Tag Archives: bebo

Facebook pages: big changes on the way

Inside Facebook has the story about changes due in the next few weeks:

With the Pages redesign, business Pages will now look much more like Facebook profile pages. According to information provided to advertisers, Facebook is moving Pages to a “Wall and tabs” design:

* The Wall tab, containing all the latest updates and Wall posts, will become front and center.
* Most static information will live on an “Info” tab, and most Photos will now live on a “Photos” tab.
* Most custom content and application boxes will be moved to a “Boxes” tab, though some narrow boxes can remain on the “Wall”

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 2 Comments

Why do MPs use Facebook?

Cross-posted from The Wardman Wire:

When it comes to social media, Facebook is pretty much it as far as MPs go. For example, of the Liberal Democrat Shadow Cabinet members, 100% have a public email address, 90% have a website (the exceptions being in the House of Lords), 72% are on Facebook, 7% blog (and for another 7% there are party blogs covering their portfolio, even though they do not blog personally), and 3% are on Twitter. None have an active MySpace or Bebo presence (though there’s one that is now defunct).

Similar patterns – heavy email use, slightly lighter website coverage, many Facebook profiles, fewer bloggers and Twitter bringing up the rear – occur across all the main political parties.

This is not just a matter of new services taking time to catch on; blogging, after all, has been around for much longer than Facebook and the first politicians on Facebook came years after the first blogging politicians.

So what is it about Facebook that makes it attractive to MPs?

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Tories have “very little to show” for £1m online spend

The Conservative Party has spent £500,000 on a campaign to launch supporters’ groups on four social networking websites: Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and iVillage. However, research by the Financial Times has found that the iVillage group had only drawn one new member.

Tim Montgomerie, editor of the Conservativehome website said, ”The party has very little to show for more than £1m of expenditure on internet-related projects over the last year. Eye-catching initiatives have always been favoured over using the internet for long-term relationship building.”

As the Financial Times reports:

All the main parties are suffering from declining membership. Mr Cameron appears willing to commit

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What next for social networking?

Predicting which companies and software are going to prosper and which are going to fizzle and disappear is a notoriously unreliable business, but it certainly looks at the moment as if Facebook, Myspace and Bebo are pretty well entrenched as the major social networking sites not only in the UK but also in many other countries, including (perhaps crucially in terms of predicting the future) the US.

Possibly this trio will change slightly in composition, having one of its members replaced or being joined by a fourth or fifth, but at the moment all three seem set pretty …

Posted in News and Online politics | Also tagged , , and | 9 Comments

Are UK politicians right to concentrate on Facebook?

Take a look round Facebook, and you’ll find multiple examples of all the main political parties, and their MPs, making use of it to promote their wares and network with supporters. However, look at other social networking sites such as Bebo or Myspace and you’ll find only a relatively sparse party presence, with very few MPs around.

Is this concentration on Facebook justified? After all, it is only one of several social networking sites, and as recently as June last year it only got 16% of the UK social networking site traffic, lagging behind Myspace on 29% and Bebo on 34%.

However, …

Posted in Online politics | Also tagged and | 23 Comments
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