Monthly Archives: April 2012

Facebook

Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 12% Of Your Friends | TechCrunch

You’re not unpopular, it’s just the nature of the news feed. Amongst all the business-related news at FMC, Facebook revealed that the average news feed story from a user profile reaches just 12 percent of their friends. Your actively shared links, photos, and status updates probably reach much higher than 12 percent of your friends, while more inane auto-generated posts about new friendships, wall posts, and articles you read may only be seen by your closest buddies.

via Your Average Facebook Post Only Reaches 12% Of Your Friends | TechCrunch.

email

Eric Stromberg — Increasing User Engagement in Emails

For any consumer application, email is an important tool to drive engagement. Last year, Fred Wilson went as far as calling it “Social Media’s Secret Weapon.” After optimizing the Hunch weekly recommendation emails for a few months last summer, I thought it might be useful to share some of the key lessons we learned to increase user engagement in emails and acquire new subscribers.

As background, while Hunch had transitioned from a consumer destinations site to more of a B2B approach (that eventually led to an acquisition by eBay), we found that sending weekly emails with personalized product recommendations was an effective way to showcase our technology and drive interesting partnerships. So we wanted to make them good. We ran countless A/B tests on groups of 10,000 users to see what worked best. For each test, we tried to constrain by cohort and keep all other variables constant. Below are a few things we learned along the way:

via Eric Stromberg — Increasing User Engagement in Emails.

Reading

8 Strategies for Launching a Brand Presence on Pinterest

Many marketers have heard of Pinterest, but despite this, most brands have yet to hop on the hottest new social network. In this article, we’ll look at why Pinterest is important to brands and provide seven simple steps for leveraging brand presence on Pinterest.

Pinterest has quickly become one of the top five referring traffic sources for several apparel retailers. A study by Shareaholic in January showed that Pinterest drove only a fraction less referral traffic than both Twitter and Google, and more than Google+, YouTube and LinkedIn combined.

Despite the powerful numbers, most brands and merchandisers are not present on Pinterest. There’s no DKNY, Macy’s, Walmart, Target, etc.

For those brands looking to develop a Pinterest presence, try these seven simple steps.

via 8 Strategies for Launching a Brand Presence on Pinterest.

Infographics

How to create great infographics | Tutorial | .net magazine

Great infographics can be a powerful tool for communicating complex ideas quickly and beautifully. In this tutorial Matthew Scharpnick, co-founder of Elefint Designs, puts you on the right track to create beautiful and meaningful infographics

In an internet age dominated by readers scanning short-form articles, how can we communicate something complex, nuanced, or dense in a short period of time? Queue the infographics.

If you read design-influenced publications such as GOOD, Fast Company, or Mashable, you have undoubtedly seen the flood of infographics that hit the web in recent years. Every day new infographics pop up on a wide range of topics including politics, economics, pop culture, technology, films, sports, and a whole lot more. At their best, these mixtures of design and data have the effect of drawing users in and conveying a lot of information in a small package.

via How to create great infographics | Tutorial | .net magazine.

SEO

Why AuthorRank Matters & How to Leverage It [Infographic]

For the average writer, marketer or content producer, AuthorRank presents a great opportunity for personal branding, but also makes us individually responsible for the quality of work we produce. Evaluating the quality of content is Google’s job, and moving into the future it’s clear Google seeks to evaluate the substantive quality of authors. By understanding AuthorRank now, authors can establish themselves and their aggregated body of work as worthy of being ranked.

via Why AuthorRank Matters & How to Leverage It [Infographic].

Reading

Top 25 Most Social CIOs: Who’s the Most Active in Social Media? [CHART]

If you thought corporate titans spent all their time ensconced in ivory towers — too important to engage in social media — think again. Here’s a chart based on research that ranks the top 25 most social-media-active chief information officers CIOs of the Fortune 250.These social scores, developed by Social Strategist and Forbes columnist Mark Fidelman for cross-platform enterprise software developer harmon.ie, list which CIOs are the most socially active by examining and compiling activity on LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+ accounts, as well as counting mentions on social networks, corporate and individual blogs, Alexa scores, and simply Googling their information.

via Top 25 Most Social CIOs: Who’s the Most Active in Social Media? [CHART].

Reading

Pinterest is Now the No. 3 Social Network in the U.S. [STUDY]

Pinterest is now the number three most-popular social network in the U.S., behind Facebook and Twitter, according to Experian Hitwise.

A new report from the researcher shows Pinterest got 21.5 million visits during the week ending Jan. 28, a nearly 30-fold increase over a comparable week in July. Not surprisingly, the site skews female with a 60/40 ration of women to men visitors.

via Pinterest is Now the No. 3 Social Network in the U.S. [STUDY].

news

What’s wrong with technology journalism | Multimedia Journalism

The majority of technology journalists are even less equipped. Many have no engineering background. They’ve never built anything like the things they write about. Or, if they were once engineers, they haven’t written a line of code or soldered a circuit in years. In a fast-moving industry, professional engineers get left behind the state of the art all the time. How can journalists without any engineering expertise possibly hope to keep up? ….

via What’s wrong with technology journalism | Multimedia Journalism.

measurment

Report: The Rise of Digital Influence and How to Measure It – Brian Solis

About three weeks ago, I celebrated my first anniversary as Principal Analyst of Altimeter Group. And, it is with great pride that I mark the occasion with the release of my first official Altimeter report, “The Rise of Digital Influence.” Not a traditional market report, it was written as both a primer and a how-to guide for businesses to spark desirable effects and outcomes through social media influence.

We live in a time when social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, et al., not only connect us, they become part of our digital lifestyle. But it’s not just about how these networks help us connect and communicate with others. Whether we know it or not, our social activity now contributes to our stature within each network. New services such as Klout, PeerIndex among many others not only measure who you know, what you say, and what you do, they attempt to score or rank your ability to influence those to whom you’re connected. As a result, social network users are now starting to rethink how they connect and communicate to improve their stature within each network. And at the same time, brands are taking notice as these services also help organizations identify individuals who are both connected and relevant to help expand reach into new media and markets.

via Report: The Rise of Digital Influence and How to Measure It – Brian Solis.