A new study-turned-infographic from Mr Youth suggests that social media interactions influence consumer purchasing tendencies. The data was collected during the three-week period of time leading up to, and including, Black Friday/Cyber Monday. Yet despite glowing percentages about social media users - 65% of users recommendations led to a purchase, and recommendations by social media users were twice as likely to lead to holiday gift purchases - brands apparently are not responding to consumers on social media sites.
Today Twitvid announced that it is launching a new open social video network and redesigned site focused on helping users find their favorite videos. Twitvid wants to make it easier to upload clips and share them to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Twitter.
For now, Twitvid's frontpage interface looks more like Digg's (before the social newsrooms). It shows most popular TwitVids by views, along with a featured Twitvid and a Twitvid Tuesdays Winner. There is a list of popular members on the right rail. Twitvid is tossing this simplistic design for user profiles that focus on personalized video taste. Sharing will be more focused around personal interests rather than top rated content. Imagine the Facebook news feed, but only populated by video that has been personalized to your tastes.
Analysis by the social network analytics company Orgnet.com shows how rumors fueled a run on Swedish-owned banks in Latvia over the weekend.
Banking officials are calling it the world's first ever social media-fueled run on banks, and officials say that the misinformation campaign may have been a deliberate attempt to destabilize Latvia amidst the ongoing European debt crisis.
Is someone sitting on the Twitter handle you want? Is it someone with 0 followers who registered in 2008 and never tweeted once? Yeah, that was me, too. At least, it was yesterday. This morning, Twitter Trust & Safety turned over to me the account I've been after for years.
The trick is to file an impersonation claim. That's the only one Twitter responds to in a timely fashion. This means you have to make a credible case that you or your brand is being impersonated, and the account has to have violated Twitter's inactive account policy. But if you have your ducks in a row, you can have that account in your hands in under a week. Here's how.
It's that time of year again. The holiday season is officially in full gear, and practically everyone, including yours truly, is working on those lovely 2011 year in review and top trends type posts. Twitter's doing it, too. For every day in December, Twitter releases a list of tweets curated around a specific theme. December 1st, for example, was all about "the year in stories," and December 5th had to do with "hot topics." These are the things that Twitter's creators think are most important about it. What do these topics say about the power of Twitter in 2011?
This week, serendipity engine StumbleUpon launched an entirely redesigned site, complete with a new logo and a focus on topic features. A few days later, Twitter announced big updates to its user interface, completely changing the experience to focus more on a supposedly simpler user interface that tries to change hashtags from a symbol for trending topics to a space for discovery. The race for top discovery engine is on. What's more notable is that this entire experience is focused on grabbing the mobile user's attention.
People today are sharing to social networks while they're watching TV. They're communicating with friends in real time (chatting, IM, tweeting) and asynchronously (commenting and posting). A new report from Ooyala predicts that these social elements will become a part of the content itself, appearing inside video players, in apps or on second screens such as tablets or smartphones. This vision for the future of social TV focuses mostly on sharing and discovering while watching. How does this vision differ for viewers and publishers?
Today Twitter rolled out a new user interface that radically changes the @ messages, hashtags, profiles and the homescreen. In addition to these user-focused updates, Twitter also launched its own form of brand pages.
Google+ introduced brand pages in November, positioning itself as a competitor to the more established Facebook Pages.
A few months ago, Foursquare changed its brand pages so that the user only needed a Twitter account in order to authorize it. After that, Foursquare's brand pages employed a more Twitter-esque, one-way-follow type mechanism. This one-way follow technique makes sense for Twitter's new brand pages.
Today at the #letsfly conference, Twitter announced big changes to its user interface. In the new design, Twitter completely changes the homescreen layout. Now @ messaging is called "connect," hashtags # are "discover," and the profile feature is just called Me. Direct messages are nowhere to be found on the homescreen; they are now located in the "Me" profile. The update is available now on iPhone and Android, and the update for Twitter.com will rollout over the next few weeks. Twitter for iPad has not changed. Our resident developer, Jared Smith, tests out the updated Twitter iPhone app. Take a look after the jump.
Social media opens up both conversation and creativity for stock traders. But most importantly, it creates community around niche interest topics.
The way stocks are discussed among investors is different than it was even five years ago. In 2008, Howard Lindzon launched StockTwits, the online community of investors, with the idea that people wanted to share ideas about trading. Lindzon was a huge fan of Twitter, and so StockTwits was built off of that.
"A guy in Kansas can be the expert on grains, rather than the guy who trades grain stocks in New York," says StockTwits CEO and Founder Howard Lindzon. "The Kansas guy can look out his window and tweet what he sees." StockTwits, says Lindzon, has turned everyone into a potential market maker and expert.
