Where is Twitter headed? Is it still a social network or is it becoming a broadcasting platform?

Its supercharged adoption rates two years ago took it from 9 million unique visitors in March 2009 to 17 million the very next month. But that kind of growth has ended. For the past year, Twitter’s unique visitor number has held steady at about 27 million.

While 27 million is definitely a lot of people, unlike Facebook, which surpassed Google in 2010 as the most visited site on the Internet, Twitter appears to have hit a plateau. What will become of the site now that it’s 5 years old and flat-lining?

At the height of its growth two years ago, 10 percent of Twitter’s active users were producing 90 percent of its tweets according to a study by the Harvard Business School.

Today, it appears that even more content is being generated on Twitter by even fewer accounts. According to a report published by Yahoo, 50 percent of tweets consumed on Twitter are now generated by only 0.05 percent of its users. That amounts to 20,000 so-called Twitter elite.

The elite include traditional media sources like the Today Show with 756,000 followers or CNN with close to 2 million. They include celebrities like Ashton Kutcher with 6.5 million followers or Oprah with 5.5 million. And they include organizations like the White House with 2 million followers.

Some bloggers have also amassed major followings. The technology blog Mashable is followed by 2.6 million people on Twitter, for instance.

After five years, is it possible that Twitter is morphing from a social network into a broadcasting platform?

For brands, businesses or people who are already famous or well-known, Twitter has clearly proven itself as an excellent platform to speak directly to customers and fans. But as a social network, customers and fans are also supposed to have the opportunity to respond.

When Shaquille O’Neal, one of the early celebrity adopters, first began using Twitter, he directly engaged his fans even sharing his location and asking them to come say hello. He continues to respond and interact, but many celebrities use Twitter primarily for one-way communication with fans.

The Yahoo study found that when elite celebrity users interacted with others on Twitter it tended to be with other elite celebrity users versus fans. Elite media and blogger accounts also were found to prefer to travel within their shared circles of influence.

One point of difference was that elite bloggers tended to share one another’s content more frequently than other elites.

Twitter as a broadcast platform actually works well for elite users, but it’s not a model that works for ordinary people and businesses where the rules of social networking still apply.

For average Joes, Janes and Jones Incorporateds, Twitter is a better place to meet some new, like-minded people or cultivate a few new customer relationships and positive word-of-mouth. But growing a sizable following that could support a broadcast model is highly unlikely without a full-time dedicated social media manager.

Unless Twitter continues to grow and succeed as a social networking platform and appeal to ordinary users, it will not hold its value to elite users as a broadcasting platform.

With stagnating growth and the consolidation of its content into the hands of the few, Twitter is at the crossroads and, if nothing changes, could start losing its appeal to both elites and the masses.

Story by www.signonsandiego.com

Using online connections to find jobs, workers.

The last time many of today’s laid-off workers had to look for a job, myself included, social media either did not exist, or it was too new to be a significant factor in our job hunt.

When CNN.com laid me off in 2001, none of today’s largest social media companies —Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn — existed. When I joined SignOnSanDiego.com in 2007, Facebook had fewer than 100 million active users. Today it has more than 600 million.

Social media is now ubiquitous. Understanding how to use it could either help or hurt your chances of finding a new job. Likewise, social-media savvy businesses have new tools to help them find and evaluate job candidates.

This week’s column is an introduction to social media for job-seekers and hiring managers.

Job-seekers

If you are looking for a job, you need to update your social media profiles, starting with LinkedIn. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, open an account and create one. It’s easy, and LinkedIn will guide you through the process and help you find contacts. Explore its features. Savvy job hunters use it to network, explore companies and look for jobs.

Optimize your profiles. For example, if you use Twitter, add your job pitch to your bio, include a link to your resume, use the background image to promote yourself, and tweet about your job hunt. If you have an online portfolio, add it to your LinkedIn profile. And if you have a blog, don’t be afraid to add links to your Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, resume and online portfolio.

Turn yourself into an expert in your field. Start a blog, create a Facebook page or tweet about your industry. If you post thoughtful, useful content, people will begin to consider you an authority. Be authentic. Don’t lie or misrepresent yourself.

Remember, anything you post online could be seen by a potential employer.Review your blog and social media profiles. Edit or delete anything that could harm your job search. Keep posts that highlight achievements or good deeds. They could help you. Finally, make sure your avatars, or profile images, are professional.

Hiring managers

Create a social media strategy to find the most qualified applicants. Begin by promoting open jobs through multiple online channels, including on your company’s blog, Facebook page and Twitter feeds. Create or update your company’s LinkedIn profile. Then if you post jobs on LinkedIn, they will appear with your profile.

As you know, most jobs are found through networking. Make sure employees know about your company’s current job openings, and encourage them to post them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The more your employees share, the more their friends and followers will share. This will help you grow social media referrals.

While evaluating job applicants, check what they’ve posted online. Look at their LinkedIn profiles, and read their recommendations. Search for their Facebook profiles. Read their blogs. Follow them on Twitter. This will help you learn more about their background, skills, interests, and how they relate to others. This will help you learn if the person would be a good fit for your company.

