According to Social Bakers, Canada is a large market for big brands. Currently Canada has 17 545 580 active users placing it as the 13th largest Facebook market. The study also goes on to state that penetration of the general population is an impressive 51.97% with 66.9% of the online population engaging with Facebook
According to the Facebook Developers Blog Trip Advisors app, Cities I’ve Visited, has received ten times more users since switching to the Timeline format . By using the open graph actions, Cities I’ve visited was able to make the app both more interactive and social. Facebook Developers Blog stated,
“Cities I’ve Visited maps the frequent interactions people take — pinning a city and rating a place — to open graph actions to maximize the number of stories people publish. For new and existing users, Cities I’ve Visited encourages pinning cities and rating places to maximize sharing and generate stories. Cities I’ve Visited uses custom properties — such as location — to create interesting timeline aggregations like “total distance traveled” and “percent of world visited.”
The new open graph system is an important tool that must be considered when designing new apps. The use of actions can be an effective way to engage users and have them publish your post to their newsfeeds. The added exposure of having users share their actions, will promote apps in an organic fashion.
Facebook is currently testing a new interface to simplify the creation of self-serve ads. Facebook’s current ad creation interface forces users to select between Sponsored Stories and Facebook ads, users are then asked to select a story type. The new format simplifies the process by first asking users “what do you want to promote”. There is also a new “objectives” option that lets user select what action they want people to take from the ad.
Another new feature is the ability to target both broad categories and people’s specific likes. For example a user could target married people who like Coca Cola. This is an improvement over the existing platform, which forces user to select broad categories or switch to specific interests. A Facebook spokesperson stated, “the redesigned tool is part of a limited test and there is no decision on if or when it will be released widely.”
Facebook’s developers blog announced that they would be implementing more actions within the app format. Users will now have the ability to perform actions that are currently associated with page posts within an app. Users will have the ability to add friends, locations or share photos without leaving the app.
Developers will also be able to create apps that will display user generated photos or videos in the news feed or Timeline.
As Majestic Media previously reported, Facebook has been designing a new Auth dialog. According to an article on the Facebook developer blog this improved dialog will launch in 5% of apps on Friday and on a more inclusive level over the next few weeks.
The new dialog will feature some key changes to help implement apps on the new open graph system. The following are excerpts from the developers blog highlighting some of the key features of the new dialog:
Functionality
When we turn on the new auth dialog, we will also add some of the most frequently requested permissions to publish_actions to make the permission more robust and improve conversion. publish_actions now includes the ability to post status updates on the authenticated user’s own timeline, tag photos, publish photos and videos. Other actions such as posting to a friend’s timeline still require the use of publish_stream.
Adding these common permissions to publish_actions eliminates the need for extended permissions and the second screen of the auth dialog for the majority of timeline apps built with the Open Graph. This makes the auth process clearer to new users and should improve conversion rates. Additionally, approved Open Graph actions are no longer required for the publish_actions permission. Apps should only ask for the stream_publish permission if they absolutely need functionality not present in publish_actions.
New Button Copy:
In the enhanced auth dialog, the button text will be one of four cases: “Add to Facebook”, “Log in with Facebook”, “Go to App”, or “Play Game”. Each of these were extensively tested and showed that more specific calls to action help users better understand the auth process. As the first point of contact for an app, it’s important for the auth dialog to exhibit a great user experience.
App developers can choose to implement this fully by selecting to enable enhanced auth dialog in settings with the developers app.