How Pinterest Drives Online Sales?  [Infographic]

Pinterest Driving More Online Sales Than Any Other Network! 

User Activity Comparison Of Popular Social Networking Sites [Infographic] 

7 Reasons To Engage Through Social Media [Infographic] 

The Social Media Lifecycle [Infographic]

Key takeaways:

• How to use the Social Media Lifecycle: The key steps that get you from monitoring to decision, action, and results
• Best practices for monitoring, analytics, engagement, reporting, and collaboration, modeled after the most successful brands in social media
• What Social Media ROI is, how to think about it, and ways to measure it.

Continue reading on Social Media Today: http://socialmediatoday.com/pamdyer/444409/social-media-lifecycle-infographic

71% More Likely to Purchase Based on Social Media Referrals [Infographic]

Ecommerce companies that invest in inbound marketing will greatly increase their opportunity to grow online sales, lower COCA (cost of customer acquisition), and increase new customer retention. Consumers connect, rate, discuss, and consume product information and reviews like never before, making a strong online presence paramount for all sizes of ecommerce businesses. Ecommerce inbound marketing makes it possible for online stores to take advantage of the emerging social revolution by gravitating consumers to their own brands and products, driving organic and social media traffic and sales, lowering COCA, and increasing the adoption of customer retention along the way.  

The below infographic design from Killer Infographics is a great illustration of the importance of ecommerce inbound marketing. Feel free to use the embed code for this infographic below if you’d like to publish it to your website or blog and share your own analysis or discussion. Enjoy!

You Are What You Tweet: 2011 In Review (Infographic)

Is the #NewNewTwitter Redesign A Step Forward or Back?

In the past month or so there have been big changes in the social world in terms of website layouts and functionality. Several big fish including YouTube, StumbleUpon and Delicious have all revamped their designs. However, the site that is getting the most attention is Twitter – yes, we were kind of shocked too. The welcome changes come as Twitter tries to increase their usability and relevancy with the year coming to a close and the first quarter of 2012 set to commence.

On December 8^th, the über popular microblogging site released their first redesign in a staggering five years with 21 global companies. Dubbed the ‘new new Twitter’, the changes were made with the intention of making the social platform more user friendly and a ‘compelling destination’ for brands – an attempt to try and tackle Facebook’s Pages. The changes brought in a new tabbed style layout where all the Twitter functions were spilt into separate island boxes to make everything easily accessible.

Twitter also introduced new brand pages with the intention of providing companies more control over the way they marketed and advertised their promoted products to consumers. With this new-found control, businesses will be able to keep visitors and customers on their accounts for longer with paid for banners (which they can link to their background) and rich media content, thus lengthening the amount of time spent logged into Twitter. That’s one small step for companies, one (hopeful) giant leap for Twitter.

The other new redesign rolled out was  the improved menu option, which includes a new option called ‘Discover’,  as well as four old but improved sections – ‘Home’, ‘Connect’ (formerly Activity), ‘Me’ (formerly Profile) and ‘Tweet’ – that present all your Twitter actions and interests.

As the name suggests, ‘Discover’ lets you discover weird and wonderful information based on your followers, interests and current location.  This unique search will enable individual search results; so what I see, is not what you’ll see and vice versa. The great thing about this new feature is that if you’re interested in a topic, such as fashion for example, but unfortunately have no fashion followers, you will still be able to see fashion related search results. The significance? Now you can tweet your friends while searching all the things you love and enjoy without having to use a search engine.

While ‘Home’, ‘Me’ and ‘Tweet’ remain largely the same as they were previously, there was a slight modification to ‘Connect’, which divided the feature into two options – ‘Mentions’ and ‘ Interactions’. While the former only reveals tweets that mention your @name, the latter allows you to view RTs, new followers, favourite tweets, people added to lists and all conversations related to you. Essentially, the ‘soon to be’ most used feature in our opinion.

Conclusion

Anthony: “With Facebook and Google+ optimising their social platforms recently, it was clear that Twitter had to follow suit or face the risk of slipping behind in 2012. Seeing as this is their first major refurbishment for five years, the new features feel a little overwhelming at first. However, once you spend a little bit of time familiarising yourself with #NewNewTwitter’s redesign and brand focus, you will quickly see that the changes have not only improved the platform, but have also opened a whole new chapter for advertisement and greater engagement through rich media content. Furthermore, the new menu options and tabbed layout improve the site’s functionality and usability. All in all, we’re thrilled with the new design and firmly believe it is a big step forward for the undisputed 140 character champ.”

