Using Third Party Apps Could Have Negative Impact on Facebook Success

The tool you’re using could be hurting your company’s success on Facebook.

A recent study by EdgeRank Checker (a tool that helps measures the all important EdgeRank value) showed a precipitous drop-off when posting to your Facebook page using third party apps such as HootSuite and TweetDeck. Studying over 1 million updates from over 50,000 pages, they found that using third party tools decreases your likelihood of engagement per fan by about 80%.

EdgeRank Checker came up with four theories on the cause of the huge drop in engagement:

  • Facebook penalizes third party API’s EdgeRank
  • Facebook collapses multiple third party API updates into one post (see example)
  • Third party updates have a high chance of being scheduled and/or automated
  • Content is not optimized specifically for Facebook.

So which of these creates the negative results?

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Email Still the King of Social Sharing

Email is dead. Long live email!

We’ve been hearing that the email era is over on a monthly basis for years now. But despite overflowing inboxes, new email killers coming out all the time, and of course spam, email is still going strong. As the site share widget has become ubiquitous on the web, many sites are hiding email sharing amongst 750 other social media icons. Do so at your own peril. Email is still the most common method used to share content on the Internet.

According to a recent study conducted by AOL and Nielsen, 93% of users share content over email. Despite the trends and the growth of social powers such as Facebook and Twitter, that number is slightly higher than the 89% of study participants who shared using social networks and the 82% who use blogs. When asked what their primary sharing method was, 66% of people answered email and it was also the preferred method in every industry surveyed.

The numbers vary depending on the type of content being shared and whom a user wants to share it with. By a large margin, people prefer to share content with their friends and family and email is huge when sharing with those groups. 89% of those surveyed shared content with their friends over email and for family the number is 86%. The only category of people email isn’t a top sharing method with is the public.

(Wait… 6% of people use email to share something with the public? Stop forwarding those chain emails to everyone Mom!)

With all that data, it’s clear users prefer to share stuff via email. Why then are most sites either lumping email with everything else behind a single share icon or at most pulling out and promoting Twitter and Facebook only?

“Email to a Friend” buttons used to be everywhere but fell out of favor, possibly due to spam and the privacy concerns of submitting not just your own email but your friends’ emails too on a web form. The email share forms still have value though and web users have actually become more comfortable again sharing this information online again as sharing personal information online has been made commonplace by social networking. You can also also offer email sharing via a standard mailto: link. This allows visitors to use their own email client instead of a web form, helpful not just to those worried about privacy but also on mobile devices.

While Facebook Like and Tweet This buttons are great for encouraging conversation about your content, your visitors still also want to be able to easily share links with specific friends and family members. However implemented, it is important to encourage and enable the sharing of your site’s content via email and not just social media networks.

The stats show, reports of email’s demise were greatly exaggerated.

Does Your Facebook Page Work for Secure Users?

Facebook added the ability for users to browse using a secure connection (or https connection) back in January, but unless you were reading their blog or Mashable most users probably didn’t notice. This important feature secures the communication between your browser and Facebook’s servers as you browse the site, closing a gaping security hole that allowed anyone to easily hijack your session and pretend to be you while sitting at the coffee shop. Previously you had to dig deep into account settings to find and turn on https browsing, but recently Facebook has been promoting this feature with a large message on users’ news feeds.

This additional promotion means that more and more Facebook users will turn this setting on for their accounts. Great news… isn’t it?

Of course, better security for users is great but this change could completely break parts of your business’ Facebook page. Facebook tabs or applications that contain unsecure (non-https) content will not display to these users, and instead a large error message displays. The message gives them the option to temporarily disable secure browsing (that certainly sounds ominous) or else they can’t see this content.

Depending on what part of your page is causing the issue, the fix could be as easy as changing or adding one setting and loading an SSL certificate to the site where you’re hosting your app or external content (if you don’t already have one).

You’ve put a ton of effort into using social media as a marketing tool for your business, now make sure to take five minutes to change that setting and test your page to make sure all your fans actually get to see it.

Facebook Changes Give “Likes” More Attention

This weekend Facebook made a simple but possibly very important change to the way “liked” links are displayed on users’ profile pages. They now function similar to shared links and display chronologically within the timeline with a large headline, short text description, and thumbnail image. Previously they only displayed a small text link grouped with other minor informational notices.

This change means that visitors to your website or blog who take two seconds to click the “Like” button are now prominently promoting your content on their Facebook Wall. This is a much lower barrier than the previous sharing functionality which required users to click a link, interact with a popup window, enter comments about the link, and then submit the form to share a link.

While a “Like” button takes up more space on the page than a share link, the updated functionality and ease of use mean that in most scenarios it is the preferable solution to including a share link. It completely eliminates the need to ever have both a Facebook “Like” and “Share” on the same page and may mean the end the use of the share functionality altogether.

Will Apple’s New App Store Subscriptions Force Mobile Development Towards HTML5?

We knew it would be coming when News Corp’s The Daily debuted with it’s in-app subscription model, but this week Apple officially detailed their new subscription service for all iOS app publishers. The new policies allow users to sign up for weekly, monthly, or yearly subscriptions and they can easily pay via the same App Store billing system they used to grab Angry Birds. Apple will handle all the payments and management of the subscriptions and users can go to a single place to cancel any subscriptions they have purchased.

