Meanwhile, brand marketers and social app developers kept their eyes on other stories. Here are three of the biggest stories for marketers and developers from 2012:

1. Facebook advertising goes mobile. When Facebook filed its paperwork to go public, the company highlighted the growth of mobile as a threat to its business. In its own words: “Facebook’s mobile platform doesn’t show ads — so the more that grows, the worse for us.”

In February, Facebook introduced mobile ads as part of a desktop campaign. In June, Facebook rolled out its first mobile-only ad units. The latter development gave marketers a means of engaging specifically with mobile users and driving them to mobile-optimized social campaigns.

2. Brand pages get a makeover. In a move predicted well in advance, Facebook updated the layout of pages in March. Walls, default landing tabs, and asking for a fan’s email address (to take it offline) were all out. Cover images, pinned Timeline content, and direct messages were in.

The update led to a flurry of redesign, from the banner-like cover images at the top of pages to on-tab apps that could suddenly stretch to 810 pixels wide. And, yet, the vast majority of consumer engagement on Facebook continued to occur in fans’ news feeds rather than on the beautiful, redesigned pages themselves.

3. The Login dialog speaks human. The Login dialog (aka, the app allow prompt) has always been a hurdle to fans seeking to engage a brand through a third-party campaign application. Why? Because the language on the prompt was scary! You’d think your personal info was being sold to China or something.

In December, Facebook updated the language on Login dialogs as seen in the image above. Finally, Facebook was speaking human – to the benefit of brands, developers, and (most importantly) fans!

So, what Facebook marketing developments did you like in 2012? Let us know in the comments!

With traffic expected from in-store signage, newspaper inserts, email marketing, and more, the campaign had to integrate across multiple digital properties. A Facebook app alone wouldn’t cut it.

So, Bulbstorm created a Facebook app and used Facebook’s Open Graph API to create rich social experiences on the brand’s standard and mobile websites. The all-screen solution was a hit! Half of visitors engaged outside Facebook.com, 30% came from mobile devices, and all received uniquely-optimized experiences for their unique environments.

The first app is Quote Me, where you put words in the mouths of the candidates. The app is optimized for mobile, so check it out from any device! If you’re on your desktop, visit our Headlines Challenge to create the front page of a partisan newspaper like the Furious Independent.

Here are three ways we’re doing user content better:

1. Provoke some thought: Many UGC prompts are glorified sweepstakes entries. Meh. Get their juices flowing by asking for recipes, stories, or (in our case) political commentary. If your question can be answered in three words, it’s not very creative.
2. Give ‘em pics: Do you have just the right photo on your hard drive? How about on your iPhone? Neither do your fans. An image gallery lets fans colorfully illustrate their content without hassle. In Quote Me, users pick from a gallery of political caricatures. Fun!
3. Get creative with layout: Don’t just drop content into a rectangle. In Election Headlines, users submit a headline and image. Pretty standard, yes? No. Our platform enables us to lay the user content into a container designed like a newspaper. See. No boxes!

So, how are you handling user-generated content on Facebook? Break free from the box and drop us a line at info@bulbstorm.com.

Instagram has an audience of over 35 million users and  proven expertise in developing light-weight, easy-to-use mobile apps – a blind spot for Facebook.

Of course, Facebook marketers should already be thinking about mobile. Here are some figures on mobile social networking in North America.¹

• 38.5% of women and 34.4% of men visit social networking sites on mobile.
• 58.8% of 18- to 34-year-olds and 36.3% of 35 to 54-year-olds  do so.
• 5.5% of mobile time is spent on social networks, compared to 5.4% of time actually talking!

Worldwide, over half of users access Facebook through mobile devices. But shockingly few Facebook campaign apps are optimized for mobile!

Bulbstorm apps deliver unique experiences on the desktop and on mobile. Thus, campaigns are delivered in a way consumers expect on any and all devices they use.

