Microsoft Officially Launches Azure Machine Learning Platform

(GNN) - You know all that big data that’s streaming into your company from sensors, customers, social media, Excel spreadsheets, and data sources all over the internet? Microsoft wants to help you process all of it, build APIs and make use of that data in the cloud with machine learning technology.

And to that end, Microsoft officially announced at the Strata Conference today, the general availability of the Azure Machine Learning service for big data processing in the cloud. It also announced some enhancements to the platform since its Beta release in June.

As we wrote in June, “The product is built on the machine learning capabilities already available in several Microsoft products including Xbox and Bing and using predefined templates and workflows has been built to help companies launch predictive applications much more quickly than traditional development methods, even allowing customers to publish APIs and web services on top of the Azure ML platform.”

Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president at Microsoft, who is in charge of the Azure ML, and spent years at Amazon before joining Microsoft to lead this project, said the latest version supports Python in addition to the popular R.

“We have added Python, which is a big favorite of data scientists. There is a huge ecosystem for this,” Sirosh told Tc.

He said this capability will be powerful for data scientists. “We made a lot of improvements and adding Python was part of that. Azure Machine Learning is the platform. You can copy a bit of Python code and plug it into the studio and create an API,” he explained.

In addition, the platform now supports Hadoop and Spark, giving it a fairly comprehensive set of tools for processing big data, regardless of your platform of choice.

The real strength of this platform is the ability to create APIs and begin processing data very quickly.
“The cloud solves the last mile problem, Sirosh explained. Before a service like this, you needed data scientists to identify the data set, then have IT build an application to support that. This last part often took weeks or months to code and engineer at scale. He says Azure ML takes that process and provides a way to build that same application in hours,” as we wrote in the June article.

Sirosh was clearly excited describing the range of choices available. “Data scientists can publish APIs with a few clicks. Applications can include R code, python code [or a combination]. It’s such an incredible selection of capabilities,” Sirosh said.

He said while competitors like IBM and SAS offered a range of services, he claimed none of them offered it in this integrated fashion that Azure Machine Learning provides its users.

“This is an integrated tool set that’s fully managed,” he said. “You don’t have to install hardware and software and you can do advanced learning and analytics.”

In addition to providing tools for big data processing in the cloud, Microsoft is also offering a marketplace where people can share applications and APIs they have created. Sirosh says this is a great way for data scientists to test their ideas publically.

The marketplace has more than 20 starter experiments today, but Sirosh sees it as having tremendous potential. He believes over time the vast majority of enterprises can meet their big data processing needs by finding the right tool in the marketplace.

“When Azure Machine Learning arrives, it’s so easy to use, and the cost of producing an API is so low, it becomes easy for data scientists and developers to make fully machine learning APIs in the cloud,” he said.
In terms of visualizing the data, the platform has some built-in capabilities, but it’s also compatible with Microsoft Power BI and IPython Notebook for further plotting and visualization of processed data.

Getting My Brain Back

#GNN Tech - I can’t do it anymore. This has been a summer of social media. I’ve used it endlessly, made plans on it, chatted, read it religiously, and watched countless friends and friends of friends go on vacation.

I’ve played a game of whack-a-mole with LinkedIn invitations and I’ve streamlined my automatic Tweeting systems. I’ve watched the world buzz by 120 characters at a time. I’ve seen hundreds of beautiful photos of beaches and old castles and bars and beers and whiskeys and sandwiches and endless cats and I don’t want to see any more. I’m done.

I’m taking my brain back.

I’ve noticed a few things happening over the past few years. First, I noticed that I primarily use social media at night, in bed, staring at the iPad while my lady wife snores beside me. When I couldn’t sleep at 4am I turned on Twitter and sent messages to people I didn’t see during the day. I read Reddit more often than I read actual books and I didn’t mind it at all. Why? Because this endless stream of social garbage is apparently far more interesting than a carefully thought-out non-fiction thesis or tersely-plotted novel, let alone the kind attention of my soulmate.

