The reason for the lack of posts recently is that I am on vacation until mid July. Normal posting will resume then:)
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More bad news for MySpace as Facebook finally passed it last month to become the most popular US social networking site. According to comScore, Facebook totaled 70,278,000 unique visitors, up 97% from May 2008 to May 2009. MySpace audience shrank 5% over the same timeframe, falling to 70,255,000 unique visitors.
Obviously Twitter has seen some tremendous growth in the last 12 months, but I find it interesting that the 5th and 6th biggest social networking sites are MyLife.com and Windows Live Profile! Also, Bebo (an AOL purchase) is slowly making inroads into the U.S. market I would expect to see them continue to grow market share.
Buried in the Reuters article last week about Dell was some interesting information about a small company that is also finding financial success on Twitter. New Orleans-based Naked Pizza, which turns $1 million in sales annually, is “betting the farm” on its Twitter presence according to co-founder Jeff Leach.
The company, which created a Twitter presence about two and a half months ago and has about 4,300 followers, last week said nearly 69 percent of sales generated during a one-day Twitter advertising blitz came from customers drawn in from the site.
MySpace is about to have a major wave of layoffs, according to Techcrunch.
Techcrunch sources say that the layoffs will likely affect between 300 and 500 employees. It’s unclear if these numbers apply to MySpace alone or its parent company Fox Interactive Media, but MySpace makes up around 1600 of the 2900 employees in FIM, so it’s likely that the social network will be hit hard.
Contacted for comment, a Fox Interactive Media spokesperson issued the following statement to TechCrunch:
This is an updated story from a post I wrote in February called How Dell is using Twitter to increase sales
Dell said last week that it has generated more than $3 million in sales from Twitter followers. Dell has been on twitter for about two years now and says that it made more than $1 million in the past 6 months.
“We’re going to watch it over time to make sure it’s tracking at the right level,” said Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s chief blogger. “It is trending upward and that’s what we’re going to be looking at overall.”
Over the weekend I reread Rohit Bhargava’s original article on Social Media Optimization (SMO). Rohit wrote that:
The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.
Rohit’s original 5 rules/guidelines for SMO was expanded to 16 rules:
- Increase your linkability
- Make tagging and bookmarking easy
- Reward inbound links
- Help your content travel
- Encourage the mashup
This is a preview of
When did social media become just Twitter and Facebook?
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Newspapers are reporting that St. Louis Cardinals baseball manager Tony La Russa is suing Twitter, claiming an unauthorized page using his name damaged his reputation and caused emotional distress.
The suit filed last month in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco seeks unspecified damages.
The lawsuit claims that someone created a false account under La Russa’s name and posted updates that gave the false impression that the comments came from La Russa. The suit said the comments were “derogatory and demeaning” and damaged La Russa’s trademark rights.
The account bearing La Russa’s name is no longer active.
A couple of months ago I wrote about the Graying of Facebook and how that more than 50% of Facebook’s users in the U.S. are over 35; the single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on Facebook is now between 35 and 44, and that Facebook’s fastest growing demo is 55-plus.
So I was shocked to see an article in MediaPost that referenced some data from Insidefacebook.com that said that during April and May, the number of U.S. Facebook users over 55 actually dropped by 650,000 after increasing by 1.6 million the prior two months.
Interesting news from The New York Times today that they have hired their first “social media” editor.
Jennifer Preston, a 25-year veteran of New York newspapers, announced her appointment, appropriately, on her Twitter feed.
“Hi, I’m the NYT’s new social media editor,” she wrote. “More details later.” Preston used the remainder of her 140-character allotment to ask: “How should @nytimes be using Twitter?”
According to a Times internal memo obtained by Harvard University’s Nieman Journalism Lab, Preston’s duties will include “expanding the use of social media networks and publishing platforms to improve New York Times journalism and deliver it to readers.
I opened up the Nashua Telegraph last week and was surprised to find an article about how two Nashua restaurants are using Facebook and Twitter to offer deals and keep in touch with customers.
One of those restaurants is Axel’s Food and Ice Cream (@eatataxels) in Merrimack NH. Axel’s has a web site, a Facebook profile and Twitter page. Through its new Web presence, Axel’s has been running special promotions for Twitter followers and will start providing coupons via Twitter in the near future.
