Take a look at the Google Play store, where the Facebook Home app, which can be installed on select Android phones, has now fallen to the No. 338 ranking in the category of free apps. That’s 200 spots lower than it ranked just two weeks ago.
Even worse: More than half of Facebook Home’s 15,000 user reviews give the app just one star. A typical review:
‘Uninstalled after 1 min
Just takes a nice phone and ruins the interface. Waste of time.’
Facebook on Wednesday rolled out a new feature that lets brands target users for status updates that don’t appear on their brand Pages.
The intent is to let brands target a subset of customers without alienating other members of its customer base. For example, a sporting goods brand could run a post appealing to basketball fans. While the post wouldn’t appear on the brand’s Page, it would run in the News Feed of fans who have an affinity for the sport. Other scenarios include a telecom carrier that wanted to target possible switchers (perhaps fans who have shown an interest in a new model of phone) rather than send a more general branding message to its overall fan population. Finally, the unit can be used for A/B testing of ads. In other words, a marketer can run two or more different messages and then see which ones do the best.
This video is about to change your life. Not just because it is funny, informative, quirky and quick, but also because you’re about to realize your entire life is a lie.
All those fun facts, little gems of historical knowledge, tidbits of trivia and did-you-know brain teasers were wrong. You read it right: worthless, bologna, made-up, fictional, simply common misconceptions.
Time to set things straight with this six-minute explosion of info via YouTuberMentalFloss.
Scott Steinberg, a top-ranked international event speaker on the lecture circuit, is a bestselling expert on leadership and innovation, and the head of strategic consultancy TechSavvy Global. His website is AKeynoteSpeaker.com.
Fleeting as social media exchanges may seem, they can have a pronounced impact on business and their influence can echoe far beyond a simple post or retweet.
While the anonymous, public and often informal nature of Internet dialogue often leads corporations to relax their guard, it’s important to note: Managing a brand’s social media presence is a tricky balancing act. The key to being successful? Keeping things polite and professional, and constantly acknowledging your audience’s voice, while adding value or insight to customer exchanges.
Looking to enhance your corporate social media efforts? Here are 10 simple rules every corporate social networking team should follow to better connect with fans and maximize the value of their online presences.
Facebook allows advertisers to create a custom page where clicks from their promotional content will lead to. A landing page ensures that your customer finds a more focused and targeted message. The more focused the advertising, the better the chances of converting leads to sales.
When it comes to landing page designs, there are some stunning examples out there. Those that use the functionalities of a landing page combined with great graphics. We’ve selected 10 stunning one’s for you here:
Have you sent your first “Pheed” yet? Launched late last year, Pheed is a new social media platform that lets you share text, photos, videos and audio. Propelled by teenage users, Pheed topped the App Store’s social networking category in late February.
Though the company says the app is not just for teens, Pheed told Mashable the user base is 81% between age 14 and 25.
Pheed’s popularity with teens was spurred by several influential teenagers on Twitter sharing that they’d discovered the app. First was Acacia Brinley, followed by Pia Mia,Garrett Backstorm and Colin Ford.
Both a website and a mobile app, Pheed is currently available for free online and via the App Store. We’ve taken a first look at the iPhone app, giving you a quick guide to how to get started with the new social service.
You can see our screenshot tour in the gallery above. Already signed up? Let us know in the comments below what you think of what Pheed describes as “the evolution of social sharing.”
New apps and websites seem to pop up every other week to help us share our lives with friends and family through videos, pictures and text messages, but in the process, we’ve moved farther and farther away from what was once the central means of communicating: the sound of our own voice. Now, a couple startups are trying to change that.
Dubbler, an app that quietly launched in beta on iPhone and Android in December, offers a simple way to record up to 60 seconds of audio and share them to Facebook, Twitter and the Dubbler community. You can add playful sound filters (similar to photo filters on Instagram) and a cover photo from your phone’s camera if you want, or you can let the soundbite speak for itself.
“I saw a lot of people texting and posting photos on social media, but no one really communicating with their voice,” Matthew Murphy, founder of Appsurdity, the Bay Area startup behind Dubbler, told Mashable.
“The whole idea is you don’t text your personality, you voice it. We wanted to give people a platform to share their voice and be heard.”
That simple premise of sharing a few seconds of audio has apparently caught on with users. Dubbler’s app has been downloaded more than 200,000 times to date and more than 55,000 times in the first 24 hours after coming out of beta this weekend, briefly cracking Apple’s top 20 free apps. The app’s success is all the more remarkable considering that the startup held off from doing any kind of press or marketing push until now. Instead, they relied on word of mouth, sharing the app with friends, family and a few influencers on social networks, including hip hop artists Common and Wiz Khalifa.
“We just wanted to see what kind of community would jump on the app,” Murphy says. As it turns out, the community and uses for the app are pretty varied. So far, Dubbler users have shared poetry, freestyle rap, jokes, and even just the sound of someonelaughing. Murphy says some simply use the app to actually sing “Happy Birthday” on a friend’s Facebook Timeline rather than just write it.
Facebook is testing a new Timeline design. Currently live in New Zealand, the new look brings a slimmed down toolbar to the top of profile pages and repositions other content.
First spotted by The Next Web, we had a friend in New Zealand grab some screenshots of the update for us so we could take a closer look.
Check out the two photos below. The top is the new design, while the bottom is the older version:
Bob Garfield and Doug Levy are authors of Can’t Buy Me Like: How Authentic Customer Connections Drive Superior Results. The book is an “owner’s manual” for business in the emerging Relationship Era. You’ll have a chance to meet Garfield at SXSW 2013, where he’ll be hanging out with the Mashable staff. Stay tuned for a further announcement.
Dear Bob and Doug: We don’t understand. Our colleagues in the frozen north (Canadia) made a huge social media splash offering “eau de dough,” a pizza-scented cologne.
We here in civilization are also trying to tune in to contemporary culture, but our Oscars-night tweet fell flat: “Don’t forget the #BigPizzaSliders for awards show night! At 9 for just $10, everyone wins. Enjoy @ http://www.pizzahut.com.” Pretty tempting, right? Yet out of 164,000 followers, only 7 retweets.
As the young kids say, WTH?
— Puzzled in Plano
Dear Puzzled: We believe you’ve located the problem: You have no idea what you are doing. Do you walk into an Oscar viewing party handing out business cards or coupons? No. So why use a social channel to advertise a crappy promotion?
Twitter is not an advertising channel, or, anyway, it shouldn’t be. It’s a place to exchange ideas, information, punch lines and content. Ever have some guy force a handbill on you at a street corner? Right, what did you do with the handbill? Our best guess is you didn’t go make copies and hand those out yourself.
Dear Bob and Doug: We publish a satirical newspaper named after a popular root vegetable. We are phenomenally funny — an astonishing percentage of the time as we hone in on human and institutional foibles with neither fear nor favor.
But one of our editors lost the thread during the Oscar telecast and called 9-year-old actress Quvenzhane Wallis the c-word. It was supposed to be funny because it was so obviously out of left field and inappropriate (the child is transcendently adorable), but instead, it was just, well, out of left field and inappropriate. On Twitter, the word “vile” kept coming up.
— Mortified in Madison
