While the official Facebook app allows for some basic Facebook Page management, it lacks a lot of key features. This new app has the ability to let social media managers post new updates and photos on their Pages, get push notifications about Page activity, view Page insights, and more.

The app is now available as a free download in Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. More countries are expected to follow.

Take the app for a spin, let us know what you think and whether it is available in your country.

Facebook has launched a feature that allows users to get special deals from merchants within the social network.

The deals will appear on their news feeds, and after claiming a deal, an email will be sent to the user. The deal can then be redeemed by flashing the email at a store.

Facebook Offers is currently in beta and is being rolled out to selected businesses in Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, US, and Turkey, according to The Verge.

All business will eventually be able to create their own deals by clicking the ‘offer’ button at the top of their Facebook Page Timeline.

Barring a backlash from users, Facebook Offers will give group buying sites like Groupon, LivingSocial and Deal.com.sg  a run for their money by replacing them as the middlemen between merchants and consumers, and an improved one.

For consumers, redeeming a deal on Facebook will be more convenient at times, since they won’t need to leave the social network. For merchants, it has a greater potential for virality, since sharing about the deal is easier.

Not only that, while merchants often have to split revenues with daily deal sites they engage with, Facebook Offers is slated to be completely free. That alone is a huge competitive advantage.

What remains to be determined is how much business Facebook can snatch from the incumbents.

For now, daily deal sites have an advantage on the mobile arena for the near term. That’s because using a daily deal app to hunt for special offers is an infinitely better experience than redeeming them through Facebook’s bloated mobile app.

Granted, conversion rates for deals on Facebook Offers could be much lower than those hosted on daily deal sites, since users won’t be actively seeking a discount when checking their friend’s updates.

But that may not matter to the merchant since no costs are involved in putting up a deal. They just have to make sure their ads don’t irritate the user too much.

Facebook has over 850 million users worldwide. Out of that, a total of 194 million users are from Asia at the end of March 2012. Most of these users from the Southeast Asia region – 97 million or 54% of the total Facebook users in Asia. Some other observations on the latest Facebook in Asia statistics:

1. In early February 2012, India surpassed Indonesia to become Facebook No. 1 Nation in Asia. Back in January 2011, India has 16.9 million Facebook users. Now, the country has over 45.9 million Facebook users.
2. In addition to India, Japan has been growing impressively in the past 1 year or so. Japan started the year 2011 with 1.8 million Facebook users. Today, there are over 8 million users in Japan.
3. South Korea has been growing with double digits figure. The country is now ahead of Pakistan in the Facebook in Asia list.
4. Among the top ten countries, India, Japan, and South Korea has been the high-growth Facebook nations since early 2011. Throughout 2012, Facebook will be focusing on these three countries for users acquisition, as the Big Blue of the social web aims to reach the 1 billion users mark.
5. Pakistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Laos also posted double-digit growth in Quarter 1 of 2012.
6. Growth in countries like Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, and Taiwan are growing at slower pace, likely due to saturation effect. For example, Facebook penetration in Malaysia is over 70%.
7. Between January and March this year, the total Facebook Asian users grew by 7%. However, the quarter-to-quarter growth rate has been on a downward trend since Quarter 1 of 2011. Facebook is expected to grow with single digit figure throughout 2012.
8. Total Facebook users in Asia will sail pass 200 million in Quarter 2 this year.

Images: Grey Review

About the author

Yung Hui Lim is the founder of the Grey Review, a blog focusing on tech startups, web application reviews, and social media in Asia and product manager at MOL, one of Southeast Asia’s largest Internet companies.

You can be sure that whenever a social network becomes successful, people will try to make money off it. Twitter is a very good example.

Of late, all sorts of people have been gaming the social network. For instance, using Twitter bots to artificially boost the number of Twitter followers, as what US Presidential nominee Newt Gingrich allegedly did.

Which was why I approached Gushcloud with some skepticism.

