Posts Tagged
social media
2011 was a huge year for social media. Granted, since 2004 we’ve seen an explosion of social networks, an insane growth in Facebook users, and Twitter take on widespread adoption. More of my students are using Twitter today that in previous semesters.
But still, in comparison to other years, this year was huge for social media. Not only did Facebook and Twitter see massive changes, but we saw another big tech company enter the social media ring: Google. The big three are all moving decidedly in one direction: mobile.
Without a doubt, Twitter is one of the best innovations of the century. It’s a simple idea coupled with a simple interface that took them to the stratosphere. But after a few years and millions of dollars in venture funding, Twitter’s simplicity isn’t what people are looking for anymore. New features are hard to come by, and whatever pushed out is just way too cosmetic.
Right from the start, most of the innovation in the Twitter ecosystem has been coming from third party developers. They outsmart the Twitter team every step of the way. Over time, Twitter is just becoming an infrastructure that processes tweets from apps that aren’t their own. For those Twitter lovers and social media enthusiasts, we have compiled a list of Twitter apps that offer more value than Twitter itself.
We don’t live on a single site or write on a single blogging platform any more. Instead, more and more of us are opting to use a range of social networks and services. We post photos to Flickr, blog in WordPress, update our status on Twitter and Facebook, bookmark with del.icio.us, share items in Google Reader, checkin with Gowalla, and more.
It can be a pain to update them all consistently, and even more frustrating to pull all of your online data together. In an effort to remedy this problem, many people spend their time putting together a site and embedding various widgets from each site, but that can take considerable amounts of time and can even be expensive depending on how you do it.
Pubwich is an open-source web application that does that job for you, bring together multiple services into one self-hosted webpage, much like the scenario I previously explained. Just a head’s up though – before we get into the review – that this is not a web application per se because it will require you to find a hosting solution yourself. Once you do, though, you’ll be up and running in no time.
Given the explosive rise in Internet usage over the past few years, businesses are now turning to the virtual world of the Internet to advertise their products and services. Sites such as Twitter and Facebook are now commonplace for advertising as they offer a number of advantages over traditional forms of advertising such as newspaper or magazine adverts. Internet-based advertising is often a whole lot cheaper than print advertising and it can reach a much larger catchment area, often outside the traditional catchment area of the business.
The key question for businesses now is: how can they harness this increase in internet-based advertising and, most importantly, can it create revenue for the business? The whole area can be a bit of a minefield to businesses who have never ventured into the world of online advertising before but luckily there are some helpful tools on the Net designed to guide businesses through this minefield.
Raven Tools is one of these. It has a wide range of tools depending on whether you use SEO (search engine optimisation), social media networks or Google products such as Analytics and AdWords. This could be a real advantage to any online business looking to broaden its horizons.
Let’s take a look at Raven Tools in a bit more detail.
Anyone who’s anyone in the social media game these days is familiar with Klout. It’s a service that measures your social media influence across multiple platforms by determining who you engage with and how effectively you engage with them. It’s a great metric for determining who you influence, how much you influence them, and what you’re influential about. But what if you want to take it a step further, and make your social media engagement more effective? Crowdbooster is a (relatively) new service designed to do just that.
Crowdbooster gives you “tweet-level” metrics on how your message fares on its journey toward reaching as many people as possible. Then, it gives you actionable suggestions of how to utilize that information to increase your influence. Crowdbooster is presently in closed beta, and while anyone can sign up for an invite, you can never be sure of how long the waiting list is. I was fortunate enough to score an invite through Klout, and here is what I’ve found.
Even before the social media revolution, we have always linked to popular things things we find online, usually the latest trends and things that popular people are using. I like Will Smith and might be willing to check out the gadgets or apps he is using. However, not everyone likes Will Smith (outrageous, I know). But we all like our friends (at least we hope so!).
Usually, there is a very good reason we’re friends with the people we are – we have a lot in common. So, if they liked something, there is a very good chance you might like it too. Strawberryj.am, wants to show you what is popular, right now. The web app does this by analyzing what links your friends are sharing the most. Let’s take it for a spin to find out more about this social app.
The most awesome thing about social networks is the ability to share stuff with friends and loved ones. And it is really ironical that the same sharing feature is fast becoming the most annoying thing as well. From over enthusiastic peers to professional spammers, people just mindlessly click away the retweet and like buttons, overwhelming the social stream.
It took decades to reign in email spam, but thankfully, spam in the social stream is getting the attention it deserves from early on. KnowAboutIt is an app that helps you fight all the social noise and spam by highlighting stuff worth looking at. The web app makes sure you know about the best links passing through your social streams. Interested to learn how it pulls that off?
Social Media is like a bull in the China shop. It’s powerful and is uncontrollably wild. People who complain about email overload should take peek at the plight of a social media consultant and consider themselves blessed. Every hour on the hour, the flow of information exponentially increases and processing it requires top notch apps.
Todaypulse offers an easy way to manage your social media marketing and create conversations with your customers.
A lot has been said already about the clout of Facebook. Businesses get better exposure and brand recognition at Facebook than at their corporate websites. Over time, Facebook has made it easy to create Facebook page for promoting your business. They have some excellent articles in their wiki to help you build a Facebook page for business.
There are tons of apps available, both free and paid, to enhance the functionality of the page and user engagement. Finding the apps that work and putting them all together to create a Facebook page that works, isn’t for everyone. FaceItPages is a web app that helps people with zero technical knowledge put together and publish a Facebook fan or business page.
We are living in the era of content overload. With the rise of blogs as a professional, reliable and responsible medium that covers news, the volume of content available on any given topic has exploded and keeps pouring in by the minute. Add to it all the social network updates from friends and family and you have an absolute mess in your hands.
It’s not only becoming difficult to read all the news and updates but it’s also getting more difficult to filter them out in the first place. A piece of very useful information is always accompanied and drowned in a sea of nonsense. Summify is a web app that bravely tackles all the social noise signals to give a summary of quality content that matters to you.
Quick Look
Get your app in front of thousands of interested users with a sponsored Quick Look post, including a poll for users to vote for an in-depth review!
Find out more
