Twitter Blog: Introducing Fast Follow, and other SMS tips

Fast Follow. Anyone in the US can receive Tweets on their phone even if they haven’t signed up for Twitter. This is a simple way for people to get information they care about in real-time. For example, let’s say you want to get Tweets from New York City’s office of emergency management (@NotifyNYC). Just text ‘follow NotifyNYC’ to 40404 in the US.

Try it out the next time you see a Twitter @username at a restaurant or store, on a billboard or on TV, or if you hear one mentioned on the radio.

via blog.twitter.com

Posted via email from Social Persuasion - The Social Media Marketing Agency Blog

The Truth About Twitter’s Promoted Tweets

Having said that, the problem all along has been how to take all of this growth and turn Twitter into a service that generates revenue. It has always been free to use, but like any company, Twitter’s objective is to make money. Enter “Promoted Tweets”, Twitter’s new advertising program. It’s very similar to Google Adwords. Advertisers bid on keywords and when a search is done on Twitter, triggering one of those keywords, an ad will be shown at the top of the results page – at least in phase one of the rollout. Only one promoted Tweet will be shown on the search results page.

via sitepronews.com

Posted via email from Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

Now Live, Twitter's New Ads: Are You Brave Enough for This?

Short-form social network Twitter has taken a bold new step in exploring its potential business model. The company appears to have begun promoting keywords in its "trending topics" list for sponsors.

When users click on a promoted trending topic, they are brought to a search results page, where the page is topped by a promoted Tweet. They aren't sent to an ad landing page, but to a live and uncensored conversation. That's what we're seeing with the new movie Toy Story 3 today at least. It's a logical and interesting way for the company to make money. It's also unlike almost any other advertising in history.

via readwriteweb.com

Interesting point that the level of Twitter chatter about a movie *could* do a better job predicting the success of a films box office performance than present methods of predicting financial success. You agree? Would you buy an ad that would encourage open ended conversation about your company on Twitter?

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Facebook Firehose Comes to Bing - Bing Social Media Marketing & Real Time Search Results

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Bing has featured a Twitter portal for social search, and by adding Facebook results the search engine is stepping up its real-time search game to include results from both services. The Facebook results include both information from public pages, as well as popular shared links from users with appropriate privacy settings for public sharing. Bing also helps you quickly scan the social links by including an excerpt from the link in context within the results.

via readwriteweb.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Bing Social Search - Experimenting

brentpurves How long will it take for this Twitter post to show up in the new Bing Social Search Results? #bing http://ow.ly/1XoQP 2 minutes ago via HootSuite

via twitter.com

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Bing has featured a Twitter portal for social search, and by adding Facebook results the search engine is stepping up its real-time search game to include results from both services. The Facebook results include both information from public pages, as well as popular shared links from users with appropriate privacy settings for public sharing. Bing also helps you quickly scan the social links by including an excerpt from the link in context within the results.

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Twitter to Change Links and How They Are Displayed

In an effort to remove the obscurity of shortened links and to prevent malware and phishing attacks, Twitter has begun the rollout t.co, its official URL shortener, along with some major changes to how the microblogging platform handles links.

In a blog post aptly titled Links and Twitters: Length Shouldn’t Matter, Twitter’s Sean Garrett announced that the company is taking a new approach to URLs. Not only will all links on Twitter.com and Twitter apps be “wrapped” in t.co links, but how they are counted against the 140 character limit. These change will occur throughout the summer.

via mashable.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Social Media Ad Spending Lags - Social Media Advertising - Facebook, Twitter, iPhone

Social media use is exploding, but ad spending in the sector continues to be a blip on the radar for most brands.

  Razorfish, one of the largest digital ad spenders, compiled data on its 2009 digital ad spending. It found that social media display advertising made up just 3 percent of its clients' budgets. Non-display in social media accounted for another 1 percent. The figures pale in comparison to the time spent online. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users spent 11 percent of their time online in 2011 on social media sites.

via brandweek.com

Need help navigating the world of advertising in social media? Drop me at note at brent[at]stirsolutions.com and we can setup a free 30 minute social media marketing consultation

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Constant Contact Acquires NutshellMail to Move into Social Media Marketing

E-mail marketing giant Constant Contact has acquired NutshellMail, a service that lets businesses track and post updates to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn via e-mail.

via mashable.com

It's a mashed up world where pretty much everything will be social media enabled -- so much so that we'll soon stop calling it social media because most sites and tools online will come socialmediafied by default.

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Twitter Blog: Twitter for iPhone

Comprehensive analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store showed very plainly that people were looking for an app from Twitter—we didn't have one so they generally got confused and gave up. Obviously, we saw room for improvement. Starting today, Twitter for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free on the iTunes App Store.

via blog.twitter.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Bing Adds Facebook, Twitter Sharing To Shopping

There are a number of “social shopping” sites and, of course, numerous product or shopping-related blogs. Among the most visible in the first category are Kaboodle, ThisNext/Stylehive and Polyvore. They offer tools and features that allow people to share, compare and vote on products. The mainstream shopping comparison engines such as Shopping.com or PriceGrabber don’t fully enter into this realm, although Shopping.com is giving away an iPad if you become a “fan” on Facebook:

via searchengineland.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Microsoft Announces Social Aggregator - (Facebook, Twitter, Bing etc)

Lili Cheng, General Manager of Microsoft's Fuse Labs, announced the debut of Spindex, the company's stab at a dynamic social media aggregation tool.

Aimed at bringing together the varied strands of a personal web at each point of a user's online experience, Spindex is currently only available in a tech preview.

via readwriteweb.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Broadcast TV And Web Media Sites Winning In Online Video, Twitter Users Most Engaged

In a joint report put out today by Brightcove and Tubemogul (embedded below), the non-YouTube sites seeing the most success with online video are those of the broadcast TV networks and Web-only media brands, followed by magazine sites and music labels. Newspaper sites are lagging when it comes to both total video views and growth.

In terms of how people are finding these videos, a little more than half (51.75 percent) are navigating directly from the publisher’s main site. Following that, Google search is the next biggest source of video-viewing traffic (38.92 percent), followed by Yahoo (5.58 percent), Bing (2.29 percent) and Facebook barely registers (with only 0.40 percent). Twitter is even smaller, but people who find videos are more engaged than any of these other sources of traffic, on average watching videos longer across different media categories.

via techcrunch.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Consumer Reports: Half of Social Network Users are "Oversharing," on Facebook, Twitter, Endangering Privacy

Those who "overshare" online - posting personal information like full names, children's names, home addresses and details about when they're away from home - are "especially vulnerable," notes the report.

To counteract these dangers, Consumer Reports made the following seven suggestions of things you should stop doing on Facebook:

1. Using a weak password
2. Listing a full birth date
3. Overlooking privacy controls
4. Posting a child's name in a caption
5. Mentioning being away from home
6. Letting yourself be found by a search engine
7. Permitting youngsters to use Facebook unsupervised

via readwriteweb.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Ow.ly and Ht.ly ~ Choose Bar or Non-bar URL Shortener for HootSuite - Twitter Social Media Marketing Tools

HootSuite users can now choose between two flavors of links — one with a social bar and one without.

In this character-limited web, URL shorteners are of great importance — for statistics, for branding, or simply for convenience. Ow.ly is used to shrink hundreds of thousands of links daily by users seeking clickthrough statistics and the one-click convenience of shrinking a link in HootSuite.

via blog.hootsuite.com

Hootsuite is also offering a pro service enabling you to use your own vanity url for your shortened url -- ie goo.gl

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Twitter Webapp Social Media Marketing - UnTweeps - Unfollow Twitter users who don't tweet often enough.

via untweeps.com

Spring Clean your Twitter account - get rid of low/no posting Twitter accounts from your too-big list of people you're following at http://www.UnTweeps.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Twitter Buys a Text Messaging Company - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

Today, though, most people in the United States think about Twitter as a Web tool, and they access it either online or using smartphone apps.

But Twitter has not forgotten about all the people in the world who do not have fancy phones. On Friday, the company announced that it has acquired Cloudhopper, a Seattle text-messaging start-up.

via bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Is Foursquare's growth boxed in? Foursquare marketing for business growth

But beyond that, if Foursquare is going to be the next Facebook or Twitter, the basics of the service will have to change to meet the social-media desires of an audience that's dropping off kids at school rather than dropping into 2-for-1 happy hour, or hunting for tips to find the best place in town to get that 21st slice of pizza.

via news.cnet.com

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

TweetUp : Twitter Marketplace - showcasing the world's best tweeters -- but only from USA?

TweetUp, Inc., announced today a new Twitter marketplace designed to showcase the world's best tweeters and enable them to grow a highly targeted following. TweetUp is a new patent-pending platform that combines the popularity, relevance and influence of tweets and tweeters with a bid-based marketplace. Major partners, including leading Twitter search clients and top web sites, will display the results, enabling users to easily find the best tweets and tweeters in the world.

via tweetup.com

Tried signing up but it's only accepting Twitter users from USA...not Canada.

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Twitter spreads its wings in India - DigitalMedia

With an estimated two million users, Twitter in India now has the third highest number of active users after the US and Germany.

The potential for Twitter in India is huge. In October last year it struck a partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India, which has 110 million subscribers. The telco’s subscribers can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free. As the mobile services pick up, Twitter could garner an even larger number of users.

via media.asia

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves

Twitter spreads its wings in India - DigitalMedia

With an estimated two million users, Twitter in India now has the third highest number of active users after the US and Germany.

The potential for Twitter in India is huge. In October last year it struck a partnership with Bharti Airtel, the largest mobile operator in India, which has 110 million subscribers. The telco’s subscribers can now send tweets at standard rates and receive tweets for free. As the mobile services pick up, Twitter could garner an even larger number of users.

via media.asia

Posted via web from Vancouver Internet Marketing Consultant - Brent Purves