Even locally, the need for a social media strategy to build a community around a brand or an initiative is clear. Recently, through Techzim Answers and our Facebook page, we gathered data on the most popular Facebook pages in Zimbabwe. The meaning of ‘In Zimbabwe’ here is quite loose; we just wanted those that primarily [...]

Note: There was a significant development to this story just before we published it. We decided to put the development as an update below the story. This has happened before and will probably continue to happen as long as the unscrupulous lot walk amoung us. The way they operate is simple; they observe a successful [...]

This social media thing didn’t work for H-Metro. Last month, we reported that H-Metro, an extremely popular tabloid in Harare, was faced with the difficult problem of dealing with a more popular impostor. On Facebook that is. The fake H-Metro Facebook page had 11,379 fans then while the real one was struggling for attention, only managing 3,854 likes, well less than half their impostor enemy.

It must be extremely frustrating being an H-Metro fan on the internet. You never really know if you’ll be able to access the tabloid’s website on any given day. The website, www.hmetrozim.com, goes up and down like a yo-yo. We get tips in our mailboxes numerous times from readers tipping us the website is down. We don’t check each time anymore.

Zimbabwe’s popular H-Metro tabloid newspaper H-Metro has two Facebook Pages. The bad news (for H-Metro) is that the most popular one, and the most recently updated one at that, is the fake one. The fake H-Metro Facebook Page has 11,379 likes, while the real one has just 3,854 likes.

The Daily News website is down. Again. Why they pulled it down is anyone’s guess right now. SW Radio Africa reported yesterday that the editor of the paper, Stanley Gama, had told them the website had been restored online yesterday after a month of downtime. The reason for the downtime given by the editor is that they are “making further developments and modernising in line with modern websites around the world”.

Barely a day after we posted that the NewsDay was down, we got notified on Twitter that HMetro (www.hmetrozim.com) was suffering a similar problem. The website has been hijacked by hackers.

Here’s what you see if you open the H-Metro website right now: