Here are all the posts from the Developer Blog in the last week.
 | 12 Desember pukul 18:00 |
We launched mobile app ads for engagement and conversion in October to help mobile app marketers and developers not only grow their apps, but keep users active within them. We wanted to share some early success stories and explain how developers are using Facebook's mobile app ads and push notifications with Parse to effectively engage existing app users.
Mobile App Ads Success Stories
YPlan, a mobile app that offers a carefully curated shortlist of the best events in town every night, started using mobile app ads to encourage their existing users to come back to their app and book new ticket deals. They saw immediate success with a 20% increase in paid bookings, and 215% ROI for their mobile app ad spend.
"Facebook's new engagement with mobile app ads is providing a unique channel for YPlan to interact with our customers," said Rytis Vitkauskas, the CEO of YPlan. "The impact on the business has been strong. With results like this after just one month, we see this channel contributing to our overall CRM strategy in the long term."
Movile, a mobile entertainment provider in Latin America, used mobile app ads to bring existing users back to their Play Kids app. In fact, they found that 16% of their premium subscriptions on iOS were directly driven by their engagement campaign with Facebook. Even better, they realized a 60% lower cost per app purchase with Facebook when compared to other channels.
Eduardo L. Henrique, Co–Founder & Head of U.S. Operations for Movile, notes: "Our team have been doing push notifications and also in-app pop-ups to drive conversions to premium but the segmentation that the Facebook platform provides is much more powerful than everything I see in the market to re-engage users and convert them to paid users."
Wait, But What About Push?
Movile and YPlan both represent two developers that tested various engagement channels to find which worked best for them. In fact, one common question we hear from developers is how our mobile app ads compare to push notifications. Each method has its strengths and can be highly effective when used in the appropriate scenario.
Due to their immediate, attention-grabbing nature, push notifications should be reserved for highly relevant messages that are time- or location-sensitive or that are related to the app's functionality. Parse offers automated segmentation, geolocational push, and time-sensitive release, so your push strategy is more effective. Further, with Parse Analytics, you can track the effectiveness of your push campaigns easily, and use customizable options to drill down into how your users are engaging with your push content.
Facebook's mobile app ads are better for longer engagement or retention campaigns. Since they appear in News Feed alongside organic content, you can show them more frequently, matching user expectations. In addition, you can also show a beautiful, compelling image, text copy, and any of seven different customized calls to action. If you want deep measurement, use app events for iOS or for Android, and see downstream actions taken as a result of your engagement campaigns – for instance, how many purchases resulted from your campaign.
Thinking About Best Use Cases
Below, we outlined some of the best use cases for push notifications versus mobile app ads to help you think about your user engagement strategy.
Creating an effective engagement strategy for your mobile app depends on your goals and needs. Push notifications and mobile app ads are two engagement channels that can serve different goals, but act complimentary as you interact with your users.
For more resources, please see our pages on mobile app ads for engagement and conversion, Parse Push, our YPlan case study, and some tips we put together on how to drive installs in the post holiday season.
 | 11 Desember pukul 22:00 |
Today we launched Facebook ads to allow you to effectively drive and measure installs for your desktop apps on Facebook (canvas apps). We also released a new Android SDK with feature improvements and bug fixes.
Introducing ads to drive installs to your app on Facebook
The new ads will appear in both News Feed and the right hand column of Facebook's website. The ads will have a strong call to action such as "Play Now" or "Use Now" and a large engaging image to show off your app to people. Each user that clicks on the ad will be taken directly to your app on Facebook to accept your app's permission. With this ad, you will be able to measure installs and continually optimize your ads based on its performance.
Get started driving installs to your desktop app
You can get access to desktop app ads through Ads Create Tool, Power Editor, or by working with one of our Preferred Marketing Developers. In our ads interfaces, simply select the objective you want to achieve, "App installs" for desktop apps. Then add your custom creative and select your placement options (News Feed and/or right hand column). Finally set your targeting preferences and place your bid.
Today, we launched to 10% of advertisers in our ads interfaces, and will roll-out to 100% of advertisers in the next several days. Go to our tutorial for step by step guidance on how to run these ads.
Android SDK 3.6
We released an updated version of our Android SDK that includes several feature improvements and bug fixes. These include:
- AppEventsLogger is now out of Beta
- Ability to set the selection property of the FriendPickerFragment that makes it easy to pre-select friends.
- Added support for Gradle and Android Studio.
For more details and a list of other updates in this release, visit our change log. You can download the SDK here.
 | 11 Desember pukul 18:00 |
People love sharing relevant, high quality media content on Facebook and across the web. Over the past year, we've introduced a series of updates - new Like and Share buttons, Embedded Posts, and News Feed changes - to help drive up average referral traffic to media sites by over 170% year over year. According to the latest report from Shareaholic, referral traffic from Facebook has increased by 47% over the past month alone and Facebook referrals accounted for more than 1/6 of an average site's referral traffic.
Today, we're building on this momentum by rolling out the new Like and Share buttons to everyone and introducing flexible width for Embedded Posts on the web.
New buttons drive over 5% more Likes and Shares across the web
In early tests over the past month after launching the new Like and Share buttons, we've seen more than a 5% lift in Likes and Share across the web. This is significant, given that both buttons are viewed over 22 billion times daily. Based on these results, we've rolled out the new design to everyone and extended it to the Follow and Like Box plugins as well.
Embedded Posts with flexible width
We're making it possible for publishers to adjust the width of Embedded Posts on the desktop web. You can set the width from 350 to 750 pixels directly in the Embed Post dialog:
Here's an example of an Embedded Post with width set to 400 pixels:
On mobile web, Embedded Posts now automatically scale to the width of the container.