Want to see it in action? Click here on your computer or smartphone to see a device-optimized Facebook campaign with YouTube integration: https://apps.facebook.com/omg-video/

Here are a few use cases for device-optimized Facebook campaigns. Introduce your campaign when consumers are:

• Browsing the feed: Your fans see your posts on their desktop and their mobile device. If you’re posting links to campaign apps, make sure the apps adapt to their device.
• Shopping:  While in a physical store, 33% of smartphone-toting moms pull recipes and menus and 31% use online coupons.² Deliver product info or a coupon at point-of-sale.
• Watching TV: 19% of smartphone and tablet owners have looked up product info immediately after seeing an ad on TV.¹ Extend the ad creative into digital via mobile.

How are your preparing for the mobile era of Facebook marketing? Let us know in the comments!

1 Nielsen: “The Digital Revolution: A Look through the Marketer’s Lens”
2 Marketing to Moms Coalition: “State of the American Mom”

Gamification has emerged as a major trend in digital marketing. Unfortunately, we see a lot of points, badges, and leaderboards that serve no purposes beyond gamification.

Gamification for gamification’s sake is a gimmick. However, when used as a means to an end rather than an end in and of itself, gamification is a powerful tool. Here are three objectives reachable through selective use of gamification:

1. Drive awareness with Facebook’s word-of-mouth channels.

Facebook ushered in the Year of the Verb by introducing its new Timeline and Ticker features. In the past, the only verb available to brands was like. Consumers like fan pages or web content.

Now, brands can use social apps to encourage fans to rate recipes, win prizes, earn badges, and more … and those actions are visible to fans’ friends through the Ticker and Timeline.

(We covered Ticker and Timeline in our 2012 Facebook outlook.)

Plus, good ol’ fashioned sharing of content to the news feed is still viable. Don’t discount the power of ideas. People love to show off content they’ve personally created, especially when they earn points for collecting votes from others!

2. Build affinity through engaging user experiences.

The world is a busy, distracting place. That’s especially true on Facebook where your brand is competing for attention with baby pictures, party invitations, and Farmville. How do you convince consumers to spend time with your brand?

Gamification tactics keep consumers engaged with your brand. A quick example: We developed a gamified social app for Cox Communications that let fans interact with photos of classic cars in exchange for points and chances to win prizes.

The campaign delivered 6+ minutes of engagement per visit! When was the last time a sweepstakes app or television commercial could claim that?

3. Create brand loyalty through rewards programs.

In a recent survey of Facebook users who’d liked a brand, 67% expected to be eligible for exclusive offers. It was the No. 1 reason fans liked a page!

Hey, why fight it? If consumers show their loyalty by liking your brand, reward them by throwing a coupon their way. Just make sure you’re rewarding actual fans and not just feeding coupon clippers and deal seekers.

Points, levels, and leaderboards are all tools for identifying and rewarding your biggest fans. It works in Facebook apps. And it works on content or e-commerce sites using Facebook OAuth. The more fans comment, share, and buy, the better the prizes!

What’s your take? Is gamification a gimmick or a legit marketing tactic?

Now, let’s pull out the crystal ball and peer into Facebook’s future. Here are three developments we expect to see in 2012.

1. Timeline for brands. Perhaps the biggest story for Facebook users in 2011 was the new personal profile layout called Timeline.

When can brand marketers expect their brand pages to mimic personal profiles? Recent history indicates soon. Fan pages lost their tabs within months of personal profiles losing them too. It’s only a matter of time.

As Facebook told Mashable back when Timeline launched: “Consistency in both functionality and appearance is really important to Facebook, so we hope to make Pages more consistent with the new Timeline in the future.”

Here’s our projection of how Facebook Timeline for fan pages might look:

2. The Year of the Verb. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to 2010 as the year of the noun. Brand marketers collected likes around their brand (the noun) by developing basic Facebook contest and sweepstakes apps and spending on ads.

As Zuckerberg says, 2012 will be the year of the verb. You don’t just like Old Navy. You want that sweater. You dont’ just like McDonald’s. You’re eating a Big Mac. We’ve already seen a glimpse of the future with music apps alerting friends that you don’t just like Bon Jovi, you’re listening to Livin’ on a Prayer right now.

In 2012, the pressure will be on marketers to develop social apps that drive verb-based engagement with their brands – on e-commerce sites, on mobile, and on Facebook itself.

