Since businesses discovered the revenue potential of fans and followers, they have been clamouring to acquire them. But what gives greater value? Those you acquire through good social media strategy and engaging content, or those you buy. Another fan buying enterprise, Bird Bird Fans, has recently launched its service of buying high volumes of fans to boost the Facebook pages of small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) new to the market. According to Mark Macias, Founder & Managing Partner of 3M Media Group, the company behind Big Bird Fans, multinationals spend “$100k a month on social media fan acquisition.” He claims Big Bird Fans will bring this technology and acquisition techniques only used by large brands to SMBs. Macias believes some people just want fans from anywhere and organic fans have too high a cost. For him, targeting is something that large companies are looking to do, not SMBs but [...]
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Google’s daily deals service, Google Offers, is coming to five new locales: Charlotte, Kansas City, Milwaukee, San Antonio and Tampa. These five cities bring the total number of locales where Google Offers is available to 38. Furthermore, this number will soon be 40, as two more cities – Oklahoma City and Omaha – are on the “coming soon” list. For starters, Google is offering a beer tasting deal in Charlotte, cheap burgers in Milwaukee and a deal on Greek cuisine in Tampa. You can check all the debut deals for the new cities here and sign for the service over at www.google.com/offers. Original Article
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The Google+ Common Name policy will never be the same. Google promised it would take a close look at the requirement that only real names and identities reside on its seven-month-old social network, and now the search giant has reversed course, allowing both nicknames and full-fledged pseudonyms on Google+. Google VP of Product Bradley Horowitz acknowledged that “the stakes around this have always been very high” and called these changed an “important step in a long journey … We’re talking with our users around the expression of identity.” The change, which begins rolling out to users Monday, is “a big step for the system,” said Horowitz, and one that will likely be welcomed by fierce common name critics like the Electronics Frontiers Foundation and popular blogger and Google+ early adopter and champion Robert Scoble. The ever voluble Scoble, who often goes by the handle “Scobleizer” online, pressed Google’s Senior Vice [...]
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Sina Weibo, one of China’s premiere microblogs and alternatives to Twitter, saw a record number of messages sent per second Monday, in honor of the Chinese New Year. Kicking off the Year of the Dragon, the new record — 32,312 messages per second — trounces Twitter’s record 25,088 messages sent per second, which was set last December in Japan during a TV screening of anime movie Castle in the Sky. Chinese news site DoNews reports the first minute of the new year saw 481,207 messages sent, roughly three times the number of messages sent during the first minute of the last new year. That figure is on par with the site’s 296% increase in users during 2011. Sina Weibo now has 250 million registered users, making the site slightly smaller than its largest domestic rival, Tencent Weibo, which has 300 million registered users. However, according to DoNews, Sina Weibo is [...]
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Google missed analyst expectations for earnings per share during the fourth quarter, sending its stock plunging in after-hours trading Thursday. The company had been expected to produce earnings per share of $10.49, but it chalked up just $9.50 in earnings per share excluding special items and also missed revenue targets. It’s important to note that Google has never provided its own earnings estimates on a quarter-to-quarter basis; these estimates are those of financial analysts that follow the company. They were looking for more than $2.71 billion in GAAP (generally accepted accounting principles) net income, which was a six percent increase compared to net income of $2.54 billion a year ago. Google’s revenue growth was strong, up 25 percent to $10.58 billion before traffic-acquisition costs are factored in. Analysts tend to focus on that latter number, and they were expecting net revenue of $8.41 billion, as compared to the $8.13 billion [...]
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