30+ Apps for Doing Business on Facebook. Josh Peters is a freelance social media consultant from Salt Lake City, Utah. He authors a blog at Shuaism.com. Think LinkedIn is the only place for business? Facebook is growing rapidly and it's becoming a destination for businesses and business professionals alike to establish a presence.
Here are over 30 Facebook applications to help promote, network, communicate, collaborate and accomplish more with your business. Which apps do you use? Blog Promotion Networked Blogs app – This app shows up on your profile or in your boxes tab and displays your blog and any of the blogs you like to read. Notes (Default App) - Default App found on the right side of your profile.
Social RSS – This one can be in either a box on your profile or even better, its own tab on your profile. Simplaris BlogCast - Quick and simple way to put the title of your blog post and a link to it in your feed. Business / Self Promotion Define Me – Displays a cloud of words others use to describe your business. Communication. 10 Things All Businesses Should Do to Market More Effectively on. Now that there are over 150 million active users on Facebook, more businesses large and small are actively reaching and engaging customers through Facebook and the Facebook Platform. Global chains all the way down to the local pub are building social marketing strategies that leverage the strengths of Facebook to drive traffic to their pages and feet to their premises. However, many business owners are daunted by Facebook’s sheer scale, and simply don’t know where to start. Inside Facebook is here to help guide business owners and marketers through that process. Here are Inside Facebook’s top 10 ways business owners can more effectively leverage Facebook to reach their target audience and drive more business.
To dive deeper on the ways you can leverage Facebook for your marketing goals – including each of the tactics listed below – check out the Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook. 1. Create a Facebook Page 2. 3. 4. 5. Social Games: How The Big Three Make Millions. So much for the first generation of big Facebook/MySpace social application startups. Slide and RockYou both got huge valuations in venture rounds.
But a new generation of application developers has taken center stage and are racking up big revenues and their own eye popping valuations: Zynga, Playfish and Playdom. All three own popular social games on Facebook and MySpace. Zynga’s Farmville has 61 million monthly users. Playfish’s Pet Society has 21 million monthly users on Facebook. All three companies are getting a ton of press and investor attention.
These three companies may be generating as much as $300 million annually on sales of virtual goods. The goal of all of these games is to get to a higher level, and generally have more fun growing things or killing things faster than your friends. Except Business Week didn’t mention the dark side of the business at all. All three companies are willing to give game currency in exchange for offers. WOW: Facebook Adding Half a Million New Users Every Day. It's no secret that Facebook is humongous: 300 million users humongous. Yet it still shocks us that it keeps on finding new users to fuel its ascent into the social media stratosphere.
A little over a year ago (August 2008), Facebook reached 100 million users. And now according to AllFacebook, that number is now a staggering 325+ million users. So just how fast is Facebook's userbase growing? - August 26th, 2008: 100 million users- January 7th, 2009: 150 million users- April 8th, 2009: 200 million users- July 15th, 2009: 250 million users- September 15th, 2009: 300 million users- Friday, November 6th, 2009: 325 million users Half a Million New Users. So let's do the math. Even more shocking is that the number used to be higher. The Facebook train has to eventually slow down; there are only so many people on planet Earth with an Internet connection (yes, that's how big their potential audience is), and it seems to be already slowing. Face facts: Why Facebook games can't be ignored | Game deve. Examining the power of social games The most popular game in the world in September was not World of Warcraft.
It wasn’t Guitar Hero 5 or a first person shooter. It was a game based on farming. Farmville has seen a level of growth unprecedented for any game. It was launched by social games publisher Zynga on 19th June and within two months had over 33 million players. The Facebook Death Star Moves Across The Web Universe (Slides) The Social Swing. Industry vet Mike Mika on the convergence of social media Social marketing isn’t restricted to the marketing department. It’s becoming part of game design. We spoke to Mike Mika, head of development at Other Ocean Group about focusing on publishing digitally distributed games with innovative social features. Tell us about how games can make more use of social media as part of their gameplay and realism?
It's a pretty exciting time right now, not just for us but for developers. This has finally paved the way for games to be persistent across multiple devices, for us to offer multiple windows into an experience. Convergence of gameplay platforms, productivity platforms and social platforms. Platforms such as Facebook or Twitter created a way for us to be more connected with our friends, more active socially, and pretty much augmented our ability to communicate with one another without barriers.
Weaving an experience, a game, into that fabric is what we are focused on. HOW TO: Create Branded Promotions on Facebook [500 FREE Invites] You cannot expect your brand to gain traction in social media by simply setting up a blog or a Facebook page. You have engage your audience by participating in the conversation, providing value, and reaching out to potential customers. On Facebook, this is especially true - a good campaign push can take your brand a long way. With that in mind, Wildfire has created a web tool and Facebook application that can do just that.
