Tag Archives: twitter

Why Tumblr can score over Twitter and Facebook?

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tumblrReal-time, dynamic notifications were among those missing pieces as far as Tumblr was concerned. The social platform has taken a step ahead to add the same to its dashboard with an idea of increasing user engagement. It’s a key feature of social networking websites such as Facebook. Based on one’s point of view, they fall on opposite boundaries of any debate so as to keep everyone in the discussion and are prompted to express an opinion. Continue reading →

Role of social media in brand building

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Unfortunately, the tendency of certain short-sighted entrepreneurs is: ‘If I build it (online presence), user will come and things will simply take care of themselves!’ If you ask me, things never pan out that way. Users won’t be dropping in or won’t be sticking around for long, if you are not giving them what they want or expect. Continue reading →

Stick to basics and you can create a social buzz about your brand

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Which are the key aspects of marketing with all-pervasive social media channels? How best to put them to use so as connect and build lasting relationships. Let us try to find out the very basics of the process. They all seem so obvious, but often we tend to forget them while setting lofty goals so it won’t be a bad idea to revisit them, before we set out on our challenging social journey… Continue reading →

10 Social Media Facts and Figures

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Today, social media has become a part of our lives. We check our accounts at home, at work and on the go too. It has also expanded into different aspects of our existence such as our personal, professional and of course, our social lives. It has risen since its birth at an impressive rate and is expected to keep rising in the time to come. Here are 10 interesting facts about Social media that will blow you away:

 

  1. One in every nine people on earth is on Facebook. So if Facebook was a country, it would be the world’s largest country.
  2. Each Facebook user spends about 15 hours and 33 minutes on an average on the site.
  3. 3,00,000 users helped translate Facebook into 70 languages.
  4. Excluding mobile views and embedded videos on sites, YouTube generates 92 billion page views per month on their site.
  5. YouTube users spend a total of 2.9 billion hours per month on the site.
  6. There are about 17 million articles on Wikipedia.
  7. 53% employers use social media to look for potential employees.
  8. Percentage of companies using blogs for marketing has grown from 39% to 43% in the past year.
  9. Google+ became the fastest growing network when it reached 10 million users in only 16 days.
  10. Twitter adds about 5,00,00 users per day.

 Here’s a video with more facts and figures to interest you even more:

5 Reasons Why Companies Should Blog More

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As a company blogger, one lays the foundations for the brand’s social reach, builds a strong reader base and delivers the company’s core message. But blogging calls for a lot of time, thought and commitment. Today, Twitter has been accepted as the most popular micro-blogging platform. While the term micro-blogging evolved from original blogging, it has grown more popular today. But blogging has advantages of its own. Companies who blog receive 55% more website visitors as compared to companies which dont blog. Good and regular blogging can help a business grow rapidly. A company should use a blog as a medium of expression and a Twitter account should be used like an outpost. Here are 5 top reasons why a company is better off blogging than tweeting:

  1. A blog reflects a company’s love and passion for the industry. With a wider spectrum of expression, blogs help companies get their core ideas across in a better way. Regular blogging will last long term only for companies who are committed to the cause of bringing about a change in their industry. In other words, sincere blogging cannot be faked in the long run as a blog is constructed with genuine thought and intent.
  2. As tweets get older, they get lost and forgotten in a huge pile of other old tweets. Furthermore, Tweets are considered as ‘one time reads’ whereas blogs can be read multiple times because of their informational nature. Older blogs are considered as archives of valuable information and they become more worthy with time.
  3. Twitter, also known as the ‘SMS of the Internet’, is limited to 140 characters. This limitation is enough to get a thought or a link across but not enough to express an idea. A blog provides you with a wider range of expression and more options to exhibit your ideas. It also opens up options of featuring pictures, videos and audio files on your blog making it a more interesting read.
  4. Likes and comments on a blog add value to a blog contributing the opinions and facts of other perple from the industry about the topic. This attribute is absent on Twitter. Although retweets and mentions are interactions of the micro-blogging world, they dont quite add any value to the post. So a blog works two ways for both the reader and the writer.
  5. It is easy to keep track of a blog as new posts add up to the larger body of the blog which is the embodiment of a concept. With every new post, the core idea of the company grows reflecting the belief of the company. This helps the company reaches out to a wider base of readers and also helps it to evolve and realize different aspects of the industry.

