Will Google Plus Catch Facebook? (GOOG) According to a recently released report on social media usage in December, it hasn't taken long for Google Plus (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) to gain traction. Google has alluded to the rapid growth of its relatively new social platform in the past, and it appears it wasn't just sales-speak. Taking on Facebook (NASDAQ: FB ) , with its 1 billion users and substantial head start, may have seemed like a stretch, much as Google's foray into mobile computing and the cloud did not long ago. But like with its Nexus phones and tablets and cloud computing solutions, Google's proving once again that it's not to be trifled with.
The results are inIt was early October when word began to spread about the popularity of Google Plus. Not only was the service growing by leaps and bounds with users -- Google put the number at 400 million, 100 million of which were "active" -- advertisers seemed to love it. About 55% of online advertisers named Google Plus a top five site for marketing, behind Facebook and Twitter. The future of Twitter is robots tweeting at each other.
Bank accounts are out, smartphones are in. In 2011, some 2.5 billion people in the world were “unbanked” (pdf), as the lingo goes, according to the World Bank. By 2016, more people will have bank accounts, but in regions like the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, even more will have smartphones, research and consulting firm Analysys Mason predicts in a report today. As we’ve written before, the increasing availability of cheap smartphones in emerging markets is one of the most important consumer trends today. Smartphone penetration should reach 46% in Asia by 2017 from 23% in 2012, and 29% in the Middle East and North Africa from 7% last year. The International Data Corporation forecasts that 70% of all smartphones shipped will be destined for emerging markets by 2017. And more residents had smartphones than credit cards in Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
Yet these new smartphone users don’t all use their phones the same way as their counterparts in more developed economies. The future of Twitter is robots tweeting at each other. Google chairman Eric Schmidt speaks on March 22 in Yangon. The company has big plans for Myanmar, and they’re closely linked to the country’s plans for mobile. Myanmar’s President, Thein Sein, has set a goal of 80% mobile-phone penetration by 2015, from current rates of 9%. With internet penetration as low as 1%, and fixed-line telephony penetration in the single figures even in big cities, mobile networks will be the only way the vast majority of Myanmar’s 50 million people can get online, and will serve as the main communications infrastructure for a modern information economy, including banking, media and civic services.
Sources at Google told Quartz about the following services that the company plans to launch over the next few months. Google.com.mm. Burmese-language support integration. Google Play… and Google Wallet? Business services. The future of Twitter is robots tweeting at each other. Twitter is full of weird stuff none of us ever notice because it mostly just looks like spam or nonsense. But if you look closely, as some have, you’ll find spies using Twitter to communicate with each other in code, environmental sensors broadcasting useful data, a toaster with 2,000 followers and an artificially intelligent chat-bot that debates deniers of climate change. Twitter is seven years old today, but in some ways programmers have only begun to explore its utility.
That’s because Twitter has, like email, become a medium unto itself. As Jason Fried, co-founder of 37 Signals put it, email is a kind of API—that’s programmer-speak for a way to interface with a piece of software. Twitter has similar potential—it’s not an “open” standard like email, but it has other features that recommend it, mainly that instead of being person to person, it’s a truly broadcast medium. This means Twitter is useful as a kind of universal platform for getting machines to broadcast their status. Avoiding Common Social Media Mistakes.
Why do we use Social Media? | Smthree's Blog. In case you missed it, Pew Research just cam out with a pretty impressive study on our Social Media habits. More specifically, this study is less about how we use social Media and more about why we use it. You can see the complete study here but some of the highlights have a bearing on how you approach your Social Media marketing: Two-thirds of Americans on-line are involved with at Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or MySpace. (Why MySpace is included is beyond me…wait, because Justin Timberlake is bringing MySpace’s sexy back). 67% say the main reason they use Social Media is to stay in touch with friends.
How does this affect your Social Media Marketing? First, recognize the power of friendship. Second, create the kind of content that your followers will care about. Third, you are ALWAYS talking to one person at a time. You constantly hear about “humanizing” your brand. Finally, deliver on expectations. Only 9% are looking for new friends. Thoughts? Steve Allan, Social Media Specialist SMThree.
Overview. By Maeve Duggan and Joanna Brenner A late 2012 survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project shows that young adults are more likely than others to use major social media. At the same time, other groups are interested in different sites and services. In the case of Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr, these are the first reportable survey readings by Pew Research allowing comparison of whites, African-Americans, and Latinos.
