Twitter

5 Social Platforms to Put on Your “Fadar”!

Over the last several years lots of social platforms have come and gone. Some are slowly fading away. It’s really hard to keep track of where to spend your time and energy! 2012 will remain a big year for big players such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn and similarly, we should also expect to see exponential growth for newcomers like Pinterest. However, as newcomers gain momentum, we will start to see other social networks fizzle off. Here are 5 social platforms we think you should put on your “fadar” (aka fading radar):

1. Quora: The question and answer platform was predicted to be the next big thing in 2010. However, half way through 2011 the big buzz surrounding the site slowly started to fade off. The site still receives decent traffic, with an estimate of 500,000 users, however, as new social sites emerge Quora might not be at the top of social minds.
2. Digg: The once beloved site-sharing website has been dying a slow death for several years. It hasn’t been able to compete with sites like Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter. It is my opinion that it is just a matter of time before it completely fizzles off. A few months ago it did launch a new version of the site, however, it doesn’t seem like users found it very appealing. A couple of years ago a great article would have received on average 3000 Diggs, now you’re lucky if you even get 100.
3. Delicious: This social bookmarking site had everything going for it back in 2005. It was new to the scene and had no real competitors. What happened? As new bookmarking sites started to saturate the market Delicious didn’t reinvent quickly enough. Rumors are it might shut-down or sell its technology.
4. Gowalla: This location-based site was once a fierce competitor for foursquare, both entering the market at about the same time 2 years ago. However, foursquare quickly gained momentum with over 1 billion check-ins to date, leaving Gowalla in the dust. Gowalla’s leadership has now joined forces with Facebook. According to industry insiders, Facebook has not purchased the technology, only the talent. Gowalla will slowly fade out.
5. QR Codes: There’s a huge online debate about whether QR (Quick Response) Codes are slowly starting to die off before they’ve even had the chance to really take off. Some people may think, why would QR Codes be on the “fadar”? I see them everywhere? Well, that’s exactly my point. The ubiquitous use of QR Codes in often ill-conceived marketing efforts, is what might lead to its demise.

What do you think? Do you take issue with any of the above observations? Are there networks or tools you feel should be on the fadar?

Maryam Mehrtash
@socialmaryam

Tags: cool, Delicious, digg, facebook, foursquare, google, gowalla, LinkedIn, pinterest, QR codes, reddit, Social Media, technology, Twitter, youtube

What If…Your Twitter and Facebook Posts Were Deleted After 24 Hours?

What if …  a new feature was introduced where Facebook Wall posts and Twitter tweets were automatically removed after 24 hours?

If you did not post anything new in a 24-hour period, your Facebook Wall and Twitter profile would be empty, showing just a blank page. If you’re managing a Facebook Page or a Twitter account for your company or client this would be a big deal. It’s equivalent to having a company website with no content.

Would this give you more incentive to publish content more frequently?

This hypothetical scenario isn’t very far from reality, considering the effective lifespan of the average Facebook post is 22 hours and the lifespan of the average Twitter tweet is 1 hour.

It’s a balancing act. Publish too infrequently and you’ll gain minimal benefit from your social media profile. Publish too frequently and you risk annoying your followers.

Keep this in mind the next time you are developing a digital strategy. Is your publishing frequency maximizing your impact online?

Victor
Digital Strategist

Photo Credit: JanetR3

Tags: facebook, lifespan, strategy, Twitter

5 Tips On How to Filter Through The Fluff!

Marketers are constantly inundated with information on the #digitalmediasphere – felt like a hashtag was appropriate for this post! The amount of information our brains have to consume on a daily basis is mind blowing, literally. According to Mail Online, each person is drowned with “174 newspapers’ worth of information every day.” FastCompany also published an infographic in September 2010 based on the book The 24-Hour Customer, indicating that we will generate more data in the next 4 years than in the history of the world, adding that the average person is connected 12 hours a day to some form of digital media which translates to 34 billion bits of information per day (an equivalent of two books).

The biggest concern for marketers is the ability to sort through all the fluff and not get bogged down. Recent studies are showing that the level of information we are being asked to break down can cause increased stress levels. So how do we keep on top of the abundance of information and still keep our sanity? Learn how to filter through the fluff and manage your time. Here are 5 tips that can get you started:

TIP #1. BE SELECTIVE. Don’t follow every single person on Twitter who follows you, or subscribe to every blog with the word “digital marketing” in it. Be selective to what you subscribe to and who you follow. Similarly, don’t feel the need to subscribe to every single news outlet, most likely they all end up publishing the same stories within 24 hours of each other anyway. By being selective you can start filtering through the noise and choosing what you really want to focus your brain cells on.

