Twitter

What's the best social media platform for business? I get hit with this question a lot, and while there's no perfect answer, I thought it might be helpful to lay out a few ideas. Define Your Social Media Goals In true marketing fashion, I'll answer the question with a question: What is your social media marketing goal? Obviously, what you are trying to accomplish has a big impact on which platform makes the most sense. Or perhaps it's not so obvious: firms that are not familiar with social media, or use it to play FarmVille, don't always grasp the nuances... Read More >

It might be free to use but that hasn’t stopped the developers of the hugely popular Instagram photo sharing app reaping the rewards. With users being picked up faster than it takes to snap a photo – Barack Obama and Kim Kardashian among them – the company behind the app has just received funding to the tune of $40 million, shooting its total value up to a massive $500 million. Not bad for a startup. The $500 million valuation of Instagram is more than twenty times what it was valued at just one year ago, according to the Wall Street... Read More >

John Flexman, a former HR executive, was summoned to a disciplinary hearing by his employer of the time due to an action he made via the popular social networking site LinkedIn. Flexman, who had harmlessly posted his CV online and registered an interest in receiving information regarding further ‘career opportunities’ was on holiday in America when he was contacted by his employers, RG group, claiming he had breached new company policy regarding the use of social media. Flexman attempted to sue the oil-exploration firm for constructive dismissal; however, the employment tribunal has adjourned to postpone the issue until May.  While... Read More >

[caption id="attachment_31914" align="alignleft" width="250"] 78% of respondents believe that social media platforms would either soon entirely replace other means of customer service[/caption] 88% of consumers are less likely to buy from companies that leave complaints on social media unanswered, a study commissioned by Conversocial revealed. For readers unfamiliar with Conversocial, this is an excellent social CRM and social customer service SAP. With Conversocial, businesses are able to involve marketing, customer care, customer service, and CRM teams in the conversation, and better understand social media ROI. The software helps companies deliver customer service on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks -... Read More >

Social networking has been described as the global cultural phenomenon of the year, and the trend is most likely to grow in 2012, when people will continue to connect in innovative ways, via portable devices that will eventually became "wearable" like Sony's Nextep wrist-cum-holographic computer projected for 2020. It's very likely that Hiromi Kiriki's design will come to a dealer near you way sooner than initially stated, and it will be equipped with everything that makes the trends grow stronger: social media connect, voice activated assistants, apps galore, bonus features, HD cameras and so on. But what's more than certain... Read More >

[caption id="attachment_22136" align="alignleft" width="220"] Uncovering and explaining temporal variations in happiness on Twitter.[/caption] This has been a pretty eventful year by recent standards, what with the protests and uprisings in the Arab world, natural disasters like the Japanese earthquake, and the economic gloom in the west casting an ugly shadow over it all. But while this year may have been eventful, it certainly hasn’t done much for our level of happiness, according to a new study by the University of Vermont which links our moods with our tweets on the social networking platform, Twitter. Researchers at the university believe that Twitter... Read More >

New York based Josh Brown,vice president of investments at Fusion Analytics, uses Twitter and StockTwits to boost his trading profits, Reuters reported. He is not the first, nor the last, the news agency informed, and the trend may continue to grow. In fact, we predicted the power of news media and social media as influencers in trades a long time ago, when we reviewed SENSEnews, a handy online service that can predict how online news and social media content affect stock prices. In this light, the move by many money managers to mine social media for content relevant to their... Read More >

Every day we are coming across many different articles and other interesting content. Often it can be a hassle to tweet all these things at once, as you don’t want to overwhelm your followers with all these tweets. In recent weeks a new Tool emerged which makes the publishing of tweets, well spaced out in intervals over the day, as simple as possible. It is called Buffer and allows you to put tweets from anywhere on the web into your “Buffer”. From there, tweets are sent well spaced out over the day. As the recent add-on to their feature set,... Read More >

OkCupid, an online dating site, has compiled a rather unusual list of charts about sex, including one of the first infographics ever made, and some Twitter-based infographics that showed that frequent tweeters have shorter real-life relationships than everyone else. OkCupid, a Time Magazine favorite apparently, and described as The Google of online dating by The Boston Globe, published the charts on their research and insights blog, OkTrends. The site compiles OkCupid’s observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of user interactions. The declared purpose is to explore the data side of the online dating world. The effect – media buzz,... Read More >

UberTwitter, the popular Twitter client for mobile devices, was forced to change its brand to UberSocial today, after a long dispute with Twitter over trademark infringement, and other issues in violation of several provisions of Twitter's terms of service. UberTwitter was not the first, nor the last Twitter client suspended by the popular microblogging service. In fact, every day, Twitter suspends hundreds of applications that are in violation of their policies, and UberMedia has been warned that failing to make the necesary changes would have such repercussions in the past: We've had conversations with UberMedia, the developer of these applications,... Read More >