Mashable. Most brands, by now, recognize the power of social media and understand it's not just a passing fad. In fact, if Facebook were a country, it would have the third-highest population, behind China and India. And more people these days own a mobile device than a toothbrush. Erik Qualman, author of "Socialnomics" and the creator of the popular video series of the same name, has released a new clip filled with fascinating social media stats and how marketers are using this to reach out to consumers. While brands seek out their "Oreo"-moment with real-time marketing messages, they're now looking beyond just Facebook and Twitter. With the rise of Vine, companies are using the platform to promote their own products instead of relying a 30-second commercial spot, which makes sense considering the average human attention span is 7 seconds (just one second less than a goldfish).
Did you know 20% of the terms typed into Google have never been searched for before? Have something to add to this story? Google Hangouts for Android Gets Merged Conversations, Contact List. Google today updated its Hangouts for Android app with a trio of new features. You can download the new version now directly from Google Play. If you’re not seeing the update yet, that’s likely because it’s a gradual rollout. Google engineer Mike Dodd says the new version will be available “this week” and the Android account on Google+ says “over the next few days” so you should get it soon enough. While the changelog for version 2.1 isn’t on the Play store just yet, Dodd has shared it on Google+: Merged conversations: SMS and Hangout conversations with the same recipient are now combined into a single conversation. You can control whether you want to send a message via Hangouts or SMS with the flip of a switch, and different message types will be easy to tell apart in the conversation.
Google released version 2.0 of Hangouts for Android in November 2013. Yet today’s update is nothing to scoff at. Top Image Credit:Justin Sullivan/Getty Images. Mashable. The newest addition to LinkedIn's growing collection of mobile apps is here: one for SlideShare, the company it bought for $119 in 2012. This is the first mobile app for SlideShare; it allows users to scroll through a feed of slideshows and presentations uploaded by those they follow and connect with. The feed on the Android app is personalized, meaning users can subscribe to certain categories like tech, finance, or news and politics. To view a slideshow, a user can swipe left or right to move between slides without ever leaving the feed. Users can also save or like slideshows, then come back to them later. Almost half of LinkedIn's traffic comes via mobile (41%), and the company expects that number to reach 50% sometime in 2014.
The SlideShare app is LinkedIn's fifth app, and operates along the lines of LinkedIn's news reader app, Pulse, which also surfaces content based on categories and publications that users subscribe to. Breaking Up with Facebook: Where Are Brands and Young Users Going? “We’d love to say ‘It’s not you, it’s us’ but it’s totally you. Not to be rude, but you aren’t the smart, funny social network we fell in love with several years back.
You’ve changed. A lot,” wrote delivery service Eat24 in its breakup letter with Facebook. Eat24 is one of the many brands reevaluating its relationship with Facebook as the site continues to make changes to the algorithm that affects organic reach. That means that even if your brand page has a million fans, only around two percent of those fans will see anything you post… unless you pay for it, of course. Shifting Facebook to a fully paid platform will most likely also shift the types of content you’ll see on Facebook from brands. In short, we’re about to see a whole lot of ads. Of course, paying to boost Facebook posts is not in every company’s budget, especially for smaller business or non-profits. Young users are looking to other platforms via iStrategy Labs So where are all the young people going?
Meet ThinkUp: Your personal social media guru. If you’re a heavy Twitter or Facebook user, you know just how many social media tools there are out there that promise to help track your activity’s performance online. There’s TwitterCounter (owned by The Next Web) for tracking how many followers you have, Klout for giving you a social media ‘rank’ and a plethora of other tools that provide similar functionality. ThinkUp, however, is not like any of them. ThinkUp is a social media analytics tool that attempts to give you meaningful information about how your social media accounts are performing, rather than just measuring arbitrary ‘ranks’ or follower counts, it analyses a number of metrics to give you useful data on ways to improve your social media skills. The team behind ThinkUp is made up of ex-Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani and entrepreneur Anil Dash, who set out to build the tool over two years ago.
Think of it as a dashboard for an overview of your social media performance on a daily basis. Twitter's New Web Profile: This Week in Social Media. Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention. What’s New This Week? Twitter Announces New Look for Web Profile: “The new web profile lets you use a larger profile photo, customize your header, show off your best tweets and more.”
“If you’re new to Twitter, you’ll start with the new profile.” The new features will be rolled out to everyone else over the coming weeks. Facebook Rolls Out New Look for Ads: “This updated look will make right-hand column ads more visually consistent with the ads that appear in the news feed.” “For advertisers, this offers a simpler way to create ads and an enhanced creative canvas on the right-hand column of Facebook.” “At the top of the page, you’ll see all of your current groups in one place.
