Back in September LinkedIn hit the 10 million UK member mark.  Since then it has added another one million in the UK and today reached 200 million members overall worldwide. The 11 million UK members make it LinkedIn’s joint third biggest market alongside Brazil. It’s the US though that still leads the way by a country mile with 74 million Americans having LinkedIn accounts. In second place is India with 18 million and in fifth place, behind the UK and Brazil, is Canada on seven million.

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Twitter has announced changes to Twitter Search that could have a major impact on breaking news and how we find it. We all know that we go to Twitter when news breaks and either scan our timeline or do a quick search. A search can throw up a myriad of results not all of which will be relevant as it’s impossible for a computer to understand context. For instance how would it know that a search for “big bird” was referring to politics and not Sesame Street? Or that people searching for “horses and bayonets” are interested in the Presidential debates?

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China’s Twitter-like microblogging service Sina Weibo, which currently has over 400 million registered users, has rolled out a partial English-language interface that suggests it could be planning to expand into the US and other English-speaking markets soon.

There have been hints of this for some time. Eighteen months ago it was being reported that Sina was actively preparing to launch its microblogging in the “US market…[in] about 2-3 months”. Clearly that did not happen. This time around it looks like it might. Read More »

If you were looking for a disconnect between how consumers and business use social media then here it is. According to this infographic from Ubervu while more than 90% of adults user social media regularly only 22% of businesses have a dedicated social media manager.

While some brands are making strenuous efforts to engage with fans there is a long way to go. In any given week less than 0.5% of Facebook fans engage with brands that they are fans of. Maybe that figure is not surprising given that on average companies only respond to 30%  of fan feedback.

While there are some brands who are great at responding to customers socially we’ve all been there with others, sent comments to brands on social media, and got no response. That’s something that needs to change.
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Back in September, Kellogg’s launched the first ever tweet shop for a week to mark the launch of its new Special K cracker crisps. The unique store in Soho offered consumers the chance to try the crisps and then purchase the product, not with money but via a tweet with the hash tag #TweetShop.

The concept of using tweets for currency seems a little odd – the products are effectively being given away for free. However, this was using currency in a different way, by tapping into social currency and the word-of-mouth nature of social networks. Read More »