Yesterday Facebook launched a developer (video) channel featuring screencasts, tutorials, and talks about its ever-changing developer experience. Especially useful for agencies creating and measuring social projects.

It’s a little confusingly-named, “Facebook Developers Live,” which suggests an event, but it’s actually more of a hub. That said, there also appears to be future webinar/Google Hangout-like “live” events that you can attend. (which will be recorded and available there)

Today I learned about a new ad format, “social inbound takeover.”

It’s basically a format that’s less about where it appears, or who it’s presented to, but when it’s presented: only when folks have come in via social.

(via interview with Complex CEO on AdExchanger) 

What is the “Social Inbound Takeover?”

The Social Inbound Takeover is an ad format aimed at selling a display spot against anyone who comes to our sites through social. You can buy just those distinct people if you want. It’s almost half of our pageviews. If you want to buy trends and things on point, we can direct ads to capture that traffic. We’ve have a lot of success with that format, because when certain stories get hot, and have people talking about a given set of topics on Twitter, Facebook, Digg or Reddit, it’s no shock that related advertising would also perform tremendously well too.

related, from same interview:

We’ll do over 650 million pageviews across the entire Complex network this month. Of those, nearly 40 percent of those will come from social — Facebook and Twitter and a lot of other sources.

Full interview here.

“There are no brand pages or promoted posts. The one difference advertisers have is that they’re able to write a check to elevate their stuff in this ecosystem.” - Tumblr

Elevate? You mean, like, make them show up more prominently than they otherwise were? Kinda give them more gravity or attention than they’d otherwise get?

There’s a word I’m thinking of…

I kid because I love. Y’all know I stan for Tumblr like crazy, and I’m very excited about their emerging advertising products.

But I really disagree with how different they think their products are from other social platforms’.

wilkinsky:

Tumblr grows to 20 billion pageviews a month, representing a big jump over the past year or so (Tumblr reported figures of 13 billion last September)

“There are no brand pages or promoted posts. The one difference advertisers have is that they’re able to write a check to elevate their stuff in this ecosystem.”

Word from the Hacker News peanut gallery regarding NPR’s somebody bought a Facebook Ad and it didn’t work so hot story.

So there are quite a few things that Pizza Delicious didn’t do right with their Facebook ads.

1. They target people who like Italian food. They don’t target people who like Pizza. 15,440 people in New Orleans have liked Pizza on Facebook. 
2. They don’t target people who like other Pizza Outlets. Or other local restaurants. If a resident likes one local outlet, he is more prone to like other local establishments too. 
3. They disregard targeting friends of people who already like Pizza Delicious. And by doing so - they don’t use the most powerful feature Facebook has to offer: social proof. 
4. That they do any kind of targeting beyond geographic targeting at all is probably erroneous for their type of business. Seriously - if they were running ads offline, would they run an ad in a magazine about Italy? Or would they run it in their daily local newspaper? Pizza is something that has a wide interest. There is no need to restrict based on any kinds of interest. 
5. There is no benefit in Liking Pizza Delicious on Facebook. No special Facebook offers. Or discount coupons. And yet they were expecting people to like their page and come visit their place right away. Their call to action is weak. You can’t expect facebook likes to convert into orders straight away - when you don’t even ask for an order. 
6. Their measurement method is very inaccurate. Asking people where they found out about you has been proven to be very very inaccurate. Instead, give them a coupon and track based on that. 
7. There was a total mismatch with their online and offline metrics. Do you ever like a page on facebook without knowing about that brand from before? Yet, they are tracking the number of Likes online. But asking people how they found out about them offline.