Turning Tweets to Transactions

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Twitter was always known as a rich source for instantly updated information, but now there’s more to the micro-blogging site. Twitter introduces ‘Chirpify’ which is a new commerce platform that enables a user to buy, sell, donate and transact using tweets. Brands can now directly sell using tweets instead of directing potential buyers to their sales page. With a funding of $1.3 million from Voyager Capital, a financial firm, Twitter’s T-commerce is the future of transactions and it is here to stay.

How to go about it:

All you need to do is sign up for Twitter and open a Paypal account and start tweeting your transactions. Be it for purchasing products or for raising funds, users can now simply ‘chirpify’ their actions. Using the amount, the username and key words like ‘buy’, ‘donate’ or ‘sell’, a transaction can be carried out. When selling something, Chirpify allows a user to set a price, shipping period, schedule and picture of your product in your tweets to showcase your product. One tweet and one reply can now monetize your transaction making the process of buying or selling as easy as ever.

Buy, sell or donate:

A wide array of products and services are sold and bought on Chirpify. These include music, tickets, writing, videos and physical goods. However, the maximum amount that can be spent on a transaction is $2000. It does not have to be only purchases and sales though. Users can simply donate a desired amount to help raise funds for a cause with the ‘donate’ options. Although ‘Chirpify’ is looking to set up other payment options, anyone with a Paypal account can currently deal on the site.

And what’s more! If you’re just there to chill, you can also buy a beer via Twitter. Chirpify powers that too! Click here to check out Tweet-A-Beer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Uza1MPPow

Twesume your way to your next job!

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Although one might be tempted to think that if you can fit your resume in 140 characters, you probably haven’t achieved enough to get a job. Quite contrary to it, Twitter’s new trend ‘#twesume’ has now positively grown its roots into the corporate world. Analyzing and grading thousands of pages of academic accomplishments is now passe. The little blue birdie now acts as a medium to reach potential employers by sending across your resume squeezed into 140 crisp characters. Now, doodling on your favorite micro blogging site just might fetch you your next job.

Who’s doin it:

After communications consultant Richard Skaare came up with the idea of ‘The 140 Character Resume’ in December 2008, writer Matthew Wayne Selznick took up the challenge to write his resume in early 2009 and introduced the hashtag #twesume to make it easier for people to search on Twitter. Since then recruiters have increasingly been turning to social media for recruitments. As a matter of fact, in 2011, 89% of companies used social networks for recruiting. Now, 2012 is speculated to be the year of the twesume.

The edge:

A twesume manages to do the work of a traditional resume and cover letter in less time and space. You can now make a micro resume with all the powerful keywords you ever needed and tweet it across. It works both ways for a job seeker as well as a recruiter. A job seeker can take a leap of creativity to catch the eye of potential employers. On the other hand, an employer can manage to have a ‘feel’ for the aspirant’s personality which was previously unachievable with generic cover letters.

How to do your own twesume:

To begin with, make sure your Twitter account is complete with a profile pic and a brief description of yourself. Then all you have to do is put your goals, accomplishments and skills in minimum number of characters and tweet it across. Don’t forget to put out specific hashtags like #twesume with it to make it easier to search for. And you can always link your tweet to your complete profile. Here is what a twesume looks like:

10 unknown facts and figures about Twitter

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Breaking ground in 2006, Twitter has come a long way in terms of popularity and development. It is not only a powerful advertising medium but also a great platform to share information and thoughts. With more than 175 million tweets flying across everyday, it has also been called the “SMS of the internet”. Here are a few unknown facts and figures about the humble Twitter which deserve a peek:

