After Facebook’s repeated attempts to take Orkut’s User base in India and Brazil, Orkut has pulled up its socks and started launching some new features. One of the immediate measures was to stop Facebook from letting import friends from Orkut.
How can the guys at Google remain silent, so they started something called Orkut Promote. A tool that will be important for various Advertisers as well as Blog owners. According to Google:
- Orkut Promote lets you and your friends share YouTube videos, photos, or text with each other, so you can easily spread word of a funny video, a cool picture, or an upcoming event.
- You can reshare your friends promotions, and they can reshare yours, so the information can spread throughout orkut.
- Once you’ve promoted something, you can track how many people have seen your promotion, and how many of them have shared it with their friends or trashed it under the my promotions tab.
A Viral Advertising feature and that too for free is something new to social networking.Although Facebook does have an advertisement system but it is paid. Here is how the Orkut Promote Screen will look. You can add a Youtube Video or an album or any text.
Promoting Videos
The Promote will be displayed in this screen besides the profile. As the service is not live yet to many people, it will take some time to appear besides some profile.
orkut Promote Preview
Statistics and Monitoring : You can also keep a track of how many people have seen your Promotes and can share or trash an Orkut Promote amongst your friends. You can also check out who has promoted your promote and how many times it was promoted. It will also tell how much time it was trashed too.
Monitor your Promotions
My Verdict: It is an effective tool as you can see that our first promote reached a view of 5 people within few minutes. This inspite of the fact that the promote feature is accessible to selected people. You have an option of Deleting or Stopping a promotion too.
How to access? If you want to access your Promote Screen, try pasting this URL in the Address Bar http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Promote . If that does not work, wait till you get the invite from Orkut.
So Readers what do you think about this free Viral Advertising feature?? Do you think this will be very useful for you or you will pass it as just another feature of Social Networking? Let us know in the comments.
Rohit Langde is a part time blogger who is pursuing degree course in Mechanical Engg.
cool feature. Definitely have to check it out..
Yah, alteast now Orkut has to pull up its socks and improve a lot in the lines of promoting or marketing users stuff. Unlike Facebook n others its more like a private social network that has very few in-built options that support sharing and broadcasting to friends. And I hope this promote feature especially helps bloggers to promote their blogs in a better way among their friends n profile visitors.
Thanks for the valuable update karthik.