After spending a day with Facebook Home, I can report that its main function is actually pretty simple. It essentially turns your lock screen into a slideshow of updates from your News Feed.

The News Feed, you'll recall, is that stream of updates that goes down the middle of the page when you open up a Facebook app or go to Facebook.com


So, is Facebook Home cool? Almost. Mostly. It's really close.

After less than 24 hours with this phone, I can already tell that it would be nice to own a phone which allows you to press one button, and then swipe through live, high-quality status updates, photos, and news stories during any spare moment of the day.

But that's not what Facebook Home does. The status updates, photos, and news stories Facebook Home shows you aren't high-quality at all. That's because they are status updates, photos, and news stories from your Facebook friends.

If you are anything like me, the group of people who are your Facebook Friends is a motley collection of family, family friends, old classmates, casual business acquaintances, and maybe a dozen or so actual, real-life "friends." Who wants to see photos and news stories from those people? They aren't very good photographers. Who wants to tap a button and see news stories from them, either? They don't usually share my taste in news.

The problem with Facebook Home is your Facebook friends. They fill it up with useless (and sometimes embarrassing) junk.

Annoyingly, right now there's no way for a user to tell Facebook that they'd like to see less of one kind of update in Home and more of another. The good news is, Facebook knows this is a problem. We're told by Facebook that it plans to improve its update-selecting algorithms and give users manual filtering options in the future. Facebook is updating Home once a month right now, so we'll probably see improvements in this area soon.

In the meantime, I've attempted to make Facebook Home more pleasant and interesting by going through my list of Facebook friends and removing people. I'm curating.

Ironically, this process has made me realize how much I would prefer Facebook Home if, instead of pulling content from Facebook, it pulled content from the people I follow on Twitter or Instagram.

On both those services, I don't follow people because I know them or I met them one time or whatever. I follow them because they take photos of or tweet about interesting things.

I'm constantly curating those lists -- adding and subtracting people based on the quality and usefulness of the content they share.

Facebook Home is a cool innovation for smartphones. Swipe-able news belongs in a smartphone's lock screen.

But I hope Facebook's innovation is one that Twitter and Instagram (a Facebook subsidiary) copy as soon as possible.





























View the Original article

Call it an epiphany: Social is officially mobile.

Several weeks ago, I was looking at the user data for one of the brands that I manage and one statistic stuck out more than others. Nearly 60 percent of the people who interact with that brand do so via smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device. I started checking other brands, and the numbers were all similar.


The majority of people interacting with our content were doing so from a mobile device.

Nielsen’s State of the Media: Social Media Report confirms that our brands aren't alone.

In 2012, the time spent accessing Facebook via mobile increased 85 percent, Twitter 140 percent, LinkedIn 114 percent, and Pinterest 4,225 percent. That’s a staggering increase. Forty-six percent of social media users say they use their smartphone to access social media; 16 percent say they connect to social media using a tablet.

Here are a five easy tips to help you optimize your social media content for mobile readers:

1. Be much more thoughtful about when you’re posting.

The average Facebook post gets 50 percent of its reach and engagement in the first 30 minutes of being posted, according to Socialbakers. It’s all downhill from there.

Start asking yourself: Where is my audience going to be in the hour or so after we post this? Is there an opportunity to capture them where they are at that moment and inspire action or tap into an emotion that you know a large number of your fans are experiencing at that time?

Don’t limit it to experimenting with when you post, either. If you have an assumption about where your audience is consuming your content (specifically, where they are on Earth), you can create some calls to action and inspire them to engage that way.

For instance, Instagram, where the mobile engagement is close to 100 percent, is great for this: “Show us what you’re doing now and how our product fits into that.”

2. Add value to the mobile experience -- which differs from adding value to the desktop or laptop experience.

The greater the distance you make your fans travel in mobile, the worse the experience becomes. No one wants to hop from one app to another—to another—to download your app that, let’s be honest, isn’t all that cool in the first place. On a desktop or laptop, people are more forgiving when it comes to bouncing around the Web. You have to be more respectful of the mobile experience.