We all know how social media works: it tickles the pleasure centers of the brain, encouraging us to return day after day to get that slight endorphin rush that comes with clicking a new link. For me that endorphin rush started with email and now there’s so much more data, so many more sources for distraction.

And I know why social media is a good thing. It keeps me in touch with people I’ve known for decades. It allows me to spread the word about my projects. It’s spurred revolutions of all kinds. When it’s good, it’s great. When it’s bad, it’s exhausting. I thought I could take it all in, control my consumption, but now I can’t. I’m ready to declare social bankruptcy.

So I did a few things. I deleted Facebook and Reddit from my phone and iPad. I’ve also deleted LinkedIn. I kept Twitter because it’s more like a chatroom and I kept Facebook Messenger for chatting with my long list of Facebook friends. I still have Swarm, but that will probably go next.

I might use Facebook now that Yelp is garbage for restaurant recommendations but everything else – Path, Color, Yo, Krablr – are gone. And it’s been great.

Anecdotally five or six of my peers have already followed suit. It’s been a weird summer. I remember years when everyone was into gin all summer or everyone was on the Atkins Diet. This year everyone is into social media fasts.

One friend told me that after a nice week out in the woods he checked his Facebook feed on his phone at a gas station. His heart rate went up and he felt the blood in his head pounding. He deleted the app then and there. We don’t notice how social media ruins us until it’s gone.

Maybe I’ll reinstall some of these apps. Or maybe these social media makers will fix it so I only see the things I want to see. Or maybe they don’t care because for every social media celibate there are a million people who will Facebook all day long. But, I would argue, we’re not going to give these bastards our attention much longer.

Teens are already revolting against Facebook and Google+ is a ghost town. Twitter is valueless when it comes to direct sales and is worthless as an advertising platform. In short, everything that was supposed to be good about social media – the connectedness, the reach, the ease-of-use, the fun – has been replaced by an endorphin rush.

So I’m taking my brain back. Facebook doesn’t pay me enough for my attention. LinkedIn hasn’t gotten me a single job. All the also-ran social networks offer little in the way of true value. In the end, I need to give my attention to my kids, my writing, and my reading.

I don’t need to see your cat or your Candy Crush score. Come over and we’ll grab beers and you can tell me about your favorite movie. It will be far more rewarding and maybe, just maybe, I’ll convince you to unfriend social media.

The Three Reasons Twitter Didn’t Sell To Facebook

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tried to acquire Twitter not once but twice, through official channels and via co-founder Jack Dorsey. The details of the efforts are revealed in Nick Bilton’s new book Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal.

I’ll have a full review of the book soon, but I found one passage in particular worth noting. It was late October of 2008, shortly after Dorsey had been ousted as CEO and consigned to a silent role as Chairman, with no voting stock or operational control. Fellow Twitter co-founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone had been invited to visit Facebook for a sit-down with CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The purpose? An acquisition of Twitter.

Zuckerberg, Bilton explains, had been working Dorsey for months to try to arrange a buyout. But his plans were thrown into disarray when Dorsey was yanked from the CEO slot. An email at one point to Jack had given a point-by-point reasoning on why Facebook+Twitter made sense.

Among those reasons was the customary threat that Facebook could choose to ‘build products that moved further in [Twitter's] direction’, a tactic that we’ve personally heard many accounts of Zuckerberg employing. The implicit threat: sell to us or we’ll clone your product.

During the meeting, Williams and Stone threw out a valuation: $500 million. Zuckerberg was not shocked, as Dorsey had already informed him that this was the range that would be sought.

But the sale didn’t happen, and the reasoning behind the rejection was outlined in an email by Williams to the board, which is partially quoted in Bilton’s book.

