Facebook brings big changes for community managers

In one of the most anticipated feature roll outs, Facebook has made life easy for page managers providing them a set of features they are going to love. Page admins can now schedule posts six months in advance, each post at an interval of atleast 15 minutes.

According to Facebook Help Centre page, ‘You can prepare a post and schedule it to appear later by adding a date and time in the future before you post it. You can schedule a post up to 6 months in advance in 15-minute interval.

You can also post in the back date by choosing a date in the past. The post will appear immediately at the appropriate place on your Page’s timeline. All times correspond to the current time zone you’re in.

For social media tools like Postcron, which have become synonymous with scheduling posts on Facebook are going to take a big hit. In order to use this feature it is important that your page has a start date i.e. founded, launched, started with the year and date. Unless that is provided the page won’t allow any scheduling.

Another big change that will make community managers happy is the option to assign roles to page admins. Page admins can have 5 different roles, each with different abilities. Only managers can change what kind of admin someone is. All admins are managers by default.

The Facebook Help Centre page provides a table (below) that outlines the 5 admin roles and what they’re able to do:

Assigning roles have been a feature provided in the team feature offered by tools like HootSuite. This one in particular would be only for Facebook and take care of privacy concerns. If you are working in a team managed remotely and see many people like analysts or advertisers come and go, then compromising the ownership of the page has always been an issue. Now, the page manager can comfortably assign roles without any such fears.

Have you started using these features for your page yet?

Part of the above post by me was first published on ODigMa’s blog

Listen button to swarm sites like Spotify with referral traffic

Justin Bieber's Facebook Page

Soon you will find a listen button on pages of musical artists. This will be between the Like and Message tab on the page. Once you click on the listen button it will direct you to the track of the artist on the social music streaming sites likes Spotify, for which the artist has already signed up.

Listen button is said to be live on the pages of Justin Bieber, Linkin Park and Slash. Though we didn’t find it when we last checked. This button will be part of core set of features offered by Facebook, located at a prominent location on the page. This is not to be confused with apps that many music streaming companies have created as specialised tabs on the page or in your activity stream.

This will provide a good marketing tactic for artists to showcase their new releases or hits on the page. Quite similar to pinning the post, they can now choose which song to highlight through the listen button. Additionally, hosting songs on sites like Spotify, Earbits, MOG, Rdio, and Slacker would act as an actual endorsement for these sites. Think Justin Bieber sending all her traffic from Facebook Listen button to Spotify. This will prove to be a real game changer and influence the bulk of the referral traffic for these companies.

So, what are you listening to?

This post by me was first published at ODigMa

Related articles

• Spotify’s new Play button brings millions of tracks beyond Facebook to the open web (socialmediaalley.wordpress.com)

The Zombieland of Facebook Likes!

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Likes are affirmation of a users’ confidence in your brand. This comes from the content you put out, the brand value that is evident, and the special offers. All of this and more comes together to form a lively community inhabiting your Facebook business page.

However, marketplace is full of people and companies who sell ‘Likes’ for as low as $50 per 10,000 likes. Is it worth it? Of course not and we will tell you why.

These likes are from fake profiles i.e. people who do not exist. Facebook can easily know about the activity from these people of unknown identities who exist just to like your page. If you still choose this option then you risk your page getting banned for good!

These likes are of no use to your brand i.e. they won’t comment, share and like your post. It makes your brand looks bad, as if you are living in a zombieland. If you truly want to gain profit from your Facebook page and are obsessed with ROI, then its real people who matter for you. Invest time, more than money and it will pay rich dividends.

So, what’s the way out? In short, start by taking a deep look into your analytics and find what is that your customer want? Align your campaign idea with your customers’ interest and make it SMART – Social, Measurable, Action driven, Realistic, and Trackable .

If you get this right, you can steer clear of dud likes!

This post by me was first published on ODigMa

Related articles

• What Happens After Someone “Likes” Your Facebook Page? (community.constantcontact.com)
• Does Facebook have everyone bamboozled ? (newmediaandmarketing.com)
• Facebook changes how a URL can be claimed for a page (marketing.yell.com)
• Assignment 10 | Social Media Strategy (seanddougherty.wordpress.com)
• Money can’t buy you love, but can buy you ‘Likes’ on Facebook! (marketing.yell.com)

RIM slashes Playbook rates by over 50% in India

Image via Wikipedia

Research in Motion (RIM) the Canada based makers of Blackberry Playbook is offering the tablet at a highly discounted rate of over 50% in India. This was announced today as part of limited season offer.

The 16 GB model can be bought at Rs.13,490 ($254) in the Indian market instead of Rs.27,990 ($527) as it was originally priced. The 32 GB model is available for Rs.15,990 ($301), the 64 GB model is being offered for Rs.24,490 ($461) against their regular prices of Rs.32,990 ($401) and Rs.37,990 ($462) respectively.

