Facebook Eyes Browser Acquisition, Wants to Throw an Opera Party

 Internet News  341 Responses »
May 292012
 

Fresh off Facebooks acquisition of Instagram for a whopping $1.17 billion and following a lackluster initial public offering punctuated by more fizzle than sizzle, Mark Zuckerberg and company are reportedly interested in scooping up Opera Software, the Norwegian outfit behind the semi-popular Opera browser, and the only browser maker that puts out entertaining press releases.

Word of a possible acquisition comes from Pocket-Lint.com, which is getting its information from one of its “trusted sources.” This “man in the know” tells Pocket-Lint that Facebook wants its own browser, one that would allow its users to interact with the site through baked-in plug-ins and special features on the menu bar.

SOURCE Maximum PC | Facebook Eyes Browser Acquisition, Wants to Throw an Opera Party.

 

Facebook Begins Testing New Timeline Design [PICS]

 interface, Internet News  416 Responses »
May 232012
 

Facebook is testing a series of cosmetic changes to the top of users’ Timelines, the company has confirmed.

Screenshots of the new design were posted on Talking Points Memo Tuesday morning. The images (below) show a condensed version of Timeline, in which a user’s details (name, occupation, education, location) appear in reverse type on top of — rather than below — the cover photo.

The carousel of thumbnail images highlighting friends, photos, places, likes, etc. has also been compressed. Images are now replaced by thumbnails. Next to these, a new “Summary” section appears, presumably to highlight key events on a user’s Timeline.

 

SOURCE  Facebook Begins Testing New Timeline Design [PICS].

 

7 Social Networking Apps for When Facebook Jumps the Shark

 interface, Internet News  376 Responses »
May 212012
 

According to a recent poll by the Associated Press and CNBC, 46 percent of respondents think Facebook will “fade away as new things come along.” That’s an ominous data point for a company whose IPO dominated the news cycle last week, and claims some 900 million worldwide users.

Facebook seems to be infiltrating every facet of our lives. “Like” buttons appear on every website. “Like us on Facebook!” shouts at us during TV commercials. And more and more apps rely on Facebook to simply log in. It’s starting to feel more than a little oppressive — it’s like we’re living in a blue-and-white-painted jail cell.

And all this IPO madness is just foul icing on the cake.

So where do you turn when the world’s been stricken with Facebook fever? We rounded up seven apps that could satisfy your social networking needs should Facebook go down the tubes — or you just can’t take it anymore.

SOURCE 7 Social Networking Apps for When Facebook Jumps the Shark | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

 

5 brands that embarrassed themselves on social

 Internet News, Marketing, Meme, Your Brand  259 Responses »
May 162012
 

Social media is constantly evolving, and with this evolution, there are more opportunities than not to misstep. A campaign on social media has hundreds of ways it can go wrong, and most of them are unpredictable. Of course, it’s important to be as prepared as possible, but sometimes, social media fails are bound to happen. After all, we’re only humans managing accounts for brands, right? Learning from others’ mistakes is a great place to start, and some of us lucky ones have learned the hard way. Here are a few examples of the social media campaigns that turned total flop.

SOURCE: 5 brands that embarrassed themselves on social (single page view) – iMediaConnection.com.

 

Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. How’d They Do?

 Internet News, Marketing, Your Brand  183 Responses »
May 162012
 

So we hooked the Pizza Delicious guys up with Rob Leathern a social media ad guru.

The key question they tried to answer: Which Facebook users should they target with their ad campaign?

Their first idea was to target the friends of people who already liked Pizza Delicious on Facebook. But that wound up targeting 74 percent of people in New Orleans on Facebook — 224,000 people. They needed something narrower.

The Pizza Delicious guys really wanted to find people jonesing for real new york pizza. So they tried to target people who had other New York likes — the Jets, the Knicks, Nororious B.I.G. Making the New York connection cut the reach of the ad down to 15,000.

Seemed perfect. But 12 hours later, Michael called us. “It was all zeroes across the board,” he said. Facebook doesnt make money til people click on the ad. If nobody clicks, Facebook turns the ad off. Theyd struck out.

So they changed the target to New Orleans fans of Italian food: mozzarella, gnocchi, espresso. This time they were targeting 30,000 people.

Those ads went viral. They got twice the usual number of click throughs, on average. The ad showed up more than 700,000 times. Basically, everyone in New Orleans on Facebook saw it. Twice. Pizza Delicious got close to twenty times the number of Facebook fans they usually get in two days. The guys were stoked.

The campaign cost them $240 — almost $1 for each new Facebook fan they got from the campaign. “Is that feeling of exhilaration worth 240 dollars?” Michael said. “I dont know— hopefully, that translates into new business.”

It didnt.

SOURCE: Pizza Delicious Bought An Ad On Facebook. Howd They Do? : Planet Money : NPR.

