Tl;dr: Do not touch Facebook. With increasing lack of understanding I notice the use of Facebook by MindArk, Planet Partners, as well as players with good intentions. It seems like they still follow Facebook's and "social marketing" agencies' propaganda as well as the public opinion that the use of Facebook is somehow beneficial. Unfortunately that's wrong. With 99% probability the use of Facebook does not help but hurt MindArk, Planet Partners, and Entropia Universe in general. If you have long term stats or even well-founded projections suggesting the opposite, then I'd be happy to deposit 1,000 bucks , if not, well, then there actually should be no reason at all to use Facebook, and then, simply believe me, Facebook is at first an advertising platform, all it's functionality and features are designed to deliver as many ads as possible to as many people as possible. The longer people engage the better, the more page impressions the better. Facebook as such is a competitor for any other media that expects users to regularly spend at least moderate shares of their free time using the media. People that browse Facebook for hours/week won't spend the same hours playing Entropia Universe. Worst case scenario is the use of Facebook's Social Plugin... It is one of Facebook's most terrific weapons and misjudged features. Essentially it's a Trojan horse, a worm, a virus, designed for the sole purpose to direct traffic from websites to Facebook. And no, traffic won't come back anytime soon, Facebook's other features will ensure that. Really, alone the implications attached to it make it a loosing game, example: when using it do you have to change your "cookie"/privacy policy in order not to illegally make your website available in the European Union? (and yes, the Client Loader is a website too). There is no use-case that makes the active use of Facebook beneficial for a Planet Partner. Companies can generate revenues by using Facebook but it needs the right product, the right audience and a lot of expertise. The latter is quite expensive, so it only makes sense with potential margins way higher than what could be expected for the small world of Entropia Universe. What about share/like buttons? Ok, but greatly overrated. With potentially viral content for the right audience to like and share they can be a nice tool, needs a lot of expertise, not in the small world of EU, see above. Are other "social networks" that bad too? Not necessarily, needs expertise but less than Facebook, so... maybe. Btw, compared to other "social networks", Facebook is considered the place for the "old, poor and dumb". Because compared to average users of other social networks the average Facebook user is in fact older, has a lower formal education and lives in a household with less income. One of the reasons why experts think Facebook has passed its Zenith. Within specific social groups there are also significant migrations from Facebook to other social media, not really among gamers though, but they've been underrepresented on FB ever since . So, planet partners, stay away from Facebook and approach social media very very carefully. Need free consulting - get in touch. And a little advise for players: If you like keep your personal private interaction with friends on social networks, but at any rate support the hard working people who actually produce (editorial) content, discuss it on the original sites and contribute to those sites. Otherwise, one day there might be no more content at all, what to like and share then?
well spoken by an admin of what appears to be a slowly dying forum that turns off a lot of folks since it is offline about once a week leaving no content for us or search engines to find... want more folks here, make here be here 24/7 like your competition. As far as fb goes, you may be right for pps, but for MA social media is going to drive compets.
Regarding EntropiaPlanets... Agreed, the random outages are annoying, we need to solve that. Unfortunately the actual reasons are hard to track, but meanwhile we know it is related to automatic backups being made at the times of the outages. There are multiple support cases with the hosting company and we hope the issue will be solved soon. The stats say EP isn't dying, in fact the traffic on EP is very slowly but steadily increasing ever since. A relatively big number of people is reading EP but unfortunately a relatively small number is posting. And then, unlike the other forums EP is not a business but a fan forum sponsored by a handful of people (while PP forums are paid from players deposits). And in fact the EP crew has been helping and continues to help a couple of the other forums. Hence no "competition". Considering EP has no support from MA or a successful planet in the back, I think it came quite far: Switched to state-of-the-art software years before the others, more features than any of the others, produced more editorial content than any of the others, since you mentioned search engines - also better SEO than any of the others, and last but not least in true community spirit EP content is available under a free license. I think there's no other EU community project that actually does more for "the community" than EP does, ultimately it's just an offer and EP very much will become what "the community" makes of it.
Sigh, just realized the official EU website now has a FB plugin too, on the most important spot on the front page... And to maximize contra-productive effects they seem to increase their efforts to post important information on Facebook only. Really, it's quite simple when you are a business. If you have analytics suggesting you will be generating profit from specific social media activities, then do it and track whether or not the expected revenues are coming in. If not, don't do it. Activities based on unfounded assumptions, hearsay, or a hype from a couple of years ago are not a good idea... Argument of authority required? I've studied media science and psychology as well as media production and made a living as a consultant for media businesses with exactly those challenges...