Vine Adds Messages: “Now you can privately send Vine videos and text messages to your friends.” What do you think? InShare391. Social Media Frequency: How Often to Post to Facebook, Twitter. 2.1K Flares Filament.io 2.1K Flares × Subway has this sandwich with Fritos on it. I know this because their commercials play constantly on my TV and computer such that I nearly have the ads memorized. Every time their commercial airs, Subway is flirting with the fine art of frequency. How often is too often to share with your audience? Social media marketers face the same dilemma.
We want to connect with followers without driving them away. If guessing is required for finding the optimal frequency, then at least we can be making educated guesses. Strike the balance between informative and annoying Good content can be found in a multitude of places, and once you find it all, the next question you may ask yourself is how often you can share. Our post on curating content sparked this exact question, asked in the comments by Ryan Battles.
I’ve started tweeting content from Buffer, ranging from 3x per day to 7x per day. Informative versus annoying. How frequently Buffer shares to social media. The Best Length for Every Online Content. 18.7K Flares Filament.io 18.7K Flares × Every so often when I’m tweeting or emailing, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much? I tend to get carried away. And for the times that I do, it sure would be nice to know if all this extra typing is hurting or helping my cause. I want to stand out on social media, but I want to do it in the right way. Curious, I dug around and found some answers for the ideal lengths of tweets and titles and everything in between. Many of these could have been answered with “it depends,” but where’s the fun in that? Solid research exists to show the value of writing, tweeting, and posting at certain lengths. The ideal length of a tweet is 100 characters Whom should you trust when it comes to advice on the ideal length of a tweet?
Twitter’s best practices reference research by Buddy Media about tweet length: 100 characters is the engagement sweet spot for a tweet. Creativity loves constraints and simplicity is at our core. Here is an example of what we mean. “Full Disclosure” Shutdown Raises Questions About Email Mailing Lists In The Social Media Era. Editor’s note: Tom Cross is Director of Security Research at Lancope, where he works on network behavioral anomaly detection technology. He is also the cofounder of MemeStreams, a collaborative bookmarking platform and a Signal Media subject matter adviser. In the days before Twitter, Facebook and even Friendster had arrived, a great deal of social interaction on the Internet occurred via email mailing lists. The closure last week of an information security mailing list, Full Disclosure, prompted a number of InfoSec professionals to ask whether these lists still have relevance when so many powerful new social media platforms are available to replace them.
The rapid relaunch of that same list under new management has answered that question. The Full Disclosure mailing list is a loosely moderated forum where computer security researchers disclose the full details of vulnerabilities in software products, in some cases before those vulnerabilities have been fixed. Centrality. Moderation. NUS biomedical ethics centre made WHO collaborating centre. SINGAPORE: The Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore's (NUS) Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine has been appointed by the World Health Organization (WHO) as Asia's first collaborating centre for bioethics. The centre joins four other collaborating centres in the world to support the WHO in developing work in the field of ethics and health, in areas such as organ transplantation, universal health coverage, managing non-communicable diseases and advancing mental health.
The appointment will be effective for four years. The NUS Centre for Biomedical Ethics will be part of the Global Network of WHO Collaborating Centres for Bioethics, which comprises key institutions with in-depth and extensive expertise in research into and the teaching of biomedical ethics. They provide expert advice to the WHO and help the organisation in its work of advancing and implementing the practice of ethics in member states. 6 Ways User-Generated Content Can Double Your ROI. Are you soliciting user-generated content (UGC) for your business? Would you like to know how to get the most out of user-generated content? Medtronic Diabetes, which develops and sells diabetes management products, has been soliciting user-generated content since 2012. Their Share Your Story Facebook app has been so successful that it is driving a 2-to-1 return on investment (ROI) for their entire social media program. Read on to discover best practices from Medtronic Diabetes for how to get the most out of user-generated content.
The Share Your Story app prompts users to like the Medtronic Diabetes Facebook page before sharing. Organization: Medtronic Diabetes Social Media Handles & Stats WebsiteBlogFacebook – 150,724 fansTwitter – 12,700 followersYouTube – 272,728 views Highlights #1: Put Customers Front and Center Medtronic Diabetes does not use professional models. Medtronic Diabetes’ first Facebook banner photo, featuring a customer. The company soon realized they wanted a Facebook app. The 15-Minute Social Media Audit Everyone Can Do.