TIP #2. TAKE TIME OFF. Set aside certain time periods when you are active on social media, reading the news, updating your blog, and so on and so forth. We spend most of our waking hours connected to some form of digital media. Sometimes it’s nice to tune out. Take a break and set rules and regulations. For example, when you are at the gym don’t be the person on the treadmill who is replying to emails and tweets. It’s okay to not reply back right away. Let your body relax and do something else. You can set time limits for yourself of when you are on and off, even computers need down time.

TIP #3. UTILIZE DASHBOARDS. Dashboards help aggregate various accounts and create search tabs to sort through specific content. Hootsuite is a great dashboard that allows you to do both. You can add all your social media accounts to this one dashboard so that you don’t have to keep switching between tabs or windows to get up-to-date on all the new content. You can also create search tabs with specific keywords such as “online marketing” or “search engine optimization” and Hootsuite will then aggregate content based on that filter. That way you can sort through the fluff without actually having to do it yourself, the dashboard does it for you.

TIP #4. ACTIVATE GOOGLE ALERTS. There are a ton of free tools available online that help you filter through the data, Google Alerts is one of them. Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results based on your queries. You get the most up-to-date information sent directly to your mail box.

TIP #5. CREATE YOUR OWN READER. Setup a RSS Feed Reader or News Aggregator by adding your favorite blogs, and websites to it so you can keep on top of the latest content without actually having to visit the site. Feed Reader or News Aggregator software allow you to grab the RSS feeds from various sites and display them for you to read and use.

Hopefully these tips will help you stay on top of your content, and help save you a little time and stress!

Maryam Mehrtash @socialmaryam

Tags: data, digital, facebook, information, marketing, Social Media, stress, Twitter

What If…There Was a 2-Tweet Per Day Limit?

Have You Ever Wondered “What if…?”

I believe innovation, inspiration and imagination begins with someone asking “What if…?”. Sometimes, when we’re in the midst of creating a digital strategy, implementing a marketing tactic or developing creative content, we conform to familiar ideas, paths and practices. But, what if we took a step back and challenged the current norms and limits in today’s online environment? Maybe, just maybe, we can create a spark that will set ablaze the next big success in digital strategy.

I will begin a series tackling the idea of “What if…?” I hope you will come along.

What if…Twitter allowed users to publish only 2 tweets per day.

For some users, publishing 2 tweets per day is already a lot to manage. For other users, it’s a huge restriction. This 2-tweet per day limit will likely affect the serial tweeters and the notorious spam bots the most.

Twitter is filled with a lot of noise. Some people try to manage it by only following back a small number of users, using hashtags to organize tweets or by using the search function to find desired information. Others simply give up on using Twitter.

But if Twitter introduced a 2-tweet limit per day, the noise would be drastically reduced. Here’s why:

• The quality of tweets by legitimate users should increase because they will have to think carefully about what they tweet. For example, “Do I really want to use up my quota and talk about what I ate for breakfast? Or should I save my last tweet of the day in case Google announces they are taking over the World?”
• Spam bots that plague Twitter will also be limited to the amount of spam they can generate in a day.

Limits, when used effectively in an appropriate context can help shape people’s behaviour. By creating scarcity, tweets become that much more valuable.

What do you think about a 2-tweet per day limit on Twitter?

Victor
Digital Strategist

Tags: noise, strategy, tweet, Twitter, what if

ALERT™ Tip: Geo-Targeted Twitter Search in Hootsuite

Twitter is a great tool for discovering what people are saying about a company, brand, or any other topic. However, if you are only interested in conversations from a certain location, using Twitter’s search function might not be very helpful.

Overall, Hootsuite is a great tool for managing your company’s Twitter account. One particular feature makes it exceptional for finding conversations from a specific location.

Geo-targeted Search

Here’s how you use it:

1. Log into Hootsuite (or create a new account if you don’t have one).
2. Click the magnifying glass located at the top right.
3. Enter the desired keyword in the Search Twitter field.
4. Click the circular (cross-hair) located right of the search field.
5. In the window that pops up, click the Save as Stream button.

The resulting stream will show tweets that include your desired keyword, in your proximity.

Now if you want tweets from a location that is different from your current city, you will first need to determine the latitude and longitude of the desired location. You can use http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html to figure out the coordinates.

How to Edit Geo-Targeted Search

1. Locate the stream you just created in Hootsuite.
2. Click the inverted triangle located at the top right of the stream.
3. Select Preferences from the drop down menu.
4. In the search query field, replace the existing coordinates with the desired coordinates (make sure you only replace the coordinates section – bolded in this example “canucks geocode:49.2639013,-123.1117966,25km”).
5. If you want to expand or restrict the geo-target radius, change the distance configuration in the search query (25km is the default distance).
6. Click the Save Changes button.

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Tags: ALERT™, geo-target, HootSuite, licensing, magnify digital, search, Twitter