With a few simple steps, Wildfire will help you create a comprehensive promotional campaign for your brand on Facebook, Ning, MySpace, and your website involving sweepstakes or a user contest. Building a sweepstakes Wildfire campaigns just require entering basic information - when does the promotion start, how long does it run for, the name of the campaign, and the prizes.
The customization features are impressive. Worth the price? Wildfire's services do not come free - the standard campaign costs about $0.99 to $2.99 each day the contest runs. So is it worth the price? Mashable. 8 Essential Apps for Your Brand's Facebook Page. Alison Driscoll is an interactive copywriter and social media consultant who specializes in . She authors a blog at alisondriscoll.com. Not even a year ago, Facebook was still being dismissed as a silly site intended to help college kids slack off. Indeed, that is what helped the social network take hold with a large number of users, but it has proven its worth in business and by now, nearly everyone is on board. Companies of all sizes are scrambling to get on the site and reach both new and current customers with a Facebook Page, the Facebook preferred method for user interaction with a brand, company or public figure.
An effective Facebook Page not only attracts fans, but is sticky so that fans keep coming back and may even share the content on the Page. To do that, you need a well thought out Page that has some great applications supported by good, relevant content. Here are eight essential apps for your brand's Facebook page: Applications 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Britney Spears Zappos. FACEBOOK FAIL: How to Use Facebook Privacy Settings and Avoid Di. Alison Driscoll is an interactive copywriter and social media consultant who specializes in . She authors a blog at alisondriscoll.com. provides users with the opportunity to share just about everything: photos, links, videos, virtual gifts and random musings in the form of status updates.
Under the guise of “being social” and “maintaining transparency,” Facebook fiends post anything and everything about themselves on this now omnipresent social network. This begs the question, how much is too much? Younger generations have no problem sharing nearly every detail of their lives, but is publicly posting all this minutiae really such a good idea?
The beauty of Facebook’s many features is that now you can choose what you show and to what type of people. Segmenting your friends into lists Facebook Friend Lists can be utilized for a variety of purposes, but the biggest draw for the average user is that they can label their friends for easy adjustment of Profile Privacy Settings. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. HOW TO: Tweet, Facebook and Digg from Your Phone. It's a simple concept: when you're viewing a web page, enter "smub.it/" in front of the " and Smub serves up the screen below, making it super-easy to share the story right away via email, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Reddit, Delicious or Mixx. You can also bookmark the page on Smub itself. For a quick example, click here to view this page on Smub. Twitter and Facebook Post Huge Growth Numbers in March.
Several weeks ago, we noted that Twitter was now growing at a staggering 1,382 percent on an annual basis, via data from Nielsen Online. Today, the latest numbers from Compete show the trend accelerating even further, with Twitter.com growing 76.8 percent just from February to March. Build a social media plan that never sleeps - iMediaConnection.c. Before Twitter, many aspects of social media could be handled in a passive, when-you-get-around-to-it way. But Twitter came around, and people just couldn't help themselves. Information needed to be tweeted more frequently and in 140 character bursts.
No time to wait for an update and very little reason to return to a fan page. Now that Twitter has prompted Facebook to make sweeping design and functionality changes, how does this affect brands that want to connect to their "fan base" (aka their customers)? Now is the time to take care of customers (by listening)Times like this call for a little re-trenching to better focus on your customers. This is about being human and starting the dialogue now, before it is too late. Be where they arePass by a teenager's computer these days, and you'll see that, most likely, Facebook is up. Get creative and remove the barriers. The key point is that they truly are people (including the brands), and they have stories, quirks, and issues.
Facebook Surpasses 175 Million Users, Continuing to Grow by 600k. Email Dashboard: How Privacy and Data Rights Policies Really Sta. Newbie's guide to Facebook | Webware : Cool Web apps for ev. Google’s Response to Facebook: “Maka-Maka” Google may have lost the bidding war to invest in Facebook, but it is preparing its own major assault on the social networking scene. It goes by the codename “Maka-Maka” inside the Googleplex (or, perhaps, “Makamaka”).
Maka-Maka encompasses Google’s grand plan to build a social layer across all of its applications. Some details about Maka-Maka have already leaked out, particularly how Google plans to use the feed engine that powers Google Reader (known internally as Reactor) to create “activity streams” for other applications akin to Facebook’s news and mini feeds. But Maka-Maka goes well beyond that. Maka-Maka will be unveiled in stages. Google will announce a new set of APIs on November 5 that will allow developers to leverage Google’s social graph data. We’ve now learned that the original November 5 date Google is shooting for may be delayed. All eyes will be on Google, but don’t expect anything too earth-shattering straight out of the gate. Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media: Facebook. Moonwatcher: Facebook Apps by Usage. American Chronicle: 8 Reasons to Start Using Facebook for Busine.