Reminder - Facebook Timeline: Are you there yet??

Only one day to go before Facebook applies mandatory upgrade to your brand pages.

Do it now!!! - is the word on street. Facebook had last month asked users with brand pages to try the new timeline feature. They offered users to upgrade & have a preview of the features. Post that, users had an option to roll back to the older version and revise their content strategies. But that is going to end tonite. Here's the message Facebook has sent to the users:

Reminder! Tomorrow starting at 11am PST we will begin to migrate Pages who have not upgraded yet to the new Timeline format. If you admin one of those Pages, you still have time to get your Page ready by adding a cover photo, milestones, etc. before tomorrow! Check out these tips from other Page admins: https://www.facebook.com/marketing/posts/10150758346981337

So, if you have still not put your upgrade strategy in place, NOW is the time to do it. Make sure you're equipped atleast with:

1. Cover Photo

2. Pinned Story: One post that you would like to highlight.

Pinned Story

You can check more about Facebook Timeline at the official site.

And here's my updated Facebook page. Go ahead and click the "Like" button on the right & would be glad to engage.

Do share the link of your Facebook page using the "comments" section below.

Check out my about.me profile!

How not to use Social Media

Goldman Sachs

Guess your morning social feeds would have been inundated by the news of Greg Smith leaving Goldman Sachs and his damning revelation of the state of affairs in the organisation. On Greg's part, it is sad that he has to leave the organization after putting 12 years of efforts since joining as an intern.

With his article in the NYTimes Op-ed going viral, it does seem that people are interested in knowing what goes on at one of the most revered organisation as it concerns money. He has indeed stated that the culture & leadership is all concerned about making money, and moved away from its basic tenets of serving its customers to enable them make long term investment decisions, but my take is which organisation isn't into that. 

Unlike when he started 12 years back, the times have changed drastically now. These days people do want to make money fast and do not might getting battered for a while. That is the sentiment that helps organisations like Goldman Sachs & others run their business, so nothing wrong with it. End of the day, its all about "money".

But resorting to a public smear campaign leveraging social media was quite uncalled for. This issue could become a classic PR case & we would have ample bytes being written about it (I leave that to the experts).

Do utilize the comments panel below & share your take on the issue. I am still skeptical about supporting a disgruntled employee.

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Social Media & Changing Food Habits

You can say, this journey of change in food habits started during my first visit of the US. Almost, 8 years back I tasted 'Pad Thai' and 'fruit tart' for the first time & instantly fell in love with it. Since then, I have been trying to perfect it & today it tastes good & so my wife wanted to put up the recipe on her food blog (haven't obliged her with the Pad Thai recipe yet :-) ). The discussion with her though brought to my notice how the food habits around us & including ours have changed with the proliferation of social media.

Food is something that is intrinsic to all of us & you can gauge the popularity with the number of blogs dedicated to it, be it - healthy, organic, vegan, pastries etc or the number of photos appearing on Pinterest.

So what is driving the change?

Frequent Travel

Food habits in each of the country were quite unique to the place of living, but since the late nineties when people started traveling places frequently as the businesses started going global, there was this sudden interest to learn recipes of distant lands. Today, mom's recipes has been replaced by food blogs.

Social Channels

A visit to thekitchn.com made me realize the number of contest taking place - Healthy Blog, Best Food Photography & others. And the key drivers of these contests is the healthy dose of sharing across the social networks - Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest (offlate). 

Even the food chains have become suave enough to have presence on Social Media and ensure that they grab eyeballs as well as business. Take the case of McDonalds & Subway brand pages on Twitter.

But more than them, its the individual contributors who write regularly - the likes of Chinmayee Bhat @LoveFoodEat or Sukaina @SipsAndSpoonful or Susan Voisin @Fat Free Vegan.

These folks have made sure that the traditional recipes are shared & adopted. In family dinner or even otherwise, the eclectic dishes are indeed derived from either a blog or probably the host came across a Tweet or Facebook post.

While, I can't still make out what a ganache means, my wife has already put her baking skills to test (unfortunately on me!!!) tonite. 

Do share your thoughts & how your food habits have changed. Make use of the comment section below and share your favorite recipe or two and your thoughts. Meanwhile, cheers to Pepperica (@jalbarai) for igniting these topic.

Check out my about.me profile!

New: Facebook Timeline for Brands

NEW: Facebook Brand Pages

Voila!!! Facebook has indeed launched its timeline feature for brand pages as promised during fMC (Facebook Marketing Conference) and we are already seeing brands lapping up the changes.

For starters, there is a preview available so you might want to have a look at how your page will appear after the change.

But, in case you decide not to change, well, you do not have a choice because according to Facebook, all the brand pages will appear in the new timeline format after 30th March. So better adopt the change & play around for a while to build some super looking brand pages.

And why this changes?? 

It seems that post IPO, Facebook wanted to leverage on the revenue potential of Ads & Sponsored stories and latch itself to paid content. With premium features, it can take care of both as the stories will appear in the News Feeds of the fans & also paid content will appear as 'story' after log out.

Another ability is to 'highlight' as post. Something that you would like to appear a the top irrespective of what day you posted. This gives brands an opportunity to showcase some of its best content & get better CTRs.

Also, it will move away from what appears as 'like' based marketing, where you had to 'like' the page before being able to comment or view images.

More information on the changes can be found at Facebook

And here's how my updated Page looks like:

Malhar's Social Media Page

A detailed follow-up post on how you can create the new brand page & better leverage the features coming up next.

Do share your thoughts on the new changes & if that will that help Facebook or brands drive additional revenues. Would love to hear from you all.

Have a great weekend ahead!!!

Check out my about.me profile!