Entries Tagged 'Social Media' ↓

With 750 billion active users worldwide Facebook is the most successful and astonishing social networking site. By efficiently utilizing this heavy traffic system any online business can acquire tremendous boost in its sales and expansion.  A Facebook fan page is easy to create, essential for driving traffic, helps in better communication, improves social media presence, and establishes business trust. Without spending even a dime, Facebook simply gives exposure to your business to a large number of online users.

Why Go For A Fan Page Design?

So why is there need of Facebook fan page design? OK to answer this, first consider if you have a personal profile, that will be good enough to attract much attention but a Facebook fanpage allows you to expand your reach and your profile’s capabilities. Now you might be thinking about a business profile, having a business profile is also not bad but rather than having just a simple business profile having a fan page is best for your company, business, product or service. A fanpage has significantly more options and extends more flexibility to your business and brand than a simple profile.

What Factors Contribute To A Good Fan Page Design?

By the time I hope you have known the importance of having a fan page. The other essential factors that must now be pondered about is, what elements must be incorporated to have a stunning fan page design that is potent enough to help in your business growth generating more traffic and thus more leads. This article will be focusing on these essential factors.

Formulating A Unique Theme- Try Hard!

The first thing you need to do is to formulate a theme for your fan page. There is nothing worse than a fan page looking bland. Try to find out ways that make your fan page unique. Think long and hard to come up with a different theme that grabs the attention of your fans as your page is one of at least 60 things that an average Facebook user is giving attention to. Never bother investing your time and resources to finally have a great design. You can be unique only with a unique and good design. Give your Facebook users with something valuable that will enforce them to join and keep them coming back.

Establish an Impact with Your Profile Picture

Have you ever thought what maximum size of a profile picture you can utilize? The maximum resolution is at most 200px for width and 600px for height of the profile picture. So why not use this resolution to its full potential for achieving greater impact? It does not mean use all of it but employ it wisely depending on your design and logo. For achieving greater impact with this range of resolution consider the following tips:

• 1. Make sure that the profile picture is exactly 200px wide otherwise Facebook will automatically resize it making it distorted and looking awful.
• 2. Your business name or service should be incorporated into the graphic to make it clearly visible.
• 3. Including contact information will also render useful results.
• 4. Incorporate your website address into the graphic if the purpose of your fan page is to drive traffic to your website.
• 5. You may have heard this saying a book is judged by its cover. The same way add effects into the logo making it attention grabbing.

Fan Page Name That Reflects Your Business

Your fan page name should be chosen wisely. It should positively reflect your business, service or product. Just a glimpse on it should tell the visitor what is the nature of your business and at the same time be catchy and easy enough to be memorable. Do not use silly or witty words unless it is the requirement of your fan page. Consider some tips for picking up a good fan page name:

• 1. Long or short name does not really matter. Do not bother about the length in fact if you opt to have a longer name you have chances of putting in more keywords. It all depends on your requirement
• 2. People who own a local business or service should include their area or town name
• 3. Using your name in the title is a witty strategy as it will help you build a name for yourself
• 4. One good practice is to put your major keywords in the name if you want to rank for them

Clever Use of FBML APP to Design Expressive Landing Pages

An expressive and original fan page design is the key to attract more and more fans. You can increase your fans with the help of the landing page. You can entice fans by offering discount coupons, exclusive info etc. in return of liking your brand or service. Call to action buttons or graphics in the landing page are also a great deal helpful in increasing likes. If static FBML is implemented into your fan page, modifications in the fan page are easier to accomplish. This application supports pure HTML and CSS and can be used to create customized fan pages. Everyone who owns a fan page must make use of FBML application.

Enhancing Your Page with Apps Like YouTube and Many Others

Another good approach in making fan page design stunning is adding different applications to it. For instance incorporating YouTube videos or using applications like Social RSS for drawing your blog’s RSS feed. These sorts of applications can not only enhance the fan page functionality but also engage visitors to your page giving them a reason to come back again. There are numerous amounts of other such applications helping you make better business using Facebook.

If you have the talent in-house and you can afford it too, go for developing an entirely new application. It can boost your business to a greater extent and can be much more rewarding. Some instances of such applications are Pizza Hut’s Order App that enabled fans to place order directly from Facebook and became a real hit, no doubt.

