beautiful bytes – Why you auto know better …

Twitter to launch UK advertising in October

Last week we mentioned that Twitter is going to be gearing up its advertising plan by allowing brands that people don’t follow to market to them through promoted tweets. This week, it has been released that its extensive advertising strategy, which started in America this summer and was recently revamped with that news, will be rolled out in the UK this October.

According to Mashable, Twitter is currently selling ad bundles for six figure investments in the UK and O2, Vodafone, Sky and Sony will be the first brands to pilot the new scheme. The ads users see will be based on their followers and who they follow, offering brands greater targeting opportunities.

Back in August, Twitter announced that from time to time it will introduce Promoted Tweets in a user’s timeline from non-profit organisations that they follow as part of its US advertising plan. We’re hoping that this will be brought along to the UK with the traditional advertising packages. Spending millions on Twitter ads is far outside what most British charities could do or would benefit from.

Facebook Page admins auto know better

Facebook Pages that auto post content from third-party apps (HootSuite, TweetDeck etc.) receive an average of 80% fewer Likes and comments on their posts per fan. The study, carried out by EdgeRank, analysed engagement on over 1 million updates and found that posting from any of the top 10 Facebook APIs reduces your chances of people connecting with it by 80%.

This, it muses, is down to two main things. Facebook penalising updates from third-party apps and the content that people publish through them not being optimised for Facebook.

When the same third-party platform has multiple updates within your feed, regardless of who posted them, Facebook will collapse them into one update, e.g. see 12 more posts from HootSuite.

EdgeRank also hypothesise that Facebook could be weighing the updates differently than objects created in Facebook, but obviously proving this theory cannot be done outside of Facebook.

The second reason is that updates sent to  Twitter, Facebook and maybe LinkedIn or other networks simultaneously won’t be optimised for any. Hashtags and @replies don’t have any relevance in Facebook. It is also suggested that the content of scheduled updates won’t be as engaging and relevant on Facebook.

I would say that if you use the same app to schedule updates to both Facebook and Twitter because you don’t have the time or resources to post individual updates to both, then automated updates are better than silence if interspersed with other, more personal updates. If you do have the time to manually post your updates you’re using then I would definitely recommend doing so.

100 million is the number

Twitter
Twitter announced this week that it has over 100 million active users. We previously posted that Twitter reached 200 million accounts, but this figure, released by CEO Dick Costolo, measures people who log into the 140 character social network at least once a month (or maybe few more if you’re us ;D). These numbers will undoubtedly help Twitter in its advertising proposition and is another indicator that Twitter deserves some careful consideration and needs to be part of a well thought out marketing plan.

Klout
It seems that these active users are curious about how much influence they’re having on Twitter, as this week the social media influence tool announced that over 100 million people have Klout.

“We love that the internet has enabled 100 million people to share their thoughts and opinions to shape the decisions of the world and we can’t wait to announce our growth to one billion influencers.”

To many, enumerating influence is less meaningful than fostering in-depth and meaningful conversations with their supporters and beneficiaries. To others it means everything, a measurement of success that they can take to trustees and heads of communication to show them how a campaign fared. Personally I think that its a good quantifier to gauge how you’re doing in your market, and to see what kind of influence competitors are having, but only a part of a well rounded campaign analysis.

And finally …

LinkedIn profiles now include volunteer experience and causes. In the new “Volunteer Experience & Causes” field, LinkedIn members can add volunteer positions, causes they care about and organisations they support. This is a great new feature for anyone who is currently looking for a charity job (who’s the next  ‘Give this girl/guy a job‘?). Volunteer work goes a long way in this sector and it’s important to get that work recognised.

Lucy J