Facebook will be turning Pages into an Online Mall

The social media giant Facebook has made things easier for marketers and companies as they have made headlines as by turning the app into an estore.

At first it was shopify which allowed users to promote product through facebook which was not a success, now Facebook pages will now have services and shopping section which will allow companies to easily sell both their products and services without leaving the social network.

Facebook which is a home to over 50 million pages will now make things easier for page administrators by allowing them to sell on Facebook, this was tested by Facebook two months ago and the implementation has been confirmed by the company COO, Sheryl Sandburg. The company is believed to change the way ecommerce works as it will cause many clients to abondone many ecommerce sites into joining Facebook and using it to sell their services and prices.

This will allow retailers to sell their products on Facebook and many other services such as plumbing, garden services and many other things will be easily done on Facebook. The new features are currently being tested by a group of retail businesses and some of the features will be released to Facebook in the next comming weeks.

Facebook will surely takeover some blogs with this move as they will be adding some special estore features such as the "add to cart" , "Buy now" and the "donate button" which will allow non profit organisations to recieving funds directly from Facebook.

Facebook is looking forward to improve the seller and customer relationship by including contact buttons which will appear on the page, Facebook as a social network will allow customers to contact, call or send messages direct to the retailers. This imptovements by Facebook are believed to improve the user rate of facebook as many bloggers and online retailers will be turning into Facebook due to its wide upcomming ecommerce services.

Governments want your personal data, Twitter Confirms Requests have increased by over 52%

Well user privacy cannot be guaranteed these days as governments have seen social networks as an advantage of which they can easily access user data. Social Networking sites have been attacked by governments requesting user data for conducting investigations. These sites includes Twitter, Facebook, Google plus, Linkedin and Whatsapp.

In the recent months facebook was made to release the data which belonged millions of users to the united states government and to the other regions of Europe and now Twitter is getting the sting to do the same. Twitter has confirmed that the requests have increased by over 52% in the first half of this year.

The senior manager of Twitter   Jeremy Kessel have confirmed on the Twitter Blog stating that this is the biggest data request ever to be submitted to twitter, within the June to August period request have increased 56% internationally as governments want to access peoples profile data.

The largest requesters of user data has been USA, Japan and China with USA having over 50% of the data request followed by Japan and China both sitting at 10% while the other international governments fill the the remaining 30% of the data requests. The United Kingdom and Turkey maintian an avarage of 8% data requests making them one of the major countries that are forcing Twitter to release user data.

Twitter has refused to give user data to some international countries as they had to strongly protect the user privacy, Turkey and Brazil are among the countries with rejected orders, Turkey standing with over 768  court orders and Brazil with only 17 court orders.

The Twitter live streaming service Periscope have received over 1391 copyright takedown which have been made by Governments which are fighting for the release of user data for investigations. These takedowns have been done in the last six months since the beginning of 2015 to an unbelievable 1391 requests in a short amount of time.

Twitter publishes most of thesevgovernment takedowns on the web site known as the Chilling Effects which you can use to see recent data requests sent on Twitter.

Facebook Launches Live Streaming For Famous People

It is one of the Biggest moves by Facebook as they had launched their first Live video Streaming at it launch which was done on Wednesday.

The Live video streaming will be restricted to famous people only which will mostly depend on the the number of followers you have on your facebook page. This video streaming service will be added in the Facebook mentions which was launched in 2014 to improve engagements between the celebrities and the their fans whereby they can respond to their followers questions and comments.

The Facebook Live feature will show up in you timeline whenever a celebrity that you are following decides to go live and while watching the broadcast you will be able to  like, share or comment without having to get desrupted.

Accessing the Facebook Live feature will really be  easy as the celebrities will only have to go the the mentions feature, select the post option and from the option they will have to select Live Video to start broadcasting their video whenever they feel like. Celebrities will also be able to see how many users are tuning in the broadcast by easily toggling with their rear camera. Broadcasted videos will be automatically saved to the Facebook Page after the live broadcast. The broadcasts will show on the News Feed as seen on the image below and whenever the fan clicks on the video, the video will start playing.

Facebook had a video hosting service which was available all users which was hosted by a 3rd party service not Facebook, Celebrities were able to share video on Facebook until the Facebook Live feature was introduced to Facebook which will fully be controlled by Facebook.

The First Celebs to use the live video sreaming service were Dwayne Johnson aka "The Rock", Serena Williams,  and Martha Stewart who were to promote the Facebook video Streaming service on it wednesday launch by going live using the Facebook live feature.

