Marketingeasy Internet Marketing Explained » social media

Twitter’s New Page Design Targets Brands

Sarah Bartlett — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 05:45:06 +0000

A popular discussion in the office today has been around Twitter’s new interface design and its move to attract a wider audience.

Twitter yesterday released a new page design that incorporate a friendlier user interface, which offers more opportunities for brands to promote themselves. The new Twitter design offers brands the capabilities for a cleaner and more emotive look and feel, with the potential to appeal to an audience previously intimidated by the Twitter format.

The major layout changes for all users – now consistent across web and mobile – include moving the timeline to the right hand side of the page, and allowing media to be displayed within tweets, rather than confined to an often messy URL and then redirecting users from the timeline.

The new look standard Twitter page for The Online Circle client Cadbury Dairy Milk Australia

At first look for brands, the most useful changes seem to be in the ability to promote rich media tweets to the top of the timeline and take advantage of an increased header presenting a banner-style space. The addition of rich media within the tweets, especially the promoted tweet which will fully display the content, allow for a better display of brand personality and presence. Interesting to note, this brings Twitter more in line with current offerings of Facebook and Google+.

The new look branded Twitter page, for 1 of 21 partners involved in the launch: Coca-Cola.

The new features for brand pages were released in partnership with 21 brands including Coke and Disney. Twitter state “We will slowly roll out enhanced profile pages to a wider audience of brands in the coming months”. At this stage the changes seem to be only available randomly once the application is downloaded, even with logging in and out.

More info about the changes to the interface:

Twitter services are now arranged intuitively across 4 sections: Home, Connect, Discover, and You. Home is simple and similar to the original design. Connect makes follows, mentions, retweets and favourites more accessible. Discover is a new customised section that ‘learns’ about users search habits: collating content of potential interest to users under hashtag search terms used prior. You is the new profile page, that more clearly displays lists, favourites, follows, interests and rich media.

We’ll keep you updated with further opportunities for brands. For now, download the app (iOS or Android) for your new Twitter, and read more about the standard changes: http://fly.twitter.com/#

Facebook rolls out secure browsing changes. Here is how to save your app

Luis Fernando Tinoco — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:01:09 +0000

It came with five days of delay, but today (05/10) Facebook has followed its roadmap announced last May and rolled out important changes to apps and brand pages tabs.

This set of modifications only affects apps’ background coding – there is no interface change (visual) or new user facing feature, and for this reason it is not getting much media attention.

But the Facebook changes are drastic and, in simple words, will make you app unusable if not followed through.

Just test it yourself.

This morning, a number of high profile pages were presented with the warning below instead of their glossy app tab.

Facebook Apps on non-secure server are now being blocked for a big number of users

The main breaking change is that all apps have to be stored on secure servers – those with a valid SSL certificate installed.

From now on, when a user with secure browsing (HTTPS) enabled, and that is the default setting affecting the majority of people on Facebook, lands on a tab stored on a non-secure server, the warning above is presented.

Even though savvy users may find a way around it, there is no easy link to proceed and access the app anyway.

More than that, Facebook hasn’t ruled out banning the app altogether, even for users not on secure browsing, as the safety of personal information is more and more sensitive to the social network.

“We may announce other steps in the near future that will limit the distribution of Apps on Facebook that do not support Secure Canvas or Page Tab URLs”, the company has announce on its Developers blog.

If your app has been impacted by the secure browsing issue, the solution is not too hard to implement.

The 2 steps – The Online Circle‘s suggestion to accomplish the fix:

Purchase of an SSL Certificate and installation on the server where the app is stored (or migration of the app to a secure server);
Update of the apps settings on Facebook to reflect the new secure URL.

The secure browsing change is not the only breaking modification introduced by Facebook today.

The other changes are more likely to impact only complex apps, but may still be causing your tab to malfunction or totally disappear.

The links below will provide plenty of resources and documentation to understand the issues and act on it when appropriate.

And this is not all.

A new 12 months schedule of major changes has also being announced. The mark-up coding language used by hundreds of thousands of apps around the world, FBML, will be no longer supported from 1st January 2012 and totally phased out by 1st June 2012. So if you want to keep your audience engaged and protect your investment on Facebook apps and landing tabs, go on and make sure your provider is up to date with the rapidly shifting platform changes happening on the world’s biggest social network. Or drop us an email at The Online Circle, we would love to help your page!

