Twitter has announced an addition to its Twitter Cards today to allow marketers to generate leads and drive purchases and all within the space of a tweet.

It is a significant move that brings the ability for Twitter users to easily leave their contact details within expanded tweets, called the Lead Generation Card,  to express interest in what a brand is offering. Read more »

Interesting research here from the research from the Pew Research Center points to how Twitter isn’t perceived by some teens as a social network in the same way as Facebook or LinkedIn.

The research found teens don’t always think of Twitter as a social networking site.

That raises the question as to what is Twitter? There has been a lot of discussion about this recently with a number of people increasingly describing Twitter as a news wire or as the sixth American news network. Read more »

A useful study here from the ‘Pew Research Center’ taking a look at the demographic make-up of US social media users across Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook. No data on LinkedIn of Google+, but great stats all the same.

It is no surprise how fast Twitter user numbers have grown, Pew says they have doubled since November 2010 and now has around 500 million in total with around 200 million who are active, but Pinterest is almost on a par with the percentage of internet users using it service.

Pinterest remains heavily skewed to women, it is also “whiter” and its users are better educated. Instagram also has more women users, as does Facebook. Twitter is the only network where there are more men (although LinkedIn if it were included would lead in this category). Read more »

On the same day Yahoo confirmed its acquisition of Tumblr, and promised not to “screw it up”, it announced an over haul of Flickr the photo sharing service it screwed up over a number of years.

Flickr, which has been overshadowed and overtaken by the likes of Instagram, gets a new look for the desktop and its Android app and users get a terabyte of storage.

The storage is a big move. It is more than anything else on offer, and will apparently hold more than 537,731 photos. Read more »

Pinterest is getting closer to big brands as it announces three new types of pin that will highlight major US retailers.

It marks Pinterest’s first step towards associating images directly with brands and could be the beginning of a change on the social network that sees it become a marketplace as well as a site where people pin ideas of things they like or that inspire them. Read more »

UPDATE: Yahoo has officially confirmed its acquisition of Tumblr. In a blog post, Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer, reassured Tumblr users as she promised Yahoo would try “not to screw it up”.

She said that “Tumblr is incredibly special and has a great thing going” and that Yahoo would operate “Tumblr independently”. Read more »

Can Yahoo get its “cool back”? As that is what it is trying to do according to CFO Ken Goldman and one of the ways it might try and achieve that is to buy Tumblr.

Tumblr would give it much better and badly needed access to the key 18-24 year old demographic.

It desperately needs to create or buy something to make itself relevant again and while deals like adding Twitter to its service will help it on along this path it will not solve its problems. Read more »

Nice idea here from the Guardian to celebrate reaching the Twitter  milestone of one million followers. To mark the occasion it wants to find out more about its followers and where they are tweeting from.

It is asking @Guardian followers to share their view by taking a picture of where they are tweeting from and tweet the picture to @Guardian with the hashtag #1msides – apparently a “selfie” is also acceptable if you’re that way inclined.

It has been promoting the occasion with a Promoted Tweet, which the paper has employed a number of times to date. Read more »

The more tweets that prospective car buyers see the higher the likelihood that they will walk into a car showroom or book a test drive, according to a new study.

The study, from Twitter UK in partnership with Compete (@Compete), found tweets can directly influence offline behaviour and the more they see the more likely that is to happen. Read more »

Forbes has been speaking to the Mail Online’s global CMO, Sean O’Neal, about its growth in the US and future plans.

What’s interesting is that O’Neal sees Mail Online’s future success coming from winning readers from a diverse group of titles from across the US media spectrum. That list include The New York Times, The Huffington Post and People Magazine.  Read more »