Today StockTwits, the online community of investors, expanded its reach to include companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX). The format for Canadian stocks is $(TICKER).CA.
To use StockTwit, sign in with your Twitter account, and tell the service which stocks you'd like to follow. Every tweet tagged with $ before the stock symbol (e.g. $GRPN, $LNKD) will show up in your stream. Tagging Canadian companies works the same way as American companies.
In a survey released today, recruiting software platform Jobvite noted that more than 22 million Americans used social networks to find jobs in 2011. One in six people, more than 15%, say they found a job through social networking. Fifty-four percent of job seekers are using Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter for their search. Even though there's a higher job seeking volume on Facebook, more than one-third don't use it to look for work. There's far more actual job hunting on Twitter and Linked; almost all job seekers use LinkedIn for job hunting versus nearly 75 percent on Twitter. Overall, 86 percent (nine out of 10) job seekers have a profile on social media. Eighty-four percent of job seekers have a Facebook profile, 39 percent are onTwitter and 35 percent use LinkedIn.
In a new study released today, Pew Internet Research found that 66 percent of American adults online use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn. They cite staying in touch with family and friends as one of the major reasons for using these sites. Seventy-one percent of the younger demographic, ages 18-29, cites staying in touch with current friends as a major reason for using social networks. Fifty-five percent of users ages 30-49 are on social networking sites to connect with old friends they'd lost touch with.
Today LinkedIn launched a revamped version of CardMunch, an iPhone app that digitizes paper business cards with a single scan. The update gives users greater insight into the person behind the card via their LinkedIn profile, images of them and their contacts, where they've worked and where they went to school, along with the contact info on the business card itself. The previous version of this app only showed the information already found on the business card.
Last week Google+ introduced brand pages, an almost exact match for Facebook Pages. While Google now claims that Google+ is not a competitor to Facebook, the Pages products are so similar that they are bound to go head-to-head. Brands are going to end up getting more value out of one or the other.
In this post we look at the early efforts of two leading luxury car brands: BMW and Mercedes-Benz. The comparison shows that Facebook has a clear first-mover advantage in user numbers and its comparatively advanced developer platform. But Facebook shouldn't get complacent, Google+ has a lot of promise as a destination site where brands can truly engage their fans.
Location-based social networks were one of the top five trends of 2010. Nowadays, location is baked into pretty much everything that developers do. Mobile and social apps are location-enhanced, not location-based. You still can, however, "check in" somewhere using geosocial networks Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places. Location-based services like Yelp utilizes the geographic position of your mobile device to figure out what's nearby.
Wondering who's actively using geosocial and location-based services? Take a look at this handy infographic after the jump.
As of October 2011, 850,000 U.S. veterans were unemployed. The jobless rate for post-9/11 vets hit 12.1 percent. With an estimated one million service members scheduled to leave the military between 2011 and 2016, it was high time for President Obama to find new ways to help vets find civilian jobs. In addition to launching a government resource on WhiteHouse.gov, Obama teamed up with LinkedIn and Google to offer additional resources for veterans.
LinkedIn now tags job postings that might be best for veterans, and Google offers additional tools for the building the military veteran community online.
Zwiggo touts itself as a group collaboration tool where you can share photos, posts, calendars, favorite books, chats, files, to-do lists, date planners, yellow notes, maps, list voting, forums and bookmarks. It does not integrate with Twitter or Facebook, and its API is already free and open to developers. With a clean, easy-to-use interface, Zwiggo is poised for new users. Now, it just needs to decide who those users will be.
Today Q&A social network Formspring adds interest categories for music, humor, fashion and beauty, celebrity gossip, sports and video games in order to help its 27 million users request types of questions they would like to receive. It is simultaneously launching a media partnership with MTV, Hearst (Seventeen Magazine), Funny or Die and The Huffington Post, which will make it easier for those brands to locate and target its fans in a way that's more personalized than Facebook fan pages. With this new marriage of questions and big brands, Formspring pushes the already-fine line between social networking and advertising.
Google+ Pages for brands launched early today, with a select group of launch partners. Later in the day, G+ Pages were opened up to everyone. ReadWriteWeb, among others, immediately created a Page. I took point on developing RWW's one and afterwards I was curious to see what other brands had done. While it's very early days, it was clear to me what works and what doesn't in Google+ Pages for brands.
