Our new favorite app: Oink!
BuzzRocket just caught wind of this new mobile app on Mashable this morning. The iTunes site says “Oink is an easy way to rate and rank the things around you. Instead of just rating places, you rate the items inside. You could easily find the most popular items on a menu and see if a friend has tried anything there. Then if there’s something you like, it’s just a single press to rate it and share it with friends.”
We love it because a) we LOVE food, and b) it combines all our favorite features from Yelp, AroundMe, Foodspotting, Klout and Instagram to make finding the best burger around a snap. The voting feature is simple, sharing is a breeze. And the more you rank dishes and cuisines, the more “cred” you earn. Of course, our team is already killing it in the coffee arena.
We love that once you get to a new restaurant, you can jump on Oink to see what the most popular items on the menu are. Always useful when dining at the newest hotspot.
Has anyone else signed up? Do you love it like we do?
Facebook changes … again. We can’t keep up!
It’s difficult for us to keep up with the ever-evolving Facebook functionalities … and we’re the experts! It seems every time you blink, Facebook has changed the way the behemoth social site works.
Earlier this year, Facebook announced a partnership with Skype and major changes in Chat, adding the ability to video chat (Has anyone actually done this???). We’ve seen Check-Ins enhanced with Bing maps, more accurate, branded location-based pages. We’ve seen Deals bite the dust.
And last week we saw a few major changes to the way you receive updates on your wall. Perhaps most interesting is the new Subscribe feature. People can now (if you allow them) follow your updates – a la Twitter follows. Gone are the days of waiting for Pete Cashmore to finally accept my friend request. Now I can see his updates and even post on his wall. As a subscriber, you can select which types of updates you want to follow. As a publisher, your public updates can only be subscribed to, and you must elect to have this ability – it’s not an automatic feature.
Facebook also launched Smart Lists, self created lists that make it easier to manage your friends lists. For marketers, these Smart Lists function much like the Page Lists that were recently added to the left navigation on the Newsfeed page. The Smart Lists are automatically updated, making your Newsfeed a one-stop shop for updates across your Facebook account. This feature also allows the user to organize friends as “Close Friends” or “Acquaintances,” making their newsfeed more relevant. Users can also share stories with select groups within his or her Friend Lists, which allows for a little more privacy. All of this should also allow for better friend suggestions to help Facebook users build a better network.
We’re not sure what this will mean for brands on Facebook, if any of this will effect the algorithm brands are forced to deal with to stay relevant on the social giant. But by the time we figure that out, all of the aforementioned new bells and whistles will be obsolete.
By Gretchen Schneider, Principal, Interactive Marketing at treadsocial. Gretchen lives and breathes all things social media. Based in Los Angeles, she oversees the interactive division for treadsocial, working with brands and personalities to strategically market themselves in an integrated, engaging manner online.
Facebook, Skype announce partnership
Group chat. New design. Video calling! Oh my! Mark Zuckerberg today announced via livestream on the Facebook Live page several new apps to come. In typical Facebook fashion, they kept us all waiting. At least the Facebook Twitter like comment thing was entertaining.
Onto the good stuff … Without question, the most exciting was the announcement of the partnership between Facebook and Skype as Facebook will today launch Video Chat, a near seamless video chatting app accessible through your buddy list. Within 20 to 30 seconds, users can download a plugin and start chatting with their Facebook friends. Sounds like it will function like AIM video chat, which has been around for several years.
There were many questions about the business side of things; how Skype would benefit. Skype CEO Tony Bates pointed out that Facebook and the video communications behemoth have a “shared vision of what communication can be” and that this partnership would get them to their goal of 1 billion users.
Other announcements included todays launch of group chat. Zuckerberg pointed out that more than half of Facebook’s 750 million users are utilizing groups. The new Group Chat feature will make it so you can have ad hoc chat. Also announced was a new design, which will make it easier to see who’s online with a fullscreen Facebook view with a visible sidebar buddy list.
Ben Parr of Mashable asked if group video chat was on the horizon, to which Zuckerberg replied, “I wouldn’t rule it out.”
12 tips on getting started on Facebook Pages
You’ve finally realized it’s time to get set up a Facebook Page for your brand. And why not? With Facebook’s nearly 700 million users and its updated Pages features, which make marketing a breeze (compared to the olden days…), you’re a fool not to. Having a Facebook presence also takes advantage of their SEO, which will help pop you to to the top of the list on most searches. In fact, Bing have deepened their relationship with Facebook to take “social search” to new heights.
So where do you begin? Here are a few tips on where to start from your friends at BuzzRocket.
IMMEDIATE
- Establish a Corporate Social Media Policy, which will advise your associates on how to behave online. Example: Bashing the company online is a fireable offense. Click here for a more complete rundown from BusinessWeek.
- Establish Brand Standards that your associates must adhere to when posting anything on your social properties, or if they are discussing the company on their social sites, they must speak within the brand/communications standards.
- Set up the Twitter app on all Facebook Pages so that all Facebook Posts automatically get posted onto the respective Twitter page. (We recommend this for the less tech-savvy folks out there. Once you get used to using Facebook and Twitter, you should get set up with a Twitter client like Hootsuite, which will track your tweets, and offers invaluable analytic information.
- If you are a location-based brand, make sure you list your page as a “Place” so users can check into your branded Page.
- Sign onto Facebook as your Page and “Like” all the Pages of the brands you work with, or with whom you want to stay in contact. Once you do this, those Page’s posts will appear in the newsfeed and make it easy for you to keep up with what they are posting.
- Suggest your Page to your friends. Do this via Facebook and by uploading your e-mail lists into Facebook.
- Identify strategic partners and develop a network on Facebook and request that they send out a message on their Facebook Pages welcoming you to Facebook and suggesting that their fans “Like” your Page.
ONGOING
- Post frequently. At least once a day. We would suggest 2 posts a day. Say you’re a restaurant operator: Mix it with informative (daily lunch/dinner special), engaging (ask a question: We’re featuring Brancott Sauvignon Blanc this week! What’s your favorite white wine varietal?) Post images with people from your establishment. People like seeing people.Post Events and Images
- Post sales, specials, news
- Answer all questions fans and followers ask on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis
- Link comments back to other pages (This feature has been disabled over the past few days. We’re hoping it returns!)
- Reshare and comment on other Page’s posts that make sense for you. If you are a coffee shop and your local newspaper posts something about the best lattes in the city, you can comment on their post as the coffee shop, which increases your visibility and further markets your brand. RESOURCES – Facebook changes almost on a daily basis. We suggest keeping up with things online since most info out there goes bad quicker than a bottle of red left uncorked overnight.
New Facebook Pages
We’ve upgraded all our Pages and love it. You? Today Facebook launched a new Pages redesign, which looks a lot like the revamped Profile pages that went live last December.
One of the main changes we love is the ability as an admin to be signed on as the page itself. This new feature allows admins to interact as the page. Admins logged in as the page will receive notifications when people interact with the page or posts. You also will be able keep up with the other pages you’ve liked through a newsfeed just for your page.
According to Mashable, “The new features will give Pages more exposure by extending their reach on the platform and are likely to drive higher engagement through new notification features. For a breakdown of what the new design and feature changes mean, we’ve laid out the core implications below.”
And if you’re like us, managing several pages at once, while still have burning desire to creep your friend’s latest vacation pics, it’s super easy to jump back to your own profile and function as yourself.
The new Pages is available for trial until Facebook automatically switches over all Pages to the new design on March 10.
While we are loving the new Pages redesign, we could live without the new Photos function (Downgrade!).
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