Future Searches

Harnessing Social Media to Build a Personal Brand

The days of customers dealing with faceless big businesses are coming to an end. People like to deal with other people, and even corporations understand that now. Just think about some of the most well-known companies and the names associated with them. The late Steve Jobs was the face of Apple. Bill Gates, to many people, is Microsoft.

Sometimes, the person that represents the brand isn’t a CEO or a manager. Many game developers rely heavily on their community managers. Ask a gamer about Pitch Black Games, and most of them will mention Sanya Weathers, a community manager that has served several companies, and is highly regarded.

Socialising as a Brand

When you’re in the public eye, representing a company, you need to be careful. Social media marketing is not the same as social networking on a personal level. This is something that is easy to forget. You might post about “Lolcats” and your favourite, perhaps slightly tasteless YouTube videos on your personal account, but do you really want your customers to see those posts? Just imagine if you went to Elle Macpherson’s brand page on your favourite social network and saw links to online petitions, games, and funny Occupy Wall Street memes. If your political leanings weren’t the same as Macphersons, there’d be a good chance she’d lose a customer.

Social Media Past Twitter & Facebook

There can be little doubt that social media is one of the most important recent innovations for both the business world and its’ customers. The speed at which it has been adopted means that businesses simply cannot afford to ignore social media platforms.

That being said, there is a problem that threatens to damage all the good work businesses have put into becoming active members in the social media community. While there is no doubt that Twitter and Facebook are the major players, their very dominance can lead to a false sense of security as well as a business’s social media strategy becoming stale and static.

The truth of the matter is that there are a number of other key players that most businesses need to be aware of so that they can ensure they are covering all the bases and not getting a nasty surprise that can have a negative effect on their brand’s reputation.

Linkedin

Probably the other major player after Twitter and Facebook, Linkedin is arguably the most “professional” of social media platforms and is a superb resource for networking. However, even if a business feels that their core audience lies beyond its typical user, it should still maintain a presence, especially if the business provides B2B services.

Twitter’s New “Retweet” Feature for More Social Users

Twitter is testing a new feature called “retweets” on a small percentage of accounts currently. I felt lucky to see my account has been included in to this Beta Retweets testing so I can write about it promptly.

New “retweet” button is displayed at the end of each tweet. We only see retweets of the people we follow. Retweet button enables people to forward interesting tweets to their followers. You can undo your retweets from the retweets page and get the message “your followers will no longer see the tweet as retweeted by you” message. There are retweets by you, retweets by others and your tweets, retweeted sections in retweets page. To make retweet easy to spot, they have added an icon at the beginning of retweets.

Retweet button screen shoot

Twitter is planning to see the performance of retweets and release the feature once it is ready. Social media is growing as those guys are leading people to communicate, share and spread the word around. Twitter, as a micro blogging platform became so powerful by just asking people the most simple question “What are you doing?” and today the biggest search engines like Google and Bing are racing to sync with it to use it’s power of “real-time search”. Good job Twitter!

Use Social Media to appear in Real-Time Search

Google and Bing revealed their integration to real-time search and social media by announcing their agreements with Twitter during the Web 2.0 Summit on October 21. Google is aiming to give a better real-time search experience by including real-time Twitter updates in their search results hence users will be able to learn what others are saying about what they’ve been searching for under the same roof. Consider you perform a search about “x brand of freezer”. You will not only see relevant search results but also public opinion about your topic that will give you quick and better understanding about your query.

On the other side, Bing didn’t go far beyond than developing a Bing Twitter search facility similar to the other Twitter search engines in the market. Bing’s new Twitter search feature is currently available in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, Indonesia, Ireland, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Arabia, South Africa, and the United States. Those guys are aware of the power of real-time web and took their step in to the social media not later that Google.

What Twitter Trends Are All About

If you use Twitter as a tool in catching up with what’s going on in the world, probably you all experienced “have no clue” moments and it becomes a pain if you are planning to create content related with trending topics to drive high traffic to your website, you need to spend some time on finding out what they are all about.

I came accross to a website today which I found so useful for understanding why trend topics in Twitter are trendy. What the trend is giving user edited short blurbs of each trend topic in top 10 explaining why they are popular. It gives you a list of latest tweets about each popular topic plus related Google news and Flickr photos as well. Check it out and let me know what you you think.

Tweet via SMS

Twitter made a deal with major mobile operators Telus, Virgin Mobile, and Koodo Mobile in Canada that enable two-way SMS support for mobile phone users in Canada to send and receive Twitter updates without any additional fees from their mobiles via SMS.

Mobile tweets are treated as standard messages and are charged with standart rates. Twitter says they want to extend real-time networking experience to mobile devices everywhere through the simple technology of SMS and are working on this service on the rest of the world right now.

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Twitter Search and Trending Topics

I love Twitter and tweeting in Twitter. Some good things about Twitter are: you don’t need to be a celebrity or anything special to contact with people that you always wanted to, you just say your words to everyone all over the world and people pick you up if they think that you are like-minded or they have an interest in your topics, products etc. It keeps you up-to-date with any topic you choose, helps you extending your network .

Twitter recently added 2 new features to it’s structure. Twitter search and trending topics. Both are in my opinion a must-to-have and will keep more users online.

Twitter search is enabling users to search across global tweets from all around the world, build a fresh timeline of updates based on a keyword or phrase.

Users have the functionality to save their favourite search terms by pressing “save this search” button. Those search terms will be displayed as a link under their search box so they only need to click on the link to execute results.

Drive Traffic to Websites by Current Search Trends

If you have a website or blog, I know that you want to drive big traffic and bring leads, generate some ad revenue or just increase your Page Rank and websites’ value.

One way to drive traffic to your website is following trends and generating posts related with search phrases. There are several ways you can monitor real-time (delays are always possible) search trends such as Google Trends, Twitter and Yahoo Buzz.

Google Trends

Google trends give you approximate popular search patterns. You can see a list of most searched 100 queries. It gives search volume index for each pattern, news articles, blog posts, related searches, peak times and locations. I believe it gives great insight for popular search trends as majority of people use Google for search.

Trend topics by Twitter

Twitter is a “a real-time short messaging service” and has recently added search and trend topics features to users homepages. It gives top-ten popular tweet topics and a great global insight as they say:

“As public tweets fly in from around the globe, we analyze them to detect when certain words or phrases occur with higher frequency. These trending phrases are surfaced in the Twitter home page just under the new search box and they’re updated throughout the day.”

Google’s Twitter Acqusition v.s. Independant Twitter

Twitter’s speculations spread for it’s partnership possibilities with internet companies like Google, Microsoft, the News Corporation and NBC Universal as TechCrunch claimed Google is looking forward to acquire Twitter in the beginning of April. Since then Twitter, the most popular social microblogging site gained more attention.

According to the Newyork Times, Fred Wilson ( the Union Square Ventures partner who was an early investor in Twitter, the microblogging start-up, and is on its board ) says:

“There are lots of conversations going on and Twitter is struggling to figure out what to do with whom, when and how,” 

There are currently only 30 people on board in Twitter and Twitter is currently recruiting for the director of strategic partnerships position that is advertised as “the first business development role in our mostly product- and engineering-oriented company.”  Twitter’s database and search capabilities of real-time updates would make this an attractive offer for Google.

Twitter turned down an acquisition deal from Facebook last fall for $500 million of its stock and hopefully Twitter is not going to sell it’s soul this time too. I love Google but I believe there should be competition instead of monopolism. Twitter want to be independant and continue their story with their own initiative.