Amanda: “These changes make Twitter less of a microblog and more of a social network. These increased personalisation options for brands and a better sharing experience for users are designed to put Twitter in the running with Facebook as the world’s social network of choice. While the changes for brands and advertising are undeniably good for Twitter from a commercial perspective, they may prove to be a turn off for users. What remains to be seen is whether Twitter can convincingly make the switch from a service purely for broadcasting 140 character snippets of our lives to one that’s as integral to the 2.0 generation as Facebook is.”

Karine: “In general I tend to like when social networks change their pages, mostly because it makes me review the way that I use them for professional and personal matters. With Twitter new design it was no different. I loved the fact that twitter still maintaining its timeline simplicity, but it’s now cleaner than ever and giving more impact to individual tweets – especially the ones with rich media – as you can see photos and videos on timeline, and scroll it down ‘forever’!  The mini profile and #Discover feature with trendy content are also great improvements.  Things that I didn’t really like: listing people it’s not so quick anymore and DM’s are hidden somewhere in the profile tab.  Apart from that, thumbs up for New Twitter!”

Danny: “Firstly I like the changes, the design, clean, crisp and easy has drawn me away from using Hootsuite and Tweetdeck and back on to the web version – I never thought this would happen. Twitter is more than a micro blogging network/service; it has evolved in many different forms. Twitter wants to be a firstly, a discovery engine and secondly (and commercially minded) a reliable news source which puts people at the centre. The redesign helped this and essentially personalised the experience. What Twitter learnt from many social site redesigns namely Google+ and the latest Facebook timeline changes is that people want to see data easily and they have applied a “timeline” to appeal to users core requirements: “personalisation, visualisation, findability and shareability”  and probably most importantly allows Twitter to become a social business through seamless monetisation.”

Bio

Anthony Ngaithe is a Social Community Executive at Caliber Interactive, overseeing clients’ social media accounts and providing reputation management. Prior to joining Caliber, he was the Assistant Head of Marketing at a fashion event company responsible for promoting fashion campaigns and acquiring sponsorship for company events. Aside from work, Anthony loves to write and read poetry, socialise with friends, play video games whenever he can and immerse himself in all things digital media and technology.

Anthony Ngaithe

Anthony Ngaithe is a Social Community Executive at Caliber Interactive overseeing client’s social media accounts and providing reputation management. Prior to joining Caliber, he was the assistant head of Marketing at a fashion event company responsible for promoting fashion campaigns and acquiring sponsorship for company events. Aside from work, Anthony loves to write and read poetry, socialise with friends, play video games whenever he can and immerse himself in all things digital media and technology.

Top Trending #Twitter Topics for 2011 from What the Trend #WtT

Justin Bieber Owns Center Stage, Followed by Soccer/Football and Lady Gaga as Top Twitter Trends for 2011

What the Trend – a HootSuite Media company – analyzed 207,518 Twitter trends which surfaced in 2011 to determine the top trending topics of 2011. To capture the conversation, localized trend information was compiled every 5 minutes from Twitter and the What the Trend community added context with user-contributed definitions. Reviewing the resulting list gives a unique view of social media’s impact on all aspects of culture.

To compile this report, the leading trends were grouped by topic (i.e. #jan25 and #egypt were both added to the Egypt Protest topic) in order to create Top 10 lists for movies, US TV shows, musical artists, sports leagues, and world news – as well as an overall list which included definitions for the varied mix of pop stars, holidays and sports.

Global Conversation

Twitter Trends offer a unique overview of world events in an unprecedented, real-time stream of unfiltered information. Along with major world events, celebrity culture and politics, trends include company promotions and #hashtag memes – which can be difficult to understand. It’s also noteworthy to see the variety of topics coming from beyond North America, including Japan, Korea and Brazil where Twitter is a common part of everyday online conversation.

What is a Trend?

Trends rarely appear on Twitter’s trending topic list for more than a day, as such, What the Trend’s results differ from Twitter’s Year In Review: Hot Topics list. What the Trend’s research methodology examines all topics regardless of whether or not a topic has had long-standing popularity – including this year’s champion, Justin Bieber who is the topic of much discussion about Twitter’s trend tracking algorithm.

Twitter provides a detailed explanation of the Twitter’s Trending Topics:

Twitter’s Trending Topics algorithm identifies topics that are immediately popular, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help people discover the “most breaking” news stories from across the world. We think that trending topics which capture the hottest emerging trends and topics of discussion on Twitter are the most interesting.

Further, What the Trend awards ‘points’ for both duration and rank on the top 10 trending topics on Twitter.com to take the intensity of trends into consideration.

Original Content From http://blog.hootsuite.com/top-twitter-trends-2011/