Twitter posts

Twitter is still the most used social network by businesses. This surprises some, but the latest statistics showed that 77% of businesses were on Twitter versus 74% on Facebook. It’s not a big difference, but it’s still at least a little surprising to many who view Facebook as the big social network and Twitter as the other guy in the field. Twitter is easier. It requires less time. It’s more about communication than popularity and there are no algorithms that can make your efforts meaningless like they can on Twitter. I’m not suggesting that businesses should be on Twitter and not Facebook. On the…

It may never stop happening. Twitter accounts are hacked every hour of every day. Every now and then, a big fish is hacked and the results can be sadly hilarious. A Twitter account controlled by hacker group Anonymous is claiming responsibility for today’s hacking of the Burger King Twitter account. As can be seen in the image above, they changed the name on the account to “McDonalds” and put the familiar “M” as the profile picture. They then announced that the company had been sold to McDonald’s because “the whopper flopped”. McDonald’s was quick to express their sympathies and state that they…

If it’s possible to be a true filmmaker using only the 6-seconds allowed on Twitter’s Vine app, actor Adam Goldberg would be the director, star, producer, writer, and mastermind behind the project. I have a lot to say about the combination of genius, randomness, and mystery that goes into his videos, but it’s best for you to see if for yourself. Check out his page and click through to all of his Vines or just check out a selection from the ones below. If you don’t watch everything he posts, you won’t understand any of it. Then again, you can watch everything he posts and still not understand any of it, but…

Anyone who has been on Twitter as long as I have (6 years I believe) knows that the site has gone through major transformations in the past. Lately, Vine might be the only major change in a while but there was a time when it seemed like proper Twitter etiquette changed week by week. When I first started, links were magical and very few people posted them. Today, many accounts post nothing but links. This is a big mistake. If you post only links, you’re really not posting anything at all. Why? Because people aren’t really following you if that’s the case. Run some tests. Use bitly or goo.gl or other click…

Those in social media marketing as a profession realize that there are certain unknowns when it comes to the new web. We know that people are on social media. We know that they don’t want direct marketing. We also know they’d rather get direct marketing than pay for the services, so there’s at least a little room for something. The question is, “what is that something?” Whether from B2C or B2B, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn give marketers the ability to try to reach the target audience and generate leads. The vast majority are trying. Most are failing, or at least not meeting…

It should have been one of the easiest Easter eggs in the world to pull off for a progressive social company like Twitter, but their lolcatz language option turned out to be a feeble attempt at being fun and clever. A user can go to their language settings or simple go to https://twitter.com/?lang=lolc. From there, a few mild attempts at using the worst language ever created barely scratches the cleverness threshold. “VIEW MAH PROFILE PUJ”, “VIEW FOTO”, and “EXPAN KTHX” are some of the changes made to the interface. Otherwise, it’s mostly about using all caps and eliminating some vowels. Not much…

In 2008, Twitter introduced the ability for advertisers to buy promoted trends, a way of taking over a portion of the homepage to drive traffic to a topic. At launch, it was a “mere” $80,000, a number that many experts thought was too high. In 2013, the number is officially $200,000. So much for the experts. According to AllThingsD: The promoted trend lets an advertiser insert its own message atop the “trends” list on Twitter.com home pages and on Twitter apps; Twitter sells a single message a day, per territory. Except when it doesn’t: Today, for instance, there’s no promoted trend on the…

There’s a minor journalistic debate currently happening surrounding the marketing, particularly how social media played into the Super Bowl ads, that is happening right now between Matt McGee and Bobby Grasberger. McGee said that Twitter was the big winner amongst social media sites as he claims that 50% of the ads included mentions of Twitter. Grasberger says that only 3 of the ads mentioned Twitter with the others using hashtags which can be used on multiple platforms. In ways, both are correct. In other ways, they both missed two of the bigger points. First, it’s clear that businesses can…

Firing employees can be hard. There are emotions at play and emotions can lead to bad decisions. They can also lead to funny consequences when the people in charge aren’t cognizant of how the new world of social media works. Such is the case for embattled British music retailer HMV. The company, already embroiled in a form of bankruptcy protection (see image from their website below) due to the shift towards digital music downloads, fired 190 employees today. At least one of those employees had access to the company’s Twitter account and gave a blow by blow report of the events as they unfolded. The…

Twitter built its empire around brevity. There were others in the microblogging field, most notably Jaiku and Pownce, that offered a longer format than Twitter. Conventional wisdom at the time was the the shortness of Twitter was its weakness, but it turned out to be its greatest strength. Now that they’ve introduced Vine, the Twitter app that allows users to upload 6-second videos and post them in their stream, it would appear that their hope in the world of video is that “brevity is the soul of wit.” Did they cut it a little too short this time? Is 6 seconds enough time to put together a compelling…