We'd like to take the opportunity to thank the 202 SaaS companies who participated. In January, we'll be hosting a videocast analyzing key highlights from the survey.

JUST RELEASED! THE LATEST EDITION OF THE SOFTLETTER FINANCIAL HANDBOOK

The Softletter Financial Handbook

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The Softletter Financial Handbook provide key financial metrics, benchmarks, and up-to-date best practices and business information for any software company.

Key lead generation and management metrics analyzed include:

• Primary operating benchmarks, including R&D, S&M, G&A, DSO, RPE, OI and more.
• Executive compensation levels for senior management--CEOs, CFOs, CTOs, CSO and others
• Sales compensation metrics for direct and telemarketing forces
• VC & MA analysis and ratios
• Dozens of business articles on every aspect of running a successful software company

The Softletter Financial Handbook includes hundreds of charts, tables and analyses of companies based on market sector, type and revenue size. Arm your finances with this invaluable information today.

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SaaS University Comes to Austin, Texas!
The University is Back in Session, February 28 -29, March 1st, 2012

Networking, Up to Date Content, 
Benchmarks and Data Available
Nowhere Else

Register Today and Save $200 with Early Bird Pricing, (Save an Additional $100 With Group Discounts)

Register Today!

Why Attend SaaS University?

• Because SaaS University is the only conference focused solely on the challenges, operational and road to success of SaaS and Cloud Apps companies and providers. At SaaS University you'll meet, learn from and interact with your peers— senior executives from SaaS software providers who need to market more effectively, improve operational excellence, execute against industry-standard benchmarks and grow revenues and profitability.
   
• Because all presentations are pre-screened and checked for hard content, accurate information, and real world case studies. And given by top SaaS experts and CEOs from companies like yours.
   
• Because you'll be receiving the most up-to-date information on key SaaS business benchmarks, best practices, and strategies for growth and profitability. At every SaaS University we unveil new and critical research that will help you plan for growth and profitability. New sessions focus on the latest trends and development in this fast growing market segment. More information on what we'll be covering later in this piece.

New Sessions and Local Speakers

• Increasing Adoption and Retention of Your SaaS Application. This session focuses on the latest means and methods to increase subscriber satisfaction and retention.
  
  
• The Future of Commerce: The SaaS/Mobile Applications Connection. The focus is on how SaaS fits into creating vertically oriented application experiences and where mobile fits into SaaS.
  
  
• SaaS User Interface Design: Learning How to Paint With a Different Palette. Transitioning to SaaS? Your user interface is going to have to make the leap too. Examine in depth actual examples of successful "after" design transformations.
   
• Managing a Mixed Portfolio: The On Premise vs. SaaS Syndrome. HP CTO Stephen Williams discusses how your firm can optimally manage a stable of on premise and SaaS applications in today's constantly evolving markets.
   
• Leveraging your SaaS community of customers via analytics. Since 2009, Softletter has been urging SaaS companies to take advantage of the SaaS model's inherent ability to aggregate all customer interaction and usage, but unless you were willing to role your own technology, it was difficult to achieve this. At SaaS University attendees will be introduced to one of the first systems that will enable you to achieve SaaS marketing and operations nirvana.

Local speakers are called out on the agenda; if you're from Austin, take a look now and see if you recognize the executives and companies who will be speaking!

Keynote Speakers at SaaS University
in Austin, TX

• Zach Nelson, CEO, NetSuite—The Tipping Point: When, Where, and How Will SaaS Finally Surpass the On Premise Model.
   
• Roger Sippl Chairman of Elastic Intelligence, Founder, Informix—The Future of Data in the Cloud. The man who brought three companies to IPO, two with market caps that exceeded $1B, discusses the nature and transformation of data in SaaS and the Cloud.

• Jan Aleman, Servoy—The CEO of the industry's fastest growing independent PaaS platform provides four in-depth case studies of companies who successfully moved from on premise to SaaS and they lessons they learned.
   
