The Chinese social media app

The Chinese social media app that has dissidents worried

Angela Zou hardly writes text messages now. Sitting at her office desk in a plush advertising agency, Zou asks her iPhone where they should go to eat. When it buzzes seconds later, she lifts it to her ear for her colleague's reply. The conversation goes back and forth through these snippets of Mandarin before they decide on the bento-box place for lunch. Like millions of others across Asia, Zou is using WeChat, a smartphone app developed in China, cost of social media marketing to send voice messages, snapshots and emoticons to her friends. Now that its walkietalkie-style messages have become ubiquitous, she said typing feels like hard work. WeChat's popularity has grown dramatically since its launch in 2011. Tencent, the company that developed the app, announced in September that its users had doubled in six months to 200 million. The vast majority are in China, though WeChat is being launched across Asia and already has subscribers in the US and UK. Historically, it has proved difficult for Chinese internet firms to expand beyond the country. But WeChat is being tipped as the first Chinese social media application with the potential to go global. As WeChat grows, however, politicians and dissidents are voicing concerns: activists fear that the app's voice-messaging service define social media marketing enables security officials to monitor users' movements in real time. And when the app was launched in Taiwan in October, legislators said they feared that it posed a threat to national security, through the potential exposure of private communications. WeChat is similar to the popular US-based mobile messaging service WhatsApp, but it does more. An amalgamation of social media tools akin to Twitter, Facebook and Skype, it comes in eight languages including English, Arabic and Russian.

CAN I STALK YOU? AN INTRO TO LOCATION-BASED SERVICE SECURITY

Have you been invited to use Foursquare or Gowalla? Or has one of your friends checked you into a restaurant or a club using Facebook Places? Congratulations, you’re now on the new frontier of social media: location. Location-based services are sites available through mobile devices that use your exact geographical location to connect you to friends and businesses. So now you have to decide: Do I need everyone to know where I am? Okay. Maybe you aren’t letting “everyone” know where you are. Many services limit your information to your friends. But when you share your information with a network, you’re trusting everyone social media marketing plan pdf on that network to protect your privacy. So there’s always the potential when using location-based social media that someone you don’t want to see could find your exact location. Google Latitude, which allows you to broadcast your location twenty-four hours a day using GPS (global positioning system) technology, has been around for more than a year. And once it got over some initial privacy concerns, it basically became another one of Google’s innovative yet obscure services that not too many people use. To date, only 4% of Americans have tried one a location-based service, and only 1% use one on a weekly basis, social media marketing best practices according to Gartner. People are not showing much interest in leaving digital breadcrumbs wherever they go. So why do you have to decide now if you’re ready to start sharing your location? First of all, more and more people are getting GPS -enabled smartphones. This makes cool apps like our free Anti-Theft for Mobile possible, and it makes it easy to broadcast your location. And more importantly, Facebook is getting into the location game.

Facebook rating pushes firms to up social-media responsiveness

When the message that “your call is important” comes from a robotic, prerecorded voice, a customer could be forgiven for being incredulous. Sitting on hold, listening to Muzak and repeatedly hearing that disingenuous message can be frustrating, to say the least. Perhaps that’s why many people are turning to social media when they need to reach companies – whether to post a complaint or a compliment, or to ask a question about their products. It does not tie up customers on the phone, and a public social-media post demands accountability from companies to provide better service. Last year, brands received almost 22 million questions on Facebook and Twitter, according to social-marketing measurement firm Socialbakers. Most are responding: According to the firm’s analysis, how to start a social media marketing business roughly three-quarters of the questions posted on Facebook got a reply. At an average rate of nearly 27 hours per post, however, those responses are slower than most consumers would like. Now, the social-media giant is weighing in, evaluating brand pages and identifying those that meet high customer expectations. Earlier this month, Facebook announced both a private messaging option for brand pages as well as a “responsiveness rating.” Companies that are quick to get back to their customers can now sport a green badge on their pages, just below their profile pictures, that identify them as “very responsive.” But three weeks in, many big brands are failing to meet the benchmark for that badge. Only one of Canada’s Big Six banks displayed the badge this week, and it was the smallest: National Bank of Canada. None of the top telecom providers had one. The same goes for many other well-known Canadian brands, including Lululemon Athletica, Canadian Tire, Tim Hortons, Loblaws, Hudson’s Bay, Shoppers Drug Mart, Jean Coutu, Canada Goose, Molson Canadian, Manulife Financial, WestJet, Air Canada and others. Fast-food subsidiary McDonald’s Canada, how to social media marketing which created the now-global Our Food. Your Questions campaign, touting its response to customer questions – via Facebook, Twitter and its website – did not have a badge this week. Neither did the main McDonald’s page. This may be because Facebook has set the bar incredibly high: To receive a badge, brand pages must respond to customer questions in less than five minutes, 90 per cent of the time, over a seven-day period. Pages are re-evaluated every week. A Facebook representative refused to say roughly how many business pages overall have the badge. The company’s own brand page on Facebook also did not display a badge when checked on Thursday.