This could be the much needed push towards gaining a part of the market share in emerging markets like India where Apple products like iPhones and iPads are just beginning to make their presence felt. RIM has just been able to sell 800,000 Playbooks globally during the first 9 months of its launch which is dismal when compared to Apple, which sold over 11 million iPads till September. With a growing middle class having a disposal income, gadget shopping is fast becoming the favourite pass time of Indians.

No doubt Asian markets like India are price sensitive and could provide RIM the much needed depth when global cues have increasingly added to its long list of woes.

The year 2011 has been particularly bad for RIM, when it saw being threatened to be banned by governments of India and Indonesia for not being able to follow local government data and privacy laws. Recently, RIM announced that it would be taking charges worth over half a billion dollars due to two major failures this year.  The over production of Playbook tablets had amounted to $485million as surplus inventory for the company. Earlier another major disaster struck RIM in the form of network outages in October which affected users in Europe, Middle East and Africa, further lowering consumer confidence in Blackberry.

RIM’s shares this year have plummeted to a multi-year low, the company has shed about $30 billion in value this year so far. The year is not yet over for Blackberry, which is also facing a trademark lawsuit from BBM Canada, a research measurement organisation over the Blackberry Messenger (BBM) trademark. In an earlier instance a US court had forced RIM to change the name of its operating system from BBX (now its called Blackberry 10).

Related articles

• Trademark lawsuit leads to Blackberry’s woes (socialmediaalley.wordpress.com)
• RIM and Indonesia battle it out over security concerns (socialmediaalley.wordpress.com)

95% of online Indians spend time on social networking sites

Image via Wikipedia

The trend of social networking has been growing worldwide and India is no exception with 95% of the online population spending time on social networking sites. This data was revealed today as part of Comscore’s 2011 Social report unveiled today.

For China the figures stand at 53%, US and UK lead with 98% followed by Brazil at 97%. India holds a total online audience (15+ age group) of 45.9mn with those frequenting social networking sites pegged at 43.5mn. The average time spent by Indians on these networks is 3.4 hours. Regardless of how open or closed a society may be, more than half of local online populations are engaging in online social networking, making the practice comparatively ubiquitous around the world.’ This is part of data for October 2011.

It’s no surprise that Facebook has emerged as dominant player among social networking sites behind Google sites and Microsoft sites. Facebook overtook Orkut in July 2010 as the number one player by the virtue of total unique visitors. Facebook has 81.9% reach to India audience with 37,600 total unique visitors followed by Orkut, LinkedIn, BharatStudent and Twitter. Facebook is way ahead of the competition in the Indian market with an avergae user spending 221.8 minutes, for Orkut its 21.4 minutes and others even less.

Facebook has managed to reach 55% of world’s global audience and accounted for approximately ‘3 in every 4 minutes spent on social networking sites and 1 in every 7 minutes spent online around the world.’ Facebook is showing no signs of slowing down after it overtook orkut in India and is expected to soon become the dominant social network in Brazil as well. However, it still trails behind regional social networks in Poland and South Korea. Facebook is blocked in China losing access to a large online audience.

According to the report, social networking sites now reach 82% of the world’s online population, representing 1.2 billion users around the world. This is in sycn with the global internet adoption curve and increase in connectivity with nearly 1 in 5 minutes online is spent on social networking sites.

Where age groups is concerned, social networking sites are no longer frequented by young ‘kids’ only. In India,  55+ age group is fast emerging the leading segment with a penetration of 83.3% (males) and 87.6% (females).  The highest reach is for the 15-24 age group with 99% of the population.

Compared to rest of the world the East Asian countries spend least amount of time on social networks with the exception of Phillippines, where 43% of the online time is spent on social networks.

The full ComScore report can be accessed here

This article of mine was originally published in Daily Post. You can also access it here

Who are the most popular Social Media gurus of India?

Image via Wikipedia

My answer on Quora

Who are the most popular Social Media gurus of India?

It is difficult to say if someone is a social media guru or not. However, in my search so far I haven’t found any in India. For me a guru would be someone who would produce some original social media related content predicting trends and providing an excellent commentary on existing scenarios.

I guess the lack of gurus is to do with the whole culture of innovation. US is coming up with most numbers of online startups, and this is directly related to the level of discussion and expertise they have developed in this field

I don’t see that happening in the Indian context atleast for the time being . But there is good discourse starting to take place and that’s a start. Websites such as India social and blogs like Gauravonomics  are doing some good job in this field.

Related articles

• Participate in the IndiaSocial CaseChallenge 2 (prathambooks.org)