A powerful move: Yahoo and Twitter together

The interaction between different players within the social media world is starting to look like a war. Google gets Buzz and now Yahoo partners with Twitter. The latter represents a powerful alliance that could benefit both parts in significant ways.

To read more about the implications of this alliance, take a look at THIS ARTICLE from Channel Web.

82% increase in social media use!!!

According to a Nielsen report, social media use has increased 82% during the last year! This is thanks to the fact that the average time spent on social media per month has moved from 3 hours to 5.5 hours. Amazing stuff, ah?

Read this quote from a CNN Money article regarding this:

"This Nielsen report establishes social media as a trend that is not only here to stay, but one that is growing at a mind-boggling magnitude," stated Bloggerwave Director Ulrik Thomsen. "The findings more than validate Bloggerwave's business model of leveraging social media for marketing opportunities -- a business model I am proud to admit we developed years ahead of the trend."

Ladies and gentlemen: Social media is the future!

It's Facebook time

These are good days for Facebook. The social media giant is near to reach 400 millions users around the world and the promising future of social media gives Facebook a lot of good reasons to smile today.

The new trend in terms of optimization seems to be oriented towards the SMO (Social Media Optimization) and it's going to be interesting to see how SMO will play along the lines of SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

Take the following note from this article I read today in Min Online:
"Just as “SEO” became the key to publishers riding the search engine ecosystem, “Social Media Optimization" may be the buzzword for the next few years as more and more of us discover news and information through friends on Facebook and Twitter."

In addition to this trend, Facebook is now generating more online traffic than Yahoo and Google' Buzz is just a response to accomodate the company to the impact social media is generating on the Internet.

Keeping on mind all this, Facebook is starting to set up the pace on the Web and when a company does that, there are many reasons to be happy and confident about the future.

The YouTube Scholarship

YouTube is one of the most useful tools of social media. Today, I came accross a pretty cool project promoted by the Nyenrode Business University in the Netherlands that gives scholarships to the best videos produced by prospective students.

This is a very interesting project that provides prospective students with an innovative opportunity to demonstrates their creativity and potential.

Read the full post from BusinessWeek HERE.

How social media is affecting online traffic

According to an analysis carried out by the Palo Alto firm Gigya, "Facebook has passed search-engine giant Google to become the top source for traffic to major portals like Yahoo and MSN, and is among the leaders for other types of sites."

This interesting note appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle website.

Another part of the article I found interesting was this:

"...David Berkowitz, director of emerging media and client strategy for the digital marketing firm 360i of New York, said the importance of search engines isn't going away.

"But there's always been one downside to search," he said. "Consumers only spend about 5 percent of their time online searching and the other 95 percent of the time at the destination. Social media is quickly accounting for a large percentage of that 95 percent. Google's biggest acquisitions, DoubleClick and YouTube, have been all about playing a big role in the rest of consumers' Web usage."..."

It's going to be interesting to see the evolution of this trend.

I just passed my Google Analytics IQ test!

Conversion University is a site created by Google that provides a great online training course in Google Analytics. After studying all the material, I decided to take the test today and I passed it!!! That means that I am certified by Google as someone who is qualified in Google Analytics.

I have to say that the test was tough and there's no way to pass it without covering every single presentation included in the course. Before taking the test, my understanding of Google Analytics was very general and I think that's why the test ended up to be quite challenging.

For someone like me, who has built a professional profile as a Web Editor and Content Manager, this course offers a great opportunity to gain a set of skills that are very much appreciated today in the job market.

This is a great course that I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in improving his/her knowledge of Google Analytics. If you have any questions about the test and/or the course, I am happy to share with you my own experience.

8 ways to use social media

I just watched a very nice video made by Lewis Howes that summarizes the best 8 practices for using social media. Very clear and to the point. He also provides suggestions for books related to social media.

I highly recommend it if you are interested in developing a good social media strategy.

To watch the video, click HERE.

