The Green Eyed Monster » social networks

Facebook: New features released today

Julie Delaforce — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 02:21:16 +0000

Facebook has announced a major suite of new features (not yet rolled out to all users), they all look to provide great additional functionality.

A quick rundown on three key new features:

1. New Groups functionality

“Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. It’s a simple way to stay up to date with small groups of your friends and to share things with only them in a private space. The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group.”

The new Groups features will enable you to create your own smaller networks within Facebook, and enable easier sharing of information to different groups of your friends.

The main features of the new Groups will be:

Easily create new groups from the left sidebar menu
Group chat functionality
Document sharing & collaboration
Ability to message the whole group from an email client if you’re unable to access Facebook

Drawbacks:

Unfortunately this does not enable easy sharing to the group from your own profile in the form of status updates. and is therefore not a replacement for the under-used Friends Lists. Facebook, please upgrade to include!
You can add friends to a group without them accepting. However, there are no news feed stories generated by creating a closed group, so it will not post the fact that a member has been added to a group on their wall for all to see.

It also seems Facebook is testing an update to comments via Groups – you’re able to type your comment and hit ‘enter’ to post, rather than needing to click a ’send’ button. Or perhaps this will remain a feature only for Groups as it creates more chat-like interaction within groups of friends.

2. Download your Facebook data

Facebook will now provide the functionality to to download all your information: messages, photos, videos and status updates. This is great news for those who’ve been waiting for a backup feature and enables easier upload of information to other services . It looks secure, requiring a password to access the downloaded file. It’s unclear whether this feature will be available for Brand Pages, for which it is greatly needed.

Read LifeHacker’s post on how to download your information from Facebook.

3. Applications Dashboard

The new applications dashboard provides more transparency about who has access to your data, giving users a greater sense of security. It will clearly show which applications and websites you have provided information to; what information they have about you and when they last accessed it. You can also easily update these settings, or completely remove access to certain applications.

Read Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post (including instructional videos): Giving You More Control.

Twestival and social media for social good

Julie Delaforce — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:21:18 +0000

There are many cynics who will say that we live in a hyper-connected world and its actually over-complicating our lives, rather than simplifying them. They say social networking keeps us at home in front of the computer and encourages anti-social behaviour. Some even think that there are too many brands just pushing their advertising messages in social media. Hopefully charity events such as this week’s second annual Twestival will go some way to muting these critics.

On March 25th, more than 175 cities will participate in Twestival, a global charity event. According to the Twestival website:

“Twestival™ (or Twitter Festival) uses social media for social good. All of the local events are organized 100% by volunteers and 100% of all ticket sales and donations go direct to projects.”

At the time of publishing, Twestival had raised over $200,000 for Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian organisation that provides access to education for poor children.

Mashable.com suggests five ways you can get involved in Twestival:

Attend a Twestival event
Donate online
Bid on the Twestival eBay auction
Tweet your support
Listen to Twestival FM.

Can’t get involved in Twestival, but still interested in how you can do good via social media? There are many other ways you can get involved. It’s no accident that charities are beginning to make their mark in social media, it’s all about community and helping one another, so the two go hand-in-hand.

Charity: Water is one organisation who are making an impact. They do the simple things right: they’re on Facebook and Twitter to bring attention to their cause and encourage viral sharing and word-of-mouth, they have a website with rich content: counters showing how much has been raised for particular projects.

Sometimes its hard for us to relate to big, international causes. Think about how social media has helped during natural disasters, such as the Victorian Bushfires in 2009. Photos and videos were shared on UGC sites which brought attention to the disaster and lead to people mobilising on Twitter to share links to charity donation information. Many showed their support for the victims by joining Facebook groups.

So now you’re inspired to do good, but don’t know where to start? It’s easy for anyone to get involved. Here are some tips on what you can do to help humanity online:

Update your Facebook or Twitter status about a cause to let your friends know about it, don’t forget to include a link to the site of your chosen cause
Show your support to a multitude of charities by signing up to the Causes application on Facebook
Create a Chip-In counter and ask friends to donate to your favourite cause
Sign up to Yahoo! for Good and add a badge for your favourite cause to your website, social network profile or blog

Showing support for a good cause has been made much easier with social media tools and applications. Now there’s nothing from being able to do more to help.

Trends: Most popular social networks of 2009 by search queries

Julie Delaforce — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:27:10 +0000

Here’s a quick insight into the popularity of some of the best known social networks and social media platforms.

The below shows the Google search volumes of Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, YouTube & Flickr in Australia for 2009.

Facebook clearly dominates the search queries and has grown steadily in popularity throughout the year. YouTube is a distant second with less than half the volume of searches, which have remained fairly steady throughout the year. It’s interesting to see that as Facebook has grown in popularity, MySpace has decreased in popularity. MySpace garners only about one in four as many queries as Facebook. Twitter and Flickr seem to get a fairly negligible portion of the search volume.

Social media wrap

Julie Delaforce — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 23:06:23 +0000

Here are a few news items and links I’ve found interesting reading in the past few of weeks:

Chris Boudreaux shares the social media policies of 82 companies on his Social Media Governance site
Online PR spending has grown in the past year (against the trend of a decreased spend on online advertising spend) and the growth is expected to continue
Companies to invest in social networks and email marketing in the coming year
Rewarding your customers: HMV’s new CRM/eCRM plan with pureHMV
Coming soon to Twitter: Lists
Facebook releases a new ‘happiness’ guage and a Gross National Happiness (GNH) index for the USA

I’m endeavouring to do this social media wrap about twice a month, more frequently if there is more content I’d like to share with you.

Social Networks & Search experience growth in website referrals

Julie Delaforce — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:56:27 +0000

Recent research from Hitwise has shown that Banking and Government are leading the way in social network referrals to their websites.

Social Networks & search have experienced the most growth in referrals in the last year, at the expense of email, portal & news referrals.

This should be a wake-up call to those companies not yet looking at social media strategies, and to those relying on more ‘traditional’ online marketing methods.

Women are bigger social media users than men

Julie Delaforce — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 03:54:17 +0000

While it comes as no surprise, it is nice to have fresh numbers on the gender split on social networks.
According to recent statistics from Information is Beautiful women dominate on the majority of social networks, Digg being the exception with a 64% male skew. Women dominate on the following popular social networks:

MySpace – 64%

Facebook – 57%

Twitter – 57%

Flickr – 55%

Read more statistics, and see Information is Beautiful’s chart.

Celebrity fan communities done right: Zachary Quinto

Julie Delaforce — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 05:13:51 +0000

Originally posted at freshchat.com.au

Whilst checking on my Facebook news feed this morning, I saw a link from the Zachary Quinto fan page to his new community. I already knew that Quinto was active on social media, so was intrigued to take a look and see what his community is all about.

Launched only a few hours ago (27 July USA time), the Zach Quinto Community is something akin to Facebook, a stream of his other social network accounts, with fans able to join, create an avatar and profile, comment and add their own posts to the stream. It’s very simple, and yet a very effective way for fans to keep an eye on what Quinto is up to and be able to interact with him. The community is hosted neatly within the Zachary Quinto Website.

Quinto’s other social media endeavours are also working well. He’s on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube (as a co-founder of Before The Door productions). Of course, it’s not enough just to create accounts on every social network out there. Quinto (or perhaps his minions) do an excellent job of keeping in touch with fans not only in the form of status updates, but also by sharing photos and videos.

A job very well done.

Have you seen any other celebrities who are doing a great job in social media?

The Green Eyed Monster » social networks

Facebook: New features released today

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Social media wrap

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