Twitter shopping: You can now buy things with just two tweets
I’ve never been a big believer in social commerce — and the newest initiative between Twitter and AmEx seems more gimmicky than a real commerce play. However, I could see big brands doing some creative campaigns with payment hashtags, so it’s worth keeping an eye on this.
Mike Isaac shared Bluefin’s Co-Founder Deb Roy’s quote from D: Dive Into Media today:
“This whole thing is about taking common sense and making it scale and making it quantative,” Deb Roy, co-founder of Bluefin, said at the conference. “If you can take [our analytics service] and not just do it about [one event like] the Super Bowl but do it for all TV shows … now you have this comprehensive view into how TV is driving engagement.”
Several startups have attempted merging the social and television spaces, but I can’t think of one that has done it extremely well. When I first heard about the acquisition, it was difficult to understand why Twitter would make such a move.
The more I read about the perspective, the more I believe an acquisition like this is not just a good one, it’s a crucial one for the long-term business success for the company. Merging the TV analytics with Twitter’s ad business could drive significant revenue for the popular social networking site — on top of the already-successful promoted trends.
Peter Kafka on the bull trend for Twitter Promoted Trends:
Twitter’s newest price hike went into effect earlier this year, and represents a 33 percent increase over the $150,000 rate the company was asking for in 2012. And it’s up 150 percent from the $80,000 a day it was getting for the ads back when it launched them in 2010.
It’s definitely a positive sign that Twitter is able to command increasingly-higher prices for Promoted Trends, but I’m still not sold.
From their perspective, any revenue is better than no revenue, and at the very least it’s heading in the right direction. But I have to believe that Twitter will have to find another solid revenue stream beyond a Promoted Trend to command real respect from plenty of doubters on the business model.
Nevertheless, if e-commerce on Facebook takes off, many expect the social network to find a way to make money off it.
Linkbait title aside, Reuters published a story today discussing the potential of e-commerce on Facebook, and more broadly, social networks.
Says the Forrester analyst: “It was like trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”
I shouldn’t need to write this again.
But the figures on growth in this country are stark. The number of Americans who visited Facebook grew 10 percent in the year that ended in October — down from 56 percent growth over the previous year, according to comScore, which tracks Internet traffic.
Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner, said this slowdown was not a make-or-break issue ahead of the company’s public offering, which could come in the spring. What does matter, he said, is Facebook’s ability to keep its millions of current users entertained and coming back.
One of the most fascinating shifts for Facebook (and any social network) is the shift from user acquisition to user retention. It appears that Facebook has made retaining and engaging their users the top priority in their strategy.
The U.S. “roadblock” is partly attributed to young people refusing to participate, but also due to the fact that there are already millions of people who have, at a minimum, given Facebook a try. So the shift—from a user acquisition perspective—needs to be in other locations around the world.
From a user retention look, what could turn on Facebook? Their own “frictionless sharing” and features that result in lost privacy for users. Privacy has always been an issue for the social network, but it has been scrutinized and criticized highly for making oversharing the norm.
And that’s the overarching point the article is hinting at. Despite increasing peer pressure, Facebook holdouts are standing firm in their decision not to participate. If enough people recognize the overarching reasons why this group feels so strongly about the social network, it could eventually lead to once-dedicated users exiting the platform.
Google’s latest TV commercial. Titled “Google+: Sharing but like real life”, the commercial is based on the idea of natural sharing. The word “frictionless” isn’t mentioned once.
Radian6’s latest infographic visualizes social media conversation from the 2011 MLB World Series.
Here are some of the most interesting insights:
Source: radian6.com
It’s been about two weeks since I finished unfollowing my account to zero. It seems that I’ve set off a bit of a trend—as Chris Brogan has unfollowed to zero as well (heh heh)—but so far, I have absolutely no regrets about my decision.
As of today, I follow about 600 accounts. This is a great number for me, but I feel that I am far from done. I have a clear vision for the types of accounts I want to include in my stream, and there will be plenty of unfollowing and following taking place in the next few weeks.
The response has been fairly positive but not without opposition. For those who have opposed my approach, I recommend that you give the unfollow-to-zero strategy a try before bashing it. It really is the greatest decision I’ve made on any social network. You will likely find the same.
The bottom line: No one can tell you what to do on your social networks. Own your accounts, make the decisions and follow who you want. In the end, as long as you are pleased with your decision, you can’t lose.
My follow count as I write this is at 7,450. At the start of the great unfollow, I was following just over 16,000 people, so this means that there is over a 50% chance that I have unfollowed you.
So far, so good. It’s not like I have any important updates about this process, but since you are already engaged and reading this post, I’ll share a few.
As for actions on my end, I’ve been hard at work identifying the users who I will be following back shortly after hitting 0. I’ve also been aggressively blocking and reporting spammers. For reasons unknown, Twitter spam has been rampant as of late (especially through DMs).
What, you expected juicier updates? Sorry to let you down!
Feel free to reach out to me (forrestk [at] gmail [dot] com) if you have anything to say. I feel that for the most part, people understand what’s going on. But if you have questions, comments or just want to chew me out over a technological channel, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Really.
I’ve found that a lot of the content that I would normally share on Tumblr, I’ve opted to share on Google+. It makes sense, though — while the platforms are set up very different, the type of content I share on each is remarkably similar.
Christina Warren put it best when she described it as “LiveJournal Meets Tumblr”. There’s some interesting discussion over there, so check out the thread if you haven’t read it already.
It will be interesting to see if the number of Tumblr posts fall when Google+ opens up to the general public.
Shuu.sh off (by BERG Studio)
» Shuu.sh is a prototype web based Twitter reader that ranks your followers on frequency of tweets. It aims to amplify the people that don’t usually get heard, and scale back those with frequent updates.
Shuu.sh is very intriguing and potentially a go-to tool for discovering great content on Twitter in your main timeline. One of the major issues with Twitter is noise — which drowns out others who have less frequent, valuable updates. Shuu.sh mutes the noise.
Congratulations to Dennis Crowley, Naveen Selvadurai and the entire Foursquare team on hitting the half-million mark for number of businesses on the platform.
With all of these new social features debuting, it’s clear that we live in exciting times. The big winner of the “social wars” is the user. With more features and more competition than ever, users will have the opportunity to pick the most applicable platforms to meet their needs.
Source: twitter.com
If social networks and popular websites were people.
loading tweets…
Introducing Sway!
A rocking chair designed for you and your special something, whether it be your girlfriend/boyfriend, cat/dog, or...
No, this guy isn’t going to fix your iPad. In fact, his shop had to change its name because they were getting inundated with...
