Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round-up (11-03-2010)

March 12th, 2010

Welcome to another instalment of the ‘Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round-up’.

1. First off this week we have the newly announced Google Apps Marketplace. The Marketplace is full of useful additions/plugins to your existing Google suite of tools.

2. Giga Tweet is a live Twitter counter of how many Tweets have been sent and the ongoing number of Tweets being sent right now - interesting stuff!

3. A lot of noise can be heard about Foursquare. FourWhere is a mashup of both FourSquare and Google maps. What they say: “FourWhere helps you find places visited by Foursquare users, and read any comments/tips they made about these places”.

4. Base Kit allows you to create hosted websites from .psd files for £10.00 per month. So if you’re hot at designing in Photoshop but not so hot at coding, this could be a good alternative.

5. What do you suggest is a visual tool that uses Google’s suggestion feature. Type in a word or phrase, and then follow it to the answer. Very cool!

Social Media post of the week: 35 Great Social Media Infographics

SEO post of the week: How To: Search Engine Optimize Your Facebook Fan Page

More of the same social media sites and tools next week!

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Twitter stats don’t tell the whole story

March 11th, 2010

As you might have seen, an interesting Twitter stat has been doing the rounds recently: ‘21% of Twitter users are active users’ ,a stat that you’re likely to see regularly from now on.

This originated from the Barracuda Labs 2009 Annual Report, which was released earlier this week, revealing data from Twitter trends and tracking, as well as Web threats and trends, and email spam and viruses. The report is also available at the company’s portal.

The study looked at around 19 million Twitter accounts, and started with one assumption: an active or “True” Twitter user has at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and had tweeted at least 10 times.

Looking back, the data shows interesting usage trends and reveals that 26% of Twitter users had 10 followers or more by December 2009, while only 40% were following 10 people or more, in fact 51% of users were following less than five people.

The report also confirms that 34% of Twitter users hadn’t tweeted once, while 73% had tweeted less than 10 times. That means nearly all of the tweets on the social network were coming from about 1/4 of the user base, and it is these users that the report refers to as ‘power users’.

So, are these revealing stats going to spell the end of the myth that Twitter is going to be the new communications platform for all? Hopefully, because i doubt even the quarter of Twitter users that are using it consistently thought it was going ever to be that.

If you’re not trying to make money out of Twitter, the importance attached to the amount or frequency of Twitter’s usage should not be as important as one might first assume.

The most important element of Twitter is the conversation, not the brand, not the technology and not the potential, but the conversation. That conversation doesn’t just happen on Twitter, it happens across many social networks, messaging platforms, via SMS, even in email and person-to-person, and Twitter allows part of that conversation, bringing communities together that choose to share information with each other.

If Twitter stopped tomorrow, the conversation would still continue, and my bet is the majority of Twitter’s ‘power user’ base, that Tweet the majority of the conversation, use other platforms to continue the conversation in other ways.

So is this the end of Twitter and the Twitter success story? No, Twitter is a massive success story, but it has been blown out of proportion in some ways. It is, as the research says, a valuable tool for ‘power users’, but in the world of social media we all have freedom of choice, we all communicate in different ways and some of us will find our preferred community on Twitter while others will look elsewhere for a better fit in terms of relevance. However, the one common theme is the conversation, and the ability to share; knowledge, content, news, excitement, sorrow, whatever.

We’ve seen the ‘no-one reads blogs’ headlines before, which again i don’t believe to be the case. Of the millions of blogs only a small percentage are useful and interesting, and those blogs are well utilised, the others quite simply are not. Does that make blogs any less useful though?

What we are seeing is Twitter maturing, as the study says, Twitter recently reported it had reached approximately 50 million tweets per day.

In the beginning of 2008, Twitter was growing approximately 0.31% per month. By November 2008, that growth increased to 1.95% per month.

After December 2008, Twitter’s growth exploded from nearly 2% per month, rising to approximately 4% per month, before finally peaking at nearly 20% per month in April 2009. Growth appears to have normalised, dropping back to 0.34% in December 2009.

We can also see more evidence of Twitter users finding their feet. A full 79% of users had less than ten tweets in June 2009, but that number dropped to 73% by December. 80% of users had less than 10 followers in June 2009, but that percentage dropped to 74% by December.

So, little by little, Twitter is finding its place in the role of conversation. It’s not going to change the way we communicate radically, but it is helping us to communicate more effectively, with those in our chosen community.

Posted in Blog, Blogging, Content, Digital communications, Digital media, Journalism, PR, Social media, Social networking, Trends and research, Useful resources | 1 Comment »

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Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round-up (05-03-2010)

March 5th, 2010

Welcome to another instalment of the ‘Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round-up’.

1. Stickr will let you post stickers on the Web. You can leave notes all over the Internet that track your activity, or that of your friends.View the video for a further overview.

2. Collecta #trends gives you top real-time trends right off the bat. Each trend gives you the latest photo, story, comment and update.  Collecta can also be used for searching your own trends.

3. Trends is another real-time trending platform, which is more visual than Collecta and offers a good selection of topics to navigate. On clicking a trend you are presented with a wealth of information.

4. Toobla. What they say: “Get Visual. Easily collect, enjoy and share your favourite content, bookmarked websites and everything else. Toobla helps you do it.”

Here is an example.

5. Thumboo - simple to generate thumbnails via a submitted URL

Social Media post of the week: If you missed it, here’s the link to the BIG social media quiz

SEO post of the week: Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Site Audit – Part 1 Anatomy of a Hands-on SEO Audit – Part 2

More of the same social media sites and tools next week!

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The BIG Social Media Quiz

March 2nd, 2010

The Liberate Media team have put a Social Media quiz together for you to enjoy between meetings or when ever you get some free time. The quiz consists of a whole load of social media questions, well 50 to be  exact. Some questions are challenging, others you will answer easily.

Once you’ve completed the quiz, add your score to the comments section, and the winner will be crowned the ‘BIG Social Media Quiz expert’, which is much more meaningful than being a social media expert!

To pass you have to score 70% or more, and no cheating!

Enjoy.

The Liberate Media BIG Social Media Quiz

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Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round-up (26-02-2010)

February 26th, 2010

Welcome to another instalment of the ‘Weekly Social Media sites, tools and posts round-up’.

1. Social Media comparison is first up today. Simply type in two competing search terms and see who comes out on top. After running the report you get a whole heap of visual results to show you who is top dog. Check out Apple Vs Microsoft.

2.  Google Fight is a fun little keyword search tool. Add your two keywords and let them fight to the death, watch the fight sequence to see who wins or has the most search results. OJ Simpson vs Hommer Simpson.

3. Manage Tweets is a new tool that gives you an easily detectable way to find out who you follow, who isn’t following you back and which inactive accounts you follow. Recommended.

4. Social connector for Outlook is Microsoft’s attempt to make email more social. Currently it only supports LinkedIn but there are more to follow soon including Facebook. For a more in-depth overview and installation instruction check out the How to Geek blog.

5. Flavors.me is a great idea, and here’s what they say: “Flavors.me allows anyone to create an elegant website using personal content from around the internet. Ideal for personal homepages, lifestreaming, splash and microsites, celebrity fan pages, commercial promotion, brand marketing – and everything in between”.

My Flavors.me page links from my Twitter profile - check it out here.

Social Media post of the week: The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today

SEO post of the week: 7 Must-Read SEO Articles For Every Wordpress Blogger

More of the same social media sites and tools next week!

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