Following last Thursdays SES London, I thought I’d summarise my favourite tool discovered from Thursdays social media conferences. There were a number of Social Media monitoring and management tools mentioned throughout Thursday but there was one tool which every single speaker recomended people use for their clients. This tool was Socialoomph, there are many features included in both the free and paid for package including:
- Scheduled Tweets & Facebook Updates
- Manage multiple accounts in one interface
- Find new Twitter Followers with keyword searches
- Automated Twitter Lists
- Automatically integrate your Blog with your social media
- Track your clicks with the in build URL shortening system
I could go on with may more features, but the above represents a number of my favourite features. Most of the basic features including scheduled tweets and the url shortening system are completely free to use, if you wanted to upgrade your experience this can be done for a small fee of $30 a month.
There were also a number of other tools mentioned throughout the events including Radian 6, Raventools.com, Social Mention, Tweetdeck and more.
Although everybody is talking about social networks, search engine optimisation (SEO) is still a priority for most companies. As seen in a recent study by Forrester, which shows that most companies that operate online will use SEO as their main strategy.
In this sense, the data indicates that at least 85% of the companies surveyed will use use SEO as part of their plans to optimize campaigns across search engines for the current year 2011.
According to experts from Forrester, in a climate of economic recovery, brands and companies are looking for options that involve lower costs and can help improve their visibility and online marketing. SEO strategies can take a bit longer to see results when compared to other marketing strategies, but Forrester says that with a well planned and executed search engine optimisation strategies most campaigns can achieve positive results.
This new SEO revolution, comes also influenced by new trends from online consumers. According to a recent study by UserCentric users prefer organic search results versus sponsored results.
Following the protests in Egypt that led dictator Hosni Mubarak to resign from presidency, now comes the celebrations. The gratitude to social networks and other Internet tools for the role they have played in the revolt is evident. Proof of this has been the idea of an Egyptian father who named his newborn daughter “Facebook”.
Although not yet clarified the future of Egypt, people are celebrating the fall of Mubarak thanks to their tenacity and their exemplary behaviour. And the celebrations go on to thank the Internet and the different networks that served as a way to encourage the protest and keep it alive at all times.
Although these statistics were released before the end of the 2010, I wanted to remind/inform you all, of the ever growing importance of Social Media, and it’s effects on all frontiers.
According to Emarketer, integrating Social Media with PPC & SEO is Top of the to do list for companies in the US (and I’m sure the UK have the same prerogative). Link Building programs and CMS processes round out the top 3 for SEO, while local search advertising and managing the impact of Google instance make the top 3 for PPC.
The rap artist Luppe Fiasco launched his album a few nights ago in the U.S…. pretty standard you may say, but the way the album was promoted was far from standard. His album was projected by lasers on to a wall showing a rather fancy QR code.
Just in case you didn’t already now, a QR code (quick response code) is a specific matrix bar code readable by barcode readers and camera phones. The information within the code can be text, URL or other data.
The fans who flocked to see Luppe Fiasco were able to point their camera phones at the enlarged QR code and download a preview of his highly anticipated album. The event was promoted through many social media sites including Facebook & Twitter, which turned out to be a huge success and opened the door for new ways in which you can incorporate new age technology and social media to promote music, movies & more.
Over the past few years, Mainly due to the introduction of Social Media and the ever increasing/ever popular Mobile Technology/Smart Phones, the normal office working hours of 9am to 5pm seem to be coming to an end.
Before we were taken over by the social media websites Facebook, Myspace, etc and having the internet on your phone… we lived in more basic times, where the only functionalities your mobile phone had were calling, texting, playing snake and making custom ringtones (awwwhhh, those were the days!), and the only social media website available was SixDegrees.com.
Now there is the constant demand to be connected all the time, whoever and wherever you are. With mobile technology advancing all the time, the modern day Joe Bloggs is walking around with a super computer in his/her pocket. Giving us all the ability to stay constantly in touch with work emails, social updates, work schedules & calendar appointments.
I think there are many pro’s to having a smart phone and having the ability to actually work without being at your desk, but it also increases the demand from the client, because they know that you no longer leave everything behind you when the clock hits 5!
So there is no question of the convenience and overall accessibility the smartphone gives us, and you all know what the offerings are from Social Media by now. But what effect is all this having on the modern day office worker? Well, although some office’s still stick by the 9 to 5 regime, there are a lot of savvy, new age online companies out there that are looking at changing to a more 2011 style of life… Does this mean we can look forward to coming in to work at 11am every morning? Possibly. But as I have discussed throughout this post, the ability to work 24/7 is there for everyone and many workers are obliging, work is creeping in to our social life and our recharge time, let’s just hope our brains can handle it!
9 to 5…. more like 12 to 12!
We hear new rumors about Facebook’s phone. In fact two models will be presented at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, which takes between the 14th and the 17th of February. The manufacturer is HTC, the phones will keep the colors of the social network brand and they will use Android as the operative system.
HTC is the manufacturer of Facebook’s phones, according to the information published by Cityam.com. This page gives as a sure thing the launch of the Facebook phones at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.
The information from Cityam.com tells us that Facebook phones will have in their home screen messages and news from the user’s facebook account. This is possible in part thanks to the Android platform, which will be operating both terminals.
Foursquare geolocation service has grown in 2010 a 3400% and recently reached 6 million users. The company has released an image with its figures of what they called a “a crazy year”, which has been a strong push for this application, despite the launch of Facebook Places.
When Facebook Places was launched many people thought it could mean the extinction of Foursquare, however, in 2010 the company recorded 381,576,305 check-ins.
Much progress has been made to the geolocation service, such as integration of the iPhone with Gowalla or the release of its 2.0 version, and optimizing Foursquare for businesses. The following graphics focuses on check-ins. (more…)
A recent blog post from the official Twitter blog has announced that the record for number of tweets sent per second (or TPS) was smashed over the New Year with the help of Japan. Just four seconds after the stroke of midnight in Japan on New Years day a massive 6,939 tweets were sent around the world, wishing everyone a Happy New year.
Japanese New Year is a very social event with the majority of the country shutting down so everyone can spend the day with friends and family and see in the New Year together. The new record 6,939 TPS is over double that of the previous record 3,283 again set with the help of Japan when during the world cup they beat Denmark.
But Japan wasn’t the only country tweeting their well wishes this new year, check out the following video showing New Year twitter activity across the world in each time zone.
The PepsiCo Brand ‘Mountain Dew’ was the first to stick social signals in ads back in October last year, with a Facebook ‘Like’ button.
Web users were able to “like” Mountain Dew within a banner ad appearing on a host of sites, which automatically alerted their friends via the Facebook News Feed if logged in at the time. Users could also interact with the ad to see which of their Facebook friends already “like” Mountain Dew. This was relatively un-talked about considering how significant the run was and how it will surely affect the future of display advertising.
Brands have been happily gathering pools of social media followers that they can engage with, but can’t effectively track the ROI or value from a social media campaign. Display advertising will give Brands the reach and access to a wider audience, but banner blindness can be a risk (which is why the ROI on a Search campaign is usually greater).
The convergence of the two will mean Brands can get that awareness they strive for whilst growing the social media channel, plus be able to track activity and value. This will give rise to a potentially very powerful form of Internet Advertising as making online ads more personalised can only make them better.
