Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts

Six tips to building a huge social network

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Social media is a great way to put yourself out there and receive a rewarding, fulfilling response from likeminded (or just open-minded) individuals from all over the world. It’s also a great way to expand your personal and professional networks, which can result in all kinds of advantages down the line, from fun opportunities to a free exchange of ideas to measurable professional gain. And anyone can build a respectable online network with a little diligence and some online savvy.

Here are six ways to help you stand out in the increasingly busy social media crowd and build a massive following for yourself by leveraging the latest apps, best practices, and Intel-powered mobile devices.

1. Reach out to readers and networks that make sense
While it’s wise to have a presence on every major social media network, you’re going to get the best response by focusing your energies on the most appropriate networks for you. Determining this is a matter of researching demographics and usage patterns, trial and error, and common sense. For example, a professional looking to establish leadership or expand visibility in his chosen industry (perhaps to get a better job offer) might choose to focus heavily on LinkedIn, while an aspiring fashion designer or visual artist would likely be best on a more visual network like Pinterest or Instagram, where folks with similar interests are more likely to spend time. Try starting here to help you get started on your strategy.

Regardless of which networks you choose, remember to tailor your messaging appropriately. Updates on Twitter should fit well within its 140-character limit, and should use hashtags when appropriate. Videos on YouTube should be short and professionally edited. Continue to refine your messaging based on the updates that bring in the most Likes, Retweets, and new followers. And remember, all of the major social networks have their own apps, so it’s easy to make updates on the fly with the lightning fast processor inside your Intel tablet. But opening all those apps individually can suck up a lot of time if you’re going to be active across many networks. Not to worry: there’s an app for that!

2. Use an app to streamline the process
Juggling a half dozen social media platforms and possibly even more actual accounts can suck up a huge amount of time. There’s no need to handle them all individually. You can use a centralized app or online service to help streamline the operation. Services like Hootsuite, Buffer, and SocialFlow let you register all your accounts, then manage them from a central dashboard, where you can create posts, schedule them for release, and better manage the chatter about you and the topics you care about. These apps let you turn an Android tablet like the Acer Iconia A1 into a convenient multi-tasking dashboard, and no matter what you’re sharing, it’ll be easy to do it from anywhere thanks to its zippy Intel® Core™ processor.

3. Share and re-share original content
Sure, sharing third-party content like lists and gifs is fun, but your social network may be more interested in content you’ve created yourself. Original blog posts are especially appealing, as they give the reader a personal peek into your mind, helping to establish you as a unique voice and build a stronger bond with your online network.

While most social media shares should be sent out only once, feel free to re-share your best original content multiple times. Experts advise sharing posts up to three times, at intervals of eight hours apart, in order to reach readers located in every time zone around the world. But remember: social networking isn’t all about you, it’s about communication, and that means more than sending out content for feedback.

4. Spend time responding, rather than just posting
Social media is a two-way (or multi-way) conversation, and you prove that you’re actively listening when you take part in that conversation rather than simply sending out blind updates. The biggest social media players have shown how successful it can be if you actually respond to other people’s posts more often than you create your own original ones. Social media users feel a connection when you write back. And when they know that you’re a real person with a legitimate interest in them who takes them seriously, they’ll be more likely to reciprocate. (Pro tip: make sure you use the appropriate syntax and standards for @ replies, hashtags, and the like. Not doing so may cause followers to quickly lose patience with you.) And once you’ve started to forge a connection, make sure you maintain it by staying active, no matter what distractions come up, or where you find yourself.

5. Leverage mobility to very your message
Life doesn’t just happen in the office and the living room. Thanks to ubiquitous connectivity and portable devices like Intel-powered tablets, you can (and should) get your message across from just about anywhere. Rather than writing a social media update about what you’re thinking, now you can tell people what you’re actually doing. Better yet, show them with a photo or short video. The Asus VivoTab Note 8 makes capturing and sharing a photo or video with your followers easy, and its Intel processor keeps it running quickly and efficiently, so you can post those updates in a snap and not miss out on any of the fun.

Mix up your message and leverage these kinds of images whenever possible; studies show that users are more apt to Like or Retweet posts that contain photos than those that only contain text. And when those photos and videos include familiar faces, all the better.