3. Facebook as offsite ID. Facebook has worked for years to serve as the driver’s license of the Internet – verifying who you are, unmasking anonymous trolls, and harvesting lots and lots of user data off of Facebook.com.

Facebook OAuth offers a huge opportunity to brands with large content and e-commerce websites. Social apps with gamification functionality (like points, prizes, and leaderboards) can fuel loyalty programs that reward active buyers, commenters, and sharers.

And, of course, those social apps will have to feature the right verbs. In 2012, it won’t be enough to ask visitors to like a blog post or a sweater. Marketers and app developers will have to push visitors to argue with a post’s author, create a custom sweater, and more.

So, what Facebook marketing developments do you expect in 2011? Let us know in the comments!

Here are the three developments we liked most in 2011:

1. Upgrade to Facebook Insights: Facebook has not always met the demands of enterprise-level social marketers, especially with the platform’s analytics package Facebook Insights.

That changed in October when Facebook rolled out a major upgrade to Insights. The update included a beautiful graphical interface, new data for individual posts, and dozens of social data types including People Talking About This, Reach, and Consumption.

More on Facebook Insights

2. New interests targeting ad options. Facebook added two new methods for targeting ads at users based on their interests. Here’s a rundown of your three interests targeting options:

• Precise interests are the likes and interests users have shared in their Facebook profiles. Example: motherhood, soccer mom, being a mom, etc.
• Topics (indicated with a # symbol) combine similar precise interests to enable easier targeting. Example: #mother
• Broad categories combine interests and other profile content into high-level groups for easy targeting. Example: parent (child 4-12)

More on Interests Targeting

3. Sponsored stories. Want more social in your PPC ad campaigns? Sponsored stories put your brand in front of a user’s friends when that user engages with your page, app, place, or website. In other words, they add a little ummph to user endorsements.

There are six types of sponsored stories, each with a unique trigger:

• Page like. A user liked your page at any point in time.
• Page post like. A user liked one of your posts in the last week.
• App used. A user used your app twice or for 10 minutes in the last month.
• App shared. A user shared a story from your app in the last week.
• Check-in. A user checked in or claimed a deal at your place in the last week.
• Domain. A user liked or shared content from your website in the last week.

More on Sponsored Stories

So, what Facebook marketing developments did you like in 2011? Let us know in the comments!

Here are three questions to ask yourself before launching your promotion:

1. Am I seeking virality? If the premise of your promotion is to go viral without an ad budget, step back and assess your campaign. Very little on Facebook is free. Game and application developers like Zynga used to rely on virality. Facebook reigned in their go-to tactics in 2009 to protect the fan experience.

A creative concept and well-built technology can drive huge organic growth. Just don’t expect to spam the news feed and get away with it. Be mindful of the difference.

2. Am I using Facebook functionality? Be careful here! Facebook does not want the legal headaches of its technology facilitating contests and sweepstakes. You cannot require fans to use Facebook functionality other than liking a fan page, checking in to a place, or connecting to an app.

Do not ask fans to post, like or comment on content on your wall or photo albums. Do not use “like” buttons as a voting mechanism. You must run your promotion through a third-party application.

3. Am I collecting contact information? At the end of your campaign, you’ll have to contact your winners to distribute prizes. Remember to collect their contact info in your promotion app, because you cannot contact them using Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles (timelines).

Besides, your Facebook contest is a good opportunity to feed your email marketing program. Be sure to grab those email opt-ins!

Want more information on Facebook contests and sweepstakes? Download our “10 Facebook Promotion Myths” whitepaper.

With Bulbstorm, Cox launched a co-opetition. Wait. Huh? A co-opetition, or cooperative competition, rallies tribes of fans around their favorite products, flavors, or TV shows. Cox’s campaign asked fans to vote for and comment on their favorite shows. The best prizes were reserved for the winning tribes!

In just 10 days, we launched a custom Facebook campaign featuring a fully-branded interface, UGC submission and voting, social leaderboards, daily prize giveaways, and much more. How? Drag-and-drop campaign builder, prebuilt gamification modules, and an awesome team of Bulbers!