Facebook Offers

It’s safe to say that Facebook has had a busy few weeks. It purchased Instragram last week for $1 billion and now it’s finally launched Facebook Offers to a select few business pages. “Facebook has been rolling out Offers since fMC and it’s now available in Beta in Japan, Turkey, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore,” a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.

The new feature allows business pages to post Groupon style offers into users news feeds, where they can “get the offer.” Once the user has selected to receive the offer, they are sent an email with the redemption details and they can either go in store with a printout or show the retailer the coupon on their smart phone.

So will Facebook Offers fair any better than the ill-fated Facebook Deals, which ended after only 4 months of testing? The process of seeing a deal from a company you already like, in your news feed feels like a relatively seamless way for the product to work, but if you’re not keen on seeing the offers you’ll have to hit the un-like button.

Offers come with some nice features for businesses though, including the ability to link an ad straight back to an offer and a pinning feature to allow you to pin the offer to the top of your page so new fans see it when they visit your page for the first time.

And for users, if you redeem an offer it will be shared with your friends on your timeline, so be sure to check your settings if you don’t want that information public.

Cheers,

Brighita 

Pinterest

Pinterest is now the third most visited social-networking site in the US according to a report released by Experian Marketing Services.

In Australia, according to Nielsen, the site’s audience members jumped from 140,000 in December to 360,000 in January. Even US President Barrack Obama has jumped on the bandwagon.

Despite some copyright issues, which prompted Pinterest to amend their T&C’s, the site is being embraced by users as well as brands throughout Australia.

Tourism Australia hit Pinterest last month and yesterday Kleenex Australia announced it was running a brand campaign on the social network which will end with the “world's fastest 'Pin to Make A Difference' pinning competition.”

So what do you need to know if you’re thinking about plunging into pinning?

• Make sure you familarise yourself with the T&C’s particularly the copyright and trademark conditions
• Know your audience. Who is using the site, who should you follow, who is likely to follow you and what do they want to see? 
• Categorise your boards correctly. This makes it easier for users to determine which boards they want to follow. Pinterest also recently changed the way the boards are displayed, allowing users to select the image that best represents the board.

• If you’re a website owner, make sure it’s pin-friendly. It’s not possible to pin images from flash site so if you think your target audience is using Pinterest consider switching to HTML. 
• And most importantly, determine if Pinterest is right for your brand and organization. Heather Sundell wraps it up perfectly when she asks “is your brand visual?” Without the right content, dedicating someone to manage another social networking site may be a waste of a valuable resource.