It seems to me, there are three reasons to sell a company, Ev wrote in an e-mail to the board outlining why they should decline Facebook’s offer. 1. The price is good enough of or a value that the company will be in the future. (“We’ve often said that Twitter is a billion dollar company.

I think it’s many, many times that,” Ev wrote.) 2. There’s an imminent and very real threat from a competitor. (Nothing is going to “pose a credible threat of taking Twitter to zero.” 3. You have a choice to go and work for someone great. (“I don’t use [Facebook]. And I have many concerns about their people and how they do business.”)

There are a few interesting points in this passage, which we’ve emphasized. First among those is that the board saw Twitter as a billion-dollar company in 2008, and Williams saw it as many times that. In 2008, Twitter had fewer than 11 million users, and had yet to see the exponential gains that would come in early 2009 as a result of publicity like Ashton Kutcher’s public race against CNN to be the first million-follower account. Twitter’s current IPO filing places a roughly $11.9 billion value on the company. Even with a crappy infrastructure still wobbling under the weight of the users it did have, Twitter’s leadership had faith.

That faith extended to the fact that there was no competitor, including Facebook, who could pose a ‘credible threat of taking Twitter to zero’. The concept of Twitter, and its execution, was so unique that even a company with Facebook’s resources was ill-equipped to mimic its behavior and success.

This is reinforced by another anecdote in the book about a possible $12 million Yahoo acquisition, which was politely declined very early on in Twitter’s life. The number, even with only 250k active users of what was still an Odeo side project, seemed so low to Biz, Williams and Dorsey that it became a running joke.

And lastly, Williams was also uncomfortable about a culture mis-match. The book as a whole drills down deeply into some very flawed, very human characters. But a strain that runs throughout is that the core creators of Twitter were all looking for ways to democratize human connections.

That started with Odeo and continued through to the Twitter experiment. Williams felt that Twitter could be negatively impacted by intermingling with Facebook’s company culture, and was willing to bet hundreds of millions of dollars that it would be better without that influence.

We seem to talk more and more about the mercenary nature of Silicon Valley and the popularity of ‘acquisition as business plan’ daily. But, it turns out, there are still people making decisions based on something other than the seven deadly sins.

And one can’t discount the impact that lightly veiled threats have on negotiations. They can often lead to a sour taste, and we’ve heard about more than one negotiation with Facebook that has been spoiled by this kind of hint-dropping. Facebook took roughly three years to clone Twitter’s core ‘follow’ feature, launching Subscribe in 2011. It was later re-named ‘Follow’.

Dorsey, for his part, was ambivalent about a Facebook acquisition, saying that “If the numbers are right, there’s a success story in either path.” At the time, he was fresh off of his removal as CEO, with little hope of getting any real power in the company back. That turned out to be wrong, thanks to friendly investor Peter Fenton, but it’s not too surprising that he saw the money as a fair trade.

But the board agreed with Williams’ reasoning and declined the offer. Zuckerberg would then go on to court Dorsey heavily, but refuse to give him a head of product position. Dorsey never went to Facebook, and when Twitter IPOs, he’ll get his voting shares back.

An interesting note: Williams actually blogged about the offer, and the three reasons, earlier this year but never disclosed that it was Facebook. An interesting quote from the piece:

At the time, the offer we had on the table for Twitter though a heck of a lot of money and a huge win for investors and anyone else involved didn’t seem like it captured the upside. Even though we weren’t huge, and there were still a lot of doubters, I believed our potential was unbounded.

In the Twitter case, we had no desire to sell. I had actually just become CEO and was raring to go—as was the team. Additionally, the company we were having the discussion with didn’t seem like one in which we’d fit particularly well or the team would be stoked about.

The passage presents us with an intriguing alternate reality where Facebook acquired Twitter, establishing an essential monopoly on the world’s largest and most recognizable social networks. And an example of how it’s still possible to mesh the concepts of business acumen and moral code.