6K Flares Filament.io 6K Flares × The word “audit” deserves more love than it gets. When I hear the word, my mind goes straight to tax season and the manila envelope crammed with receipts and forms that I keep stashed away in the closet. Audits seem to equal anxiety, which is too bad – because not all audits are created equal. A tune-up at the garage is essentially an audit for your car, a check-up at the doctor is an audit of your health. You can learn a lot from regular reviews like these. The same holds true for an audit of your social media marketing. Social media audits matter for everyone Maintaining a social media presence can be a full-time job, which makes it kind of difficult if your full-time job requires your time and attention be spent elsewhere.
On the flip side, there are those of you who actively maintain social media profiles and take great pain to keep everything updated and cohesive. Social media audit checklist Examine your social media profiles Ready? P.S. How Boolean Search Improves Your Social Media Monitoring. Do you search for information on social media? Did you know that Boolean search isn’t just for search engines? Many of the main social networks accept some form of traditional Boolean search operators, as well as their own, to help users identify specific information about content, brand mentions, even other users. In this article I’ll show you how to use Boolean search on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ to get more detailed information from social media.
Why Use Boolean Search? Boolean search can help you get a better idea of what’s being said about your products and services online, especially within a specific niche like an area or topic. Let’s look at how Boolean search works on Twitter, Facebook and Google+. #1: Filter Twitter for Topical Tweets Twitter has a robust search section that uses traditional Boolean search operators. Twitter allows you to use many Boolean search options. In this instance, Boolean search is great for searching specific brand names in quotations. Potential Uses. 4 Ways to Crowdsource Product Ideas Using Social Media Contests. Do you want to take your customer engagement to the next level? Have you used crowdsourcing to gain consumer insight or to choose your next product line? Do you use contests as motivation to get input from your customers? In this article, you’ll discover how crowdsourcing your products through contests on social media will help you deepen customer involvement and increase loyalty.
Why Use Crowdsourcing? Crowdsourcing is a method of getting ideas, content, support or other types of solutions from a group of people. You’ve heard of crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo that allow fans to give financial support in exchange for incentives, so people can complete their projects.
Local Motors helps deliver cars exactly as customers want. Applause (formerly uTest) is a tech application testing site that enables crowd beta-testing worldwide. You don’t have to be a super-innovator to crowdsource. . #1: Ask Your Customers What They Want Here’s an example from a local toy retailer. Your Turn. Happy-mothers-day-google-doodle-marks-mothering-sunday-with-cycling-family-9222589. While Mother’s Day has set dates in other countries, in the UK Mothering Sunday is marked on the fourth Sunday of Lent.
The day's origins lie in domestic servants and apprentices being given the day off by their employers to visit their mother and the rest of their family. The occasion is also linked to customs dating back to the 16th century, when it is believed that people would visit the ‘mother church’ – the main church or cathedral in their area - in the build up to Easter. Read more: Quotes about a mum's loveThe best films to watch with your mum Giving a bouquet of flowers on Mothering Sunday is said to come from children picking newly-blossomed wild flowers and violets on their way to church. Mothering Sunday was also known as Refreshment Sunday, as the strict Lent rules in some denominations were relaxed.
Families were therefore allowed to indulge briefly on Mother's Day, and would eat Simnel which was customarily topped with moreish sugar violets. Twitter Photo Tagging: This Week in Social Media. Klout Snapped Up by Lithium Technologies.
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Google+ Facebook Updates News Feed for Pages: This Week in Social Media Social Media Examiner. Relationship Marketing, How to Build Meaningful Connections that Lead to Business. Reddit. Q4 2013 Referral Traffic: Facebook Up, Pinterest Up, Twitter Down. How Brands Can Leverage Holidays for Their Social Campaigns. YouTube. Tumblr. WordPress. Video and Film. Pinterest. Why We Pin It? Takeaway Lessons from Pinterest. Newspaper to Put All Reporters Through Social Media Boot Camp.
Social TV. Twitter Tests 'Recommended Accounts' Feature. How Social Media, Mobile Are Playing a Bigger Part in Healthcare. Mobile networks. Top 10 Social Media Marketing Posts: This Year in Social Media. Glam Upgrades Social Network Builder Ning With Premium Ads, Mobile Web, And A VIP Version. How Employers Really Feel About Social Media [INFOGRAPHIC]
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SEO. Kony 2012: Over 7 Millions Views in Two Days. Beyond Facebook: The Rise Of Interest-Based Social Networks. On Youtube. Social Media Consultant Gone Bad… Real Bad! Social Network for Social Media Marketers: This Week in Social Media. Twitter.