There are many more online communities — Quora, Glassdoor, BranchOut, Behance Network, etc. — that job-seekers and hiring managers would find useful. The social media blog Mashable is a good place to start learning about them and to find career-related resources. Visitmashable.com/tag/jobs and leave a message.

BY SPECIAL TO THE U-T

Online video tips to help improve marketing success

 

Online video is one of today’s most engaging and powerful social-media marketing mediums.

It’s a wonderful tool for showing what your company does, explaining how your products work and spotlighting customer testimonials. Many businesses want to use video to help them market their products and services but don’t know how to do it well.

To be effective, a Web video has to look good, sound clean, and be short.

Keep it simple. A plain background behind a talking head or a product demonstration is very effective — the viewer’s attention stays on the subject. Also, video with a plain background compresses better for streaming versus a background with lots of details and colors.

Use lots of light. I often see fuzzy and muddy videos that were shot in dim light. Open up a window. Aim a few lights on the scene. You can’t have too much light.

Use a tripod. Shaky and jerky images, with lots of cuts, is fine for music videos but not for a business product. Don’t handhold your camcorder. Use the tripod.

No special effects. When you edit, avoid using flashy transitions and complicated effects that strain the compression technology used in streaming video and can result in a less-than-optimum online playback. You don’t want your video stopping, stuttering and dropping frames. However, it can be very helpful to use graphics.

Text. Use a large and easy to read non-serif font.

Sound check. Bad audio plagues most online videos. You can make your film sound professional by using a good quality microphone plugged into your camcorder. An inexpensive lavaliere mike pinned to your talent’s collar will work wonders. Bad sound is a common problem because the built-in microphones found on most camcorders are not very good.

Be brief. Keeping your video short and to the point may be the most important. Whatever your goal, limit your video to just one point. A good Internet video should be between one to two minutes long. Three minutes max. If you plan your video well, that should be plenty of time. It is always better to have a series of short videos on your site rather than one or two overly long videos.

It is not hard to make a good Web video. You don’t need a Hollywood crew. Just make sure it sounds and looks good. And most importantly, keep it short, sweet and to the point. And, after your video is live on the Internet, you need to make sure it gets found and watched. The Google search engine loves video and can greatly boost your SEO results. To make sure Google finds your video, create video site maps for your videos and post them at Google’s online Webmaster Tools.

 

3 ways not to use analytics for your real estate website

3 ways not to use analytics for your real estate website Make sure online traffic stats are meaningful Inman News™ By GAHLORD DEWALD Share This I love analytics. I love measuring stuff online because it's pretty much the only way to figure out what people are looking for, what problems they're having, and what problems they're solving. But if you are always chasing just the metrics and not thinking through how analytics relates to your individual, specific and unique business, you're cruising for a bruising. Chasing just a single metric -- like bounce rate, number of visits or time on site -- is almost always a recipe for disaster. Web metrics are things that are most useful when they are put in context. I'd like to tell you about what happens when you take them out of context. It is possible to royally screw up your website while making the metrics look like you're doing a great job. IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER/WARNING: I'M NOT JOKING WHEN I SAY THESE TECHNIQUES ARE HIGHLY UNLIKELY TO HELP YOUR BUSINESS, EVEN THOUGH THEY WILL IMPROVE THOSE METRICS THAT KEEP YOU AWAKE AT NIGHT. ALSO, RESULTS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE DEEMED BY THE AUTHOR TO BE ACCURATE BUT ARE NOT GUARANTEED. 1. Decrease your bounce rate overnight Bounce rate is one of those large, glaring numbers on the first page of almost every Web analytics report. In most packages, bounce rate is the percent of people who see just one page of your website before leaving. Bounce rate itself isn't a very useful metric, but since it resides on that Web analytics dashboard, people like to worry about it. You know how often real estate professionals get asked, "How is the market doing?" I get asked, "What's a good bounce rate?" about that often. So here's a great way to screw up your website by decreasing your bounce rate: Add a splash page. That's right, a good old-fashioned splash page can reduce your bounce rate practically over night. That's because when someone lands on your home page that visitor gets the splash page instead of something useful. Then some of the people will click through the splash page and get to your real home page. Of course, a lot of people will still get to your home page and decide your site is not for them. But since they already have seen two pages (your splash page and your actual home page) they won't count as a bounce. Voila! Instant improved bounce rate, with practically no work. For best results, be sure to make the "skip intro" or "go to home page" button really, really big so people can see it. If they don't click that button they will still register as a bounce. Also, avoid music or auto play video or other stuff that scares people away before they get a chance to click "skip intro." 2. Improve your search engine traffic by at least 30 percent: by doing absolutely nothing. This technique is really only applicable to regions that have a definite season for selling real estate. For example, if you sell vacation homes in an area that caters to snow birds or if you have a climate where it's really unpleasant to look at houses except in the winter, this technique will work like a charm. In fact, your search-engine optimization specialist may already be using it! Here's how it works: Measure your search-engine traffic four to six months ahead of your big selling season. Then, two to three months before the big season, measure search traffic again. The second reading will almost always be higher, regardless of anything you're doing because as the time nears to the big season more people will be searching. What you're actually measuring with this technique is the general rise in interest in real estate leading up to your selling season. It's very important if you use this technique to only use it once per year. For example, if you have a summer selling season don't try to repeat this technique in the fall because then you'll lose almost as much as you gained before. The excellent part of this little trick is that it works in any business that has a season. If you decide to get out of real estate and sell Christmas trees you can still use this technique. Just compare search traffic for Christmas trees in June vs. search traffic for Christmas trees in November and you'll be an SEO guru every single time (remember, you don't want to compare November to January, though). 3. Increase your time on site by minutes, hours and days with this fun interactive tip. Time on site is one of those metrics that is nearly devoid of value for real estate (unless you're selling time-based advertising, that is). But just like bounce rate, it is one of those large glaring numbers on the analytics dashboard that sits there mocking you, reminding you that people are only spending fractions of a minute looking at your site. You can change this almost instantly with this weird old tip: Hide the navigation. That's right -- just put the navigation to your website somewhere unusual. Make it tiny. Make it almost the same color as the background. That way, people will spend forever trying to figure out where the navigation is so they can find what they're looking for. All those minutes spent looking for the search page add up. Advanced variations of this tip (if you want to really show some increased "engagement") include: Animated navigation that the visitor has to sort of chase around the screen. Bonus for auto side scrolling and magnification effects. Lots and lots and lots of drop-down items for visitors to read through. Navigation items that are named vaguely or nearly the same as other items. For example, have a "Community" page and an "Our Town" page. Hide the navigation in different places on different pages. Top nav on the home page, left nav on the search page, right nav on the blog... you get the idea! There you have it: A metrically improved but totally screwed up website in practically no time at all! The point of listing these techniques isn't that you should do them (It would be fun to A/B test some of them, wouldn't it?), but that you need to think about the greater context of whatever metrics you use. Here are three things you can consider to avoid the three techniques listed above: Just because the metric is in big type on the analytics dashboard doesn't mean it has anything to do with your business goals. Consider the context of your metrics--are they effected by things outside your control like seasonal interest? Understand exactly how the metrics you choose to measure relate to your business goal. Gahlord Dewald is the president and janitor of Thoughtfaucet, a strategic creative services company in Burlington, Vt.

