Could WhatsApp take over from Facebook? Could Twitter take over from WhatsApp?

Battle of the social media messaging tools as Twitter launches group DMs

Were you a victim of the Facebook and Instagram outage this morning? Both sites, along with other related apps, were down for around an hour, which sent the social media world into panic.

One of the features users would have been missing out on during this time is Facebook Messenger, which allows both one-on-one and group conversations between Facebookers. In the mean time, Twitter was one of the remaining social media channels still live and kicking and has now added a function to directly compete with Facebook Messenger...

Facebook is one of the two main platforms used for group conversations, the other being WhatsApp which last week launched a browser/desktop version.

Facebook-owned WhatsApp is one of the most popular instant messaging apps globally. It claims to have 700 million monthly active users sending more than 30 billion messages every day. According to Expanded Ramblings, Facebook Messenger has 200 million users.

While many users still benefit from the group messaging tool on Facebook Messenger, it's clear that WhatsApp (which also offers a group messaging feature) is currently the more popular choice for instant messaging.

But is Twitter trying to overtake WhatsApp? And is it possible?

Twitter has finally added group direct messages (DMs) to its service. If you use the service as a way to privately communicate with friends, family, brands or even the odd random celebrity, you will soon be able to communicate with more than one person (or brand) at a time.

Rolling out over the next few days to all users, the group DM feature will allow users to add multiple contacts to a group chat. You can start a group chat with any of your followers, but those individuals don’t have to follow each other to participate in your chat.

You’ll receive a notification when you’ve been added to a group direct message discussion. Watch Twitter's group DM launch video here:

Will you be using group DMs? Let us know what you think of Twitter's new tool in the comments.

Facebook @ Work - Like or Dislike?

Making work more fun “Facebook at work” usually refers to people wasting the day stalking frenemies from their desks instead of doing their jobs, but apparently this is about to change.

According to an anonymous source inside the company, Facebook is currently working on a way to position the social network as having a rightful place in the office.

“We are making work more fun and efficient by building an at-work version of Facebook,” says the source, who refers to it as “FB@Work” and says the effort is based in London.

What’s not clear is whether FB@Work is being built as an internal communication platform, or  as a way for companies to leverage Facebook to drive new business.

Everyone at Facebook is doing it...

“Everyone at Facebook uses [it] for work,” explains one ex-Facebook employee. “Most of their communication and planning is done though Messages and Groups. It would be a pretty natural thing to try to expose this way of using Facebook to get things done at the office to the rest of the world.”

External companies are already using Facebook for work, too.

“Facebook Groups and Messaging have already [transformed] how we communicate,” Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Social told Ingrid Lunden. “We know 100% of our employees are on Facebook. Rather than...ask employees to login to yet another system, we [created a Facebook Group] to house many of our real-time company chats and conversations.”

But this project is not a new venture. Facebook has supposedly been stopping and starting the idea for 3 years, due to the battle between the potential opportunities and challenges of doing so.

Stopping and starting

“This is one of two projects that constantly get started and come close to being launched but have been cancelled at the last minute,” reveals another ex-Facebooker.

The other? A controversial version of Facebook for under-13s.

With the latter, privacy is the obstacle. Enterprise presents a different problem: “Facebook employees find using [it] for work communication really useful, but it wasn’t clear whether it would serve a broader demand.”

It as also been hinted at that Facebook has wider plans for an enterprise product aimed more at competing with LinkedIn.

“Facebook is thought of as a community and place for friends, and LinkedIn feels more transactional,” the source says. “Facebook has to be careful not to lose that community appeal.”

Obvious opportunities

Regardless of the challenges, there are obvious opportunities if Facebook did ever launch “FB@Work.”

“[The] blurring of personal/professional online identity creates opportunities for Facebook to play a role in enterprise services,” says Shih.

What do you think - would you 'add' or 'ignore' FB@Work?

photo credit: FACEBOOK(LET)

Survival of the Tweetest - Hux's Claim to Fame!

One of our Directors, Mark Huxley, has written a piece on social media which has been published today in Insider Quarterly as part of their Summer issue. Hux introduces his article by acknowledging the shift in the insurance sector's thinking, whereby the vast majority is now taking its digital footprint seriously and considering how social media can be harnessed as a channel to help spread company messages in a different way.

He comments that the sector is catching up quickly, and goes on to explore the various benefits generated by social media and the trends which have appeared amongst businesses who are using it effectively, with a particular focus on LinkedIn. But beware, there is an important need to take care with the "more publicly ubiquitous social media channels" such as Twitter or Facebook.

