You can read more about our motivation for building Conversocial here.

Over the last few months, many of our customers have been using the beta version of Conversocial to help manage their fan pages. We already have several paying customers. Next week, we’re launching version 1 – the culmination of our work over the year, the feedback we’ve received, and what we’ve found is most important for our customers. We’ll be demoing it at Facebook for Business, an event organised by Tempero, one of Conversocial’s early customers. Numbers are limited – you can sign up here. If you don’t manage to come, don’t worry – get in touch and we can arrange a demo of Conversocial and a free trial.

Tempero will be discussing their moderation packages for Facebook, and we’ll also have a raft of speakers from integrated agencies, and Facebook themselves. We’ll be sharing some of our own internal research on what type of posts create the most real engagement, and sharing the results during the event (a blog post will come after!).

Follow iPlatform on Twitter here.

An idea devised by Dare Digital and brought to life by iPlatform, the app allows users to get their very own unique England squad shirt and number, which is shown in a giant squad gallery (which includes the real squad, and lots of celebs who’ve signed up for their own unique shirts!), and can be shared back to their Facebook profile.

Join the Squad

Within the first day an overwhelming 30,000 users had joined the squad and had their own unique shirt number.

Stephen Fry tweeted about it, Campaign Magazine rated it 5 stars and due to the vast amounts of money spent on alcohol after many late nights of working on it, iPlatform may now own the rights to our local.

Stephen Fry, loving the app!

Over 77,000 users now have their own individual shirt name and number. As this will be the closest that any of us mere mortals, oh and Walcott, get to wearing the England shirt, long may it continue to grow.

By engaging properly with your fans in the feed, you build up their trust and interest in what you have to say – so when you have an application, or a video, or a new product you want to promote, they’ll listen; and if it’s good, they’ll share it with their friends. Without this trust, it doesn’t matter how many fans you have – they’re not listening.

Twitter has taken the lead in companies’ minds when it comes to having conversations with followers. It’s a great platform – and because conversation is the only thing you can do there, it’s easy to understand why companies have jumped into it. But, the great mass of your customers are on Facebook. The availability of the Facebook platform and engagement ads has meant that a lot of companies have focused purely on its potential as a broadcast medium – but the newsfeed and status updates were invented in Facebook first, and the amount of comments and engagement can dwarf what you get in other platforms. We believe that it’s time for companies to start really engaging and having conversations with their customers in Facebook. This is especially important for companies who have already invested in large pages with lots of fans (it’s likely that you have customers asking you questions right now, and you’re just ignoring them) but it’s also a powerful medium for all companies, big or small, to interact with their customers.

We want to help companies have these conversations, and manage them in an effective way. It can be difficult for companies to keep track of all the comments they are getting, especially if more than one person has responsibility for responding and engaging back. To help address these problems, we’ve been working on a new software as a service product, Conversocial. Conversocial pulls in every user interaction on your fan page or pages, and makes it easy to manage your responses and actions, individually or as a team, with tools to make your day to day management more efficient – including keyword tracking and email alerts for flagged content.

You can read more on what Conversocial can do here.

Conversocial is already being used, by numerous customers, to manage fan pages with almost 10 million fans between them. Over the past couple of months our early customers have been helping us test and scale. We have bold plans for where we want to take Conversocial, but we also believe in following an agile process – we release basic features early, and focus on learning what you actually find useful and use, and then use that knowledge to improve.

If you are managing your company’s fan page, and struggling to keep on top of what comments you’ve already read or responded to, Conversocial can help you right now. And if you’re not managing your page yet – you should be! Get in touch now.

We’ve been working on a solution and we’re releasing it to the world: pyFaceGraph. It provides an easy and flexible way to access the Graph API, which won’t break as Facebook add new capabilities. At the moment, the client itself contains only 72 lines of code. It’s been released into the Public Domain via the Unlicense, so you’re free to use the code however you like.

The Graph isn’t the only part of Facebook’s new API offering; we plan to release OAuth 2.0 helpers for Django and WSGI applications, to make federated authentication with Facebook as simple as possible.

The overall traffic to social networking sites has also grown continually over the last three years. Social networks and blogs are the most popular online destination, followed by online games and instant messaging.

These numbers show once again how relevant Social Media is for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of the global population.

If you want to find out how we can help you build and deliver successful campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

With it you can challenge your friends to do something to help raise money. Users choose a friend and a challenge to “spur them into action”. All the money raised is used by Comic Relief to help transform the lives of poor and vulnerable people, both at home and abroad.

The iPlatform can help you develop campaigns  and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in finding out how we can help, get in touch now. Follow us on Twitter here.

The study, by Rice University, examined the dollar value of Facebook fans on the sales of the cafe chain Dessert Gallery (DG), by setting up a Facebook fan page and measuring the effect on customer behaviour between fans and non-fans. The page was updated regularly with pictures, news and promotions.

Over the three months of the study, the research found that customers who became a fan of Dessert Gallery on Facebook became more loyal throughout the period. Although they spent the same average amount of money in each visit as non-fans, they visited the cafe 20% more often and were more likely to recommend the cafe to friends, and showed a stronger emotional attachment to the company.

It’s possible that simply the act of publicly declaring themselves a fan created a positive feedback loop with how they felt about the company, and this had a real affect on sales and recommendations. This shows the potential for all brands in increasing their fan page activity, even on a most basic and simple level.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in finding out how we can help, get in touch now.

The iPlatform delivers marketing campaigns and competitions in Facebook and other social platforms. If you are interested in reaching and increasingly part of the population who spend time in the social networking website, get in touch now.

With its 24.3m users, the UK is still leading – with an impressive 40% of the population on Facebook. In comparison, Turkey, France and Germany have rates of 26.3%, 24.3%, 8.1%.

These numbers show once again how relevant the Facebook platform can be for marketing campaigns that wish to reach a growing part of these countries’ population. If you want to find out how we can help you deliver successful marketing campaigns on Facebook, get in touch now.

With 400 million users - 50% of which log in the network website every day – increasingly using the site as a tool for sharing stories with their friends, this may not be a surprise. However, we can say this also reflects the continuous implementation of Facebook Connect over the Web – more websites are sharing content into Facebook now than ever before.

These stats show how important Facebook has become for your business. If you want people to be telling their friends about your products or your content, you need to be either in Facebook, or using Facebook Connect!

Get in touch to find out how we can help.