Words are not needed. Maybe some, RIM is the parent company of Blackberry if you didn’t know. Clearly this editor wants to get away.
Monthly Archives: May 2012
Admin Roles and Scheduled Posts come to Facebook
Once again Facebook is rolling out new brand-focused features for Pages, this time making a play at a number of third-party apps like Hootsuite and Tweetdeck with the introduction of Admin Roles and Scheduled Posts today on the site.
Admin Roles
Page Managers can assign an admin to one of five unique roles, Manager, Content Creator, Moderator, Advertiser, and Insights Analyst. By default, all admins are managers.
Looking at these roles in the chart below from the official Facebook support page, they’re aiming to make the process as easy as possible for brands partnering with outside agencies for their community management, media buying, or statistical research.
Scheduling Posts
One of the biggest hurdles for any business to overcome is the time and resources needed to push content out on Facebook. Now with scheduled posts right inside Facebook, brands can focus on content (and spend more time) on the platform.
To schedule a post, enter your status update, then select the clock icon. Options asking for year, month, day, hour, then minute all appear as scheduling parameters.
Posts can be scheduled up to six months in advance (I tried a Merry Christmas post with no luck) and scheduled every 15 minutes.
This move is extremely smart for Facebook as a publicly traded company for three reasons:
1. Ideally, this increases the time spent on their site by eliminating the need to use what could be considered the main benefit of certain third-party apps.
2. They need to entice the next wave of social marketers, those who may have not really gotten interested in Facebook truly since the IPO launch. Now they have a slew of tools for brands right from the start.
3. They show the industry that they’re listening to the needs of their existing brands, and improving their ad tools as the market (and innovations in tech) dictates.
For many brands, especially global corporations, there are multiple agencies working on one social media strategy. The ability to add an admin and set them only to create ads is a huge step for increasing the workflow and collaborative process between brands and their agencies.
With the ease of collaboration in place, marketers and social managers will have more time to focus on the quality and creativity of the content they bring…further increasing the value of a Page to a fan, which in turn increases the value of a Page to brand.
Facebook Messages now have read receipts
Not sure when this started, but I just noticed this today. Facebook displayed a read receipt after a certain amount of time without interaction. The message: “seen at 10:49″ appears, as you can see below
This has been a week of new features for Facebook, first with Page Management App, then Camera, and while I don’t know when this started, more and more little things seem to be popping up all over Facebook.
Facebook Releases Camera iOS App
Today another brand-new Facebook app hit the App Store for iOS. Following Monday’s Page Management App, today we have Camera, a photo-centric app that allows you to look at Facebook through only images.
While reports seems to suggest that Instagram, which was purchased by Facebook for a whopping $1Billion in April, will be unaffected, one has to assume that they were somehow involved or an inspiration for this release.
Already, the biggest advantage this app has over other photo apps is the fact that pics from foursquare, Path, and other apps are all included in the photo stream, not just Facebook or Instagram. Also, the photo roll from your iPhone is right at the top for the all important, increased “frictionless sharing.”
From the Apple App Store:
Share your photos in a snap with Facebook Camera. Post a bunch of photos to Facebook at once, and see what friends are up to with a feed of nothing but their photos.
– Post multiple photos from your camera roll at a time
– Crop and apply filters to give your photos a new look
– Scroll down a single feed of all your friends’ photos
– Tag your friends, add photo captions and say where you are
– See photos from the different apps your friends use
So far the only disadvantage I find is that you can’t use the volume button to snap a shot, oh and it’s for personal only right now.
Facebook releases new Page Manager App for iOS
First posted on the On Ideas Blog
Finally Facebook Page Management for brands gets it’s own application on iOS, appearing in the App store Monday
afternoon in the US. After connecting with your Facebook profile, any brand pages with admin rights appear in the app’s navigation screen.
From the App Store description
Pages Manager helps admins connect with their audience and keep up with activity on multiple Pages, all in oneplace.
Features:
– Post new updates and photos as your Page
– Get notified about new activity on your Page when it happens, no matter where you are
– Respond, post and comment as your Page while you’re on-the-go
– Manage all your Facebook Pages from one app
– View your latest Page Insights
The navigation functions pretty much as a full menu of options for brands, including sharing status updates and photos plus a snap shot of insights. It is missing the message functionality for pages, but one would imagine that will be added.
As Facebook evolves as a publicly traded company they’re starting to roll out a lot of new features. With new application feed changes, increased sponsored content, and now this iPhone Page Management App, Facebook is definitely looking to increase their value for brands on the site.
Page admins can use the app on the go to post photos from events or in-store quick and easy. Since it’s new, it’s still unknown what this will do for Facebook’s Edgerank. One note, you may want to run off the notifications if you have a high traffic page. Great for posting, not for notification alarms around the clock.