The final and perhaps most important point to consider is that, whether or not a company elects to engage themselves with social media, in reality there is not an opt-in or opt-out.

Brands across the globe are being spoken about every minute of every day across the entirety of social media in all its various guises, where news travels at the speed of light and where reputations can be made as well broken in quite literally a matter of minutes.

Read Mark's full article on the Insider Quarterly website.

photo credit: Jason A. Howie

Marketing your company through social media

Lamb CMC's essential tips to consider when thinking about building a social media presence for your company.  Probably the fastest growing area of our business, both in interest and actual work has been communication services involving social media. We have written a number of times here about how Linkedin and Twitter need to be considered as a key element of your external brand positioning, so we won’t preach here, but rather assume that if you are reading this then you have made that leap of faith to give it some serious consideration.

So what should be in your mind when thinking about how it should be delivered within your organisation?

Well the very first thing is to realise is that this is a strategy that will by its nature spread across the whole your organisation. It cannot nor ever will be delivered as a single thread that will not influence all else. It is a public broadcasting medium, therefore you need to appreciate that what is said here could extend many times beyond your direct following or networks. People sharing or retweeting could potentially give it a huge outreach that will overlap all your other communication channels. So think organisation-wide and develop a concerted strategy before pressing send.

Know your goals

Most think that it is the size of your community that is the key aim. Of course that is important, but knowing what you want to achieve with that community is of much greater importance; is it to drive brand awareness, traffic back to your website or is it perhaps sales? Your social communications strategies must accord to these goals and always have them in mind.

What is your ROI?

Whether managed internally or externally there will be a cost and with that you need to have the measurements to know that the campaign is meeting your goals. Whether short, medium or ultimate aims, be clear about how it will be measured.

Should I worry about Follower numbers?

In a word, no! It is more about having influencers – people that are trusted and have engaged followers themselves. Look out for bloggers, acknowledged experts, interesting “celebrities” in your sector and active tweeters; all of whom can help spread and evangelise your messages.

Look out for other communities to be active within

There are some obvious channels to use, Twitter & LinkedIn being two here, plus Facebook, as with its new Timeline platform it finally makes some sense for businesses to profile on it. But there are equally many other communities that have been created to be shared amongst like-minded people. Look them out and get involved as you never know who might be on them.

Understand the data

There are a plethora of tools on the internet that can help you delve into the effectiveness of your social media presence. Everyone has their favourites; here at Lamb we use HootSuite  as the dashboard for monitoring the various accounts we have. Aside of the usual timelines, mentions, messages, etc it has a great search tool for looking at Twitter trends as well as being able to tell you when and how many times a tweet posted has been retweeted, thereby showing the outreach of it. We use Klout and its inbuilt scoring matrix to gauge how effective our accounts are. Its algorithms assess amongst other things, your activity, the quality of your followers and the outreach of your tweets to build a number score. Very simply the higher the number the greater your perceived Twitter clout or Klout is considered. It also shows how it goes up and down, which can be a great indicator of any specific messaging done. SocialBro is great for lifting the bonnet of your Twitter account and seeing who’s following you, who they really are, how active they are and how influential they are for you.

Make everything social

Ultimately one of the prime motivations of all this is to raise awareness. A big part of which is to drive traffic to your site and likewise raise its profile in the Google search rankings. This is now almost entirely driven by how active and contemporary your site is, therefore it pays huge attention to the social media content within it. Don’t miss that trick then and make sure your site captures and displays that content where Google will find it.

Twitter - Can you afford to not be part of the conversation

We've all heard about the benefits of getting your business represented on Twitter and connecting to your network of customers but have you considered what the consequences of ignoring this social network might be? Potentially there could be a P.R. storm brewing around your company reputation while you are oblivious to it. We had a bit of bother here this week, when one of our clients, became the victim of some spurious tweeting as they had been erroneously identified as a company that has been making unsolicited calls about pursuing mis-sold PPI policies. I think we all know about these calls, texts & emails that are unwanted and intrusive. The details of this episode are of no more importance so we will spare names, etc. But it raised a very serious issue about reputation management if you have a Twitter/social media presence, as our client does or if you do not, which we feel is worthy of a few mentions here.

Shockingly, given that the company had been mis-identified, they became the victim of some brief but quite spiteful tweeting, which had it gone unnoticed, could have caused a nasty bump in their reputation. By its nature Twitter is at its best when breaking news and the story spreads fast and wide. As it was both we and they got on top of it and wrote a suitably worded email to the person that posted it, pointing out the error and demanding an apology. Which for the record was willingly given, the tweet deleted and an apology posted.