Facebook next on the hit list

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 05:36:29 +0000

THEY are at it again, fresh from attacking the Syrian’s Ministry of Defence website the notorious hacking group Anonymous has announced that their next target will be the social networking giant, Facebook on the 5th of November.

The group of hackers has claimed participation in nearly every recent prominent hacking attack of this year. They have successfully executed attacks on 70 law enforcement websites and the Sony Playstation Network.

This recent interest in Facebook may be a result of the organisation’s recent announcement that it plans to create its own social network site called AnonPlus. After the group’s Google+ account called “Your Anon News” was taken down, they began fleshing out AnonPlus.com that has been described as a “new social network where there is no fear…of censorship…of blackout…nor of holding back.”

But an Anonymous spokesman said that even heads of the group were unsure how seriously to take the threat since the organisation doesn’t have a strict command structure and members usually mask their identities. “I found groups of people who say we absolutely are and have a trick up our sleeves, and others that say it isn’t us and that this is stupid.” said the spokesman.

But, as with all Anonymous messages only time will tell if this announcement is real, fake, just a message made by a single member to rally the rest of the real Anonymous troops or just a “keyboard hero” that claims to be from the infamous organisation.

How will you engage in Social Multimedia?

Liam Marcon — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 04:53:30 +0000

Google's new photo-sharing platform Photovine is now in beta.

Google recently launched the beta app and website for their forthcoming photo sharing service, Photovine. This new iPhone app and social media service will finally put them in direct competition with other fun and popular apps like Instagram and Picplz. Will it become the next big thing in photo sharing? I’m not so sure.

While info on Photovine’s development direction is limited, it appears it will have minimal to no connection with Google’s recent Social Media platform, Google+. If this is true, I believe it to be a huge strategic error.

One of, if not the most important features of killer apps like Instagram and Picplz are their ability to post content simultaneously across a near baffling number of social media services. In just a few seconds I can take a photo, add a cool filter, caption, tags, and geo-locations then post it on my Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Foursquare.

This simple and quick functionality I believe is an important reason why so many Social Media platforms can survive and even thrive despite being in direct competition.

If it becomes more difficult to manage content on one of these social media platforms than others, there is a good chance it will fail as users are less likely to manually update multiple services or completely ditch the ones they are currently entrenched in. Right now, it’s Google+ and even the yet to be released Photovine that should be worried.

If Google can’t even properly interconnect their own social media services or support their own operating system (No Photovine Android app has been announced), how can we expect them to do so across our favourite 3^rd party social media clients or photo storage clouds?

As mentioned, the Photovine app is currently ONLY available on the iPhone with no Android app officially announced. This could be a smart strategy, targeting the most engaged and abundant audience for their service, however should the success of this one seemingly independent product really be put above the brand’s overall image as a company that follows through and supports its products/users long-term.

Whatever they do they better do it soon, because rumour has it Facebook will soon be announcing their branded Photo-sharing app. If true, this could for some users tip the scale of useful feature differences between Facebook and Google+, negatively impacting the growth of Google’s fledgling platform.

So, how do you engage in Social Multimedia and do you have room for one more on your electronic grapevine?

The value of a company

Lucio Dias Ribeiro — Sun, 17 Jul 2011 08:46:36 +0000

“The price of a company’s stock depends not on the value of a company but on the market’s perception of that value, which is often easier to change than value itself.” John Kay, Financial Times Get Social Media now? Related posts:Social Media Resistance – Breaking the Shell What is wrong with Twitter? ADMA Forum [...] Related posts:

Cadbury Dairy Milk Australia hits 100,000 fans!

James Coleman — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 03:09:15 +0000

Congratulations Cadbury and The Online Circle team

This week at the agency we are celebrating a big milestone. The Cadbury Dairy Milk Australia Facebook fan page we manage has reached 100,000 fans making it the 7th largest Australian food/beverage Facebook fan page.

Cadbury are celebrating this milestone by giving away 10 ‘thank you’ packs, click here to enter.

The Online Circle has been managing this page since its inception in early 2010. Well done to all the team who have worked hard on this account. Click on the link for other articles relating to Cadbury celebrates Facebook success