• Rick Chapman, Softletter — Research and information only available from the company who's been tracking the SaaS market in greater depth than anyone else. Highlights from the 2011 SaaS survey, which consisted of over 160 questions with 202 SaaS companies participating.
   
• Sharon Mertz, The Gartner Group—SaaS 2011: State of the Service, Market Impact, and What the Buyers Tell Us. Key and up-to-date Gartner data will be made available to conferences attendees during this presentation. The session concludes with recommendations to consider implementing today for both buyers and providers of SaaS solutions.
   
• Patrick Fetterman—SaaS and the Rise of Community Management (and the Death of Traditional Product Management). Every SaaS CEO needs to understand everything you think you know about product management in software companies obsolete.

Register Today!

25 Quick Tips to Maximize
Your Facebook Usage

by the Softlette Staff

(This article was published in a recent issues issue of Softletter)

We’ve not previously been big fans of Facebook for B2B marketing in the software industry because of privacy and security issues and the association of the site with teenyboppers and the college crowd. But the site now scares Google with its 700m+ active users, number four most-trafficked website ranking, and fastest growing demographics coming from those 25+ years old.

Thus, it’s time to look at Facebook as a serious business tool (but we warn you, if you’re a smaller company, attempting to Tweet, manage a LinkedIn group, and grow a Facebook community will suck up inordinate amounts of time). To date, in terms of lead generation and business generation, none of the major social marketing systems have ranked as high as “old” reliables such as E-mail or webinars. Nonetheless, the system’s growth makes it incumbent for you to at least consider using Facebook for marketing and lead generation, though its applicability to your business will still be driven by the markets you address.

That said, here are 25 quick tips to using Facebook.

The Facebook Plunge

1. If you’re new to social marketing systems, don’t start with Facebook (unless your marketing segment is heavily oriented to B2C). Facebook is the most dangerous of the social marketing systems; one of the most popular metaphors associated with the system is it’s a “party.” Parties are nice things, but they can sometimes spin out of control. The heavily viral nature of the Facebook systems means that anything you post on your site can quickly spread throughout the system in minutes. Only work with Facebook when you can devote an experienced resource to it.
    
2. This point builds upon point one. Censor and manage your Facebook pages closely. Establish company wide policies on what your employees can and cannot say about your company on your and their pages. If you are not able or prepared to enforce this, consider not using Facebook. Conventional wisdom says censoring your Facebook pages will harm your ranking and productivity in the system. Your business will hurt far more if inappropriate comments and opinions are posted on your Facebook Wall and other pages. And set your profanity filter to “Strong.”
    
3. Remember that you don’t control your Facebook site—Facebook does! And Facebook can and has taken down numerous and significant sites with no warning. Recently, tech sites NeoWin, Ars Technica, and RedMond Pie were shut down for weeks by Facebook because of a fraudulent DMCA complaints sent by people using junk E-mail addresses. Official Facebook policy requires that someone complaining about your site must rescind their complaint before your Facebook page will be restored. Facebook’s willingness to anger significant press and influencer sites means that you can’t count on your size or market significance to move Facebook to protect you or your business interests.
    
4. Consider using smaller social sites instead of Facebook to manage communities of like interests and business focus. Grouply, GroupMe, Huddl, Shizzlr Stack Exchange and other systems offer Facebook-like functionality and/or aggregate content (but do lack the critical mass of people using these systems that is one of Facebook’s attractions). Or use Facebook’s new “Groups” feature (introduced last autumn) to limit your community to a more manageable size and scope.
    
5. Rather than relying on Facebook (and all other social marketing systems) as primary online marketing systems, consider using them as feeder systems that connect into a social marketing system such as an online forum or other community system you can directly manage and control. Many new forums and community builders now provide API connections to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other systems. Even if such connectivity is not available out of the box, it may pay to develop it internally.
    
6. In the our recent Social Marketing for Software Companies Survey, 73% of Facebook users stated their primary reason for using Facebook was “brand building.” Brand building is something marketers tend to fall back on when they don’t have a clue. Unless you are a very big company, you don’t have the money for brand building. Your mindset should be that your primary use of any social marketing system is to either drive revenue through lead generation and promotions or decrease costs by leveraging the network effects of these systems in areas such as recruiting and customer service and support.
    
