Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Consider a random, non-specific piece of content. It could be a blog post, an article, a picture, video, song or any other piece of digital information you can fathom. The content of the content is not important for what I am about to discuss. This post is concerned with why people share links more on a social network like Twitter than they do on a network like Facebook.

“Facebook is for friends,” is what you’re probably thinking. Good. Facebook is for friends, and you are interested in social media optimization. Your friends aren’t. They are your friends, probably in spite of your interest in things like social media optimization, and since they aren’t interested in this very specific topic, you may not feel compelled to share something so arbitrary to them.  ... Read This »

Twitter and Facebook are about to go head to head in a grueling evaluation of their effectiveness as blog syndication channels. At the end of three standard paragraphs there will be only one declared winner, one declared loser and ultimately two options that aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but for comparison sake: the following is brought to you by Smobot – “the social media optimization guide.”

First, we have to assume a level playing field. Let’s examine a situation where you’ve got an equal number of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, and both options will each only receive one status update per blog post, the content of which shall be, again, assumed equal. Facebook enables users to comment, “like this” or something, share content, and invite friends to “fan” that Facebook page (fan: v. – the act of becoming a fan of a person, place or thing’s Facebook page). Twitter enables users to @reply and retweet content. Overall, retweeting occurs more frequently than Facebook sharing (refer to Mashable’s home page), but Facebook enables users to easily suggest the Facebook Page to their entire network of friends. Round one is a draw.  ... Read This »

Networked Blogs, the almost official blog directory & syndication application on Facebook, offers users the ability to subscribe to, rate, comment and share blogs with their friends. I would advise any blogger to add their blog to the directory, but I would not suggest that you funnel all of your Facebook friends to it. While Networked Blogs offers some nice features and indexation in a fairly high-traffic blog search engine (2 million visitors / month with close to 1 million users), the application is too many degrees removed from both your blog and Facebook.  ... Read This »

Facebook is a relatively simple machine that can be reduced to an empirical formula. I am SMOBOT, and I see the world in numbers. OK, not quite, but let’s have a crack at it.

The platform was intended for college students almost exclusively upon conception. Word-of-mouth spread across dorms clogged with students, each connected to the internet, and all in close, isolated proximity to one another. There was a need to connect, and the means by which to do it. Students would have a way to connect, communicate and show off their connections, which was an incentive for them to recruit others to join the Facebook network.

Having saturated the college scene, Facebook opened things up to high school students, each connected via mini networks at school. And as soon as the PC became a staple good, Facebook opened their doors to anybody with an email account.  ... Read This »

Clearly, some social networks are better than others for subscribing to blogs. Facebook’s fan pages offer a slick, interactive platform where users can keep up with the latest, comment on and share content with their friends. Twitter has taken the world by storm with a re-invented status update. Myspace also allows users to keep up with their “friends” activity streams. And Linkedin has taken full advantage of this recession, ballooning to over 14 million users a month. The question is: