Facebook & its' Social Impact...

This blog is about a well known topic but focuses on few points that you have never thought about before.

For Facebook (FB), no introduction needed. In Sri Lanka it’s the most popular social network. It suppose to attract and it’s targeted for young adults and matured people. But according to the consumer report survey, May 2011 there are 7.5 million children under 13 with FB accounts and 5 million under the age of 10 which happens to be a violation of terms and conditions of FB ultimately.

No one can control this situation. For a person who wish to join FB needs only an e mail account.It’s that simple. This simplicity of sign up might be a reason for this negative trend.

However, despite the fact that children under age use FB, it creates a very good platform to maintain relationships with family and friends who are not around and to make new friends around the world. Further it acts as a communication medium for the businesses and individuals. FB ultimately has created a new standard of social acceptance since it has been more of a necessity now a days.

Facebook can be considered as an advancement of human networking but still there is a negative social impact. As of September 2012, FB had over 1 million users of which 8.7% profiles are fake. Therefore through these fake profiles things that are harmful for the society can happen since those can’t be tracked as to whom the profile belongs to.

Today FB has been a cause to many broken relationships. It might not be FB who should bear the full responsibility but it has been aiding the roots of problems and issues.

Not only that it can be said that because of FB the value or the quality of human relationships has reduced to a level that a friend can be defined solely in terms of the fact that whether they are in your FB profile or not.

In Sri Lanka FB is a fast growing social network. Therefore the users should be intelligent enough to overcome the negetives discussed above and to take advantages of it properly.  

User Vs Consumer In Facebook

Customers are the most important people for any organization. They are the resource upon which the success of the business depends. People first become prospects and then moved to customer. In Digital marketing prospects of the organization is internet users. According to the www.internetworldstats.com Sri Lanka internet penetration is 15% as at 30 June, 2012. Most probably it has shifted to 20% within last 11 months. These 20% people in Sri Lanka are really prospects for organization when doing Facebook advertising?

Most of the Sri Lankan people are engaged with Facebook. It’s about 60% of the internet penetration. Most of the companies are doing marketing activities on Facebook as a tool of digital marketing tool. As per the data given by www.socialbakers.com Mobitel is the one who has more local fans on Facebook. They have got 281,592 fans. But it’s only about 0.11% of the Facebook users in Sri Lanka. With that amount Mobitel can reach at least 25% of the SL Facebook users. Because when a fan like or share Mobitel stuff automatically it shares with his/her friends who are not engage with Mobitel too. I think these 281,592 likes are not the real loyal or interested customers of Mobitel. We need to consider how many fans from our fan base will be added as our customers. We are doing advertising on Facebook to gain customers for the company. We need convert user into customer. Basically we need to identify user pattern of SL Facebook users. Then we can handle effective campaign via Facebook.

I have identified few areas which we need to concern before the advertising on Facebook. Those are,

# Some people are on Facebook just for the sake of having a Facebook account. They are not actively doing it & some even don’t know how to.

# Sometimes people like on some pages because of their friends like on it. It’s not display his/her real loyalty/Interested. Sometimes people requested personally to like on some pages.

# Age - Most of the people engage with Facebook are teenagers. Every Brand’s target Market is not engage with Facebook. Most of people in Facebook are not taking decision on household requirements.

# Negative comment can make huge lose to the Brand. If one person expresses his/her idea in negative way, it will damage brand seriously.

Now we have to face this kind of problems. But we can minimize this risk. However it’s better to engage with Facebook advertising for organization. If they fail with 20% Sri Lankan is better than fail with 50% Sri Lankan in the future. Anyway in the future Facebook will be a good place for marketing. That time we can reach teenage, matured and the entire population with developing technology in Sri Lanka.

How Facebook Target a Niche Audience with Facebook Advertising

Facebook is an online social networking service. It is the most famous social media network in the world. Basically it started as a social network where people can connect and share ideas online. But with the growth of facebook usage this has become an attractive platform for advertising. Most of the companies are doing advertising on Facebook. Facebook is not only for the advertising. Through facebook we can have more publicity on any subject. But now a days facebook advertising has become the most benefited advertising tool for business+Brands.  

Before doing a promotion campaign business consider, whether the promo campaign reach the target customers and its cost. When considering these two factors facebook perform well. In our topic we consider about niche market. Those who satisfy special needs of people, they are not going to engage with mass media to carry out their promotions. Therefore this is a better way to promote niche businesses. They don’t need to consider all facebook users. They can target people who are interested on their subject very easily via facebook.

Let’s see what we can do on facebook,

We can create a facebook page for a selected brand or company. Creating facebook page is a very simple task. We have to follow a few steps to create a page. We don’t need to pay to create a page, It is totally free, we can add information and photos of the selected brand or company.

Then we can invite our selected audience to engage with our page, they can like on our page and get updates of the page everyday. We can use facebook advertising option to grab the correct people to our selected brand or company. We have to pay for it but it’s not a higher margin. We can use Targeting option to filter our target audience. In targeting option we can see few bases such as,

·         Location

·         Age and Birthday

·         Interest

·         Education

·         Connection

Using above techniques we can reach our target audience, but it’s not enough, therefore we need to make daily updates to keep in touch with people who are interested about your page. It will gain additional benefit when people like the post, it will get published on their wall. Then there is a possibility to reach his\her friends also.

Having a facebook page is not enough to create sales or inquiries about the selected brand or company. We have to maintain and update it to get maximum benefit from it.

With the development of social media, facebook is not the only media to target niche audience. Now even other social media becoming popular, but in Sri Lankan context facebook plays a huge role up to now. Anyway there is possibility to change it, therefore we as Sri Lankans should get updated with new things!!!

Search Engine Optimization...

All the time people are engaged with needs and wants, if they have any need they try to fulfill that, for that they follow buyer decision making process. First they identify the gap between what they really need and what they already have, and they find ways to fulfill those uncatered needs, in that they try to engage with more information relating to their subject. We can see many people engage with different information sources such as parents, friends, printed media, TV and other media. Among those sources internet search has became the top of all. Most of the people use digital equipment to do their works therefore they usually engage with internet search. They search what they need on search engine and find results to continue with the buying process.

Search engines are programs that search documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. A search engine is really a general class of programs, however, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Google, Bing and Yahoo! Search that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.

Typically, Web search engines work by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

Many companies have taken steps to ensure that they pop up in the searches done by customers and the searches will show more positive content. Any company would want their company web site to come at the top of the result given by search engine for search done regarding a particular search. At this point we discuss and want to know about Search Engine Optimization. What is SEO?

 “SEO includes all technical tasks that help search engines to effectively crawl and index all relevant content of a website and; all marketing tasks that enhance the authority and relevancy of the website for a given subject, so that the website can gain high ranking in organic search results when users search for terms related to the subject matter of the website.”

Simply we can say, “This is the activity of optimizing Web pages or whole sites in order to make them more search engine friendly, thus getting higher positions in search results.”

Key Success Factors in SEO

·         Key Word Research

It is important to understand what are the key words actually used by customers in searching the products company offer. This will help you in making sure you optimize your page to the correct key words.

·         Crawlability

Search engine has got some system that crawls through your website and indexes the data in those pages. So in order to make your web site more relevant to the searches, you have to ensure that the crawlers have access to all the pages in your site. Also simple meaningful URLs will help the crawlability further. You can find out how many pages the crawlers has access to by doing a search as "site:www.yourwebsite.com".

·         Site Structure

It is important to have a proper site structure to make your web site more attractive as well as to optimize the quality. Traditionally, consumer get exposure to the product at the market place and then buy and consume the product and give positive or negative feedback. But today web site will be the place where people can get 1^st impression on particular brand. Therefore need to worry about structure of the web page.

·         Content Building

It is very important to have a considerable amount of valued content in your web site. This will be included corporate information, customer reviews, videos, etc. To be a unique brand You must use differentiate content than others usually done. It’s better to use keywords in content to optimize search results.

·         Images & Videos

It’s better to have images & videos in the web site. But when including images and videos we have to ensure that the file names are appropriate to the content and that you provide alternate tags. Because search engines can’t read images, the crawlers will view the image file name and include the web site on search results based on that image file name.

Following tools help to carry out success SEO,

·            Similar Page Checker

·         Keyword Density Checker

·         Domain age tool

·         URL Rewriting tool

·         Keyword suggestion tool

·         Backlink Builder

·         Backlink Summary

In conclusion SEO can be discussed in terms of the Sri Lankan corporate sector. Most of the Srilankan companies have got their own website to carry out the business process, but they have little knowledge on activities to be done through internet such as SEO. Still there are a few companies which, actually get the use of SEO in Sri Lanka.

As an example, when typing the “Foods in Sri Lanka” as keywords on google, we can see a few tagged images and Cargills food city in top of the search result. It’s more beneficial for the Cargills food city. Sometimes this can be a competitive advantage for the company as well.

Therefore it can be concluded that Sri Lankan Companies should focus more on getting the maximum benefit of using marketing tools like SEO at a relatively low cost to traditional marketing. 

Assessing the Usability of Hiru TV Website...

This Blogpost would be a detailed evaluation of a website from it’s usability if not user friendliness  perspective. Hiru TV website which operates under the URL www.hirutv.lk. Following is the analysis.

Accessibility

1. Site load‐time

Site loading time of the website is poor. Since it takes about 15 seconds to load after typing the URL.

2. Adequate text‐to‐background contrast

Text-to-background contrast is good as text colours have used according to the background colours except for the part in white letters on a yellow background.

3. Font size/spacing is easy to read

Used font sizes and spacing is OK. Font sizes differ depending on the importance.

4. Flash & add‐ons are used sparingly

Flash & add-ons are used. They are not disturbing but attracting attention progressively.

5. Images have appropriate ALT tags

Images do have ALT tags which gives an idea about the content.

6. Site has custom not‐found/404 page

Site does not have a customized 404 page. It automatically redirects to the home page.

Identity

7. Company logo is prominently placed                              

Yes. Hiru TV logo is prominently Placed.

8. Tagline makes company’s purpose clear

A tagline is not available for the website.

9. Home‐page is digestible in 5 seconds

Home page contains lot of information since is not digestible in 5 seconds.

10. Clear path to company information

Yes. There is clear path to company information and it’s really easy to find out. It’s located as the 2d tab of the main menu.

11. Clear path to contact information

Contact information can be obtained through company information page itself. But since there is no sign at the home page about contact information user might get bit confused.

Navigation

12. Main navigation is easily identifiable

Main Navigation is Easily identifiable with the availability of sub tabs under the main tabs.

13. Navigation labels are clear & concise

Navigation lables are clear and Concise. For example : Home, Asia Broadcasting Home, Uploads, Top 20, Teledramas, Movies, etc.)

14. Number of buttons/links is reasonable

There are too many buttons/links which would lead to confusion.

15. Company logo is linked to home‐page

Yes. Hiru TV logo is linked to home page.

16. Links are consistent & easy to identify

In the home page there are many links to TV programs, facebook, Gamezone, Music Videos, News, etc. This can be too much of information for the user at once.

17. Site search is easy to access

There is no Site search option. But a Site map is available.

Content

18. Major headings are clear & descriptive

Major headlines are clear because of the difference in font sizes and colous but not very descriptive.

19. Critical content is above the “fold”

Yes.  The main Navigation Bar is at the top of the page.

20. Styles & colors are consistent

The Site mainly uses Yellow and Black which are theme colours of Hiru TV and white for the body of the page consistently.

21. Emphasis (bold, etc.) is used sparingly

Emphasis is used sparingly where very important information has been highlighted in bold.

22. Ads & pop‐ups are unobtrusive

There are no Pop-ups or outsider Ads.

23. Main copy is concise & explanatory

Main copy uses many videos and pictures to convey the messages therefore it is concise in terms of distributing loads of information in a understandable way to the user.

24. URLs are meaningful & user‐friendly

www.hirutv.lk is easy to remember and meaningful too.

25. HTML page titles are explanatory

Yes. It contains the relevant page name. Eg: http://www.hirutv.lk/top20/

www.hirutv.lk is a reasonable website which contains lot of interesting facilities such as Listening to music, watching music videos, teledramas,etc. Not only that the moving news line of the website is eye catching. However it can be concluded that Hiru TV website is user friendly forgetting the poor loading time and bulkiness, given the content it carries for it’s users.