7. When setting up your Facebook account, think carefully about what E-mail address you’ll use with the account. If you have already created a Facebook account with the E-mail address you’ve decided is applicable to a business you’d like to use with a new account, Facebook makes it difficult to use this address with the new account. Facebook does not allow you to delete an account, only “deactivate it.” It will only “delete” an account if you do not log onto the deactivated account for a period of at least two week (we’ve seen longer times) and will not let you use the account’s E-mail address until the old account finally disappears from the system.
    
8. If you’re going to use Facebook, most experts believe that posting every day or every other day is optimal. In our recent social marketing survey, 40% of corporate Facebook users stated that they posted daily. Your content should of course be relevant to your audience, but Facebook users seem to like to discuss Facebook as well. If you can post content about your customers using Facebook, this will probably help your EdgeRank (covered later).
    
9. Facebook allows you to create two types of accounts—Business and Personal. In most cases, avoid Business accounts; their functionality is highly limited in terms of the network effect that makes Facebook useful. Only create a Business account if the only thing you’ll be doing with Facebook is administering ad campaigns.
    
10. When Facebook was first established, Profiles were the primary way to network and communicate with other Facebook members. Pages have supplanted Profiles. When setting up a Facebook account for your business, focus on creating pages first. Making your life easier is Facebook’s new capability of allowing you to switch between the Profile and Page views.
     
11. Facebook allows you to create custom tabs that share space with the default Home, Profile, FindFriends and Account tabs. To create a custom tab, find the FBML (FBML is Facebook’s proprietary version of HTML) in the system’s search box and add it to the appropriate page. You’ll then have to go through a short process of setting up the FBML; if you’re not comfortable with this, there are inexpensive services that will do this for you. Remember that you can only have one FBML application per page, so you’ll need to decide where you want to display tabs on your pages. The most typical use of tabs are to serve as landing pages, encourage visitors to your site to provide you their E-mail address, inform visitors about special promotions, etc. Custom tabs are important and you should implement them as soon as you’ve become comfortable with basic Facebook operations.
     
12. The Facebook Share button is being deprecated in favor of the Like button. The Like function is primarily designed to allow you to add a direct connection to your Facebook page from a third party or corporate website. When a visitor to your site clicks on the Facebook Like button an article appears in the visitor’s friends News Feed with a link back to your site. (It is possible to link the Like button to your Facebook page.) The Like function is implemented by embedding code provided by Facebook into a page on your site; two code versions are provided, one designed for use with Java enabled pages( iFrames; this option allows enables more advanced page analytics). If your site is based on a CMS (content management system) such as DNN, Drupal, Ektron or relies on dynamically generated pages, you may have to use a plug in to do this gracefully.
     
13. Put your Share button on all content relevant to your company, including blog posts, downloadable material you want to distribute widely, forum posts, etc.
     
14. Facebook will allow you link your account to Twitter, Skype, Zvent and LinkedIn (to a page, not to your profile) either through direct services or third party applications. Linking social systems increases their network effect and you should investigate cross linking to all social systems you use if possible.
    
    Search Optimization
    
    
15. To optimize your Facebook page for SEO purposes, remember that Bing, not Google, powers the site’s internal search. Also remember that a Facebook page’s name is also its page title tag. You can create search engine friendly URLs for your Facebook page by using the vanity URL feature of the site; you need twenty five Like links to that page before this feature can be turned on (if your site is large enough, you can post Like links to your Facebook from within your site to speed this process along).
     
16. Most experts recommend posting to your Facebook page at least every other day and once a day is considered (see tip eight) optimum, particularly in B2C markets. This can represent a considerable amount of work on the part of your marketing department so use existing content on your site such as blog posts, forum posts, interesting comments about your industry from third party sources, etc to help fuel your posts. Facebook is not a venue for long posts, so short snippets of interesting information should suffice most of the time. The site has recently upgraded its Comments feature, allowing longer posts, but the rule is still to keep your posts short and sweet.
     