You can definitely make your fan page stunning in no time just you need to be witty and strategic to make use of this awesome application to its full potential.

Google, these days has again lunged into the battle field against Facebook. The search engine giant has recently unveiled its latest social media endeavor that is Google+.  It seems Google will never give up in its social media hunt.  Although Google has launched many successful products and it is hard to imagine an internet user who has not ever used at least one product of Google. Let me first take you through a glimpse of Google’s success stories.

Google’s Success Stories

Google has gained remarkable popularity since its inception that most people spell googol (which is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes) as Google. The motivation behind the name “Google” was organizing an infinite amount of information on the web just like the term googol suggests.

The search giant is now at a position that “Google” is now considered identical to the word “search”. YouTube, the most popular video portal on the web has Google as its backbone and major driving force. Yahoo! and Hotmail which once had been the most popular mailing services are now the victims of Google. The advent of Gmail has devastatingly snatched their market share and the unfortunate services were unable to do anything. Other Google products that have no other comparison at the time are Google Ad sense, Google Analytics and Google Maps. These products are accredited facing little or no competition at all. Apple iOS once considered the super power in the mobile world now has a competitor in the form of Google Android giving it a real difficult time. In current 2011 the two ecosystems are on course for a massive collision and the venture is about to get a lot higher.

Still Google urges to take hold over Facebook in social media? Social Media- Yes the only field that has not stammered with Google’s manipulations. So what’s the thing that has bogged down Google’s expedition in being successful in the social media world? Will Google surrender with its trials in social media? To find this out have a look at Google’s social media adventures.

Google’s Social Media Craze- a Milestone Yet to Achieve

Orkut- the First of Google’s Attempts

Orkut- once the most post popular social networking sites has gone through a tough time with the entrance of Facebook in the limelight. Orkut became a big hit in the two big countries India and Brazil and has puzzled analysts about its intriguing popularity. But as soon as Mark Zukerberg launched Facebook, the world of Orkut suddenly turned upside down. And with the passage of time Orkut’s popularity diminished to an extent that users hardly want to go back again.

Opensocial-Google’s Next Strategy

The next strategy taken up by Google was the introduction of OpenSocial- a network providing API’s for social applications across multiple websites. The application supported sharing and interacting with existing online communities. It had a solid foundation but ironically it still failed to achieve its goals. The reason of failure was again Facebook that was not at all compromising in sharing its place at any cost.

Google Wave-Still another Attempt?

Google after two failures still had the nerves to give another try. Google Wave a miserable project of Google had a real time messaging platform. The project was launched in May 2009 to an applauding crowd of developers expecting to see its bright future. It added a social layer to regular email and acted part as twitter and part as instant messaging. The sad story is the product seemed a bit ahead of its time and users failed to get acquainted with it.

Buzz-Can’t Google Just Stop?

Another bitter attempt- Buzz was a new way to initiate conversation about the stuff people found interesting. The application was directly embedded in Gmail. The mayhem started when the application ended up in exposing people’s contacts to the general public. The idea behind its creation might be to have a twitter replacement. But the result was a grand failure.

With so many attempts leading failure people have started criticizing Google. Some of the commentators are of the view that it’s just not in Google’s blood to surmount the devil of social media. In the craze of taking over Facebook’s rule in the world of social media Google has recently launched another jazzy social networking site called Google+. Let’s have a look at what it offers to tempt people now and will it be Google’s last attempt?

Final Quest in Taking over Facebook’s Reign- Possibly!

So the quest begins again with the appearance of Google+ in picture. The project is completed with the help of several hundred engineers at Google who worked day and night.  The interesting thing to know is, this time Google did not initiate the idea itself rather it’s a response to a rival’s success. The original idea is enhanced through several amendments to come up with a product that could actually endanger the king of social media i.e. Facebook. Some people are of the view that although the project has some interesting new features that will impact the social networking model but it is far from being a Facebook killer. It is yet to find out what it really comes out to be for Facebook- a killer or a sufferer.

Features- A Comparison between the Two Rivals

To counterpart its rival Google has introduced some really interesting features in its new product. Just have a look at the features of both.