If you haven't already, add the Like and Share buttons and Embedded Posts to your website today.
 | 9 Desember pukul 18:00 |
As the Facebook games ecosystem continues to grow and diversify in 2013, we've seen strong performance from international game developers based out of Europe, the rise of cross-platform games on both web and mobile, and breakout hardcore game hits. Join us as we celebrate Facebook's 2013 games of the year.
A few highlights from this year's list of games. Out of a total 23 games:
- 10 come from studios based in Europe or the Middle East
- 8 are cross-platform, integrating with Facebook on web and mobile
- 8 were developed by indie studios
- 7 are mid or hardcore games
- 5 are arcade games
- 5 are casino or slots games
The games of the year were selected based on user ratings, Facebook implementation, growth, and overall quality. We've also introduced a Staff Favorites category to share some of the games most played around our offices, and a Hall of Fame category for the games that launched earlier than 2013, but continue to be immensely popular with Facebook gamers. Lastly, while we have singled out one game that stands above the rest by all measurements, we've also decided to leave the Best New Games of 2013 list unranked.
Game of the Year 2013
Criminal Case by Pretty Simple
This hidden object game from a French indie studio combines crime scene investigation with engaging sharing mechanics to create the most successful Facebook game of the year. As detailed in our case study of the game, Open Graph stories featuring visceral artwork drove organic growth for the game throughout the first half of the year. Content updates and additional cases drove more growth for the game in the second half of the year.
Best New Games of 2013
Bake Shop Drop by Broken Bulb Studios
An adorable match-3 game featuring delicious-looking pastries from the developers of the Miscrits, a long-running Facebook game franchise. Rather than switching or line-drawing match mechanics, players drop a single pastry from the top of a display case onto pastries of the same type below. | 
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Farm Heroes Saga by King
A farm-themed match-3 game from the makers of the wildly successful Candy Crush Saga. The bright colors and rounded edges of the art style distinguish Farm Heroes Saga both from other match-3 games and from King's previous successes in the genre. | 
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Heart of Vegas by Product Madness/Aristocrat
This slots game is the first from this London developer since its acquisition late last year by land-based casino company Aristocrat. The high quality graphics and sound speak to the developer's skill with the category. | 
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Hit It Rich Casino Slots by Zynga
This beautifully designed slots simulation from the FarmVille developer features slot machines based on characters and themes from movies, television, and comic books. | 
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Jelly Splash by Wooga
A richly animated line-drawing match-3 game from the developers of popular Facebook game Diamond Dash. Jelly Splash launched first on mobile before going cross platform on Facebook.com in summer of this year. | 
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Kitchen Scramble by Disney Interactive
This cooking-themed time management sim puts players in a food truck and sends them to various food-themed "countries" to serve local cuisine. This is the first original IP developer for Facebook that feels like a Disney production, right down to the animated mixing bowl loading screen. | 
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Monster Legends by Social Point
From the Barcelona-based developer of hit game Dragon City, Monster Legends lets players collect, raise and battle monsters of all kinds against each other. The "Pandalf" panda-wizard monster is an office favorite. | 
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The Smurfs & Co.: Spellbound by Ubisoft
A sequel to 2011's The Smurfs & Co, French game developer Ubisoft follows up with a more personalized village-building experience featuring the lovable blue Belgian comic characters. Spellbound proves that recognizable brands still carry a lot of weight with players on our platform. | 
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Soldiers Inc. by Plarium
A real-time strategy game from an Israeli indie developer. This gritty war epic grew rapidly over the summer and still continues to draw a large audience of hardcore players. | 
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Solitaire Tales by Qublix
From a Toronto indie studio, Tales is a steampunk-themed solitaire game that treats players with familiar gameplay in a rich fantasy setting. | 
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Thunder Run War of Clans by SpinPunch Games
Another hardcore strategy game, this indie studio was founded out of a Stanford University dorm room just last year. | 
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Vikings Gone Wild by EveryDayiPlay
A hardcore strategy game from a Polish indie studio built with the Unity 3D engine. Players build armies of Viking warriors to pillage one another's homesteads for spoils of gold and beer. | 
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Staff Favorites
DoubleU Casino by AFewGoodSoft
This high quality casino game from an indie developer launched in mid 2012 and provides real casino experiences with a unique virtual Vegas concept. | 
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Game of Thrones Ascent by Disruptor Beam
A role-playing simulation based both on the megahit "A Song of Ice and Fire" book series and its HBO miniseries "Game of Thrones." | 
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King's Bounty: Legions by Nival
A complex turn-based strategy game that has grown on a few of our staff over the last year. | 
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Panda Jam by SGN
A cross-platform casual game where players collapse cubes of matching colors to free trapped baby pandas. | 
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Wartune by 7Road/Proficient City
This is the English language version of a popular strategy massively multiplayer online game. Since its launch on Facebook by publisher Proficient City, the game has grown rapidly in size and is one of the most successful core games on the platform to date. | 
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War Commander by Kixeye
One of the earliest real-time strategy titles on Facebook lets players build up armies, attack each other and compete for resources. It's still played regularly by Facebook staff two years after leaving beta. | 
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2013 Hall of Fame
Candy Crush Saga by King
The King match-3 game has been a phenomenal success this year entertaining audiences on Facebook.com and mobile devices alike. | 
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DoubleDown Casino by DoubleDown Interactive/IGT
With a suite of engrossing casino games, DoubleDown keeps players hooked with lively themes and opportunities to compete with others. | 
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FarmVille 2 by Zynga
Sequel to one of Facebook's earliest farm simulation games, FarmVille 2 features some of the slickest graphics on our platform. Exciting new content keeps players coming back and contributes to this game's remarkable performance. | 
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Slotomania by Playtika/Caesar's Interactive
Always fresh and fun, this slots game keeps delighting web and mobile players with its creative categories and engaging graphics. | 
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