These readings come from a national survey conducted between November 14 and December 9, 2012 on landline and cell phones and in English and in Spanish. The results reported here come from the 1,802 respondents who are internet users and the margin of error is +/- 2.6 percentage points. A demographic portrait of users of various social media services. The Danger of Assumed Ubiquity in Social Media. I was talking to my graduate communication management class earlier this week about deciding on if and how to use various communication technologies. A text we were discussing stressed the importance of weighing the difference between benefits and costs to determine the value of a communication technology. One point I made to them was to beware of assuming that because something is popular with you and your friends, or seems to be getting a lot of buzz in the tech media, that it is the best medium to reach your intended publics, be they employees, customers, investors, B-to-B partners or others.
I called this "the danger of assumed ubiquity. " In other words, just because a bunch of public relations people are raving about the latest social media platform, don't assume that it is everywhere, that everyone uses it, or more importantly, that the specifically segmented public you want to reach (you DO segment your publics, right?)
Is using it. Are You A Social Media Nonprofit Manager Looking for Your Peers? #npsmpeer. Social Media Is About Engagement With A Purpose and How To Measure It. London police kills. Facebook’s Timeline organ donation app goes live in Ireland today. Facebook said today its new organ donation tool app for Timeline has gone live in Ireland today. By clicking a new health and well-being button, users can declare their willingness to become an organ donor, share that information with friends and family, and ultimately help save lives. Thousands of Irish people carry organ donor cards in their wallets or handbags but without the knowledge of friends or family. People in Ireland who wish to become an organ donor simply need to tell a next of kin. Facebook's Timeline tool will make it far easier for individuals to share their wishes with family members.
Raising awareness is crucial to increasing organ donation rates, which currently stand at just more than 100 people annually. "Small acts of kindness happen every day on Facebook but we hope that our tool will use the power of friendship to save lives," Facebook's director of policy Simon Milner said. Saving lives through organ donation John Kennedy. Five tools for measuring Pinterest analytics - Media Measurement. In the last few months, the social networking site Pinterest has risen to prominence and it’s easy to see why Pinterest offers users a unique sharing experience.
Using Pinboards, users can convienently highlight content (including websites, pictures and even inspirational quotes) by pinning them to their Pinboards. Unsurprisingly, the site has become an addictive and fun place to discover new content. For businesses, the real advantage of Pinterest is the volume of referral traffic to external sources, outranking even Google+, Linkedin and Youtube combined! We’ve listed five analytics tools to help your business get the most out Pinterest… Analytics Pinterest monitors a basic selection of analytics for its users, however if you’re interested in recording more in-depth analytics, there seem to be two main tools you can choose to help you find decipher some the data: Pintics Pinerly If you do not fancy Pintrics, Pinerly are about to release a much antipicated own Pinterest analytics tool.
10 Free Twitter Tools for Analysis, Trends, And Insights. With over 36,000 tweets being made per minute, there are loads of conversations about you and your brand taking place on Twitter. To keep up with this data, we are now witnessing the emergence of numerous tools, applications and services which enable you to analyze your twitter account and keep an eye on the competition. Here we look at 10 tools which can be utilized by advanced users for conducting focused research about brands and the tweets related to them. Provides interesting tidbits for individual twitter accounts such as a graph to display the number of tweets made in a month. The other graphical inputs shown by tweetstats are the average percentage retweets (RTs – displayed according to the users you retweet most often) and average percentage replies from your total tweets. Is a very nice graphical tool for individual twitter accounts to find out the volume of tweets made at a particular time of day for the entire week.
No-Cost Social Media Listening Tools. Think you can’t afford to have a good social media management system? Think again. Budget should never be a deterrent in monitoring the chatter around your brand. Listening to online buzz should be part of everyone’s day whether you are an enterprise level operation or a one-man shop. Even though the market is saturated with low cost and high cost listening tools, you can put together a pretty good basic listening dashboard with no-cost tools. Hootsuite Hootsuite is the best place to start. In this screen shot of my dashboard above, the tabs I have are along the orange highlighted line. Google Alerts I have a number of Google Alerts set up to be delivered to my email daily. Social Mention Social Mention is good for real-time searches. RSS Readers I recommend setting up a newsfeed that you can peruse on a daily basis. Finally, here are a few reasons why you should monitor your brand online: This is just a short list of free tools you can piece together for a good monitoring system.
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