Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

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 »

In the quest for the optimal blog post layout, I had to decide between any combination of Social Voting button layouts. Adding a “Digg This” button to my content would offer the promise of hitting it big with Digg – page one results often get so much traffic that they crash servers – but my content does not really fit in with the Digg demographic which is primarily concerned with news, pop, gaming and science. Marketing is a science of sorts, but the weed smokers on Digg would probably bury my submissions. Reddit is like a high-brow Digg, but still more about obscure news than marketing. What does that leave?

Facebook offers a nice social sharing button … thing, but I have two problems with Facebook’s sharing feature. It does not offer a high-traffic link aggregation page like Digg and Reddit, and Facebook users don’t share links very often. I need something that provides the allure of making page one on a high traffic channel, and the widely accepted utility of sharing content (links) with friends. The Twitter API, Tweetmeme, offers a widget that does exactly what I need.  ... 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:

Tweetmeme, a relatively new social voting site, has ridden Twitter’s coattails right past Reddit, in a matter of months according to statistics from Compete. With a site structure very similar to Digg and a virally expanding community-base in Twitter, it is a safe bet that the once small site has Digg well within it’s sites.

Digg bodes impressive growth over a one year period – better than 60% according to Compete. But compared to Twitter’s 1000% growth among an extremely diverse user-base, Twitter and it’s sister API, Tweetmeme, may soon invade the Digg Nation’s long-standing dominance. Granted, I have some reservations about the name – Tweetmeme doesn’t exactly roll off the tounge well – but I anticipate that Twitter will continue to fuel it’s usership.  ... Read This »

Twitter’s popularity has grown exponentially since it’s launch in mid 2006. Even over the past year, Twitter has gone from just under 2 million visitors per month to over 22 million visitors per month, greater than 1000% growth according to statistics from Compete. But how did the little, feature-limited site grow so fast?

I have to admit, my first encounter with Twitter left me unimpressed and wondering what all the hype was about. But I gave it a chance and after a while, I finally got it. That is to say, I got the growth and potential business models behind it.

Twitter started out as simple SMS tool, and grew into the social network that it is today through very intentional marketing tactics – co-syndication & co-branding. It started out as a simple status-update tool termed “micro-blog,” but users soon discovered that it could be used to communicate real-time news in a publicly search-able fashion. Soon, it became adopted by the press as a good news feed (a syndication tool), and after that, the rest was and is history.  ... Read This »