6. Meld online social with real world social
Building a presence on the Internet will only get you so far. When you venture into society, use the opportunity to engage nearby members of your online network in person. This can be in the form of hosting meetups or other get-togethers at your favorite cafĂ© or watering hole, or exploring further afield by pulling together groups when you’re on the road. Invite people individually on Facebook, or broadcast your whereabouts via Twitter or Foursquare. Don’t forget to capture photographs and commentary from the gathering while the fun times are raging. Nothing beats a great party picture captured on your tablet to help build your network even further!

Follow these tips and you should start to see your social presence gain momentum. But whichever tips you take to heart, remember an Intel-powered tablet can help bump you up to the next social strata. All-day battery life gives you the power to post those selfies well into the night, and copious connectivity options let you keep your feeds active until dawn.




Source : pcworld.com
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Does Facebook think users are dumb? “Satire” tag added to Onion articles [Updated]

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Facebook is already an unbearable enough place as of late, at least in my case. Awful national and international news stories continue to appear in my personal feed alongside friends' amateur political commentary and personal quibbles, and that mix makes the occasional ray of satirical, hilarious sunshine from off-kilter sites like The Onion welcome. Sadly, Facebook has begun trying to ruin even these fun articles by appending their titles with a "satire" tag.

The major catch to this auto-tagging is that it only appears in a "related articles" box. Here's how it works: If a friend posts an Onion link to his or her Facebook feed, click on it for a laugh. Once you're done at The Onion and come back to your desktop or laptop browser, Facebook will have generated three related articles in a box directly below whatever you'd clicked on. In the case of an Onion link, that box will usually contain at least one article from the same site, only that article's headline will begin with the word "satire" in brackets. As of press time, we were able to duplicate this result on three different computers from different accounts, one of which is shown above.

We can only assume this was implemented as a reaction to users believing that Onion links are nonfiction reports (you can lose hours flipping through Literally Unbelievable, a site that catalogs such boneheaded moments), but we're not sure what compelled Facebook to go so far as to assert editorial control. Maybe the company still feels bad about how users reacted to its intentional News Feed manipulation from 2012.

What's more confusing is this limited implementation, which itself takes a while to explain. Original posts on friends' feeds and The Onion's official Facebook page don't come with a tag. If users save the article to a read-later list, the tag will vanish as well. And other satiric sites, particularly The Onion's newest sibling site, Buzzfeed-spoof Clickhole, are immune to the tag.

We reached out to Facebook to find out how long this practice has been in effect, whether we should expect to see it spread further across the site, and if any other sites fall under the "satire" tag umbrella. The company's PR team responded by asking us for screengrabs of the "satire" tag, but we've received no further response since then. We've also reached out to The Onion for a statement, but mostly because we can't wait to laugh at the article it prepares in response.

Update: A Facebook representative issued the following statement to Ars Technica: "We are running a small test which shows the text '[Satire]' in front of links to satirical articles in the related articles unit in News Feed. This is because we received feedback that people wanted a clearer way to distinguish satirical articles from others in these units." That test has been ongoing for over a month, and while we were told other satirical sites' links have received the same tags, we were not given a list of those sites. Our question about whether the tag would ever appear in other places on Facebook remained unanswered.





Source : arstechnica.com
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Facebook Trending brings popular topics to light, rolling out now

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Following the inclusion of hashtags, Facebook began testing a Trending box during the late summer last year, showing popular topics in the upper corner of one's account much in the same way the aforementioned microblogging site does. Fast-forward a handful of months, and Facebook has now begun rolling the new feature out in certain (yet unspecified) countries, while mobile users will have to keep waiting as testing is still underway.

The idea behind Trending is simple, and could be handy for those who want to see the bigger social picture rather than live in the bubble of their friend's list. Trending items, which are topics popular in the moment, whether recent events, news, or something else entirely, are listed in a small box in the top-right corner of one's main page -- not quite in the News Feed, but close enough.

Not all will be seeing the same trending topics, however, with the list -- which is slight in nature with only a handful of topics -- being personalized for each user. Some topics displayed with on Facebook-as-a-whole trends, but others will be trends within topics you're interested in, as determined by your past Facebook activity, likes, and other applicable settings.

With each trending topic comes a small blurb that explains what the topic is about, and clicking it will then pull up posts related to the topic, making the social network altogether Twitter-esque. If you're not seeing the box yet, hang tight -- Facebook hasn't said which regions are getting it, and when it will roll out to others, nor when it'll be showing up on mobile.