Gushcloud is a Singapore-based startup that, in a nutshell, rewards its users to perform certain tasks promoted by marketers: Tweeting or sharing on Facebook about a product, writing a blog post, or completing a survey. In this way, it’s similar to ChurpChurp.

For marketers, Gushcloud offers an advertising platform that allows them to pick their audience demographics, control how much they want to spend, and how much they want to pay their ‘Gushers’.

It is designed for individuals and companies to advertise with any budget on either Facebook or Twitter. They will be able to see who are the people that have performed the tasks set, and review demographics and click-through rates.

I do have some concerns with this approach. This pay-per-post sort of marketing may lose its efficacy in the long run, once social media users realize these tweets or posts are paid for.

They may also not appreciate having their feeds flooded with commercial tweets. It’s a possible scenario given how Twitter may be launching it’s own self-serve ad platform for small businesses, taking market share away from Gushcloud and its ilk.

It’s a little like an MLM business — easier to make money if you’re in it early on either as a platform like Gushcloud or an individual Gusher, but it gets much tougher as more players enter the market, causing saturation and market fatigue. The high click-through rates which they proclaim now for their campaigns may eventually see diminishing returns.

Another issue I see is how they are blurring the line between authentic and sponsored messages by attempting to cast their marketing solution as both. I wonder if they are going against the fundamental nature of true virality — that people share content because they genuinely love it and not because they’re paid to do so?

Noting my concerns, Althea Lim, Gushcloud’s CMO, said: ”We believe that there will be a minor percentage of people who are tweeting or Facebook sharing for the rewards. However, we found out via our audience base that consumers on the platform are self-censoring themselves; they are only doing the tasks that they like or believe in.”

I guess her point is that paying people to tweet is okay most of the time since they are likely to retweet only what they believe in, even as they receive a monetary incentive for it.

What she didn’t mention is that people are in fact being incentivized to spread a message which they in normal circumstances wouldn’t. A not-so-popular message, through Gushcloud, may end up becoming artificially more viral. Like pumping steriods. There’s also no telling how users may choose to behave in the future. Would they continue to stick to sharing only what they like?

But — and here’s my big disclaimer — I do think Gushcloud is a legitimate startup trying to solve a real problem, that of helping marketers reach out to consumers in an increasingly noisy world.

I genuinely wish them all the best, and I hope they won’t be adding to the noise.

They do at least have one believer though, and a prominent one in John Wu, the co-founder and former CTO of Alibaba Group. His private equity firm Singhome Fund has invested an undisclosed amount of seed money into the company. John is certainly a good partner to have, given his expertise and connections to the Chinese market.

And since their launch last October, user adoption seems to be coming along nicely, with US$70,000 spent on Gushcloud campaigns and 27,000 users within four months.

So where is Gushcloud going from here?

Althea says that the company plans to build “white label brand pages to further incentivize and engage their targeted consumers.”

In terms of expanding to other markets, they have managed to engage several Malaysian celebrities to use the platform, and are even setting up an office in San Francisco.

They’ve also attended the latest SXSW conference. Said Vincent Ha, co-founder and CEO: “Most of the agencies that we spoke to validated the Gushcloud idea. Some where even surprised that such a simple idea of rewarding users for marketing actions weren’t executed in a way like Gushcloud”

In addition, the company has plans to enter Indonesia in May, and Australia before the end of the year. By 2013, they hope to push into the rest of Asia – China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Philippines and Thailand.

I’m genuinely curious how Gushcloud will do as they expand. It’s certainly a good test case of whether this pay-per-post model could work — along with their Silicon Valley brethrens, of course.

Recently, I was invited by the incubator JFDI.Asia to deliver a talk entitled “That Thing You (Forget to) Do” (inspired loosely from Tom Hanks’ movie “That Thing You Do”) on best practices of product development, management & marketing. Following up from part one, this article focuses on two fundamental aspects of product marketing: distribution and public relations.