Plotting The Way To IPO, Twitter’s Product Roadmap Has Become Too Data Driven

In its rush towards becoming a public company, Twitter is in danger of sacrificing focus on the altar of growth. And it’s doing it with decisions based heavily on data and testing, rather than with an overall vision.

This week, Twitter shipped an update to its iOS, web and Android apps that features in-line image previews, a preponderance of action buttons and new tools for advertisers to caress your eyeballs.

Over the past few months, the Twitter product has evolved haltingly, with missteps like the external #Music app that have turned attention inwards to the core offering.

It isn’t all bad. The speed and performance of Twitter have come a long way recently, both on Android and iOS; some of its experiments have paid off with useful new features. And the recent efforts to support emergency alert services are incredibly welcome, and a great way to leverage Twitter’s services.

But overall, Twitter’s product strategy is beginning to feel scattered and disjointed, and it lacks a real sense of coherent design oversight.

Multiple sources inside and outside the company have expressed to us that Twitter’s engineering and feature teams are frustrated by this approach. Twitter’s over-reliance on user testing in making decisions and a strong focus on ‘optimizing for growth’ over any other consideration is causing friction.

User testing, or a/b testing, is all about shipping changes or new features out to groups of people before making a decision about which to support. With apps, the power of this model is greatly expanded.

Twitter is able to split off segments of its hundreds of millions of users into buckets that it can use to test engagement or interactions like button taps. The data is reviewed and a decision about a feature or change is made based on the success of one test or another.

This is a common practice at tech companies some consider it absolutely indispensable to product development. But some of Twitter’s recent decisions point to an over-reliance on the results of this kind of testing to make choices.

There are dozens of detailed missives on the Internet about why this kind of testing should be interpreted with care, as even small changes in test parameters can sway results one way or another.

From what we understand, the design decisions at Twitter are currently being made largely by data especially if that data shows that a few more ounces of growth can be squeezed out of the apps.

To give you an idea of how much Twitter relies on this kind of testing at one point it was possible to see two versions of the timeline on the same device on different accounts.

We saw this in action in the wild, and in the images below, you can see the ‘old’ timeline and a test version of the one that shipped this week:

The timeline on the left was tested for a few weeks before the data pushed it towards shipping. You’ll notice the static interaction buttons on the screen.

These, it’s fairly clear, were designed to lower the barrier of interaction for users on the platform. If the interaction buttons are right in the feed, more people will likely tap on them. Here’s what the timeline looks like now.

Unfortunately, this is a fairly awkward design decision, leading to a cluttered interface and likely just as many accidental taps as intentional ones. It may even have been those accidental taps that led to the data pushing this feature into the shipping version of the app.

Frankly, it’s ugly, and one of the main reasons that it made it out of testing was the data showing that it could result in increased engagement.

Twitter’s expanded image timeline was also tested this way.

This is all exacerbated by the fact that the desktop version of the app is on its own evolutionary track. Modules are swapped and expanded, but it still looks and works much different from the mobile counterparts.

Over the past few weeks, several changes have been made to Twitter in the interest of pumping up user growth and ad-friendliness. Among those are the new conversation feature, which links tweets together with a blue line and pre-expanded timeline images.

With the conversation feature, Twitter trampled one of its own inviolate rules: Everything on Twitter is in reverse chronological order.

Now, replies to conversations cause the original tweets to bubble up in the timeline, knocking them out of order and contributing to chipping away at the core nature of Twitter.

Conversations were implemented in order to increase the friendliness of Twitter to new users, but in the process they’re obscuring one of the things that was so good about the service, and may ironically confuse users more than help them.

Chronology has a simple, primal power and it’s always been part of what makes Twitter what it is. Screwing with that is exactly what happens when you follow your nose to growth rather than examine carefully what the impact of a feature is on the product.

Pre-expanded images pushes Twitter further toward Facebook’s inscrutable feed, with a stream of out of order visuals that can’t be opted out of on the web. And, more importantly, it homogenizes Twitter’s network in a way that makes it feel like every other feed.