Google Plus to Split up in The Next Months

On Monday Google plus have confirmed that they will be improving the quality of their service by splitting their social network into different categories to improve growth.

This development by Google plus has been sparked by the social media improvements that have been brought by Facebook and Twitter to help them improve user commitment as they have added new customizations which has divided the social network. Things that were done on services like youtube using a Google profile will no longer require a Google profile which means that Youtube users will not use a Google account to comment on the youtube streaming service.

This change was being inspired by Google after it social network failed to match up with the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin which are the most broad growing networks as they have even improved recently making Google plus to stay behind as one of the least networks. These changes by the Google plus team are believed to bring its network to a good position as they are to seperate the Well known Photos, Youtube and Hangouts, away from the social network itself making it a stand alone.

The well known Google plus profile will not be visible on search engines which means that you profile searchable or followable which is the biggest change by Google plus . Among the major changes by Google plus is Youtube as the video sharing service will be one of the big companies to experience the changes as the comments made on youtube will no longer be linked to the users Google+ profiles as confirmed on the Youtube Blog . Youtube users will continue be allowed to use the Google plus profile to share videos until Google confirms the deadline date.

Google plus users are currently motivated not to stop using youtube, Photos and other services to be affected by the updates as the big changes will take months before they are implemented on the network.

Facebook will allow retailers to sell from Facebook

Facebook has brought in an improvement to their App which will allow users to buy products directly from the App without having to leave the App.

Facebook is no longer only focused on chats, likes, sharing but have seen an importance of increasing their online revenue by making eCommerce available on Facebook. With the eCommerce development by Facebook twitter was the first social network to integrate buy buttons which are well known as the twitter buy button which made users to buy without leaving the social network.
If you think that Facebook is behind well you you got it wrong because Facebook has been working on it plan to integrate shopping buttons that will look very similar to the ones used by Shopify as reported by Buzzfeed concerning the Facebook buy buttons which are very much likely into becoming a success.

Facebook has been fully experimenting the buy and checkout features of the buy now buttons as a plan to integrate eCommerce to its social network. This has been a big move buy Facebook which can negatively affect social media marketing strategies as the customers will not have to leave the App to make a checkout which will exclude from having to visit the merchants site.
The shopping feature by Facebook is currently being tested on a couple of users as confirmed on Wednesday on a press conference that the new eCommerce features will be made available soon as the tests will be working very well as shown in the mock image Below.

The Facebook spoke person Mike Manning said it wont be a predictable experience for the buy buttons and ecommerce features as it is not really known when will retailer get to use these features because many may take time to Adapt to the changes made by Facebook. There adaptions are made on Facebook but has been only visible to certain retailers for testing the improvement of the App. The Facebook spokesperson Mike Manning has refused to give the names of the current participating ecommerce retailers but has confirmed that the service is used by both small scale and large scale ecommerce retailers and ecommerce stores.

With these new features it does not seem like Facebook is looking forward in the revenue behind these eCommerce features as they will be giving these  customization freely without any charges. The company has confirmed that the improvements are designed to increase user engagement in their app not to make revenue.
With this improvements in social media and ecommerce has made making money online as one of the easiest ways for both blogger and ecommerce sites, this the biggest improvement by Facebook.

Facebook opens its first African Office in South Africa

Just before the Facebook internet.org was established in southern Africa, Facebook has opened its first African Office which will focus on the African continent.

Facebook with having over 120 million users in the African continent has opened it first office in Johannesburg which is the countries biggest city well know as "EGoli ,the city of Gold" which is well known for its mining. The purpose of Facebook building its first office in the African continent was to focus much more on the emerging markets of Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and South Africa.

According to Facebook 20% of the African population has internet access which is believed to reach 50% by the year 2020 as big companies and other network operators are working together to bring developments in the African continent which will boost the levels of internet access in the continent.

Facebook has also joined hands with Cell C which is the leading telecom company in bringing developments which will boost the project of improving the levels of internet access in the continent.

By certain calculation it has been estimated that 80% of South Africans access the internet through a mobile phone while the remaining use Personal Computers.

Facebook has seen Africa as the biggest investment opportunity which they believe as having the potential of reaching over 1 billion users because currently the African continent has over 100 million users out of a remaining 1 Billion potential users who hardly have internet access. The new Facebook of will be lead by Nunu Ntshingila-Njeke who will overseer the success of the development.

This is a big development plan by facebook in the African region and believed to bring a huge global impact to the African continent and will it work as they have planned.