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 »

Many businesses try and engage user and demonstrate their expertise via running chats over Twitter. These are on a chosen topic, and curated and followed by a pre-assigned #hashtag.

Twitter chats can be a  very useful way of networking and community building for those involved, however they are also easy to miss. While you can read the conversation back, this clearly limits the interactivity and value of the conversation.

That’s why Mark Shaw has come up with a new Twitter service called @TheChatDiary, on which he will try and highlight many of these Twitter chats. 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 »

There are three ways to look at Yahoo’s $1.1bn acquisition of photo-blogging service Tumblr.  You can view it as a considered strategic move to evolve Yahoo and give it a slice of social media.

That or it is an opportunitistic leap to rejuvenate Yahoo’s aging products and users.

Thirdly, it is possibly desperate. Mayer and Yahoo have just paid $1.1bn for a company with revenues last year of $13m.  Read More »

For anyone who grew up during the 70’s and 80’s, the continued digital revolution is staggering to behold. Each new development brings us more wonderful experiences, with amazing freedom, at a hitherto unimaginable speed. But for the next generation, my 12 year old daughter included, nothing has changed.

Home computers or laptops are the norm and black boards at school are now white, touchscreen and fully interactive. Increasingly this generation also has access to numerous internet enabled devices. In my daughter’s case, it’s an iTouch that she got when she was ten, which (shockingly) I didn’t actually realize gave her internet access for the first year she had it. We’ve come a long way from the Bush tape cassette player I got when I was ten. Read More »

It has been just over a year this week since Facebook’s IPO and this infographic takes a timely look back at some of the milestones that the social network has racked up along the way.

Since its IPO, Facebook has launched a raft of innovations designed to make the site more attractive to advertisers.

It seems some of these are paying off and in the UK we’re seeing click through rates (CTRs) increasing, suggesting consumers are actively engaging with more Facebook ads. 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 »

Yahoo! will integrate Twitter into its news frontpage, continuing its battle to be relevant in the social age. Certain tweets will now be included amongst the aggregated news headlines, although it’s not yet clear how they will be selected.

It is somewhat ironic that Yahoo! chief exec Marissa Mayer is bringing Twitter into the fold, as her previous employer, Google, had a major fall out with it.

Read More »