Wow. This is great news… isn’t it?

Turns out it may not be that simple.

Yes, Apple is making it easy to get your subscription content into the App Store and in front of those millions of potential customers, but they’re going to take the same 30% cut they do from any other App Store transaction. And there are also some huge caveats that are making many developers very upset. Check out these two excerpts from Apple’s announcement:

All we require is that, if a publisher is making a subscription offer outside of the app, the same (or better) offer be made inside the app, so that customers can easily subscribe with one-click right in the app.

And also…

…publishers may no longer provide links in their apps (to a web site, for example) which allow the customer to purchase content or subscriptions outside of the app.

Essentially, that means you can no longer link to your subscription options online and if you offer a subscription service elsewhere you must also offer it from within the app. And give 30% to Apple every time a payment is processed.

30% on the initial sale of an app is fair. Apple has built the store, provided the marketplace, and given developers access to millions of consumers. With subscriptions, they are acting as little more than a payment gateway. It is up to the developer of the app to create the subscription features, develop the extra content, communicate to the user that they exist, and then finally convince them to sign up. Apple has no role in converting an app user into a premium subscriber. Even PayPal’s high transaction fees are less than 3% on most transactions. Apple wants 27% more than that just to process your payments.

They’re also not going to let you tell users subscriptions are available elsewhere. The press release stated that if you do offer subscriptions on your website you are required to also offer them from within the app so Apple can get their share. For many SaaS companies, it may not be a sustainable business model if you’re having to give away that much of each sale. Especially when your service is primarily web-based and the iOS app is just a tool for existing customers.

Think about companies such as 37signals who have been thriving for years selling subscription services online. Is there anyone out there looking at the App Store first when evaluating large, full featured project management tools? An iPhone app doesn’t help them sell more subscriptions. It’s just a viewer and a way to do simple tasks in a service you already pay for.

Even more confusing, 37signals and many other companies offer APIs which allow third party companies to develop sites and programs that access their data. There are at least 11 iPhone apps currently available for 37signals’ Basecamp, none of which are actually from 37signals and therefore have no right or ability to sell subscriptions to the service. But Apple’s new rules say that these apps must include a way for Apple to sell an in-app subscription in order to be approved. The new rules are just too broad to be fairly applied in every single case.

Will these changes force some developers to decide against offering iOS versions of their apps? If a service already has a large customer base and doesn’t need Apple’s marketing help, does it make more sense for them to develop their mobile apps in HTML5? Developing with HTML5 would save money on cross-platform development while they also maintain complete control over their subscription revenue. That’s exactly the direction 37signals went earlier this month when they launched a non-native, brand new mobile web app for Basecamp even before these new rules were public.

Overall, the whole thing is clear as mud. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the new rules may raise possible antitrust issues. Apple needs to quickly clarify and possibly amend the new policies and explain when they apply, or they will soon be facing a backlash from the very developers whose work has made the iPhone and iPad a monumental success.

Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate Now Available

Internet Explorer 9 is another step closer to full public release as Microsoft made available the first release candidate (RC) of the browser for download. Release candidates are past alpha or beta versions of software and indicate that this should be code that is close enough to bug free that it is almost ready for the general public. If no fatal bugs are discovered, the software will be released.

In addition to the obvious user interface changes and some performance boosts, IE9 will bring with it much improved CSS3 and HTML5 support. It’s nowhere near perfect, but IE9’s adoption of modern and cutting edge web standards is leaps and bounds better than Internet Explorer 8. As users ditch IE8 and adopt IE9 they’ll finally be able to enjoy many great touches and flourishes that web designers and developers can easily add thanks to CSS3.

Go download it and then take it for a test drive on some of these speed and capabilities demos.

Companies React Proactively to Gawker Security Breach to Protect Customer Accounts

I’ve had to change a lot of passwords in the last two weeks.

I had a Macbook stolen one weekend and then this weekend my login data was among the 1.3 million usernames and passwords compromised when hackers broke into Gawker Media’s servers and stole everything they could get their hands on. The hackers were able to access and download user data, CMS source code, and more from the servers and then posted it to torrent sites for anyone to download. If you’ve ever commented on any of Gawker’s hugely popular sites such as Gizmodo, Lifehacker, or Deadspin your credentials are most likely in there. (Find out for sure using Slate’s checker.) This is a huge security breach and could impact Gawker Media’s industry dominance as they must work to regain the trust of their readers and commenters.

Meanwhile, a few other companies are taking this opportunity to not only protect their customers’ accounts, but also demonstrate that they’re concerned about data security and grab some positive PR as well. Companies such as LinkedIn and Amazon have mined the stolen Gawker data for email addresses matching their customer accounts and automatically reset their passwords. This proactive step not only protected customers but will also reduce a lot of upcoming customer service hours needed to handle and fix hacked accounts or return fake orders. It also prevents customers unaware of the incident with Gawker from misplacing blame if their accounts were compromised.

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