Similarly, if you’re in the Facebook or Pinterest app and you click on a brand’s link, it’s going to send you to a website. Unless you’ve checked that link in social, you’re not 100 percent sure where you’re sending them. It might look great on your laptop, but on mobile it could look like a Geocities site and do your brand a huge disservice.

Keep your posts simple and undeniably specific to your brand.

3. Design for mobile first.

Keep your font sizes legible on your graphics. If you’re tapping through to a photo, you don’t want to have to zoom in on something just to read it. If you’re taking the time to design an asset, make sure you’re taking the time to design it so that mobile users can read it.

The default has been to design social assets for the desktop or laptop experience and back into mobile. Reverse that. Design for mobile, and it will back into the desktop experience.

4. Test different mobile platforms to understand the differences.

If you post a photo album on Facebook, you can’t click on the links that you've put in the captions of the individual photos if you’re using an iPhone or Android phone. However, those links work when you’re using most tablets. That’s good to know if you want to drive traffic in mobile.

Of course, that’s just one of the many quirks and intricacies when it comes to presenting social content in mobile. Understanding the user experience across devices is important in making sure your posts are accomplishing their desired outcomes.

5. Check your analytics.

Every brand is different, and every audience is different. Before you completely shift the way you’ve been creating and posting content, take the time to dig deep into your metrics and understand where your engagement is coming from. Certain demographics will use mobile more than others.

For the brand I mentioned earlier, males 18-34 had the highest instance of engaging with our content through mobile (nearly 75 percent). We were able to make some assumptions based on that and test some content around those assumptions.

Test, measure, analyze, optimize, rinse, repeat.

















This story originally appeared on PR Daily

Your smartphone isn't just for checking email and playing Temple Run.

Business owners can perform a variety of tasks on those smartphones when they're away from the office -- far away, in fact, like on a beach or ski lift.

A recent infographic from Desk.com compiled 13 of these apps that help with financial management, communication, customer support and more.

Take a look:

A new report from product Q & A site FixYa found that the iPhone was more reliable than smartphones made by Motorola, Samsung and Nokia.

The study looked at data from 722,558 problem reports listed on the site, and combined that information with market share data from StatCounter to create an ultimate reliability score for each smartphone manufacturer.

Apple scored a 3.47 on FixYa’s Reliability Reporter — roughly three times more than Samsung’s 1.21 — and 25 times more than Motorola.



“Smartphones are consistently being compared on a case-by-case basis, but no one has looked at the overall trends across a manufacturer's entire smartphone line,” said FixYa CEO and founder Yaniv Bensadon in a press release announcing the results of the study.

“Our newest FixYa report looks at lines like the iPhone, Galaxy, or Lumia, and through a careful analysis of issues versus market share, we’ve been able to directly compare manufacturers using a reliability score. The result is an accurate and fair method of a scaled approach to fairly compare these top companies to truly see who is the most reliable, and who is barely even competing.”

Deeper than just comparing one model of phone to another, FixYa’s report looks at the brands' product lines as a whole, noting common complaints for each one.

Apple users, for instance, complain about the device’s battery life, lack of new features and customizability, and issues connecting to Wi-Fi.

Samsung smartphone users have entirely different problems, with issues surrounding the microphone and speaker on the phones as well as battery life. Samsung customers also complain that their device gets hot.

Device temperature was also an issue for Nokia customers, who complained about not only the device getting hot, but also laggy response time, a poor app ecosystem and poor battery life.

Motorola owners, who ranked the least satisfied with their handsets, were the only ones who didn’t complain about battery life (perhaps due to the fantastic battery on the Droid Razr and Droid Razr Maxx). Instead they had issues with the device’s camera and speaker quality, as well as problems with the touchscreen. Motorola owners were most dissatisfied with the apps that came preinstalled on their devices.

You can check out FixYa’s complete report now on its website.

Image via iStockphoto, krystiannawrocki






































View the Original article