Update on Post (3 May 2012): Video of the talk in JFDI Asia – credits to JFDI for recording it

How start-ups should view product marketing

There are two important questions to answer, whether you are a founder or an employee of a start-up. What’s the mission and vision of the start-up? How do we communicate the product to the customers so that they know that we are solving their problem or fulfilling a latent or present need in their daily lives? The questions are fundamental because it focused on the why and not the how of products.

So, in order for a product to go to market, it needs to overcome two barriers:

How will your customers hear about your product?

This is the awareness problem in product marketing. To solve this problem, you can either engage mainstream or social media, build a story around your start-up and then get the message out in the market. A lot of times, most people conflate this with the distribution, which is in fact the next question:

How do your customers access or buy your product?

This is the distribution problem in product marketing which the team within the start-up have more control. It involves the team working out what sales channels and distribution centers your product should go on. For example, the iTunes app store or Android market is a distribution channel for mobile app developers to sell their apps to customers.

The same can be said of software as a service (SaaS) platforms where a team selling web services can harness as a possible distribution point for their web products. Another aspect of the distribution problem is the strategic partnerships your startup build with a large multi-national company which are usually not within your control and depends on how much the big company really needs you.

Product Marketing: PR and Awareness

The first rule to doing product marketing is that you should never associate public relations with vanity. Whether it is a social or mainstream media site, the objective is to associate the message you want to propagate about your business to the potential customers. Everything else is immaterial.

Hence it is not sensible to do a machine gun approach to send out press releases to bloggers or journalists and expect them to cover you. It is essential for start-ups to work out a media plan that goes concurrently with the product development process. For example, you might want to do a soft launch of your mobile app in order to acquire feedback for improvement from early adopters.

The objective is to grow users, and hence the article must provide a link for potential users to download your app. The message should be about how the app from your start-up solves either a problem or need from customers.

Why should you stop there? You should continue to match the roadmap of your product development to your media engagement plan. So, every press release must fulfill a business objective about the product. Once you understand the process, you should also construct a list of the media you want to engage.

By the way, do not wait till the product is launched and then engage the press expecting them to want to cover you. Everyone in the press is busy but they want new stories. So you should build relationships before that. Where do you meet these people? Usually, you meet them during conferences and networking events.

Usually, people from the media are friendly and you should build rapport with them. Do not expect them to paint you in a fantastic light, and sometimes you need to provide the angle for them to cover you. Work with the people who understand your start-up, and don’t be offended if they don’t respond to you immediately. One important rule is target who you might want to cover you from a publication. For example, in SGE, you can contact our editor directly to let us know about a story.

The difference between Asian and US press is that the former is more friendly and does not attempt to be edgy when they ask you questions. Usually, Asian start-ups can get shaken with aggressive questions from the western press.

You should just answer what you can and politely decline if the questions are too controversial or an attempt to push you to provide confidential information. You don’t need a media trainer but make sure you have a FAQ made for the entire team whenever the press tries to probe about the start-ups.

The next thing is to build up your social media assets and used them to propagate your message. Having Facebook and Google Plus pages, as well as a Twitter account and a LinkedIn page will suffice (read: Minimum social media assets businesses should have). If your business is location sensitive, have a FourSquare location page will be vital as well. Sometimes being cheeky and creating an image that propagates an internet meme might help to draw customers to your website.

Some advice on engaging the press. You should use your discretion in how much you want them to know. If they are trustworthy, you might want to let them know certain confidential stuff but with the understanding that they are off-the-record.

Finally, just remember, PR is building awareness. There are cases where a company gets heavily featured in both mainstream and new media but it saw no conversions to customers coming to your site to buy the products. So, you need to make sure that you are engaging the correct channel to find your customers.

If you are building an app for people who like extreme sports, getting tech blogs to write about you will not get you the customers. You might want to find the influencers or tastemakers of extreme sports to help you spread the word.

