Twitter

This is perhaps one of the biggest social media fail stories ever recorded. McDonalds has managed to embarrass itself on Twitter after its latest Twitter campaign went horribly wrong. The company’s social media director, Rick Wion told PaidContent that as part of their Promoted tweet ad-campaign, the company switched from #MeetTheFarmers to #McDStories in their tweet, soon after which few detractors hijacked the hashtag and started tweeting tales about animal cruelty. Users soon added additional topics like unemployment and stomach problems. The company’s problem was compounded by the fact that nothing much could have been done as the very nature of Twitter allowed free [...]

Today consumers are the most detrimental members of a company’s marketing department. They don’t spend hours analyzing and constructing best practices, they simply share and publish their raw emotion and opinion of products, services and more to billions of people. When companies utilize Facebook to join the conversation, they are amongst the 70 percent of small business owners. Currently, only 40 percent of businesses are utilizing Twitter, but this social media platform’s popularity is only predicted to increase. In fact, Twitter has been deemed the conversational search engine of our time. Shouldn’t businesses be the most interesting person in a [...]

The redesign that Twitter has undergone this time around is a marked shift from the past. Up until now, Twitter had stuck to its design elements and at most had tweaked them for better usability. This time though, the changes are significant and going by the number of changes that we see, brands as well as users are in for a big surprise and could radically change the way the micro-blogging site is used on an everyday basis. With over 100 million users and the competition heating up, the change was imminent and perhaps arrives at the time when advertisers are warming up [...]

After being on Twitter for over a year now, I have grown tired of it. Not that I have any qualms about the platform or its features — but the fact that the platform has gotten under the whims and fancies of two kinds of users: Real humans who act like bots, and the Bots. I love the site’s simplicity and the inherent usefulness, but lately, I believe gaming the system and generating clicks has been the single biggest moto why users use the site and while the problem was prevalent ever since it opened up to public — it has only gotten worse [...]

News Feeds, first popularized by Facebook is fast finding its way into other sites. Google+ adopted similar design on the site and now Twitter seems to implement it with the Activity tab. The tab brings latest updates which includes Favorites, follows and retweets from people you follow. The design can be quite overwhelming at first but you’ll really start to appreciate the feature once you get hold of it. It gives you an ability to make sense of what’s happening on the site which until now was quite impossible to acheive. But there are couple of shortcomings in this feature. Firstly, the updates appear as [...]

Gaining influence on Twitter can be a difficult task, but a research conducted by four university students is here to make your task a tad easy. The study analyzed the influence patterns of tweets on the site to determine what exactly was required to be a Twitter super-user. After all, what are influencers doing it right? And here is what they found. More Number of Followers Does Not Mean More Influence Given a choice, what would you prefer? 1000 untargeted followers or 100 highly engaged ones? It’s a no brainer. 100 it is. There is no point of having thousands [...]

I have to admit I am a big fan of Dan Zarrella and his scientific approach towards social media. Last time around, he found out that longer tweets generate higher CTR’s. This time he has come up with another very interesting finding. “The best place to include a link in a tweet is at the beginning.” Apparently, this conclusion did not come easy. Dan analyzed over  200,000, random, bit.ly-link-containing Tweets to arrive at the result. I have already seen some Twitter users implementing this strategy, but in most cases people tend to place links at the end, and that includes [...]

InboxQ has developed a cool new feature that maps the locations around the world where certain keywords are often talked about on Twitter. The company says the tool visually represents the geographic distribution of knowledge for a given keyword or topic based on its index of millions of Twitter users. InboxQ believes many topics are highly provincial, so we plotted the map with the keyword “Social media “and found out that the knowledge cluster is around San Francisco, New York and London. The feature is fun to use and definitely comes in handy for marketers looking to understand where their [...]

Yes, for reasons not known, longer tweets lead to higher click through rates. HubSpot analyzed 200,000 link-containing tweets and found that up to about 130 characters, as the length of the tweet increased, so did the CTR. The reason for the increase could be that the longer tweets are usually accompanied by a  short description, or a recommendation, or a comment. This allows people to distinguish between bots – which usually post smaller tweets- and real humans. Try this tip and let us know f you have witnessed an increase in CTR.