But do these buttons work? It’s hard to say. What we know for sure is that these magic buttons promote their own brands — and that they tend to make you look a little desperate. Not too desperate, just a little bit…

Don’t worry. These buttons will vanish. The previous wave of buttons for Delicious and Digg and Co. vanished, Facebook and Twitter and G+ might vanish or they might survive, but the buttons will vanish for sure. Or do you seriously think that in ten years we will still have those buttons on every page? No, right? Why, because you already know as a user that they’re not that great. So why not get rid of them now? Because “they’re not doing any harm”? Are you sure?

via How important are all those ugly Tweet Buttons to news sites? » Nieman Journalism Lab.

With all the tweets bombarding our Twitter streams, it’s not uncommon to wonder how many people are actually reading your tweets. The answer, according to one new study, may surprise you.A team of researchers from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology recently published an article in the Harvard Business Review that found only 36 percent of tweets are deemed “worth reading.”

via Study: Only 36 Percent of Tweets Are “Worth Reading” – 10,000 Words.

Sharing is predictable, and follows specific patterns over time. There are two main types of links: evergreen ones, which have a long sharing curve, and breaking news, which have an average life span of 2.8 hours on Twitter and 3.1 hours on Facebook.

via Bitly to Launch New Consumer Version.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

via What Your Klout Score Really Means | Epicenter | Wired.com.

According to the February 2012 UM formerly Universal McCann report, “The Business of Social: Social Media Tracker 2012,” frequent internet users in the EU-5 have been steadily increasing their usage of microblogs, though compared to some Asian countries, like Japan, penetration remains low.Microblogs had the furthest reach in the UK in 2011, at 26.8%. Spain, despite jumping off to a strong start in 2009, was second at 24.8%. The remainder of the EU-5—Italy, Germany and France—had noticeably lower microblog user penetration.

via Microblog Penetration in France Low, but Growing as Election Nears – eMarketer.

Ever feel like you tweet something important, but no one believes you?

A recent study shows you how to boost the credibility of your tweets, making people take them more seriously. And it’s not just marketing fluff; the study was conducted by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University.

via How to Make Your Tweets More Trustworthy [STUDY].

Companies are now able to search and analyse up to two years of Twitter updates for market research purposes.Firms can search tweets back to January 2010 in order to plan marketing campaigns, target influential users or even try to predict certain events.Until today, only the previous 30 days of tweets were available for companies to search. Regular users can access posts from the past seven days.

via BBC News – Twitter partners with Datasift to unlock tweet archive.

The Yandex agreement is similar to the real-time Twitter search that used to be offered by Google — a partnership that ended last year around the time that Google was launching its own Google+ service.

Yandex says it has licensed the “full feed of all public tweets,” covering all languages — but seems to highlight specifically those tweets that are in Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian or Kazakh, covering tweets from more than two million users. People will be able to search by usernames and hashtags, too. In total, Twitter has around 100 million active users, covering some 250 million tweets per day.

via Yandex, Google’s Russian Rival, Is Twitter’s New Real-Time Search Partner | TechCrunch.

The Pulse of News in Social Media: Forecasting Popularity.

Imagine you run a consumer electronics company. You just launched a game-changing new smartphone that will make or break your company. Two weeks after the launch, you’re hearing stories about your new phone burning users while they’re using it. You see the odd Tweet here and there but aren’t sure what the scale of this problem is or how you should respond. You make a panicked call to the company who monitors social media for you and they tell you that they can start tracking for this going forward but since they only get a realtime stream of Twitter data, there’s nothing they can do to get the last 14 days worth of Tweets.

They would love to help, but there’s nothing they can do about it. In a realtime world, once the stream of Tweets has passed, they’re gone.

Until today, this was how the world worked.

via Gnip Blog.