Archive for Social Media
Sharing on Facebook Now More Popular than Sharing by Email
Posted by: | CommentsHow do you know which social sites are most popular? Aside from looking at the raw traffic numbers, a good indicator is data about which sites are seeing the most content shared on them.
Among the companies with access to tons of this type of data is AddToAny, makers of one the most popular widgets that lets content sites provide their readers with an easy way to share stories across multiple social media sites.
According to AddToAny, Facebook now dominates sharing, with 24 percent of shares from the widget consisting of users posting items to the social network. That handily beats out email (11.1 percent) and Twitter (10.8 percent), making the world’s most popular social network also the most popular service for sharing content. This is undoubtedly welcome news at Facebook, as the site continues to emphasize sharing and readies its own real-time search engine.
Interestingly, if you combine all of Yahoo’s properties – Delicious, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, and Yahoo Messenger – it accounts for 14.4 percent of sharing, making it second on the list. Less surprising, MySpace has fallen well down the ranks with just 5 percent of shares. Other notables include Digg at 4.4 percent, Bebo at 3.1 percent, and LinkedIn at a mere 0.4 percent. Meanwhile, the demise of email sharing isn’t all that surprising considering that on the whole, social networking now has more reach than email worldwide.
Here’s the full breakdown:
Reviews: Delicious, Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter
Tags: AddToAny, email, facebook
Source: Sharing on Facebook Now More Popular than Sharing by Email
5 Tongue-in-Cheek Reasons to Use Social Media
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Yesterday I checked out the Twitter page of someone I was following whom I didn’t know. Her Twitter profile page said “Thank You Twitter — I am now Somebody!”
Today, I learned on the front page of the Oregonian that almost 3,000 people showed up at midnight downtown because they heard on Twitter and Facebook that there’d be an impromptu performance by Dave Chappelle. Dave appeared at 1am, totally blown away by the size of the crowd, and unable to perform because all he had was a megaphone.
Apparently, there are good, sound business reasons to use social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can reach thousands of people in a matter of minutes, get feedback on your products, announce your new over-hyped mega-program, and give lots and lots of value to those who eventually buy your over-hyped mega-program.
But business aside, here are five (very) tongue-in-cheek reasons you might want to start using Twitter…
Read More→
Gmail Makes PayPal and eBay Emails Less Sketchy
Posted by: | CommentsPayPal and eBay spam has gotten to the point that I’m not really sure how the actual companies send any legitimate emails anymore. I’ll pretty much automatically delete anything that purports to come from them, unless I’m expecting a payment from someone via PayPal.
Although Gmail has already taken some measures to protect users from eBay and PayPal scams, the latest will hopefully put this problem to bed. They’ve added an “authentication icon for verified senders” that displays a key icon next to the name of email senders that the service has verified as authentic.
How does it know that the mail is authentic? Brad Taylor of Gmail explains that “all of the sender’s email is authenticated with DKIM,” which stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail. Right now, it’s a feature you enable from the Labs page under Settings, and is only in action on email from eBay and PayPal.
You could easily imagine this feature being extended to social networks though, as scammers continue to attempt to phish for user’s credentials so they can spam friends and spread malware. Gmail says that they “hope to add more senders in the future” and that when they do, the feature will work exactly the same as it does in today’s test run.
Reviews: Gmail
Tags: ebay, gmail, paypal, phishing, spam
HOW TO: Post Video to Twitter With the iPhone 3G S
Posted by: | CommentsOkay, so you’re one of the cool kids that got yourself the spiffy new iPhone 3G S, and you probably really want to take advantage of its best new feature — video. Sure the new phone gives you a quick post to YouTube option, but did you know there’s already a few great ways that you can post your videos directly to Twitter?
We’ll show you how to quickly get your video creations from your iPhone to Twitter. We’ll also help you understand some of the dos and don’ts for each particular option, to make sure that your newly tweeted videos show up just as you envisioned them. Happy video recording and tweeting!
1. Use YouTube to Post to Twitter
Earlier this month we half-jokingly noted that YouTube is now the TwitPic of video. Why? Well, they finally enabled a long sought after feature: auto-posting of videos to Twitter. Given that the new iPhone now lets you post your videos straight to YouTube from the camera app, you can combine these two great new things and push your videos from your phone to Twitter in no time at all.
Here’s how: Before you share video with YouTube, make sure you update your autoshare settings for the site. All you need to do is connect the services you want to integrate with YouTube. In this case, it will be Twitter, but you also might want to make the connection between YouTube and Facebook and/or Google Reader as well. Once you’ve made the connection, you can forget about manually sharing your YouTube videos with Twitter ever again.
Now every time you record a video, just tap to post it to YouTube from your phone’s camera app, add a title, description, category, and a few tags, and hit publish. Once your video is uploaded, a tweet will be auto-generated and posted to Twitter on your behalf.
The great thing about this method for tweeting iPhone 3G S videos is that you don’t have to worry about shooting your video in widescreen/landscape or standard mode. You can film horizontally, vertically, and for longer periods of time, and YouTube will still format the video appropriately.
2. Email Your Videos to Twitter
The simplest method is just to email your videos to Twitter. The ever-evolving email-to-blog platform, Posterous (now with blog import), has created a dead simple way to get your iPhone 3GS videos from your phone to Twitter via email.
As you would with any other content you want to post to Posterous, simply email the video to post@posterous.com. If you’ve already configured your Twitter auto-posting settings for Posterous, which you can do here, then your video will post to Posterous and automatically tweet out a link.
