A social media study conducted by Pew (pdf) reveals some interesting facts about social media use by teenagers. One of the most interesting takeaways is that Tumblr just isn’t as popular as many people believe in the youngest demographic. Twitter is. It’s growing substantially with 24% of teens microblogging their 140-characters regularly in 2012 compared to 16% in 2011. Instagram is also growing in popularity with 11% of teens using Facebook’s mobile image darling. Compare this to Tumblr, a much older service and one that is wrongly associated by many to be a teen haven, is sitting at only 5%…

Yahoo is finally tossing its hat into the social media ring. Recently, Yahoo announced that it would be incorporating tweets into its newsfeed on Yahoo.com. This signals a serious shift, since Yahoo is giving equal weight to tweets and ‘bona fide news.’ Anyone who’s paying attention will have noticed that Twitter is one of the largest growing companies in the world. With over half a billion users and over $250 million in advertising revenue just last year, Twitter is also one of the most valuable brand strategy tools available to a company. However, Yahoo is now using Twitter as a news outlet,…

Facebook and other social networks are employing keyword-sniffing programs that monitor our private communications such as chats and direct messages. When a potential criminal activity is found, the communication is presented to human auditors who determine whether or not to inform law enforcement. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? This was one of the most thought provoking questions I’ve ever explored before writing an editorial. The conspiracy-theory-loving, “leave my internet alone” part of me was absolutely outraged (albeit not a bit surprised) once I heard about this practice….

You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’! Yep, times are still changing, as more public company boards are lending their ears to digital directors who can develop their online marketing, social media and mobile device strategies.  “Content marketing” is the new buzzword on everyone’s lips, and C-suite execs are finding themselves “increasingly ill-equipped in the boardroom” and, in many cases, digitally illiterate. This may be enough to scare many into hurriedly making a Facebook or Twitter page – but it’s not the whole…

If there’s one major flaw with the way that many businesses use automation tools, it’s that they’re not able to properly control the flow of content from its longest form down to it’s shortest form. This is unfortunate because using RSS feeds to post to Facebook and Twitter from a blog, for example, doesn’t save much time at all but minimizes the effectiveness of the networks. It’s all about flow. It’s about taking advantage of the strengths of the various networks will not falling into the traps that each allows. Let’s take a look at an example of content flow. In this case, we’re going to work it down…

Content speaks for itself. It speaks for a company. It speaks to the people. Most business websites are sorely short on content. Sure, they have sales content and information about the company, but so few today are actually putting out high-quality content about relevant topics that make their websites more of a resource. Today, people want to trust a company before doing business with them and content is the easiest way for them to understand that you know what you’re doing. It’s not just about having information for visitors to see in order to convince them that you’re an expert. It’s also about…

Twitter has had a rocky road since its rise to fame in 2008. It first had issues when its growth outpaced its ability to handle the load. Then, it started getting a bad name for being irrelevant. Then, the spam started to dominate. Users are hot and cold on it depending on what day you ask them, putting the shortened update social network in a constantly precarious state. Still, they’ve managed to thrive through it all. Some point to the streamlined way the company has been operated over the years. With under 200 employees sustaining a site that has over 190 million monthly visitors, they don’t need…

Picture this. You are driving your car on the highway, and you decide to tweet about the lack of traffic on your morning commute. By hitting a button on your steering wheel and speaking when prompted, you can easily tweet to your followers without even glancing at your smart phone. This is technology that we may eventually see in our cars. With social media becoming more and more a part of everyday life, and phone-related driving accidents increasing, it is not crazy to think this could happen. One of the benefits of this feature would be the safety it brings to drivers. Unfortunately, drivers can’t…

In the early days of search engine optimization, the pitch that many companies used was very appealing. “We’ll get you listed on thousands of search engines so that everyone can find you.” Today, this seems like a ludicrous statement. There’s only three real search engines that account for 97% of the search traffic and it’s been like that for some time, but back as recently as 2008, many companies were still pushing automated search engine submission as their primary selling point for search engine optimization. The same thing is happening today, only with social media. There are companies out…

Things were looking good for Google Plus when it first launched almost two years ago. Even while it was still in its testing phase, millions of people were clamoring to sign up for Google’s social networking service. Invites had to be suspended for the invite-only field test because of the insane demand for new accounts. It only took two weeks for ten million people to create accounts on the new service. Hopes were high and it looked like a real competitor had finally arisen to take on Facebook. But even as the number of users increased, users and journalists began criticizing the service. More…