Both of these features, especially when taken in aggregate, break the fundamental building blocks of Twitter, making it just one more scrollable column that looks like Facebook just as Facebook is in the middle of efforts to attempt to make itself a place for real-time conversation like Twitter.

It’s not the pre-expanded images themselves that’s such a big deal; it’s the execution. On the iPhone, you’re looking at most of the screen swallowed up by one or two images, and on the web, maybe three or four. Yes, you can disable the inline images for now on mobile apps, but I’m not sure how long that will stay that way.

It damages the readability of Twitter in a huge way. Yes, every other social network and messaging platform out there is moving to the ‘stream of images’ model, but making Twitter like every other network isn’t going to be good in the long run.

The power of Twitter lies in the fact that you’ve curated a stream of information that you want to read. It’s not though Twitter would like to believe it in the fact that you’ll soon be able to see every kind of movie clip and news brief and what have you in the feed.

It’s the commentary around those events and clips, and not the content itself, that makes Twitter what it is.

You can bend and twist the shape of networks in various ways to make room for advertising, engagement tweaks and new kinds of media, but eventually you’re going to break something. And Twitter with its tighter, more focused stream is very much in danger of doing that right now.

Those choices exemplify how nearly all of Twitter’s recent decisions about features are based on data from user testing. There is no overall design philosophy or endgame at work, and that lack of vision is hurting the look and usability of Twitter’s apps.

They’re barreling full-speed down the road, attempting to keep engagement and growth numbers up without looking ahead to where they’re going to be.

And don’t even get me started on the Android or tablet apps. Fun fact that Android tablet app released earlier this month? Built by Samsung, not Twitter. So why hasn’t Twitter released its own definitive tablet update?

What we hear is that Twitter is in the midst of a months’-long slog toward fresh new release for phones and tablets. Some details of the new release, called ‘Highline,’ internally leaked out a few weeks ago it may feature TV-related updates and a new swipeable interface.

This week’s release wasn’t part of this plan, it was an update specifically to push out those ad-friendly expandable images.

The idea behind a swipeable interface is fairly easy to divine, as it could make the app friendly to multiple timelines. If these feeds could be treated as discreet items, Twitter could move beyond its ‘Home,’ ‘Connect’ and ‘Discover’ feeds to offer more specific feeds focused on things like TV. And, judging from how #Music went, that seems to be the way that it’s headed.

But Twitter’s development and design culture has contributed to frustrations at various levels during the project. Some components have been rebuilt several times only to get quashed at high levels because the testing numbers weren’t good enough.

As far as we understand it, the next release was originally much more ambitious, and set out a distinct vision for all of Twitter’s apps.

But its forward edges have been blunted significantly by the process of test, poll and pull back that currently dominates Twitter’s product-development strategy.

The current direction of Twitter stands in stark contrast when compared to recent apps like Tweetbot 3. Yes, Tapbots charges a simple fee and is not a soon-to-be-billion-dollar-company.

But its two-man team has managed to produce a cleaner, more focused mobile app in a few months than Twitter has been able to do with all of its resources. And people both inside and outside the company have noticed.

There are some situations where Twitter’s reliance on experiments has paid off with interesting stuff. See two recent user engagement initiatives: MagicRecs and EventParrot. Both utilities were launched as Twitter accounts first, that people could choose to follow and get notifications from via DM. MagicRecs has since been rolled into Twitter’s main product, and if EventParrot does well then it probably will, too.

But MagicRecs stands apart from other recent changes like the in-stream actions, conversation lines and pre-expanded images in that it’s about personalization, and doesn’t interfere with the main Twitter experience.

The freedom given to run experiments and execute features based on those is incredibly important. Look to the way that Gmail resulted from Google’s ’20 percent time’ policy, or the fact that many of Twitter’s features were contributed by a community experimenting with the new service.

