This infographic shows what happens in 60 seconds on some of the most popular domains/apps. Some stand out stats include the fact that in 60 seconds there are 278 thousand tweets, 20 million photo views on flickr, 2 million searches on Google and 72 hours of video uploaded to YouTube. Rising social stars such SnapChat and Pinterest feature as well with 104 thousand photos shared on SnapChat and 11,000 active users on Pinterest.
LinkedIn continues its rapid growth and development with the introduction of LinkedIn applications. Now you can link your LinkedIn profile to your WordPress blog, add a Google Presentation, or work within your profile in a secure collaborative workspace.
This is a welcome addition to LinkeIn, making the service more sticky for users whilst providing you with far more creative ways to promote yourself to perspective employers. There is a danger that some over enthusiastic users could damage their reputations rather than enhance them – though for the rest of us this could be rather entertaining.
When talking to politicians and business people about improving their presence on-line the most often response I receive is ‘I do not have the time’. With Posterous they no longer have an excuse.
Many are put off by long sign up forms, email authentication, resizing of images and general complication with getting to know how a blog that they sign up to works. The needing to be at their PC to write their post and upload the pictures can feel like another job on the endless list of to-dos where everything else seems to take a priority.
Now with Posterous all of these barriers have been removed. If you can use email you can use Posterous. Within minutes you can quickly and easily be posting photographs, messages and just about anything else you want to your own page on the site.
To start you simply email anything you want to appear to post@posterous.com (words, photos, mp3s and files) putting in the subject line what you want to call the post.
You will receive an email back straight away with links to view your post, edit your post and the ability to set up a username and password. Here you can either just carry on with the automatic website address that was generated following your email or change to something you prefer. It really couldn’t be easier.
When you are ready you can add a profile photo and some information about yourself, but everything you do is so quick and simple to use.
If you already have a blog with blogger or WordPress, twitter, flickr and other social media sites you can synchronise these so that when you email Posterous the appropriate content will be uploaded to your other sites. If you don’t then whatever you send will be added to your Posterous page.
You could in effect never ever visit your own blog on Posterous, though after just one visit to customise you could never come back again by simply emailing your content. Now even the busiest, and technophobic, business people and politicians can do that!
For a while I had been wondering if I could manage a fifth blog for more personal stuff – I guess I will now at Wellbelove’s Posterous.
* with email
Many politicians are familiar with being called a twit, as would be some front line staff of many organisations large and small. Not many would be familiar with the term ‘Twitter’.
So what is twitter, and should you be twittering?
Twitter is a social networking and micro-blogging service allowing members to send updates which are text-based posts, which can be up to 140 characters long, to the Twitter website. Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.
Updates can be added to a twitter by a wide variety of ways including via the Twitter website, short message service (SMS), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.
Those wanting to keep up-to-date with your twitter can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. Your twitter alerts can either be open to anyone to subscribe or you can create a closed group of approved subscribers.
You may think that this is pointless, or great fun. The majority of twitters so far are people just wanting to keep up-to-date with what their friends – but does Twitter offer opportunities to politicians or businesses.
For politicians there are several opportunities, twitter could be used to keep voters updated on what they are doing or update supporters on their campaign. Twitter alerts could be used to alert voters to the need to vote, and which party to vote for.
For businesses twitter could be used to alert subscribers to special offers, new products or updates to their website.
For a charity this could alert supporters to new campaigns or updates on fund raising efforts.
For a television company they could remind fans of a particular programme to alert fans to when their favourite programme is going to air.
For music artists they could tell their fans where they are playing or highlight a new release for downloading online.
Twitter could be used to alert members or employees of internal messages, though if you have a closed list you will need processes to identify and remove those who move to another organisation.
As with all subscriber services those setting up twitters for either political or business purposes need to remember that if you spam your audience they can and will unsubscribe. As with email marketing you must ensure that a message goes out soon after your subscribers come on board, if you do not send an update for several months after they joined the subscriber may have forgotten that they subscribed and see the message as spam.
140 characters gives similar challenges that those writing for Google Adwords, especially in German language where the words are typically a lot longer.
So why use Twitter as opposed to an SMS delivery service? Twitter is a social network with, if your updates are open, others able to discover and subscribe to your updates from their Twitter account. Adding a Twitter button on your site will attract your visitors that are already Twitter users to subscribe to your alerts.
You can monitor how many ‘followers’ you have, send direct messages to individual followers and followers can send direct messages to you.
How to create a Twitter account
This is very easy – simply visit the Twitter website and register. Think about your username as this will be associated with the messages on your feed.
Twitter to your Facebook
Often when I advise politicians on how to best use the web to communicate with their constituence they tell me how they have no time to maintain so many sites and to communicate in so many different ways. One of the great developments of Web 2.0 sites is the convergence of features from many different websites as they allow each other to feed into them. With the Twitter Sync application you will not only send out messages to your ‘followers’ but update your Status Profile on Facebook at the same time.
How to add your Twitter to your WordPress page
You can see my twitter on the left hand side of this blog. To do this yourself after setting up a twitter account go to the WordPress dashboard, select presentation, widgets, drag RSS 1, click within RSS 1 to configure, from the bottom of your Twitter page right click on the RSS button and copy shortcut, put this shortcut in the configuration box for RRS 1, you need to save changes and then should see this in your WordPress page. If it doesn’t work check you’ve saved at every stage and that you see the confirmation that your blog has been updated. Other blog services also have widgets that enable this.
Should you really twitter?
Many years ago in the United Kingdom the telecommunications company ran a campaign featuring a character a chatty bird called Buzby. If Buzby was still around today I am sure he would be twittering away – if you don’t other’s will be twittering louder, and reaching those you need to twitter to.