Product Marketing: Distribution

Distribution is the other part of product marketing which most start-ups in Asia do really badly. The reason is that they often conflate press to bringing customers to the site or download the app. Hence, from now onwards, you should make sure that these two issues are separate. Here are the few things which you need to ask yourself in working out your distribution channels:

What is the platform and delivery process that allows you to distribute your product among users in a quick and robust way?

If your native mobile application is a paid app and requires a lot of downloads with a good payment mechanism, you should look at the apps store platform where most of the apps are making the most money.

If you are distributing the app for free, you might want to make sure that you get an app store platform that can reach out to many users quickly. You might want to figure out how to get to the stage where your app is on the featured list of that apps store.

The same rule applies to web services. You can distribute your product through web service providers. If you have a fantastic web service that complements a web browser, the question becomes, “should you write a browser extension such that you can distribute your service through this browser?”

Accessibility is an important rule when figuring out distribution. If you are using a payment platform, you should try to do within 2-3 frames so that the user can easily purchase your web service or download your app. Similarly, working with strategic partners (larger MNCs) will be similar. You should find out how they can add value to you before becoming part of their offerings.

It’s great PR to work with big companies but if they are half-hearted in delivering their services, you might want to reconsider because getting a strategic partner requires you to fulfill tough and stringent service-level agreements (SLAs).

One more thing I want to share about distribution is the firehose strategy: Should you create an API to allow 3rd party developers to help you distribute your service quickly? It really depends on the nature of the businesses.

You should create an API to market your presence and increase user growth, as well as to avoid spending time and effort to maintain something that does not solve your business objective. But do avoid the mistakes pointed out by this article when building APIs for 3rd party developers.

Product marketing helps your company to build up the awareness and distribution of your product to users. As for how to measure the metrics, iterate and manage the product, we will leave it to the last installment of the series to discuss that. Meanwhile, you can look at the slides for reference:

Image credit: LladyYas

In the modern world, in whatever business you are running, social media presence has become part and parcel of life. Most start-ups and some major corporations that have experimented with social media and now reaping benefits in customers engagement, management of PR crisis and announcing new initiatives.

So if you want to enter the new world of social media, what are the social media assets you really need?

The good news is that most of these assets are free and setting up is relatively easy, the real challenge is the management of these assets.

In this post, I will provide a list of minimum viable social media assets you can’t do without.

Twitter accounts & lists

A Twitter account is good for conveying announcements and news about your company. Some companie,s like Starhub, deploy Twitter for customer engagement. Whenever you have major announcements, you should be able to tweet and get friends, evangelists and champions of your company to help you spread the word.

Customer engagement is a slightly trickier and requires the person who handles the account to be able to make tactful comments and be empathetic to the needs of the customer. With social media, it’s easy to get into controversy.

In the case of some businesses that are location or offers specific, you should probably create two twitter accounts: one for announcements, news and offers and the other for customer engagement. Do remember that Twitter does not allow user names (or handles) to be more than 14 characters.

Some companies use their Twitter accounts to create Twitter lists of their employees and seperate them into different departments. It is not a bad idea and allows customers, potential strategic partners or employees within the organization to communicate in real time.

Of course, if you want to do that, make sure that you have a clear policy for your employees on how they should conduct themselves on the social network.

Facebook Pages

With 800M+ members on Facebook, Facebook Pages are now essential for companies and brands for engagement. Facebook Pages have allows you to post updates of your companies (similar to Twitter), put up thoughts and opinions about products to drive customer engagement, poll your Page fans to do some market research and receive feedback from them.

Some organizations have built Facebook apps that integrate with Facebook Pages easily to allow more interactivity between their fans and the brand or organization. The good thing about Facebook Pages is that you can allow multiple admins. You can also interact with the Page while taking on the identity of the brand.

