Facebook

For the past four years the Facebook wave has been breaking over South Africa, bringing a deluge of excitement, controversy and hype with it. During that time the user base has grown from less than 10 000 to well over three-million people. To put it in context, if our population had grown at the same rate as our Facebook users, there would now be 15-billion South Africans on the planet. That’s great for Mark Zuckerberg and his crew of teenage gazillionaires, ...

Many journalists working for traditional media are reticent about joining the digital revolution, but there is little doubt that social media has helped build a more cohesive and supportive traditional journo community. Here are five ways in which Facebook has bolstered the solidarity of those still working for ‘the old order’: Emotional support In the movies and in real life too, many newsrooms once came custom-fitted with a dingy whiskey-soaked bar across the road where journalists in scruffy old leather jackets would ...

If you have a Facebook Page then you need to be aware of some changes being implemented from the 23rd of August. Facebook recently announced the changes on its Developer's Blog. If you have a Page you will probably have already noticed this announcement at the top: Get ready for your streamlined Page: This headline has been followed by an explanation which reads like this: "Starting on 23 August, we'll be simplifying your Page to make it easier to browse: 1) Boxes are going ...

Speculation is rife that Facebook is gearing up to unveil its long awaited geo-location application. Location-based services have become the hottest social networking trend of 2010. Foursquare has streaked ahead of the pack by registering over 100 million check-ins at the time of writing, but Facebook, with its massive user base of 500 million and its unlimited resources, could deliver a new angle that pushes this trend beyond the early adopters and into the mainstream. An attempt to take ownership ...

I ♥ Cape Town, the official Facebook fan page of Cape Town Tourism, is celebrating a milestone after hitting the 100 000 fans mark in just one year. The page proved to be a powerful tool to convert visitors here for the World Cup into "Cape Town Fans" during the 2010 FIFA World Cup™. Almost half of the fan page’s new followers signed on in the last three months; the page grew by 40 000 fans between May ...

Facebook have made their advertising platform exceptionally easy to use. All you need is 135 characters of text (around 35 words), an image and a good idea of what kind of person you want to target (categories like age and gender). But, though the basics may be easy, getting truly excellent yields from your ads (ie more clicks for less money) requires a mixture of art and science and presupposes both careful planning and sustained attention. Here are five battle-proven tips for ...

For well over a decade Google’s iconic self-service advertising system has been connecting businesses to potential customers cheaply and efficiently (while generating billions of dollars for Google in the process). Adwords is so brutally effective that it has become the reflex choice for many brands online. A whole ecosystem of businesses has sprung up around the optimisation and administration of Adwords campaigns. The problem, though, is that when you have a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Many companies continue ...

It's only been 24 hours, but Flipboard -- a brand new iPad app -- is already living up to the hype of revolutionising the way we consume and interact with social media. By creating an interactive magazine format populated by content from your Facebook and Twitter accounts, Flipboard  has taken a solid step forward from what social media and aggregator tools like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite have been doing for some time -- de-cluttering the social media space. The company calls ...

Facebook has just announced the mind-boggling achievement of 500-million active monthly users, placing it way out in front of all its rivals. It's not really a race, given that its next closest rival is China's Qzone (owned by Tencent, in which South Africa's Naspers has a 46% stake) with an estimated 200-million users. Social media darling Twitter has yet to sniff the 100-million mark with new memberships peaking last year July at 7.8-million per month. According to web monitoring site HitWise, ...

Facebook has clearly grown weary of losing business-oriented members to social networking rival LinkedIn, and have decided to do something about it. That paradigm has existed almost since social networking began and has developed into something of a lore. Popular, social searches happen on Facebook, but when it's time to get serious and "grow up", you move over to LinkedIn. Branchout is a new Facebook application that seeks to add career networking to the Facebook universe. According to TechCrunch, "the application ...