Why would anyone waste time playing a silly game on Facebook?
That’s what the majority of users are saying.
But think for a moment about the small part that does play. By “Small” I mean 75,000,000 users on Farmville.
Facebook now has team working on marketing with games, developing ways to make the user experience better. Targeted ads, to be sure.. but also connecting people similar interest
People who use Facebook either tend to tell us that they love playing games or hate them, and we haven’t had the right tools to enable developers to grow their games while at the same time providing a great user experience for non-gamers. We’re building more sophisticated tools that will allow us all to be more successful against those goals.
For game players, here are some improvements we’re excited to be launching today:
- Full stories in News Feed so they won’t miss when a friend shares an action or needs help in a game. The more active a person is in a game, the more prominent the stories will be.
- Smarter bookmarks on the home page that will automatically appear and reorder based on the games they’re playing. They will no longer need to individually bookmark apps, and it will be easier to get to favorite apps.
- A clearer, highlighted number for pending requests or tasks alongside bookmarks.
- Requests in the Games Dashboard, where they can manage all their game activity and discover new games.
Facebook Developers Page
And best of all.. less announcements to the rest of us that aren’t involved in the game?
How will you include this market in your profitable social media plans?
From “Vancouver Opera Uses QR Codes to Promote New Opera”
This fall Vancouver Opera is kicking off its 51st season with a world-premiere, commissioned opera Lillian Alling. Since this is a brand-new opera, Vancouver Opera needs to do a little more to promote the opera than if we were talking about Traviata (which will be on April-May this season). In addition to the title character tweeting and blogging, Vancouver Opera using QR codes on posters around Vancouver to promote the opera. You scan the code (the one to the right in fact) you go to the Vancouver Opera website, but the codes on the posters will lead you to behind the scenes looks at the making of this tremendous new opera. read more
Local media continues to evolve with Ask.com going back to it’s roots and actually answering questions.
ASK says that about a 1/3 of its queries are in the form of a question, that about 5 times more than other search engines.
The new twist?
A new iPhone app coming form Ask will be location aware.
There’s a lot of noise out there about what social media is, what it isn’t, how you use it, why you use it, and so forth. In fact, if you try to learn every detail, you will never get around to using it.
Yes, you can profit from social media. Yes, you can create relationships. Yes, you can chat with old friends. You can run ads. You can be polite. You can be obnoxious.
Getting beyond all the hype, social media is a communications medium. Just like the telephone, snail mail, and email before it, it is a way to meet people, talk with them, and get to know them better. Like all previous communication media, it has conventions.
Remember that in the past most advertising circulars that came by mail got thrown away. People calling on the telephone to sell you something were considered lower than dirt. We appreciated personal letters and phone calls. We appreciated people trying to help us.
When marketers discovered social media, they dived in with both feet, sending out blatant marketing messages, sending messages every three seconds, hoping to drive traffic to their products and services. They quickly found out that most people on social media were like people everywhere. They hated having advertising messages they didn’t want thrust in front of them.
The best marketers on social media, like the best marketers anywhere, realize that the surest way to profit is first to help, to educate, to create relationships, and to build a solid reputation. They stay away from direct advertising in posts because such advertising doesn’t work very well.
This is the essence of profitable social media. People are hungry for information that will help them accomplish their goals. The more you help them do that, the more likely you are to attract them to your commercial web sites, where you can sell all you want.
Social media is like the private party where you meet people for the first time and develop personal relationships. Take some time to get to know people and their needs before you dump products in front of them. Use your posts to attract the right people into your marketing process.
Many companies have successfully used social media to build their businesses. On this blog we’ll give you a lot of examples of how they did it and how you can do it as well.
