This week in social media: Twitter galleries, Beyonce's baby bump and Man City in social push

This week sees use of social media among US adults soar, Twitter launches User Galleries to tempt people to use Twitter.com, Facebook ditches Places and adds location to updates, Manchester City in a digital and social media push, Beyonce’s baby bump break Twitter record and 10 cool Facebook brand pages.

Adult use of social media soars
Thumb up for this one! Here’s a reason for your company to jump on the social media bandwagon if you haven’t done so already (who are we kidding, of course you have). New research by Pew Research Center has found that 65% of all US adults now use social networking sites, up from 61% one year ago, with 43% saying they visit sites like Facebook and Twitter every day. Interestingly most of the growth came from Americans over the age of 30 with seniors making up the bulk of it. With Silver surfers now joining in on the fun, why are some businesses still scared of entering the social media sphere we wonder?

Twitter launches user galleries
Totally unexpected, but perhaps unavoidable Twitter has launched User Galleries that gather all the recent images tweeted by a user in a pretty and scannable gallery. I love this new addition – it does make me want to user Twitter.com more – but it has also made me rethink what images I tweet. Downside: it will only display up to 100 images.

10 cool Facebook brand pages
ShinyShiny has listed ten Facebook brand pages it thinks tick all the boxes and make people want to actually ‘Like’, competitions and incentives aside.

Facebook ditches Places and adds location to status updates
In a somewhat surprising turn, Facebook has scrapped its Places check-in feature after only one year. But Facebook hasn’t left location-based features completely, as it has instead launched a new ‘add location’ to your updates or tag a place in a post. Gravy, we weren’t really getting anything out of Places either way apart from stalking our friends’ whereabouts.

NOTE: As Facebook rolls out these changes they might have changed your privacy settings. So unless you want your location posts to go public, check your privacy settings now!

Pregnant Beyonce breaks Twitter record
It doesn’t take a nature disaster or big sports event to break records in the social world. Sometimes all it takes is a celebrity and her belly like we discovered this week. Pop star Beyonce’s performance and subsequent reveal of her pregnancy smashed the standing tweets-per-second (TPS) record when her ‘happy news’ garnered a whopping 8,868 TPS.

In total B obtained 280,000 mentions on Twitter that night according to MTV’s own statistics.

Want to increase website traffic? Make sure you add the Google+ button
Webpages that have Google’s +1 button installed generate 3.5 times more traffic from Google+ than website that don’t according to HubSpot. Well of course. If you have your content connected with a Google +1 it will create more referral traffic from Google+, goes without saying really. If you don’t have the button there is no way for it to generate referral traffic… Anyway, it is time to join the party. Circle us up!

Facebook hits 1 trillion page views in June
Well that is according to Google’s Double-Click says TechRadar. If you ask comScore they will tell you the ‘real’ number is 467 billion not 1 trillion. Either way, it is a huge number!

Think SEO when creating Facebook pages
In a world of SEO and getting the wording right, new research shows that search makes up to 34% of all external referral traffic to Facebook pages. Facebook page admins should therefore be concerned with search engine optimisation when naming pages, filling in fields on the Info tab, posting content and placing links to Pages on websites.

The growth of social media
An interesting infographic by Search Engine Journal that tells it how it is and how social media has grown since the early days. Among the stats are:

    • 1 in 4 Americans watches a video on YouTube every day

 

    • 86% of US internet users between 18 and 29 uses social networking sites in May 2010

 

    • Facebook dominates the daily unique visitors graph with 310million daily uniques

 

    • 53% of employers research potential employees on social neworks

 

    • In 2012 it is estimated that 43% of companies will use blogs for marketing purposes, up from 39% this year

 

Would you like a pizza with that app?
Pizza chain Domino’s has launched its official iPad app on the UK app store, so you can now order your pizza, pay for it and track it as it makes it way to your house. The latter is really cool if you haven’t got anything better to do than track your pizza delivery man… But luckily we can think several things that are more worthwhile.

Manchester City rolls out digital initiatives
Between us here at Sutro we care more about Manchester United, Arsenal and Aston Villa, but we have to say that the digital initiatives by the ‘world’s wealthiest football club’ Manchester City sounds pretty impressive. Man City is to offer RFID chip membership cards, augmented reality season tickets, online data toys, connected TV channels, Foursquare, mobile remixes and more – and all for free!

Man ‘earns’ £11,000 through Twitter by betting against his boss
Must admit that when I spotted the RTs on this one on my Twitter feed recently I did wonder if it was some kind of spam campaign. What started as a bit of fun – basically this guy trying to prove to his boss that Twitter isn’t a waste of time – ended up with 23,000 retweets and @poultrykeeper £11,000 ‘richer’. Unfortunately the boss in question didn’t pay up and poultrykeeper in no richer. This is a great example of how Twitter can work to spread the word, but please don’t think of it as an excellent way to get exposure. Most people just RT without even looking at what they are sharing – sadly.

Vanity Fair *hearts* Mark Zuckerberg
As the Next Web comments it “truly is the most beautiful sign of nerd’s revenge when you see who’s made it into Vanity Fair’s New Establishment list this year”. For the second year in a row, VF editor Graydon Carter has included Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tops the Top 50 list of an “innovative new breed of buccaneering visionaries, engineering prodigies and entrepreneurs” as “The Age of Information gives way to a burgeoning Age of Technology.” Click through to Vanity Fair to see the complete list.

Google+ lets you ignore people
Yep that’s right, you can now ignore people’s updates on Google+ if you so wish without blocking him or her completely. By ‘ignoring’ you will not see any of their posts in your stream, you won’t be notified about their activity, and they will be de-Circled – all with them being none the wiser. He or she will still be able to see your stream and comment on your updates.

Facebook has offered this for a while so you can keep people as friends but don’t be hassled with their updates. It honestly does make for a happier social experience sometimes.

Elisabeth Edvardsen

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