Facebook Is Changing The Game With Facebook Messages
As planned, Facebook made it’s major announcement today – Facebook Messages. The poorly kept secret that Facebook was entering into messaging was greeted with mixed response. With Facebook’s extensive reach of approximately 500 million users, many observers believed Facebook Messages could challenge the leading email providers like Google’s Gmail. The early hype of “Gmail killer” may have been overstated, but Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook engineer Andrew Bosworth explained that their new endeavor, code-named Project Titan, is more than just another emal client.
Facebook Messages is a re-imaging of messaging and a new look at digital communication. It integrates email, instant messaging and text messaging into one ongoing conversation. At the center of the platform is what is described by the company as “seamless messaging”. It’s a system that combines the conventional communication lines. It allows users to communicate via email but if you’re signed into Facebook with Chat open, an incoming email will pop-up in an IM window so it is readily available. When you respond, it is automatically returned as an email. If your friend continues the conversation after you have signed out of Facebook, your message can be pushed to your phone via a Facebook iPhone app (and a likely upcoming Android app).
In addition, Facebook has eliminated the usual email threads and separate chat logs, in favor of a single conversation history it calls the “Social Inbox”. If you’re thinking that a single chat history will lead to a lot of noise, spam, and a generally cluttered inbox, Facebook is using what it knows about your social network to filter priority messages from messages that aren’t immediately registered as spam by Gmail’s Priority Inbox.
I believe the integration of various messaging methods is a big step forward in communication which will be readily accepted by Facebook fans and probably has already caused some emergency strategy sessions at Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and especially Google. Facebook expects to add IMAP email integration so the new service will work with Gmail.
Despite Facebook’s innovative approach, I don’t think it’s a “Gmail killer.” For example, Facebook Messages will eliminate the Subject Line, CC, and BCC (I would imagine because it’s difficult to add to the integrated SMS and IM messages). This alone will be a deal breaker for many users. It is also likely that Facebook Messages will not support HTML messages since it will be integrated with SMS and IM, although we do not have confirmation on this point. If true, users will not be able to send any specially formated messages. Meaning no messages with images or a company banner can be sent through this system. Facebook Messages is clearly designed for social messaging between friends and not for business oriented activities.
Facebook hinted at its future plans on its blog, “Relatively soon, we’ll probably all stop using arbitrary ten digit numbers and bizarre sequences of characters to contact each other. We will just select friends by name and be able to share with them instantly. We aren’t there yet, but the changes today are a small first step.” Facebook Voice anyone?…the Google Voice team will be meeting bright and early tomorrow morning.
According to Zuckerberg, the new Facebook Messages system will be rolled out very slowly over the next couple of months, starting today with an invite-only beta launch. You can request your own invite here at the Facebook Messages page. Check out the Facebook video below.
Let us know what you think of the new Facebook Messages, leave a comment below.
How Video Marketing Can Boost Your Lead Generation By Over 300%
If you’re not using video marketing to promote your business, product/service, and/or yourself (we’ll have later post on why you should be promoting you as well as your company), you’re making a HUGE mistake.
Video Marketing is one of the hottest craze on the Internet right now and for good reason too. Internet Video Marketing benefits include:
- Ranking higher on search engines
- 52% of Internet users watch video
- 27% of Internet users exclusively go to the Internet to watch video
- Web Videos are one of the most “sticky” (stay on a particular webpage) parts of the Internet
- Online Video Marketing creates a bond and attraction between viewer and the people on video
- Most companies aren’t using Internet Video Marketing so it gives users a strong competitive advantage
We believe Video Marketing is a MUST for almost all companies. Most of the benefits are listed above but another lesser known fact is that YouTube is the #2 search engine in the world. That’s right, not Yahoo, not Bing (formerly MSN) but YouTube. Literally millions and millions of people are searching YouTube daily, so if you’re not on that Social Media site you’re losing out to your competitor who is.
However, the key is most of your competitors are probably not using online video marketing yet. So you can be an early adapter and reap the benefits. For example, if you search for the term fishing equipment in Google, first you’ll find that photos and videos are prominently displayed in the organic results. Second you’ll see that over 22,000,000 sites reference the keywords – Fishing + Equipment. (Please note that your search engine research may vary slightly from the above for various reasons like when you try this)
Now go on over to YouTube and type in the same keywords. You’ll see only 26,000 videos referencing those keywords. Now just think about that for a minute – You can get on the #2 search engine in the world with well over 21,000,000 less competitors, still rank highly on the #1 search engine and do all this for FREE. So now do you see why we recommend clients to do video marketing.
So what kind of videos can you do?
- Product or service demonstrations
- Customer testimonials
- Reviews
There are many other types of videos you can do. But there is a strategy involved in Video Marketing including what specific subjects and tags to use for your videos, what equipment to use, how long it should be and where and how to post them to name a few.
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