via lowes.inman.com

Top five social media mistakes that businesses make.

Don't make these social media blunders

BY SPECIAL TO THE U-T

 

Social Media is hot these days. No matter what the size of your business, you should be usingFacebook, Twitter, blogging, YouTube and LinkedIn daily to get your content online, so you can be easily found and “shared.” Social Media should be considered another marketing tool, and it involves planning, strategic thinking and tracking metrics just as any another element in your marketing mix.

The mistake comes when a business jumps too quickly to get its social sites up. Starting a social media marketing campaign without prior thought and planning cannot yield the results you are looking for. If you don’t start with a goal, how will you know when it has been met?

Here are the top five social media mistakes that businesses make:

No social media marketing plan

Once you determine your goal for your social sites, it’s much easier to determine who in the company should manage it: marketing or customer service or both. Don’t be afraid to have multiple people at your company responsible for different aspects of your social media voice. There are many reasons a business wants to have a social media presence:

• Build a loyal community

• Allow its customers a way to provide instant feedback

• Be a valuable resource for information in your niche

• Offer limited time coupons

• Provide faster customer service

Lack of posting frequency to social sites

Once you create the sites, how often should you post to them? It depends on how quickly you want to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and grow your network. Here are some best practices:

• Blog: Once a week minimum. Once per day is best.

• Twitter: Once a day minimum. Three to six times per day is best, spread out throughout the day.

• Facebook: Once a day minimum. Three times per day is best, morning, afternoon and evening.

• LinkedIn: Personal profiles should have status updates daily. Groups should post a weekly discussion topic.

• YouTube: Post three times per week if it’s a short update (three minutes or less). Once a week if longer Q&A or “Product Review” type format.

Not using keywords

Social media is so much bigger than building a community of loyal “followers.” The smart business knows that keywords are the way to be found online. To improve your SEO, you must use your keywords often. Many businesses don’t realize that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn can all be used as search tools, and if you conduct a keyword search while you are logged in to one of your social sites, you’ll get results within that site, based on your query. All business social sites are public and 100 percent indexed by Google, so tweets and posts can come up in natural search results.

Lack of engagement

Your social sites won’t yield the results you are looking for unless people are participating. Participation includes:

• “Liking,” sharing or adding comments to your Facebook posts

• “Retweeting” your Twitter tweets

• Subscribing and commenting on your blog or YouTube videos

Your posts should tell people what you want them to do. Always reply back when they have taken the time to comment. Be personal and add value.

No call to action

When people find your content online be sure to tell them what to do next, e.g., call you, fill out your online form, subscribe to an e-newsletter or download a free report. How will you entice and capture them to get them into your sales funnel? Make sure your offer “adds value” and tells your visitor “what’s in it for them” so they will be more likely to respond. Provide valuable content, build relationships and don’t always sell.