SOURCE: Facebook Newsroom
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Facebook slapped with lawsuit over ads reportedly displaying false endorsements

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Facebook has been hit with another lawsuit this month, this one by a user who states the social network falsely showed that he "Liked" USA Today when, in fact, he never had. Such an advertisement appeared to the people on his friends list, showing them an endorsement from him that he states he never performed. The user is seeking financial compensation for this action, as well as compensation for all other users who experienced the same phenomenon.

Facebook user Anthony Ditirro has filed a class-action lawsuit against Facebook in a San Jose court for displaying his endorsement of a publication he claims to have never visited or "Liked," in the actionable sense of the word. Though, according to the lawsuit, Ditirro has nothing against USA Today, it is also not something he has endorsed and so he takes umbrage with the falsely-generated "Like" on the advertisement.

The false use of his endorsement, according to the class-action lawsuit, runs afoul of various federal and state-level privacy and related rights, and the $750 in damages comes by precedent of a California law allowing for such a figure in the event a personal image is used in the manner specified without the owner's permission. As mentioned, this isn't the first privacy-related lawsuit the social network has received in recent weeks.

During the last days of December, two Facebook users filed a lawsuit against the social network under claims that it reads the contents of private messages that contain a link to a third-party, doing so to mine data for advertisers and marketers. That claim -- which Facebook has called "without merit" -- is said to be in violation of the Electronics Communications Privacy Act and related California laws. In that instance, the plaintiffs are seeking $10,000 in damages for all users who allegedly fell prey to these claimed privacy violations.






SOURCE: GigaOm

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Social Media Update 2013

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Some 73% of online adults now use a social networking site of some kind. Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the number of users, but a striking number of users are now diversifying onto other platforms. Some 42% of online adults now use multiple social networking sites. In addition, Instagram users are nearly as likely as Facebook users to check in to the site on a daily basis. These are among the key findings on social networking site usage and adoption from a new survey from the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project.

About the Survey
The results in this report are based on data from telephone interviews conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International from August 7 to September 16, 2013, among a sample of 1,801 adults, age 18 and older.  Telephone interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by landline (901) and cell phone (900, including 482 without a landline phone). For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.  For results based on Internet users (n=1,445), the margin of sampling error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.




SOURCE: Pew Internet




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Google+ Auto Backup brings drive uploads to desktop

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The same service you’ve been using with your smartphone for several months is hitting the desktop world this week with Google+ Auto Backup. This software ships - strangely enough - with the newest version of Picasa, uploading your photos automatically from a certain directory to your Google+ social networking account. This service works with photos that are 2048pixels on their longest end unless you’d like to devote Google Drive space to the effort.

This upload process could easily be done by you with a series of uploads from your folders of photos manually, but the idea is an extra added bit of simplicity. Here you’re able to tell this internet-connected app to watch a directory in your computer, uploading any and all photos that come along from the point at which you start.

This app can also be configured to work with your media locally. While you’re able to pull media from a variety of locations - folders and physical drives included - you’ll be able to have all of this data copied to a single local hard drive while you’re at it. It would appear - for now - that you don’t actually have to use this Google+ Auto Backup app to connect with Google+ at all, if you don’t want to.

In releasing this app with Picasa 3.9.137, we may be seeing one of the last signs before Picasa is fully folded into Google+. It’d be a strange idea, collapsing the service entirely, but it’s not without precedent. Look at how similar the icons are already!





VIA: 9to5Google, Picasa
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Vine vanity URLs go live for Twitter VIPs

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Vine has launched vanity URLs for its new web-profiles, allowing at least some users of the short video sharing service to reserve their own personal addresses. Confirmed as incoming yesterday, registrations for the custom URLs are now being accepted, though you'll need to be an existing Vine user and a Twitter VIP if you want to snag one initially.

That's because Vine is only allowing those who have both been a registered user for thirty days or more, and who have posted at least two Vines, to be among the first wave of vanity URL users. Everybody else will have to wait until Vine loosens its grip on them.

Even then, today only those with verified Twitter accounts can grab an URL today on Vine; they'll have a pre-suggested name matching their existing Twitter handle. Everybody else will have to wait until Monday, December 23rd when general registration opens up, though since there won't be any pre-suggestions it will be a first-come, first-serve arrangement.

Once registered, the profile page will pull together all of the publicly shared Vines from each user, though not allow new videos to be shared through the web. That will still be handled by the app itself.