Google Plus Business Pages

If you have a Facebook Page, you should probably have a Google Plus Business Page as well. Why is it important? Google Plus is the default social network for Google now and your Google Plus company and brand page will ensure that you are not left out of the powerful Google search engine.

The Google Plus Pages works similarly to the Facebook counterpart. In addition, you can create Google Hangouts, which are live group video chat sessions, for your community as a means of engaging them.

LinkedIn Groups and Pages

LinkedIn is probably the best tool for corporate recruitment, but what’s the easiest entry step?

First, create a company group and page and get people to follow the latest updates of your companies. In a LinkedIn company page, you can post potential job opportunities and also announcements of your latest product launches, news about your company and also providing some industry updates as a means to engage professionals within the same industry.

In the case of LinkedIn groups, you can use it to conduct discussions with professionals and people around your industry and also share some recent news within the industry. Nevertheless, depending on how you control the group permissions, you act as a facilitator for members within the same group to build relationships with each other and set up potential business opportunities.

Top Image: Denis Dervisevic

Keith Ng at GameMaki brought a Angry Bird plushy on stage and challenged the audience to put away their mobile games for real world challenges. He asked the audience to join the game by taking a picture with a DEMO friend and put it up on the GameMaki app, which allows people to see what interesting challenges are taking place around them and easily join in by snapping a picture of the completed activity.

Businesses, sports teams and everyday people can create their own games and casually engage customers or challenge their friends.

There hasn’t been many takers though. Perhaps everyone at Biopolis Way is just too busy to take the time and compete. I, for one, am determined to win!

Wildfire presenting at DEMOAsia

Christoph Zrenner, founder of Singapore-based start-up Wildfire, began his perfectly polished presentation by telling the audience that Coke Zero causes cancer — or at least that’s what they say online. He pointed out that whether it’s true or not, once an idea gains traction and goes viral online, it’s nearly impossible for a company to change the conversation.

He was joined on stage by his co-founder and brand manager Benjamin Duvall. Together, they explained that their product InfluencerForce helps companies by scanning online conversations and alerting and engaging passionate customers when an inaccurate message starts to spread.

Why would someone care that  several million people tweeted that Coke Zero causes cancer Christoph pointed out that people like to be right and share their opinions. More importantly, InfluencerForce makes it fun to to engage in the conversation and interject the truth. InfluencerForce rewards active influencers for their contributions, recognizing key influencers who tell everyone that Coke Zero doesn’t cause cancer (and you’re dumb to think it does).

The Social Expert Panel

Teamie took a different approach to gamifying real life. The Singapore-based team wants to make online learning social and fun. The product aggregates video, documents and opinion polls into a place where students can interact with their homework and each other. Teamie rewards students for asking and answering questions or submitting their homework before it’s due.

Teachers and parents have access to a detailed analysis of the student’s performance, making it easy to identify students that may need more attention.

With this layer of gaming built in to so many companies, it’s important to ask – what really motivates people?  As the expert panel pointed out, rewarding customers with badges worked four years ago but a simple badge no longer carries the same weight.

GameMaki, Wildfire and Teamie all depend on a community of users who want recognition for their participation.  Gamification is a way to add to the user experience but won’t keep people around forever. To be successful, each of these companies must concentrate on building their customer base to find out if people really want life to be a game.

Interview with Teamie:

Here are several key points summarized from the full report.

1) Social networking has emerged globally as the activity which Internet users spend the most time on.

Social networking sites are reaching 82 percent of the global Internet population, or 1.2 billion users. The activity now accounts for 19 percent of time spent online, making it the most popular activity on the Internet. That’s a huge jump from a mere six percent in 2007. Social networking is followed closely behind by search/navigation, retail, and communication.

2) East Asian countries spend the least amount of time on social networks.

While social networking is almost universally a popular activity, cultural differences do matter. While Asia Pacific are seeing high penetration rates for social media, its Internet users are spending only 11 percent of time online on social networks, or slightly under three hours a month.