Have you downloaded the app? What are your thoughts if you are a community manager or anyone who manages a Facebook page?
Facebook Testing New Activity Feed Layout
With Facebook set to begin trading publicly on the stock market this week at somewhere between $34-38 per share, a lot of talk has been going around about if they’ll be able to sustain the traffic and momentum necessary to support such a large public offering. Followed up with reports that GM is pulling $10 Million in Facebook ads, and a new report that says “half of Americans think Social Media is a Fad,” if you were Mark Zuckerberg (or his hoodie) you too would be trying to figure out new ways to keep users engaged.
If you check out your personal Facebook page lately, you may have seen quite a few changes. Besides the obvious change to timeline, Facebook has been experimenting with a number of new features designed to make your sharing more intuitive and more personal.
Look at your friend list now, it not only shows their profile photo, but their name as well.
The activity feed, which has always been a personal point of contention against the new Facebook Timeline, is now cleaned up, more streamlined, and truly showcases the activity online.
If you look, the new stream pulls everything from new page likes to foursquare badge checkins to Instagram photos and even activity from new Spotify apps into a compact window with a sample of the content.
I think this is a HUGE upgrade for the user experience, and will allow more content from apps and 3rd party sites using Facebook Connect to be seen.
What do you think about the new change to the Facebook activity stream? Let us know in the comments below!
Are you getting a Promoted Yahoo Story about Same-Sex Marriage on Facebook?
Have you seen any promoted stories inside the timeline like this before? I found this in my Facebook Jacksonville Smartlist, advertising the Yahoo story about Obama coming out in support of Gay Marriage. This is the first time I’ve seen a story promoted like this on Facebook…regardless of topic.
UPDATE: Found another story on another list. This one a different color and about Twilight stars.
How TED used social media to evolve from a single event into a global media brand
Originally published on the Social Fresh Blog
For something to succeed online, it doesn’t need to just be good, someone has to want to share it, according to June Cohen, Executive Producer of TED Media.
June discussed TED’s evolution from a single conference into a global media platform at Mashable Connect this past Friday morning.
And how, along the way, the key has always been inspiring and innovative ideas.
For TED, they discovered early on that the nature of their content created scores of like minded individuals eager to take on the cause of spreading these ideas themselves. Cohen outlined their strategy towards taking these “ideas worth spreading” and inspiring a community of discovery and change.
1. Feed the hunger for participation.
People want to be a part of something bigger. For TED, the desire to scale to a global level was enabled by an empowered community, who were ready and willing to translate talks into different languages.
To date, TED Talks have been translated into 86 languages through all-volunteer efforts.
2. Encourage sharing.
There are 1200 TED Talks now online that have been viewed collectively more than 800,000,000 times.
Cohen explained that the increasing widespread use of social media naturally played a part in this process, but more importantly using the tools of the web in the best possible way to increase the sharability of content.
“Online users are exquisitely vulnerable to distraction” said Cohen.
With a rise in mobile, TED embraced the trends of their community and purposely designed their online talks to be optimized for small screen, cut long intros and started the videos strong.
TED also made sure videos are framed close to the speaker’s face. So on a mobile phone, viewers can see the emotion of what is being communicated.
And TED videos can be watched through many devices, embedded, downloaded as free podcast, etc. By embracing open (free) models they aim to reduce the barriers between the ideas and their intended audience.
3. Listen to your users.
Your users will usually be the ones to give you your best ideas. They’re the ones interacting within the space in ways a brand may not have ever imagined unless they actually listen.
“We don’t have a monopoly on good ideas,” said Cohen; tapping into that empowered community for global research and development.
Many of the best ideas for TED and their expansion has come from how they listen to requests from their community.
Ask yourself, what do you really need for your company? What do your users want?
4. Reach people everywhere (not just online.)
How are you engaging your community beyond a piece of content online?
The success of TED talks fueled a demand by individuals to start having their own TED talks and bring the positive message to their part of the world. Instead of allowing it to happen on its own, TED embraced this desire and created the TEDx platform.
This TEDx umbrella gives individual communities this power to come together and host their own TED-like events. For TED, it’s ability to ensure that their message continued to flourish in the way they intended.
5. Don’t forget to tell a story.
At the heart of great media are great stories.
Compelling and diverse content presented in a variety of interesting ways keeps people engaged. What are you creating for your brand’s audience? Is it providing some value that warrants their time?
Cohen cited presentations from Wael Ghonim and Hans Rosling as a sampling of these truly moving presentations that strike a chord and spark conversations in all parts of the world.
http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
Image source: TED
