the ranking of the most discussed gadget categories. The graphs, charts and numbers are pulled from about 500 million different sources.

It is called the Social Media Command Center, a nerdy collaboration between CES-owners Consumer Electronics Association and cloud computing giant Salesforce. Inside Social Commerce talked to Michael Peachey, Salesforce Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, about how the partnership came about and what trends they were already seeing early in the conference week.

Read the Q&A and learn how Salesforce is monitoring social media conversations and engaging consumers live from CES on our sister site, Inside Social Commerce. 

Social sales and marketing platform company Hearsay Social today announced two high-profile hires: former Google executive Michael Lock as COO and Microsoft veteran Mark Gilbert as VP of Product.

Lock spent eight years at Google building the company’s enterprise business. Before then, he worked for IBM and Oracle. Gilbert led various products at Microsoft over the 13 years he spent there, including System Center, Visual Studio and Bing. He was also responsible for technical and product strategy for Microsoft’s $17 billion server and tools business and expanding Microsoft’s business in Europe and Asia.

Hearsay CEO Clara Shih has experience at both Google and Microsoft, and co-founder and CTO Steve Garrity also previously worked at Microsoft.

Spruce Media

Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developer Spruce Media has laid off about 30 people from its account management and design staff. The company says it is focusing on its software offering as it finds less demand for managed services, however it says it has not completely eliminated its services business. Read more from Spruce Media COO Lucy Jacbos on AdExchanger.

Offerpop 

Social media promotions platform Offerpop announced three new hires this week.

• Xiaotian Huo, Developer - former developer at Merchant Plus.
• Mark Davis, Business Development Representative - former associate recruiter at Dave Partners.
• Aaron Ketry, Account Executive  – former account executive at Panjiva.

Some Hollywood executives are questioning the value of Facebook ads and fan pages, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The report says film execs “confide privately they are considering cutting their spending on Facebook ads,” though everyone on the record said the social network was still one of a number of important channels to drive awareness about upcoming films. The article suggests that studios, like companies in other industries, are skeptical of the returns on paying for Likes, especially as News Feed changes limit the organic reach of page posts.

But with the way most studios approach Facebook ads, it’s no wonder why they would think the cost is too high and the results aren’t there. That doesn’t mean Facebook is an ineffective channel; it means Hollywood isn’t using it in the best way for its business. Movie marketers are emphasizing Likes at the wrong point in the funnel, and they’re not using the right ad formats for their goals.
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Facebook advertising company Nanigans ran a Facebook mobile campaign for an e-commerce app developer during the holidays, moving the app’s rank in the Apple Store from the mid-200s to the top 10 in its category, with the use of Facebook’s mobile app install ads.

Within a 10-day campaign period leading up to the holidays, the app moved more than 200 spots from No. 253 spot before the campaign to the No. 5 spot. Nanigans found an average clickthrough rate of 0.74 percent, reaching as high as 1.5 percent in core segments. The ad delivered more than 32.5 million impressions, with more than 8.5 million in one day. In total, the campaign cost $325,000, with daily spend surpassing $90,000 on multiple days.

Facebook first announced its mobile app install ads coming out of beta in October 2012 for iOS and Android developers that have integrated Facebook into their apps. The ads allow developers to promote their native mobile apps through Facebook’s mobile News Feed, featuring an ad design with a “Install Now” call to action that brings the user to an app’s landing page in the Apple App Store or Google Play.

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Facebook has begun automatically turning off notifications for groups and close friends that users were not interacting with, a company spokesperson tells us.

When this happens, users will see a notice in their notifications window with the option to turn the notifications back on.

“This is part of our efforts to make sure that users are receiving the most meaningful notifications,” the spokesperson said.

Third-party apps using the notifications channel are not affected by this change, which began last month, but there are a number of other quality controls for app notifications. For example, developers cannot send notifications to users who have not visited an app in the last 28 days. Developers also need to maintain a minimum 17 percent click-to-impression ratio, otherwise their access to notifications may be temporarily blocked.

By being stricter about when users receive notifications, Facebook can help keep the channel effective. If users regularly receive notifications they aren’t interested in, they may become less likely to check their notifications in the future, which could hurt developers that use the channel to promote re-engagement with their apps.

Users can edit their notification settings, including the type of notifications they receive and how the notifications are delivered, here.

Thanks to Matt Navarra and Tyler Willis for the tip.

Facebook is introducing a new feature to its self-serve ad tool to allow advertisers to create new page posts directly from the ads creation process.

When users select “promote page posts” from the ad dashboard, they will be given the option to create a new post. Previously, users could only select an existing post or choose to have its newest posts automatically promoted. Now, admins can post a status or photo update to their page without leaving the ad tool. This makes page post ad creation more efficient, especially when the person who manages ad campaigns is different than the person who typically publishes content to the page. Many third-party ad tools included this functionality, but this is the first time Facebook has offered it on its own platform.

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