However it raises point number one. Twitter is a written medium in the public domain and as such is bound by all the same libel laws and protections as anything else similar, like a Facebook post, a comment on Linkedin or an email (where there is now strong legal precedent). It is therefore incumbent upon anybody posting anything that they remember this fact and think twice before submitting anything controversial.

On the flip side I think our client handled their own situation perfectly and responded straight away, made direct contact, politely pointed out the error and demanded the withdrawal which is point 2. In an environment like Twitter, necessary responses really must be thought through but as far as possible, immediate, time can quickly become an enemy.

What has really got me thinking though, is point 3. What had happened had our client not had a Twitter account and were blissfully unaware that a reputation fire was burning around them. The simple truth of social networks is that in reality there is no opt in or opt out, the only difference is if you are not active then you have zero control over the conversation, but if you are then you have the opportunity to be proactive and shape what is being said.

The statistics of what is posted on Twitter are staggering; 250 million tweets per day, over 100 million active Twitter users and if like me you are part of that community then you will see first hand how breaking news spreads instantaneously across it. Perhaps the most famous example being the posting of the amateur film when the plane came down in the Hudson River, or the death of Amy Winehouse beating the BBC to spread the sad news.

This subject is particularly relevant at the moment due to the news this week regarding the jailing of a student who made racially offensive comments about footballer Fabrice Muamba on Twitter. This is another example of how comments made online can be treated every bit as seriously and are governed by the same laws of libel as comments made in the press or elsewhere.

So I am pleased that our client has escaped the clutches of a bad press day this week but I am now just a wee bit more worried, nay paranoid about whatever else may have been missed. My advice, join the conversation and of course, make sure you use an expert to help you. As you know the Lamb door is always open for a cup of tea and a chat...

Linked in to LinkedIn?

Mark Huxley speaks about his continuing love affair with LinkedIn, the importance of staying connected with industry peers and how he has rekindled various old professional relationships that might otherwise have been lost. He discusses why LinkedIn is such a crucial social media tool for professionals worldwide and what you might be missing out on if you choose to ignore it.  ______

I have been a member of LinkedIn for quite some time now and to me it has become an integral part of my working life. I love the connections I have made, more so I have relished the countless numbers of my own working past that I have reconnected with. I follow many of the debates that the Groups throw up with a passion and it has become an automatic go-to place for much of the research I do. I cannot then fathom those that I speak to who refuse to use it or have a closed mind to all the benefits it can bring.

I think it is the truth to say that LinkedIn is the single form of professional social media that we recommend to every single client we work with. To me it is the world’s largest online directory of professional people, the companies they work for, the Groups that interest us all, the endless volumes of research and communication tools as another tool. None of us would not use the phone or email, so why would someone elect not to use LinkedIn?

Some statistics…

• 150 million users Worldwide
• 8 million users in the UK
• 2 new members sign up every second
• Circa 4.2 billion searches made on it in 2011
• More than 2 million companies now have profiles on LinkedIn

So why do we advocate it so widely? Firstly and most importantly, unlike all other social media channels it exists for one reason alone; it is purely for professional people undertaking their professional lives. In that task, it cannot be doubted that they have utterly succeeded.

If you make the leap of faith and start using it, after some polishing of your LinkedIn skills (which many a trained professional can help you with) you will soon be:

• Keeping in touch with an entire network of people, crossing many professional boundaries. With their own activity everything will be current, saving you lots of hard work in keeping track of what they are up to. Don’t forget friends beget friends, so you will be able to constantly build your own network, sharing friends old and new
• You can invite your rolodex of business cards to come join your network
• Share and collaborate upon what you are working upon and for that matter anything of wider interest to you and them
• By joining the myriad of Groups that it has, you can drill into specific sectors and topics, seeing the current thinking and rumours on the street.
• Actively join in discussions, either asking questions or sharing sagely opinions
• Keep in touch with companies that are of specific interest to you, who’s joining, who’s left, what are they doing right now
• Research more about the people you are going to meet for the first time. What is their role at the company, how long have they been there, where did they come from, what have they done in their past
• Take out one of the paid for packages and you can see who’s been looking at your profile, really helpful if you’ve been targeting a specific person or company

Frankly the list is endless and every day LinkedIn creates new services that are aimed at making all our professional lives just that little bit easier and more interesting. If I finish with one word of caution, then it is that LinkedIn is only a tool, like your phone or email. The real art of networking is still the face-to-face time that makes the whole working relationship work. They are still founded upon friendship that harbours trust and builds the opportunities to prove worth in work, act or deed, which leads to the long-term relationship. This must never ever be forgotten!