The WSJ has a report that Facebook is considering using Twitter style hashtags to help people stay up to date with breaking stories and key conversations on its social networking platform.
The paper also notes that Facebook has been using hash tags by stealth since its acquisition of the Instagram image sharing service which uses them
According to the paper hashtags are currently being tested so that users can track conversations about specific topics.
When a new app or social media service launches, one of the first questions to pop into our heads is: What are the potential opportunities for brands and marketers?
The latest service to hit the spotlight is Twitter-owned Vine, a short-video service app which allows you to share six-second videos on Twitter and Facebook.
What’s so great about it you say? Think Instagram for GIFs. Ah yes that got your attention didn’t it. The launch of Vine comes at a time when social media is turning increasingly more visual and could therefore become very useful to marketers.
Soft drinks giant Coca Cola has become the latest brand to embrace the power of storytelling and content marketing. At the end of last year the global brand re-imagined their corporate website – it had not seen an update since 2005 which is practically Medieval times in digital terms - by turning it into a content portal, taking on the look and feel of a magazine.
Coca-Cola Journey offers something for everyone when it comes to content – environmental issues, sport, health and recipes.
Over the past year we’ve seen a noticeable shift in which type of content people are likely to engage with. Social media is not all about cat videos and gifs, but there has been a rise in popularity of images and videos and the social web is now more visual than ever.
Popular platforms like Instagram and Pinterest let people share snapshots of their everyday lives and aspirations with just a few buttons. But how can brands leverage the power of visual social media?
On a personal level you might not want to see all your old tweets since the beginning of time (or since you signed up), what with all those snarky remarks about X-Factor (or any other reality shows you may have been watching) or reminders of just how much you love cute cuddly animals that live online (try an image search for ‘God of the internet’ and you’ll see what I’m talking about).
But having the option to download the entire archive of tweets linked to one account can very useful for brands.
There are some very interesting stories circulating around the web about the latest tweak that Google has made to its search algorithm. In case you aren’t familiar with the dark arts of SEO (search engine optimisation) every now and then Google updates the way in which it ranks links in search queries. Recent updates, named Panda and Penguin, have by and large favoured mainstream publishers who produce unique content over publishing farms that produce low grade content or re-purpose other publisher’s content – which is generally good.
Most of us will easily be able to name the top three social networks worldwide based on their number of users. As this infographic from Silverpop shows, Facebook tops the list with over 1 billion, Twitter lands on second with 500 million while Google+ snaps up the third place with its 400 million users. Next on the list are the big networks in China, Weibo and RenRen.
Some fairly seismic news from The Guardian this morning. Anthony Sullivan, group product manager for Guardian Core products at Guardian News & Media who was speaking at the Guardian Mobile Business Summit 2012 conference in London, revealed the website’s latest usage figures and they make fascinating reading.
Sullivan reported that at certain times of day more people are accessing the website via mobile devices (phones/iPads/tablets) than they are via traditional computers.
New research by Socialbakers has found that a branded Facebook post will get half of its reach in the 30 minutes after it was published. This means choosing which time to publish your updates is even more important, especially when considering the recent fall in Page reach due to changes to Edgerank earlier this autumn. The data also shows a dramatic drop-off in reach after the first 10 minutes, the time in which posts get one-third of their total reach.
With only 10 minutes to capture the attention of your Facebook fans, is your brand’s content calendar up to date?
Facebook released an update to its algorithms – known as Edgerank – earlier this year which was aimed at strengthening the importance of engagement with Pages. This firmly put the focus back on good content by making updates feature more prominently on a user’s Newsfeed the more it was interacted with. But since the changes many brands have experienced a considerable drop off in the reach of their posts, making marketers question if it was part of Facebook’s strategy to get brands to pay for using the service through advertisement and sponsored stories.
