As YouTube celebrates it’s seventh birthday there are lots of facts and figures flowing out of Google Towers about its mammoth video sharing service.

Not least the fact that four billion videos are watched everyday and a staggering seventy-two hours of video are uploaded to the the site every minute. Read More »

As YouTube celebrates it’s seventh birthday, The Verge have reported that a staggering seventy-two hours of video are uploaded to the the site every minute, a whole day’s worth of content more than a year ago. Owned by Google, YouTube has become embedded into the search process with videos hosted by it gaining prominence in the Google search algorithm, and therefore search results. Consequently, it has eliminated competition from the like of Vimeo, who offer an equally good, if not better, service, but do not have the groundswell in take up. Read More »

In the quest for content that users of brand social assets will appreciate and interact with, imagery continues to surface as a key driver of engagement.  All you need to do to understand this is consider your own social media behavior.  While you may check your social streams multiple times a day, the odds are good that you fly through these “social checks” at quite a high rate of speed.

It’s also likely you’re prioritising your focus first on who posted the content.  There are certain names you are more attuned to because historically, those names have brought you content you use or care about.  Second to that, it’s the image attached to a post that either makes you slow down or stop at least long enough to read the headline.  Other social users are no different from you, which is why imagery is without a doubt King Content’s queen. Read More »

Arsenal topped the Twitter Social Media league with nearly 1.5 million Twitter followers (also the 3rd highest worldwide for a football club) in May. However, having the most followers doesn’t necessarily equate to being the best. Manchester City were this month’s champions both on the pitch and in the social media world.

City collected their second “Best of the Month” award this season in Freestyle Interactive‘s  monthly Premier League Social Media Stats infographic series. Read More »

Listening to CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann describe how he abandoned plans to become a medical practitioner to found Pinterest, it is easy to forget that every novel, differentiated idea that takes the limelight also comes with a risk—overhype.

Google are continuing their determined push into the social world by incorporating Google+ commenting into YouTube, the major video service owned by them. However, such moves may have deeper cultural ramifications for the company.

Speaking to Reuters, YouTube Head of Operations Tom Pickett said:

“YouTube has been lacking great social features. Commenting and sharing have been part of YouTube, but the experiences could be much better than they are,”

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Barack Obama’s campaign team has long been praised for it’s innovative use of technology as a story telling an organising tool and developing a wide ranging social media arsenal, but with a new video it has upped the ante once again.

Obama 2012 has just released a YouTube video called “The Road We’ve Travelled” in which members of the administration past and present, including Mayor Rahm Emanual, David Axelrod, and Vice President Joseph Biden, tell the story of their first term, and the tough decisions that had to be made, and what has been achieved. Read More »

Whilst online surveys often overstate the uptake of technology, Ipsos MediaCT’s offline Tech Tracker data tells us that just over four in ten GB adults now own a smartphone, representing an increase of roughly 30% in the last two years. The rise of the smartphone has coincided with the increased popularity, and normality, of social media usage. Arguably the two are connected, the modern mobile device being the ideal format for keeping up-to-date, and updating, as it means people are always online, even when on the move. Read More »

YouTube is changing the algorithim it uses to suggest videos to users. From now on, the videos that appear as either related or suggested videos will give greater prominence to the amount of a video people view on average e.g. a minute long video watched foran average of 55 sceconds gains a higher ranking in the algorithim than a four minute video that is watchedd for an average of 55 seconds.

YouTube explain this in a post, saying the previous algorithim “was a helpful way to promote channels, but issues like misleading thumbnails kept this system from bringing videos with deeper engagement to the top.” The offer content creators optimisation tips in order to get the most out of these changes. Read More »

Nicholas Cage would have trouble driving this lot away. Every minute in social media there are millions of interactions taking place –  they happen on Pinterest, Foursquare, Flickr, Tagged, LinkedIn,StumbleUpon, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube as detailed by this nice infographic here detailing what can happen in a mere 60 seconds in social media.

How many Tweets do you reckon? Enough that if you read them all it would take days to get through them all.  And forget about Facebook with 700,000 messages you could be there for weeks. Read More »