A few months ago we blogged about introduction of upcoming ‘Orkut Promote’ feature on Orkut and also explained in detail regarding the Monetization plans undertaken by Orkut. We also undertook a growth comparison of Orkut vs facebook in India. Now Orkut has announced that it has started rolling out ‘Orkut Promote’ to its audiences although Indian audiences may have to wait for few months to start using the feature.
What is it that ‘Orkut Promote’ does?
- It allows users to create self-promotion campaigns on Orkut. It also adds the ability to easily create promotions using text, photos from your orkut albums, and YouTube videos
- It has built-in ‘spread’ and ‘trash’ features that let you pass on the promotions you like to friends and delete the ones you don’t so that they never show up for you again
- The promote feature has inbuilt analytics to measure audience responses to it. It can record total views, clicks and deletion generated by promotions.
Check Out the Video Below:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JNgKNRSgm0
What does it means for marketeer’s?
Orkut is the largest social networking site in India and has very good presence in latin markets such as Brazil. The main difficulty faced by marketeer’s in exploiting Orkut channel till date was due the lack of viral and sharing features. This promotion tool can thus help to bring brand owners back on Orkut as users or even on communities.
This features also opens up great source of incoming traffic for publishers too as they were solely relying on tools such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg etc. Publishers and marketeer’s targeting audiences in Emerging markets were desperately looking for such options as Orkut commands a majority share of social networking space in those countries. This opening up of promotion channel will attract marketeer’s back to Orkut although the benefits are yet to be seen at initial stages.
What does it mean for Orkut?
Almost Any Internet Giant dependent on web presence wants a pie of social networking space be it Microsoft-facebook deal, Google – Myspace partnership or recent acquisition of Friendfeed by Facebook.
Orkut despite its majority share in markets like India understands the growing dominance of Facebook (registering a growth of 10 in per cent M-o-M in India alone)in its territory. MySpace has largely been laggard outside U.S and has even seen falling dominance even in home market. Orkut’s growing reverence could also be gauged from its many feature introductions like Friends updates and status updates in recent past. ‘Orkut promote’ seems to be their last resort on taking over Facebook at the same time attracting marketeer’s back to its fold.
Orkut Monetization plans has not seen much success also due to its closed door policy in terms of accessibility and virality. This promotion feature thus allows Okrut to promote advertisements in line with Social promotion boosting interest from users and orkut can use the same ‘trash’ approach in targeting advertisements. Orkut also needs to embrace small advertisers added with couple of more feature addition to maintain its market share.