The rough part of this, for me, is that Twitter is trying very hard to be an independent profitable company, and that’s a good thing. I want Twitter to be around for a long time; I think it fulfills a role so vital that I’m not sure the Internet could do without it.

And we hear that there are people inside Twitter who feel strongly about the organization’s need to make design choices rather than simply ones based on the data.

And that’s where Twitter will benefit focusing its efforts: on building a service with lasting usability and enjoyment.

Short-term user growth and engagement hacking is the path that it has taken on the run-up to IPO in order to justify an asking price and have good numbers to tout in its S-1 and on the roadshow. But currently, the products across the web, Android, iPhone and iPad display a lack of clarity of vision.

They’re getting ugly, cluttered and confusing and for little reason. Twitter itself is one of the clearest and most compelling sells in all of ‘social media.’ It’s a real-time feed of information from sources that you can interact with if you choose, or simply consume at your own pace.

Releasing updates that don’t honor those powerful, simple tenets is a recipe for long-term disaster no matter what the short-term gain.

At time of publish, Twitter had not responded to requests for comment.

Facebook's New Policy Changes Unlikely to Bring Back Teenage Users

Facebook has recently announced a new modification to its policy, which will now enable teenagers to post publicly, something which was forbidden thus far. Considering that the company’s ever-growing user base is actually hemorrhaging teenagers, will this gimmick bring back some of the younger users?

A study released recently has confirmed something that others before it have said that teenagers aren’t that big of fans of Facebook anymore and they prefer Twitter over the world’s biggest social network, which has become a little bit too crowded (not to mention their parents are probably using it).

The latest change from Facebook allowing users under 18 to post messages publicly, rather than just for their friends, seems to be a way for them to try and bring back some users that have left or to keep those that are thinking about it and have already stopped engaging on the platform that much.

Of course, the decision has already caused a ruckus and parents are none too happy with Facebook’s decision since it means their kids are even more exposed than they were before.

Combined with another change that Facebook implemented recently, namely the fact that no one will be able to hide from search anymore, let’s just say no one is too happy.

“We believe that some of our users, particularly our younger users, are aware of and actively engaging with other products and services similar to, or as a substitute for, Facebook. For example, we believe that some of our users have reduced their engagement with Facebook in favor of increased engagement with other products and services such as Instagram.

In the event that our users increasingly engage with other products and services, we may experience a decline in user engagement and our business could be harmed,” Facebook said in a statement, basically admitting the results of the studies and the reasons behind their new policy changes.

Unfortunately, however, their efforts might not pay off since a simple privacy setting is not their biggest issue. Teens are more inclined to use mobile devices than the rest of us who were raised without this much technology and thus, they’re more likely to want to use tools that are a lot speedier to handle, like Facebook mentioned Instagram, rather than browse through Facebook. (Softpedia) (GNN) (Yoogle)

Getting The Most Out Of Your Facebook Fan Page

“Pages” on Facebook are powerful tools for communicating with your customers, visitors and fans. However, at first glance, it may seem difficult to use them. For this reason, I would like to help you by summarizing some easy steps in this article. I will try to write briefly for the sake of reading, you can search more in Facebook Help Center.

Change the URL name

Your fan page comes with a complex URL by default. You have an opportunity to reserve “Facebook.com/YourCuteBrand”. If you have at least 25 fans, then you can choose your username by going to “Facebook.com/username”. It will be very useful since new URL is both user and search engine friendly.

Sending posts is an art

This is the heart of your fan page activity. Majority of people “like” your fan page just for one reason. They want to see what you are providing before everyone else. When you post something new, your fans will see it on their News Feed. This is an invaluable opportunity for your marketing efforts.

However, you must be very careful, you need to optimize your posts. Frequency of your posts is critical. Do not stop for weeks or months. It is a common mistake to create a Facebook page and leave it blank. On the other hand, another common mistake is to send posts 10 times a day. In my opinion, sending a post at intervals of 2-3 days is optimal.