The mobile and integration dilemma

There are many predictions out there for social media in 2010. I just came accross an article written by Mike Koehler ("Key Trends in Social Media for 2010") that talks about some of the things will happen this year.

According to Koehler, "The two key words for 2010 will be mobile and integration." This statement made wonder about my own place in this new world of social networks. I mean, I don't browse the Web with my mobile (I actually find it irritating), I don't have an iPhone and I can't even think about getting my hands on the latest Google's Nexus One.

Considering that, am I going to be really behind if I can't accommodate myself to the experience of using the Web with my mobile?

I'm just wondering...

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn numbers

I took the following information from the post "The Big Three Social Networks Have Emerged as Professional Networks: LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter" written by Don Bulmer:

- LinkedIn: LinkedIn has approximately 50 million users worldwide in 200 countries. The membership on LinkedIn is growing at roughly one new member per second. When LinkedIn launched in 2003, it took 477 days, almost a year and four months to reach the first million members. The last million took only 12 days. Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members.

- Facebook: Facebook has over 300 million members with 150 million that log in at least once per day. The fastest growing demographic on Facebook are 35 years and older and according to Facebook more than 2 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared across the network, each week.

- Twitter: Twitter has more than 32 million members with the segment of 45-54 year olds being the top demographic and 25-34 year olds following closely behind at second. It has been found in other studies that baby boomers and senior citizens are more likely to join Twitter than their grandchildren.

I thought this was something interesting to share to get a picture of how social networks are doing today. If you want to read the full article, click HERE.

How to screw up your social media

Today, I read a very interesting article that talks about different ways to ruin your social media efforts.

Catharine Taylor, the author of the article "Eight Ways to Ruin Your Social-Media Strategy" points out eight common mistakes that occurred when managers deal with social media strategies. This is the list:

1. Pretend you can do without it
2. Play down the costs
3. Act like you own the conversation
4. Fear empowering your employees
5. Assume you have little to learn
6. Take negative feedback personally
7. Fret about return on investment
8. Understimate the power of seemingly small efforts

After reading this article, I couldn't stop thinking about the way my previous company managed its Facebook campaign. Taking into consideration the author's list, this is my personal reflection of the mistakes my company did:

1. Pretend you can do without it
My manager always thought social media was useless.
2. Play down the costs
He set up a campaign with the conviction that the only thing he needed to do in order to succeed was creating a company page on Facebook.
3. Act like you own the conversation
The language on the page was everything about "we are the best", "come and play", etc...
4. Fear empowering your employees
My manager was scared to death with the idea of people devoting time to Facebook during working hours. For him that stuff wasn't real work.
5. Assume you have little to learn
He didn't care about social media, he didn't believe in the fact that maybe user engagement could bring new ideas to the table affecting site improvement.
6. Take negative feedback personally
After we created the page, there were three groups on Facebook talking very bad about a pop-up campaign that we were using with an affiliate partner. My manager thought it was useless to interact with these angry users and try to deal with the problem.
7. Fret about return on investment
We placed some ads on Facebook with zero results in terms of ROI. After one week, he decided to abandon forever social media strategies.
8. Understimate the power of seemingly small efforts
He thought social media was useless... he didn't even know what Twitter was.

To that list, I would like to add one more thing:
Our site was oriented towards the Spanish market yet the page we created on Facebook was in English language!

What I saw on my previous company was probably one of the worst social media campaigns ever built. I blamed my manager for the failure of this campaign which unfortunately was one of the numerous problems he created with his management style... no wonder why the company eventually closed down.

Twitter Analytics

What is the best tool to measure your success with Twitter?

I came across a very interestting article (read full post HERE) that talks about a new tool (Tweet Level) developed by Edelman which allows you to measure your Twitter performance.

There was a comment made to that post that mentioned another tool called twendz which seems to be a good one too.

Now, I am wondering what could be the best tool I can use to measure my Twitter presence...