  1. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey and launched in July 2006.
  1. The founders settled on the name ‘twitter’ which means ‘chirps from birds’. It then gave rise to the term ‘tweet’ which is a short burst of inconsequential information.
  1. The number of registered users on Twitter grew from 3 million in 2008 to 500 million in 2012.
  1. On Jan 2008, Twitter had a workforce of only 8 employees. There are now over 400 employees working with Twitter.
  1. Twitter’s projected advertising revenue for 2012 is $259 million and that for 2014 is $540 million.
  1. India currently has 13 million users on Twitter.
  1. One million Twitter accounts are created everyday and 11 accounts are created every second.
  1. It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day to reach one billion tweets from the very first tweet. It now takes about one week for users to send a billion tweets.
  1. Twitter has set a new record of 8,900 tweets per second (TPS). The previous record is 6,939 tweets per second set 4 seconds after midnight in Japan on New Year’s Day 2011.
  1. The first unassisted “out of the planet” Twitter message was posted from the International Space Station by NASA astronaut T. J. Creamer on January 22, 2010.

Top 3 ways in which restaurants have benefited from social media

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We all know it takes more for a restaurant to get popular than just serving great food. It also needs to market itself and connect with its customers. Social media has proved a useful tool in serving this very purpose. From launching a new product to harvesting reviews, social media has benefited restaurants in a number of ways. Here are three of the best:

1.Locating Food

Location based services like Foursquare have not only shown the hungry man the way to a nearby food paradise, but they’ve also played an active role in building a loyal customer base for restaurants. While these services have enabled restaurant owners to put their outlet on the virtual map, they have also delivered foodies with a platform to express their loyalty. With Foursquare, a person frequenting a particular restaurant may compete with other customers and become the “Mayor” of that place. Coupon Applications on Facebook and QR codes are other ways of bridging the communicative gap between outlets and customers. With such social platforms, restaurants can now take notice of the customer’s loyalty.

2.Online Reviews

Gone are the days when restaurants tucked in a feedback slip with your check. While most people are in too much of a hurry to even fill out the survey, some just lie in an effort to be polite. Writing online reviews give customers a chance to get their views across without having to do so in person. This enables them to share genuine reviews which can either be a detailed rant about the decor and ambiance of the place or just a line expressing how yummy the food was. These online reviews have helped restaurants with the management of their ORM (Online Reputation Management). They have also proved to be more accessible and more genuine than paper surveys.

3.Tracking Mentions and Keywords

Twitter, twitter on my screen, who ordered toast and baked beans? Food outlets have often used social media sites like Twitter to take notice of loyal customers over the vast world of the internet. A simple mention of your favorite dish can bring you on a more personal level with your favorite restaurant. Whether it is tracking down people who are enjoying a newly introduced dish or reading about a customer’s unsatisfactory visit to an outlet, restaurants have always used social media to fill the communicative void between themselves and customers.

 

Twitter Contests Open Doors To Scam

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Contests might fetch you prizes and goodies, but they can also fetch you something you don’t like- SPAM!!!

There was a time when spam mails clogged your mailbox. While such mails continue to be diverted to ‘Junk mail’ to this day, spam has now snaked its way to a larger platform – Twitter.

Some tweeple log-on to twitter to post their thoughts, while some for the sole purpose of sharing information. But there are also some who hunt for contests and giveaways. These users have recently been catching the eye of spammers.

A recent scam which drew our attention is the “Draw Something” scam on twitter. This scam mainly targeted users on twitter who discussed the new application which has taken the virtual world of iPhone by rage. Here’s more on it:

 

The official twitter handle of the National Fraud Reporting Centre, UK  (@ActionFraudUK ) is playing an active role in the fight against scams. You too can make the cyber world a safer place by reporting spam to twitter. To know more about spam and how to report them click here.