Back in May the New York Times put real people behind Twitter feed as an experiment to see what would happen. It only tried it for a while before it reverted to mostly auto tweets, which is what many news organisations do including the BBC. Until now that is.

Today the BBC is implementing a new system after auto tweeting its headlines for years it will be putting its editors behind the tweet wheel and getting them to tweet during day time hours. It makes all the difference. Read More »

Twitter have launched a new feature this morning which adds even more context to tweets. Since #newtwitter launched a year ago, the micro-blogging network has been building on the original simplicity of 140-character posts to provide context of conversations and media contained in tweets.

This update reorganises the layout of the tweet as displayed in the timeline, placing the ‘retweet’, ‘reply’ etc buttons at the top along with an ‘Open’ link, clicking which reveals the timestamp and ‘sent from’ data. At the bottom of tweets containing compatible media, there is now a ‘View media’ link which expands a module like the one above, showing an Amazon.com product. Read More »

UPDATE – A follow-up to this morning’s announcement about Twitter and the X Factor Simon Cowell, the show’s creator and one time social media sceptic, has come out and said in the New York Times that “The only powerful people now on TV are the people on Twitter and Facebook.”

Bold stuff indeed. The comment underscores how important TV is to Twitter and how it is working to expand its content team to work with media firms. Read More »

According to the UN’s telecommunications agency, The ITU, the number of worldwide internet users has reached over two billion people. Just imagine how many slices of cheese on Ryvita that lot gets through.

Add the two-billion internet users statistic to a quote from science writer Matt Ridley that ‘The internet is the latest and best expression of the collective nature of human intelligence’, and it would seem to hold exciting possibilities for digital marketing that uses ‘collective brain’-based insight. Read More »

Very interesting post from Dan Zarrella who has been analysing where in a tweet is the best place to put the all important link. Will it be a surprise to learn that we have all been putting it in the wrong place?

It was for me. Most tweets you see, if they include a link, include the link at the end of the tweet. That always seemed the natural place to put it right? Apparently while that might feel intuitively correct it is not the best place for it go to at all. Read More »

Politicians up for election are well served by having a Twitter or Facebook account, according to a new study, which found the use of social media during an election race can double the amount of votes candidates receive.

A study compiled by a lecturer at Dublin Business School during Ireland’s general election in February showed that, based on the number of fans, friends or followers a candidate had, social media made a “significant difference” to their chances of being elected. Read More »

A recent study commissioned by Barclays Corporate found that almost 63% of all mobile owners use their device during the online purchase process at present but that this still accounts for just 5% of total ecommerce spend (£26bn) for 2011.

However, the research predicts that this figure will rise to £19.3bn a year by 2021 due to the growing popularity of smartphones and tablet devices, sales of which are set to hit 6m by the end of this year alone. Read More »

Parents tend to be the “most valuable” consumers for advertisers on a social media level, while teenagers are the most prolifically engaged mobile users, according to a study by Nielsen, which highlights digital consumer behaviours and consumption patterns.

About two-thirds of parents use social media to learn about brands, treble the amount of non-parents. While teens are the most likely group to upgrade from the free to the paid version of an app, said Nielsen, and they’re also most likely to respond to an ad, regardless of how it was served. Read More »

It might only be a YouTube ad at the moment seen by around 80,000 but the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has flourished via social media, is working to get an on national TV in the US. It has raised the cash through crowdsourcing with San Francisco-based digital advertising start-up called LoudSauce.

Occupy Wall Street quickly raised the $5,000 it needed mostly through Twitter and Facebook and the ad could be placed on air in the next few weeks. Read More »

Facebook has always been about driving engagement, the problem they’ve had over the past few years is that their mechanism for engagement hasn’t gone much further than the inflexible ‘Like’ button, a share, or, if you’re lucky, a comment or two. This was great while it lasted, but it did open brands pages up for social media black hat techniques.

We’ve seen a well-known socially irrelevant brand up their likes by 5,000 in the space of a week and take unprecedented engagement from people, that if you investigate, either work for their PR agency, or are praising the price of a product they’re ineligible to purchase.
All very naughty and not in the spirit of organic brand growth. Read More »