17. The ratio of business to “personal” posts on your Facebook page differs based on what your site wishes to accomplish and your company size. But even for the largest sites, a continuous stream of self promotions on your Facebook page is tedious. Probably one third of your content should consist of the lighter aspects of the industry in which you compete leavened with some personal tidbits about your Facebook manager or management team—birthdays, anniversaries, new additions to the family, etc. Avoid personal posts that stray too far into politics (unless you’re a politically-oriented site), religion, and so on. You are permitted to post one funny pet video; no more after that. Videos of your pet snake ingesting a live mouse aren’t funny (a true life example).
    
    
18. To use Google analytics within Facebook, use iFrame-based pages. Google’s tracking system doesn’t work well with Facebook pages built around FBML. Unless you are a professional web developer, you will probably need to hire a third party to build these pages.
    
    Facebook Advertising
    
    
19. Facebook pages and profiles require constant attention if anyone is to actually “see” your page. Facebook has its own uber ranking algorithm (sigh), the “EdgeRank.” When you post new material to your page/wall, the Facebook system assigns your updates and notes a ranking based on the number of people who read and comment on the post, how many posts are “shared,” how many are “liked” and the number of these interactions over time. The overall goal of this (from Facebook’s point of view) is to sell you advertising to your fan base, who will presumably be interested in your ads because over time people who have interacted with you have similar interests. If this sounds somewhat convoluted, it is. Facebook is an ouroboros, with every tentacle of the system pushing on the other.
     
20. Facebook advertising is 33% to 50% less expensive than Google on a CPC basis. There is a great deal of debate about which system is more effective in reaching a targeted audience. Facebook fans point to the fact that the relationship model you build creates a universe of people who are supposed to have similar interests (and thus similar demographics) to yours. Google adherents note that targeting search terms means, in theory, that people are looking for products/services such as yours and are further along the sales funnel. Only time and experimentation with your market can determine if you should spend on one, both, or neither of these advertising systems.
     
21. A nice feature of the Facebook ad system is that it allows you to count your prospective market by setting up an ad campaign that targets your prospective market without actually launching the ad. Once you have setup a campaign that targets your audience by interests, location, and other demographics, the system will count the number of people who meet your criteria.
     
22. Unlike Google, Facebook ads are more image oriented. Incorporating an image into your ads will generate increased click-through rates.
     
23. If you wish to geo-target your ad campaigns, implement the Facebook Place page. This enables you to aggregate your fans into local groups.
    
    The Social Graph and Open Graph Protocols
    
    
24. Google wants to control the world of relevant search while Facebook wants to control the world of relevant social interaction. One way Facebook hopes to achieve this is via a strategy the company call “social graphing.” A social graph tracks and aggregates relationships between entities (usually people, though anything, including companies, can be entities in the graph). To push this process along, Facebook supports what it calls the “Open Graph Protocol.” Implementing this protocol for a website involves putting specialized tags onto your page that will enhance your website’s social graph standing. More information about the use of these tags can be seen at this link— http://ogp.me. We hope you enjoy the process of adding yet more meta tags to your website.
     
25. To see your Facebook page’s standing in its social graph, use the Social Graph widget located on the right side of your profile page. You will see a graphical representation of your site’s social graph ranking. The denser the graph, in theory, the better. Right now, this feature isn't terribly useful, but Facebook is building a revenue model around this relationship aggregation technology and plans to spend more time and money persuading you to spend more time and money worrying about this graph.

A final note about Facebook. The company is constantly under attack by the press and privacy advocates for its practices in regards to keeping personal information secure. Facebook has been criticized and belatedly responded to counter pressure in this respect often enough to make it clear that it's internal corporate policy to press the boundaries in the area of privacy. When using Facebook, plan around this fact and keep track of the system's privacy settings and policies to avoid being caught in a future crossfire. If your customer's information is compromised, they won't blame Facebook; they'll blame you.