Keep your facebook page updated using scheduling tools

[Update 16.June.2012: Facebook has add post scheduling feature for page admin. Refer comment below by Victor Stanescu]

Running an engaging facebook page for a brand requires consistent postings and engagements (two way communications). While we can’t automate the interactivity part, but we can look into status/post scheduling tools to keep our page active. Below are two Facebook Post Scheduler that my company is using, we use it to plan and schedule our posts across the day and month. It helps us in planning and providing quality information to our followers and at the same time create a sound brand name for us. Here’s the tools.

 

1. Octopost

Octopost is the first tool we discovered and use to schedule our posts, it’s an facebook app where you can reach at https://apps.facebook.com/octopost/. Free version is available with 10 post limitation per month. While the unlimited version cost only USD 5 per month. On top of the familiar Facebook-like UI, we found its analytic part - “Engagement Insights” widget particularly useful to analyse and evaluate your post performance. This widget shows stats like "Total Responses – in like, comments etc” to your post.
Octopost went extra mile to help you with your finding content to post with the “Browse for Ideas”, such a great idea and convenient tool but hell, it’s a bad idea to use it! The content available in the directory are populated with international content and far not niche to engage our audience (unless you are running some sort of international news fan page). Kudos to Octopost for coming up with such a great tool and hope they can further improve in the “Browse for Ideas” widget and make it a unbeatable product.

 

2. Postcron

Postcron is another tool recommended by a friend of us. Like Octopost, it’s available Free with 10 post per month limitation. Their app can be found on http://postcron.com/. Their UI looks tidier and load faster as compare to Octopost. It also allows scheduling to twitter too . It has a good “Search Feature” which allow you to search through your post but it has an annoying “Time Zone Request” prompt. The app prompt for your time zone every time you login to the page which i feel quite annoying.
Feel free recommend your secret tools in the comment area. Happy facebook-ing!

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Started a CSR project with a group of students – melaka3.com

Three months back, we started a project with a group of students. They were hired into the company to help setup and run a CSR (corporate social responsibility) project of my company – Melaka3.com

Melaka3.com is a brain child of these students and me, we were challenged to kick start a CSR project with limited funding (from my company) and technical support from the staffs. We came out with a few ideas and decided to go with Melaka3.com project because we think that it’s a sustainable and achievable project to run given our limited resources. So, what Melaka3.com is all about? and why it’s a CSR project?

Melaka3.com is a non-profit website to promote Melaka as a tourism spot, we share travel-related information and review interesting places around Melaka that we have personally visited. We thought that this is an interesting project to work-on given all of us been staying here for at least few years and each have some special places or recommendations to share (it’s a good excuse to explore Melaka too). :P We believe we could help promote Melaka as a must stop place for tourist travelling to Malaysia (a lil’ Melakanism here :D), and we believe we can do this efficiently given the IT expertise available in the company (which i soon found that we need more than IT expertise, for example, we need designer and marketing talents. :( Well, let’s deal with this later).

These are what we have done so far:

1. Melaka3 home page – www.melaka3.com 
2. Melaka3 social medias:
• Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/Melaka3
• Twitter Page: https://twitter.com/#!/melakapromo
3. Sponsored JCI IAB 2012 at Dataran Pahlawan Melaka.
4. Discovered and review a cafe with lots of good feedback from our followers.
5. Give away a 2GB DDR3 Ram to our Facebook follower (a second hand RAM we got after upgrading some of the laptop in the company) via a simple competition.
6. Sponsored to students to participate in a beauty contest.
7. Made 71 blog posts (yup, we know our blog posts are not in good quality but we are working on this. yes, please trust me, we notice.)
8. Sending out weekly newsletter to our subscribers about the latest happening and promotions in Melaka.

I personally hope this baby will grow and help contribute to Melaka tourism. Kudos to the dedicated and talented who help setup and running this project; they are Edwin, Teck Chia, Shin (aka Monkey), YS Hon, Sang Heng, Jaclyn, Matthew, Yeishyan, and Tian Lee. And thanks to our followers.

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Fourth Business Venture–Blogmakeover.net

Blogmakeover.net is my fourth business venture. It also marks my second business partnership with Chris. What Blogmakeover.net provides is basically service to design and to convert a blogger into a business website with customize themes, widgets and features.

Not many realize the power of Blogger as a platform to build your online business website. Blogger is a blogging platform (owned by Google) and used by more than 1 millions users all over the world. With minor tweaks here and there, some design works plus some plugins (from us), Blogger can be a great platform for small business owner. Leveraging on the blog editor tools, business owner (without programming knowledge) can share their products or services online. With a click of a button, the contents are published online and with the built-in social media buttons, it can be shared to the world via Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and etc.

The whole idea of using Blogger as a business website came up when a cousin of mine (Jenny, which happen to be our first client) came to me for a web design job for her home bakery business. She showed me how she is using Blogger back then to take orders and upload photos of her handmade cakes. Then, the “light-bulb” moment struck me when she asked if she could use Blogger as her business website since she is familiar with it and it’s free to use. Without giving her any specific answer, I brought the idea home and dive into research immediately. It didn’t take me too long to find out that blogger template are editable but not many knows how to do it as there is no documentation provided by Blogger. Most of the information available online are compiled by enthusiasts who have putted in hours of trial and errors.

It took us one month to learn the basics of blogger template programming code (and yes, we are still learning it today) and another one month to design and code Jenny’s website (www.intoxicaketed.com). We have came a long way and are now able to complete a job on average within 7 working days. Have completed 12 templates up to date and hopefully we can grow the list in the future. We love to demonstrate how Blogger can be simple, cost-effective and FUN to use as business website.

You can our latest portfolio in the link below:

http://www.blogmakeover.net/search/label/blogmakeover

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My new blog–Connecting the dots…

Have decided to buy myself a domain for a long time. Finally, i made it.   You can find my previous blog here – jeeshenlee.wordpress.com (yes, i will not longer post there but i do drop by occasionally to answer comments).

So, this is my new personal blog where i share stories about my entrepreneurship journey, codes that i wrote at work and circuits that i build at spare time.

I will try to keep it simple and manageable by posting with different tags:

• Venture: about my entrepreneurship journey.
• Codes: obviously, about programming codes. I’m a .NET developer.
• Circuits: about electronics and circuits that i built at spare time.
• Downloads: i do write small apps and made it available for downloads.
• Ramblings: notes that are important to me but not others.

Well, that’s all for my first post – connecting the dots and setting up a new path ahead.

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