Furthermore, timing is essential for your posts become successful. Know your fan base; their location, their local time, and calculate the best hours of the day. If your visitors are work-related, reach them when they are at work, and vice versa.

Nevertheless, you have the opportunity to target your posts to the right people. Prior to sending your posts, click the lock icon near “Share” button to customize for demographics; location, language, etc.

Fan page insights

Analytics of your fan page is very important to understand your audience. There are 2 main sections in “Page Insights”. First one is “Users” insight. In this section, you can find valuable information like demographics; gender, age, cities and countries of your fans, and find other information like activities; page views, tab views, external referrers and media consumption.

Second part is “Interaction” insight. You can observe how your fans are interacting with your posts. There are detailed reports like number of impressions, “Likes”, comments for each post and number of unsubscribers for page general.

Custom tabs

One of the greatest things about your Facebook page is you can customize it. You can choose the landing page. You can put custom objects on your custom tabs. You can add videos, import your blogs, your photo galleries and you can combine your fan pages with your distinct Facebook applications.

By the way, I see some notable examples which use new Facebook interface for 5 photos at the top, seem like one horizontal picture, that is something creative for custom-made page.

Polls can go viral

They are useful small applications which can go viral. You can catch your potential fans by asking interesting questions on your niche. When a fan answers your question, friends of that fan will see the poll on their News Feed. If they are interested, they will answer the question you asked, and voila; your poll starts to spread among people.

Pages “like” other pages
If you have multiple Facebook pages under your control, it is a perfect time to connect them with each other. Go to your Facebook page and click “Add to My Page’s Favorites” in the left menu of that page. Another way is to go to “Edit Page > Featured” section. When you finish setting, your pages will be shown on the left “Likes” of your page.

Also, you can show “Page Owners” in the same way. Again go to the same “Featured” page to edit.

Advantages of these pages for SEO work

Search engines treat your Facebook page as a separate website. Hence, you can use your fan page for different purposes. For example, it will be a terrific resource for users who search for your brand.

Connect your Facebook page with Twitter

If you want to write something on your Facebook page and want to see it also on your Twitter page, then try “Facebook.com/twitter” to reach the connection settings page. You can also connect your Twitter page to view your tweets on your Facebook page. There are some applications on Facebook for this purpose.

RSS feed

If you do not have a RSS Feed for your web page, you can use the one comes with your Facebook page.

Example: Facebook.com/feeds/page.php?format=atom10&id=(write your FB page ID here)

If you have not changed your name yet, check the URL of your page to find your page ID. If you have changed your username, click “Edit Page” then check the URL for ID.

How to increase the number of fans?
Try to promote your Facebook page everywhere possible. Give links at your websites, blogs, email marketing campaigns, offline marketing efforts. Suggest your page to your friends, and encourage them to suggest to their friends, too.

If you want to pay specially for Facebook page, I suggest Facebook Ads. You can easily target potential fans by their gender, age, city, country, and their interests like favorite movies, bands.

Use social plug ins of Facebook like “Like Button”, “Activity Feed”, and “Like Box”. An extra mini tip; use @YourFacebookPage while writing something in Facebook.

The philosophy behind

Everyone has Facebook pages, but only few is doing extensive marketing with these. The question is;  how? If you observe successful ones, you can see that they are all doing similar stuff with this social tool; they are using these pages to “communicate” with their audience. They are trying to “be” there, they are trying to answer questions, try to understand their customers’ needs.

Facebook, like any other social tool, is not an old school advertising channel. People are there to talk, to interact. Fan pages are not different. It will be a huge mistake, to create your Facebook page and never return or to send posts for advertising purposes only.

Respond to comments, and  answer questions. Do not be afraid to give links to other websites or resources that you do not own. It is an invaluable social environment if you manage to be part of the conversation. This is the key to success with Facebook pages.