Google+	Facebook
Circles One unique selling point that can be called a whole new concept in Google+ is circles. The feature lets targeted grouping that makes it easier to manage your friends, family and other groups that you want to keep separate and share things separately with them. This is the coolest feature that allows you manage groups and share stuff the way you want. The interface is designed by Andy Hertzfeld (in charge of the design department at Google+) that gives you an experience that rivals that of Apple. You can organize contacts using the HTML5 drag and drop. With circles users now enjoy sharing stuff to the person it concerns. Tiny animations make the interface look good.	Friend List Facebook does not have a grouping of friends feature. But with the help of friend list groups can still be created. To manage different lists is also not as easy as managing groups in Google+.
Hangouts The most liked feature currently in Google+ is hangouts. Now hang out with your friends in group video chat or leave a video message. It’s a superb feature that allows group chatting with up to 10 people. The person speaking gets focused automatically. The feature supports Windows, Mac and Linux. The only weakness the feature has is anyone on Google+ can join a hangout having a unique URL to it. The funniest thing here is, fearing its popularity level Facebook launched a similar feature just within a week of its release.	Video Calling Another feature that Facebook recently introduced is Video Chat. But I doubt you cannot do group chat using this feature. Leaving video message is available in this feature as well. It does not support Linux yet.
Huddle This is a text chat application for android mobiles and iPhones. It is just like other group messaging features available in Google+ mobile applications. It allows sending a cluster of messages to all the contacts without the trouble of sending messages separately to each contact within a circle. On desktop browsers Gtalk is also available for chatting. Enjoy group chatting with any number of friends even on the go.	Mobile Chats One of the best and popular feature that allows chat with friends on desktop but does not have any official application for mobiles. It allows creation of custom chat applications for mobile phones using XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) or Jabber protocol.
Location Allows sharing your location with your friends just with a click.	Places This feature in Facebook is limited only to some countries and also you cannot share your location directly from your Facebook wall with friends.
+1 Button Vote One up for a thing you like or find interesting.	Like Button Just press the like button and get your favorites liked and known to others.
Privacy in Google+ Sharing in circles lets users to have more privacy.	Privacy in Facebook You share updates with specific people by manually adding in their names.
Sparks This feature allows users to specify the topics of their interest and later on browse through real-time news and developments regarding the topics specified. The results can also be shared with others.	Not in Facebook Facebook does not have this feature.

The comparison of features demonstrates Google+ to be on the winning side. Although most of the features are same in both applications but Google+ seems to refine them to a greater extent. But this is not the end of the story there might be things missing out in Google+. Let’s find them.

Is There Anything In Facebook That You Think Missing In Google+?

The answer to this question is YES. Just have a look at the following:

Facebook business pages

For people in online business Facebook pages are a great resource to get traffic and sales and establish a brand name. Google is yet planning to introduce such feature in Google+.

Facebook Games

An interesting fact about Facebook games is that 53% of Facebook users play games and almost 19% are totally addicted. Moreover about 20% of gamers are paid for in-game benefits and there are millions of regular Facebook gamers. This feature is not yet available in Google+.

Facebook Questions

In Facebook users are allowed to ask questions just by clicking on the “Ask Question” button placed on the home page. Google+ does not have this feature.

Awfully Interesting Fact That Is Worth Knowing

We have gone through a long discussion of what Google+ and Facebook can do and what cannot. The amount of attention and popularity each is receiving and other stuff like that. Have you ever thought who the most followed celebrity on Google+ is? The most interesting thing I found while writing this article, Mark Zuckerberg- the CEO of Facebook is the most active personality on Google+ right now. Is this fear that has lead Mark Zuckerberg put a constant check on Google+ with every minute passing? Whatever the reason it seems obvious that both the rivals are prepared never to surrender.

Is There Any Conclusion To The Story?

The question in the title of this article still remains unanswered as everyone knows Google+ is still in its limited Beta. Due to this reason a lot of stuff is still not implemented in Google+ so Google has the time to fill in the missing holes(some of them mentioned in the article) and what comes out to be its final version, no one knows. So I would advise you to just wait and watch the show before giving any final verdict.