Relevant Social Media Links: Highlights from this week
We skipped the team meeting this week but our Specialists came through with their updates! Here are some of the relevant social media links, important updates, trends and awesome examples of businesses using the major social platforms this week:
Announced it’s testing a new look among a small group of users to make it easier to find what you’re searching for on the site. “Our goals with this new look are to make it easier to get around the site and help people get more information about pins they care about,” a Pinterest spokesperson told Mashable. “We also made some changes behind the scenes that we hope will make things faster.”
Over the last week, several Instagram users began reporting that the photo-sharing app was locking them out of their accounts, and asking them to confirm their identity by showing photo ID. “This is just a general practice for both Facebook and Instagram to request photo IDs for verification purposes depending on what type of violation may have occurred,” a Facebook spokesperson told Talking Points Memo. “Unfortunately, I can’t share more with you beyond that as we don’t go into details beyond that.”
Flickr
The Flickr blog put together a remarkable collection of snow flake marcos (close-up high resolution photos) to remind us that our roads, cars and driveways are actually covered in several inches of tiny, beautiful works of art.
Quora
Last week, Quora introduced a new feature for bloggers fittingly called Blogs on Quora. Bloggers are encouraged to write about their topics of expertise, and Quora will deliver them into users’ feed as a way of answering questions that have no yet been asked. The topics you follow on Quora determine which blogs will appear, so that you only see blogs about topics you’re already interested in. This new feature should be great for quickly building an audience for any blogger’s specialty.
Prime Minister Harper offered his Twitter followers a treat yesterday, tweeting his activities along with photos and video. It appeared to be a fairly typical day for Harper, who attended meetings with senior staff, took questions from the opposition during Question Period and ate breakfast with his cat, Stanley. Nick Taylor-Vaisey of Macleans magazine said that while some Canadians considered Harper’s most recent social media injection a PR stunt, “most papers this morning gave the tweets prominent play, so Harper wins again.” See all of Harper’s tweets here.
Google+
A new report from the UK and picked up by Forbes, looking at “active” users is shaking things up – stating that Google+ is now the 2nd most “active” social network – 343M active users to Facebook’s 693M, with Youtube and Twitter following close in 3rd and 4th. Of course all numbers on active users are taken with a grain of salt – who defines active? What does that mean? We wonder - especially since we are not seeing this activity (from an engagement, content and chatter perspective) to the extent this report suggests.
MySpace
Most interesting this week: MySpace has angered indie artists and labels. They are allegedly paying major labels big bucks in order to stream their artists’ songs, but aren’t doing the same for indie bands. This may be because major labels have a 40% ownership stake in MS. Indie artists feel “exploited”.
Based on early reviews I’ve read, what separates MS from other music streaming platforms is the volume of indie music they have and the opportunities they offer new artists, so I think showing disrespect to indie artists could hurt them.
YouTube
Interesting stats on YT – SuperBowl ads shown on YT before the game get 600% more views than those uploaded afterwards! 9 million compared to 1.3 million.
Google has updated its new YouTube Capture app for iOS – making it even easier to shoot & upload videos from your iPhone to YouTube. HD now available and better audio sync.
After you Like a page, Facebook now suggests other pages you may like.
Lysol talks about how Facebook helped increase their sales by 30% and allowed them to reach half of women aged 25-34 in the US. They did this by not focusing so much on the brand, but on users sharing healthy cleaning tips.
