by admin | May 25, 2021 | Marketing Basics, Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Facebook has started opening up its Community Help feature — part of the Safety Check system — to businesses and other organisations so that that they can provide critical information and services for people to get the help they need in a crisis.
The Community Help feature was added to Facebook’s Safety Check system a year ago to let people find and give help such as food, shelter and transportation after a crisis.
“But people helping people is only part of the solution. Organisations and businesses also play an integral role in responding to crises and helping communities rebuild,” said Facebook’s Product Lead for Social Good Asha Sharma said on Thursday.
“Enabling organisations and businesses to post in Community Help will give them a new way to reach communities impacted by crises,” Sharma said.
Facebook has started rolling out the feature to Pages for organisations and businesses like Direct Relief, Lyft, Chase, Feeding America, International Medical Corps, The California Department of Forestry and Fire and Save the Children.
The social media giant said it would make the feature available to more in the coming weeks.
Some of the crises where people used Community Help the most in 2017 include the flooding in Brazil (May), Hurricane Harvey in the US (August), the attack in Barcelona (August), the flooding in Mumbai (August) and the earthquake in Central Mexico (September).
People have also engaged with Community Help more than 750,000 times via posts, comments and messages, and the most frequent categories they use are volunteer opportunities, shelter, food and clothing donations.
“Our priority is to build tools that help keep people safe and provide them with ways to get the help they need to recover and rebuild after a crisis,” Sharma said.
“We hope this update makes it even easier for people to get the help they need in times of crisis and will give businesses and organizations an opportunity to build stronger communities around them.”
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : WhatsApp now has 1.5 billion monthly active users (MAUs) who are exchanging nearly 60 billion messages on a single day, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday.
In an earnings call after announcing the fourth quarter results, Zuckerberg said that Facebook-owned Instagram is now the most popular Story-sharing product, followed by WhatsApp.
Both Instagram “Stories” and WhatsApp “Status” features now have 300 million daily active users (DAUs) — compared to 178 million Snapchat users, TechCrunch reported.
On February 19, 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion, its largest acquisition to date.
WhatsApp currently has over 200 million monthly active users in India.
To help businesses communicate better with their customers in India, WhatsApp last month officially rolled out “WhatsApp Business” — a free-to-download Android app for small businesses — in the country.
The new app, available on Google Play Store, will make it easier for companies to connect with customers and more convenient for its users to chat with businesses that matter to them.
In India, 84 per cent of SMBs think that WhatsApp helps them communicate with customers and 80 per cent of SMBs think that WhatsApp helps them grow their business.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Although Facebook ‘Stories’ is not as popular as it is on Instagram and WhatsApp, the social media giant is convinced that the feature can fetch money through effective advertising and due to this, the company might soon launch it on desktop.
The company said that the narrative, ephemeral, camera-first format is the future of sharing… and advertising, Tech Crunch reported late on Thursday.
The report said that Facebook was doubling down on ‘Stories’ by testing the ability to create them from desktop and a much more prominent placement for viewing it atop the News Feed instead of in the sidebar.
“We are testing the option to create and share ‘Stories’ from Facebook on desktop and are also testing moving the Stories tray from the top right corner to above News Feed, just like on mobile,” a Facebook spokesperson was quoted as saying.
Previously users could only consume ‘Stories’ on web that had to be created on mobile.
Brands, Event promoters and Group admins who manage their Facebook presence from desktop might embrace ‘Stories’ more now that they can post from there, too, the report pointed out.
Advertisers are likely to be more comfortable after getting Stories on desktop.
Moreover, a Digiday report said that Facebook was also building an augmented reality (AR) team in London to help it pitch sponsored AR filters to advertisers.
Facebook users will be able to upload photos or videos, or shoot them with their webcam to post from desktop. That could attract the monologue-style YouTube vloggers who have trained themselves to talk into their computer.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Markets, Medium Enterprise, Networking, Online Marketing, SMEs, Social Media, Technology
Bengaluru : Facebook and YouTube have become the platforms of choice for the Indian Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), accounting for 80 per cent of their total social media traffic, followed by Instagram, Blogger and Quora, a report said on Wednesday.
According to Bengaluru-based integrated solutions provider Instamojo, Facebook and Youtube drive the highest traffic at 60 per cent and 20 per cent respectively, followed by Instagram (7 per cent) and Blogger (5 per cent).
Q&A platforms such as Quora accounted for 3 per cent of the total traffic.
“Social media channels have allowed merchants to tap into a wider audience and digital payment platforms have eased the process of collecting payments,” Sampad Swain, CEO and Co-founder, Instamojo, said in a statement.
Instamojo witnessed a 100 per cent growth in social media traffic as compared to last year. The company works with over three lakh MSMEs.
According to the company, 80 per cent of micro-businesses today use social media to grow and sustain businesses.
Currently, MSMEs in the education sector use YouTube to upload tutorials and monetise through their content on the platform.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Marketing Basics, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
London : Facebook was on course to lose 17 billion pounds ($23 billion) of its value after it announced it was making changes to its News Feed feature that will allow users to see more updates from family and friends than posts from businesses, brands and media.
Facebook share fell 4 per cent within hours after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the changes to make the social network more meaningful, The Sun reported.
This could also result in lining them up for its worst financial position in more than three months — and Zuckerberg losing $3.3 billion of his own personal net worth.
“One of our big focus areas for 2018 is making sure the time we all spend on Facebook is time well spent. We built Facebook to help people stay connected and bring us closer together with the people that matter to us,” Zuckerberg posted on Facebook late on Thursday.
The CEO said that Facebook has got a feedback from the community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other.
“We’re making a major change to how we build Facebook. I’m changing the goal I give our product teams from focusing on helping you find relevant content to helping you have more meaningful social interactions,” he said.
“As we roll this out, you will see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people,” Zuckerberg added.
This planned change sparked fears people will spend less time on the site, leading to its share stock suddenly dropping.
Zuckerberg admitted that the new changes might not pay off at first, but believes it is important users have more meaningful social interactions, The Sun said.
—IANS