 

5 blunders your brand is making on Facebook Timeline

 interface, Marketing, Your Brand  240 Responses »
May 092012
 

Companies that neglect Timelines brand-friendly attributes will fall victim to the ever-distracted nature of the online consumer. At Socialbakers, we continuously analyze social media data to determine how brands can maximize their social media investments by posting engaging content to the most influential online users. Based on millions of points of global data, we have found the following mistakes cause the greatest hindrance to a companys success in using Timeline.

SOURCE: 5 blunders your brand is making on Facebook Timeline single page view – iMediaConnection.com.

 

Facebook announces initial IPO price range of $28 to $35

 Internet News  317 Responses »
May 042012
 

Facebook is slated to set its price range for its initial public offering (IPO) at $28 to $35, according to an amended filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) first reported by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. The company is expected to be publicly listed on the NASDAQ exchange on May 18 under the ticker symbol “FB.”

“Facebook, Inc. is offering 180,000,000 shares of its Class A common stock and the selling stockholders are offering 157,415,352 shares of Class A common stock,” the company wrote in the S-1 filing.

“We will not receive any proceeds from the sale of shares by the selling stockholders. This is our initial public offering and no public market currently exists for our shares of Class A common stock. We anticipate that the initial public offering price will be between $28.00 and $35.00 per share.”

However, one WSJ reporter also noted on Twitter that some investors, including Peter Thiel (founder of PayPal and venture capitalist), Microsoft, Greylock (another VC firm), and CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself are already looking to cash in to some degree before the IPO on non-public stock that they had held so far.

At the listed opening price range, the company is expected to raise over $13 billion, and would put its market capitalization, or estimated total worth, in the $77 to $96 billion range, just shy of Amazon’s current value and about twice that of HP’s. But that’s still relatively low compared to the Silicon Valley titans. By comparison, Google’s market cap is at about $200 billion, and Apple is hovering around $540 billion.

SOURCE: Facebook announces initial IPO price range of $28 to $35.

 

How a fake Justin Bieber “sextorted” hundreds of girls through Facebook

 Internet News, Law  298 Responses »
May 022012
 

Police in Biloxi, Mississippi received a disturbing report in the summer of 2011: someone using the e-mail address dalton.powers1@yahoo.com had been contacting young girls in the area through Facebook. “Dalton” said he was new to Biloxi and was looking for friends. When girls aged 9-16 responded, he struck up conversations. These led quickly to a question game in which he asked the girls about their bra sizes, sexual experiences, and bodily imperfections.

When girls responded, Dalton then demanded that they go further and send him topless images. If they did not, he would take the information provided by the girls themselves and send it to their parents, friends, and school officials. Numerous girls complied, though some could only bring themselves to pose in their underwear. Nearly every shot came from the cameras on the cell phones each girl owned.

Of course, a single picture wasn’t enough. Dalton demanded that those in their underwear send him topless shots, that those already topless send him fully nude shots, and that those who had posed nude send him live webcam footage of sexual activity. Some girls, even very young ones, did so in order to avoid further embarrassment.

Parents complained to police after several girls revealed what had been happening. “They didn’t want to play his game anymore,” Biloxi police Detective Donnie Dobbs told a local paper recently.

Connecting Facebook accounts and e-mail addresses to an IP address is trivial; connecting those IP addresses to real-world Internet subscribers is no harder. So the Biloxi police had little difficulty tracing Dalton to a house on Melbourne Circle in Montgomery, Alabama.

The only problem: while IP address lookups may be accurate, they never identify people. And the family living in the house on Melbourne Circle certainly hadn’t been conducting criminal extortion on Facebook. So what was going on?

SOURCE: How a fake Justin Bieber “sextorted” hundreds of girls through Facebook.

 

How Often Should You Post On Your Wall To Engage Fans?

 Internet News, Marketing  219 Responses »
Apr 252012
 

To engage your fans, you need to post enough content but not too much at the same time. Is there a magical number for the ideal number of posts on Facebook?

No, there is no magical number. The average number of posts tends to range between 2 – 3 posts a day but there are just too many factors that affect the engagement of a post to say that it works for each brand. So what is the right frequency?

Below are the average numbers of posts per day by the top 10 Brands and Media on Facebook. We have gathered data from last month, from March 25th to April 24th 2012.

SOURCE: How Often Should You Post On Your Wall To Engage Fans? – Socialbakers.

 

Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users

 interface, Internet News  542 Responses »
Apr 242012
 

More than half of Facebook users are worried about timeline, according to a poll of 4,110 people by Sophos.

More specifically, of the 4,110 respondents to the Sophos poll:

  • 51.29 percent said timeline worried them;
  • 32.36 percent said they didn’t know why they were still on Facebook;
  • 8.39 percent guessed they’d get used to timeline; and
  • 7.96 percent liked timeline.

According to  Sophos, the type of Facebook user who would respond to one of its polls is likely more security-conscious than the average user on the social network.

Still, more than 50 percent expressing concern and fewer than eight percent giving timeline the thumbs-up isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users.

 

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