While many were initially skeptical of the idea of Vine, questioning whether Twitter users would really jump at the idea of sharing six-second long video clips with each other, the app was a surprise hit. As well as jumping to the top spot for free iOS apps at one point, it spawned a Facebook-made rival integrated into Instagram.

Most recently, Vine updated with video editing tools, as well as the ability to save Vines-in-progress so that they could be finished up later. The ability to modify Vines that have been recorded but not published was also added.



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Twitter adds private DM 'photos' and new swipeable mobile apps

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Twitter has added support for private image sharing via direct message, in an update to the 140-character messaging service that also sees new, swipeable timelines in the mobile apps. The update, which is released for both the iOS and Android versions of the Twitter app, also brings direct messages further out into the open, adding a new tab in the navigation bar for the private communications.

There’s also support for faster navigation between it and the other existing tabs. Whereas before you had to tap to switch between them, now the Twitter app allows for swiping left and right through the columns instead.

Support for private images has been one of the more commonly requested updates for Twitter, since the service integrated its own photo sharing system. Previously, sending an image would upload it publicly; now, however, you can opt to share them without revealing a public copy.

However, not every third-party Twitter client is handling DM image sharing correctly, and we’ve seen reports of some being unable to open the links.

Some of the changes are platform-specific, depending on the capabilities of the individual OSes. For iOS, for instance, there’s now support for in-app notifications which pop up when you receive a DM, a favorite, a retweet, or a reply.

Meanwhile, on Android, there’s now support for mobile notifications from specific users. By starring individual profiles, you can be notified just about those people, not everybody else you might follow.

You can download the new versions of Twitter for iOS and Android from the App Store and Google Play respectively.




SOURCE: slashgear
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Yahoo reclaims top web property spot from Google in ComScore US report

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For the first time in over two years, Yahoo came in at number on on ComScore‘s list of Top 50 US Web Properties. The list, which was just released today, is a bit of a surprise, as Yahoo hasn’t claimed the top position since May 2011. While initial speculation made it seem like the acquisition of Tumblr had something to do with this boost, that is not the case.



Yahoo has still held on strong at the top of the list, claiming position two or three, several times in the past few months but they hadn’t reclaimed the top spot until this month. Yahoo also currently has the top Ad Focus ranking score, which measures a site’s reach online.



It’s hard to pin down why the sudden increase in Yahoo’s popularity. Marketing Land initial speculated that the Tumblr acquisition had a lot to do with it and that some of the site’s traffic was counting underneath the Yahoo umbrella. However, Tumblr is actually on the list on its own, claiming the 28th spot.

Later on, a statement from ComScore noted that none of Tumblr’s traffic has been combined with Yahoo’s and that another unknown factor is playing into the sudden boost. They added that it is likely just a normal seasonal fluctuation, as both Google and Yahoo have had very close numbers over the past few months.





VIA Marketing Land

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Zuckerberg introduces Internet.org partnership, wants to connect the world

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Facebook‘s founder Mark Zuckerberg has introduced Internet.org, a partnership that spans the globe with a goal of connecting the entire world to the Internet. The collective encompasses many big name members, among them being Samsung, Nokia, and Opera, all of whom will work together to connect the two-thirds of the world that don’t have access to the Internet.



Presently, a tad over a third of the world’s population is connected the Internet, a number that comes in at 2.7 billion. That leaves another two-thirds without connection, with the reasons for this varying based on location and such. The rate of Internet adoption is said to be less than 9-percent per year, a number those behind Internet.org hope to see increase as a result of their efforts.

Said Zuckerberg: “Everything Facebook has done has been about giving all people around the world the power to connect. There are huge barriers in developing countries to connecting and joining the knowledge economy. Internet.org brings together a global partnership that will work to overcome these challenges, including making internet access available to those who cannot currently afford it.”

Under the initiative, members will work together to develop technologies – and their adoption – that make it cheaper for individuals to connect to the Internet while reducing the cost of data delivery. Among this effort will be the development of higher-quality smartphones that come with a smaller price tag, and partnerships to expand access in what Facebook calls areas that are lacking.

The technologies being development will also focus on more efficient use of data, decreasing the amount that apps and such use to help keep over all data use – and thusly costs – down. This will include things like cache systems and compression tools. And finally, the members will work towards creating and sustaining business models that facilitate Internet access.





SOURCE: Facebook Newsroom
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