The Posterous advantage is that if you have cross-posting enabled for a ton of other sites — they do support quite a few — and you just want to share your video with Twitter, you can use the twitter@posterous.com email address. Also pretty nifty is that the subject line of your email becomes the title, the email body becomes the video post description, and tags can be added using the syntax ((tag: video, iphone)) in the subject line.
Posterous is perfect for recording video in widescreen/landscape mode or standard mode, and it will format your video accordingly. The only downside is that videos will need to be short in length, as any videos longer than a minute cannot be sent via email.
3. Get a Video-Friendly App
Although the deluge of video recording and posting Twitter apps has yet to happen, there are a few worthwhile apps that are already supporting posting iPhone 3G S videos to Twitter.
The unreleased TweetReel really is the TwitPic for video, but it’s only available as an iPhone app (coming soon). This nifty app lets you shoot videos (and photos), or grab them from your library, add your Twitter text, and post it to the web. Videos are posted to your TweetReel site (tweetreel.com/twittername), and immediately shared with Twitter.
If you’re looking for something already on the market, check out Twittelator Pro 3.0 [iTunes Link]. The updated app, which costs $4.99, includes a video recording and sharing option that lets you attach videos to tweets, and upload them to the photo and video sharing site yFrog. Just remember to shoot your videos in widescreen mode if you want them to render correctly (ie. not post sideways). We’d also advise you to record videos from the camera app instead, as videos recorded in Twittelator Pro aren’t saved to your library and might disappear should you choose to tweet without a WiFi connection.
Another possibility for mobile video fans is Kyte’s updated premium iPhone app [iTunes link]. The app also comes with a $4.99 price tag and supports video record and upload, with videos uploading to your Kyte channel. To tweet your video uploads from the app, just add your Twitter login credentials to your Kyte integration settings.
More Twitter resources from Mashable:
- 19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared
- Top 5 Ways to Share Video on Twitter
- 5 Ways to Share Images on Twitter
- 5 Terrific Twitter Research Tools
Reviews: Facebook, Google Reader, Posterous, Twitpic, Twitter, YouTube
Tags: iphone 3Gs, iphone app, tweetreel, twittelator pro, twitter, video, video uploads
In Case of Fire, Do Not Use Twitter [Pic]
Posted by: | CommentsAlthough likely a Photoshop, today’s Twitter meme du jour doesn’t seem too far fetched: “In Case of Fire, Do Not Use Twitter”, reads the image currently on the front page of news ranking site Digg (included below).
Twitter’s use in emergencies is well-established: we’re all familiar with the trend of live-Tweeting an earthquake – perhaps in favor of taking cover. Meanwhile, an emergency in Atlanta saw a councilman using Twitter, not 911, to summon help.
Even the parody isn’t so new: in May, the satirical news site The Onion joked that a dorm room fire “was quickly located and extinguished by authorities after 38 people Twittered that they were ‘fleeing a fire’”.
Social Media Marketing: Get it While It’s Ignored
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Not many people are doing any social media marketing (yet). As long and hard as I search online for folks actively engaged in social media marketing, I’m just not seeing it.
I can guess what you’re thinking. “This guy is either blind, insane, or both.”
Before you pass judgment, allow me to explain. I am seeing boat loads of social media networking. OMG… the sheer VOLUME of networking that’s going on today with social media is staggering. People are accumulating Twitter followers faster than my fleece jacket picks up cat hair… and you see growth of Twitter daily (85% in the past couple of months alone).
Facebook is getting its share of attention as well. It’s not unusual for someone to send a tweet to their 10,000 followers, have that tweet posted on their Facebook page, and then receive hundreds of re-tweets and replies to the Facebook page.
That, my friend, is called “Networking.”
A Quick Primer On Social Media Networking Versus Social Media Marketing
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You tweet. You’ve got friends on Facebook. You’ve got a blog and post to it every so often. And you’ve even got a YouTube account where you routinely post your PowerPoint presentations. You’re marketing with Social Media tools…. aren’t you?
Look for my prediction about Twitter at the end of this article…
Not necessarily. More than likely, you’re caught in the act of doing social media networking, and not social media marketing. There’s a distinct difference (for now), and if you think about it, you’ll see the point.
Marketing is about getting leads for your business (today). It serves no other master than lead generation. And while sales and marketing are deeply intertwined (much to the chagrin of both departments), they are still separate beasts. Marketing generates the leads, and sales convert those leads into paying customers.
The distinction between marketing and sales blurs somewhat with online marketing. You’ll have your lead generation systems — advertising, content syndication, joint ventures, etc. These systems drive leads to your online sales team — your landing page, ethical bribes, autoresponder emails, newsletters, etc.
The key difference between traditional marketing/sales boundaries and what happens online is that your sales efforts should also be part of your lead generation system… and this is especially true when it comes to using social media.
Bet You Didn’t Know About THIS SEO Trick
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Sure, you’re up-to-date on SEO tricks and techniques. You know that stuffing your keywords meta tag won’t raise an eyebrow with Google. You understand the value of having your keyword phrase in the URL and Title meta tag. And like most people, you’ve heard about this thing called Latent Symantec Indexing, but you’re not sure what it is or if it’s worth your time.
Maybe you’ve done some homework and you placed a few header tags and image alt tags on your pages. And there may even be the slight chance that you took the time to optimize your copy with your primary keyword phrases and industry-related phrases.
Now what?
How to you get the search engines (Google in particular) to notice all the cool stuff you did to search engine optimize your web site?