In contrast, Latin Americans are the marathon runners of social networking, clocking in at 28 percent and over 7.6 hours of monthly usage. Israelis have emerged as the most prolific social media users, at 11.1 hours. In Asia, Philippines is the only outlier occupying the global top ten.

While usage patterns differ across continents, what is similar is that women consistently use social media more than men, or 1.5 hours more per month to be exact.

3) Older people no longer form the minority of social media users (with the exception of Asia).

It used to be true that social networking is a young person’s game. But older people have caught on in the past 18 to 24 months. In fact, the aged 55+ segment is the fastest growing among all age groups.

However, this trend is far more noticeable in North America, Latin America and Europe than in Asia Pacific, where old people still lag behind. Penetration rate among those above 55 in the Asia Pacific is only 59.8 percent against a global average of 79.9 percent.

Internet users aged 15 to 24 are the most prolific at utilizing social media, while those above 55 are the least regular.

4) Facebook continues to be the most dominant social network.

Facebook reaches 55 percent of Internet users worldwide, accounts for three-quarters of the time spent on social networks and one in seven minutes of total time spent online. Facebook is the leader in 30 out of 43 individual countries tracked by comScore in the beginning of 2010, and has since gone on to capture pole position in six more countries.

Today, there only seven markets where Facebook is not the largest player ?– China, South Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Brazil, Poland, and Russia.

5) Microblogging tools like Twitter, Tumblr, and Sina Weibo are gaining traction.

Today, Twitter reaches one in ten Internet users globally, hitting a growth rate of 59 percent over the past year. It has emerged as an important tool for ordinary citizens to report on important events like the Japanese Tsunami and the death of Steve Jobs as well as organize political movements like the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Sina Weibo, the tenth largest social network worldwide, is the leading microblogging tool in China with an impressive 181 percent growth rate in the past year. Tumblr, in 12th position, grew by 172 percent over the same period of time. These two tools have registered the strongest growth among the top 20.

With microblogging tools registering the strongest growth, it’s likely they’ll become an even more dominant force in the social media world for years to come.

6) Among the top 20, US-based social networks are attracting vast non-US audiences.

The top four social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Profile, and LinkedIn — all have the majority of their users coming from outside the US.

7) Google+ surged to 25 million users faster than any social network in history, but future success remains uncertain.

Google+, which is Google’s own social network, was off to a fast start. It reached 25 million global unique visitors in under a month, and now currently has 65 million users, or five percent of the total social networking audience. To put things in perspective, Facebook took 36 months while Twitter needed 33 months to reach the milestone. However, while sign-ups have certainly increased, Google+ weekly visits have actually dropped to 1.16 million in August from a peak of 1.8 million in July.

8) In the US, social networks lead in online display ad delivered, but lag in terms of spending.

More online display ads are now being displayed on social networking sites than anywhere else, capturing one quarter of US ad impressions. This mirrors the rise in social networking as the predominant activity for Internet users. However, advertisers are still not paying a lot for display ads in social networks, accounting for only 14.8 percent of total US online display ad spend.

This is according to an international study done by Experian Hitwise, a global information services company, which surveyed a grand total of eight countries. Besides Facebook data, the study also surveyed social media usage in general.

Coming in second is New Zealand, which averaged around half an hour, while Australians are third, hitting 26 minutes and 27 seconds. The next best Asian country is India, at around 20 minutes, or seventh place.

None of the other Asian countries with high Internet penetration rates, like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, were studied.

The finding that Singaporeans are world-beating marathoners in social media should come as no surprise. A joint study by Google and Ipsos showed that Singaporeans are the most prolific mobile social networkers among 30 countries.

On a per-capita basis, Singaporeans are very adept at using Twitter, beaten only by the Americans.

They are not a lone island when it comes to social media usage, of course. In general, countries in the Asia Pacific region have been found to connect with others online quite extensively.