Vancouver Internet Marketing Social Media Marketing Consultant Canada

According to the post, by Twitter engineer Ryan King on the Twitter Engineering Blog this evening:

"Our analytics, operations and infrastructure teams are working on a system that uses cassandra for large-scale real time analytics for use both internally and externally."

In other words, Twitter is in fact working on an important analytics product that will launch to the public soon.

Twitter analytics? Here's hoping they're useful and enable businesses to develop more effective twitter and social media marketing strategies.

According to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, the service racks up around 800 million searches a day, or 24 billion per month. That's a lot more than Yahoo's 9.4 billion and Bing's 4.1 billion. It's nowhere near Google's 88 billion, of course, but still, rather impressive.

Do you ever use the Twitter search feature? Does that even come to mind as an option when you go online to find something? When I'm already on Twitter.com I remember that I can use search there, but often don't have thoughts of Twittering something until long after I've already Googled or Binged something. Can I say binged? Maybe bingeing (A period of excessive or uncontrolled indulgence in food or drink: an eating binge) isn't that far off from describing internet (or Twitter search?) usage for some.

Having said that, the problem all along has been how to take all of this growth and turn Twitter into a service that generates revenue. It has always been free to use, but like any company, Twitter’s objective is to make money. Enter “Promoted Tweets”, Twitter’s new advertising program. It’s very similar to Google Adwords. Advertisers bid on keywords and when a search is done on Twitter, triggering one of those keywords, an ad will be shown at the top of the results page – at least in phase one of the rollout. Only one promoted Tweet will be shown on the search results page.

Short-form social network Twitter has taken a bold new step in exploring its potential business model. The company appears to have begun promoting keywords in its "trending topics" list for sponsors.

When users click on a promoted trending topic, they are brought to a search results page, where the page is topped by a promoted Tweet. They aren't sent to an ad landing page, but to a live and uncensored conversation. That's what we're seeing with the new movie Toy Story 3 today at least. It's a logical and interesting way for the company to make money. It's also unlike almost any other advertising in history.

Interesting point that the level of Twitter chatter about a movie *could* do a better job predicting the success of a films box office performance than present methods of predicting financial success. You agree? Would you buy an ad that would encourage open ended conversation about your company on Twitter?

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Bing has featured a Twitter portal for social search, and by adding Facebook results the search engine is stepping up its real-time search game to include results from both services. The Facebook results include both information from public pages, as well as popular shared links from users with appropriate privacy settings for public sharing. Bing also helps you quickly scan the social links by including an excerpt from the link in context within the results.

brentpurves How long will it take for this Twitter post to show up in the new Bing Social Search Results? #bing http://ow.ly/1XoQP 2 minutes ago via HootSuite

Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President of Microsoft's Bing search engine announced today the launch of a new social portal that will produce real-time results from both Facebook and Twitter. The site, which will be live later today, will be found at bing.com/social and will be "the first search experience integrating the full Facebook firehose," according to Microsoft.

Bing has featured a Twitter portal for social search, and by adding Facebook results the search engine is stepping up its real-time search game to include results from both services. The Facebook results include both information from public pages, as well as popular shared links from users with appropriate privacy settings for public sharing. Bing also helps you quickly scan the social links by including an excerpt from the link in context within the results.

In an effort to remove the obscurity of shortened links and to prevent malware and phishing attacks, Twitter has begun the rollout t.co, its official URL shortener, along with some major changes to how the microblogging platform handles links.

In a blog post aptly titled Links and Twitters: Length Shouldn’t Matter, Twitter’s Sean Garrett announced that the company is taking a new approach to URLs. Not only will all links on Twitter.com and Twitter apps be “wrapped” in t.co links, but how they are counted against the 140 character limit. These change will occur throughout the summer.

Social media use is exploding, but ad spending in the sector continues to be a blip on the radar for most brands.

  Razorfish, one of the largest digital ad spenders, compiled data on its 2009 digital ad spending. It found that social media display advertising made up just 3 percent of its clients' budgets. Non-display in social media accounted for another 1 percent. The figures pale in comparison to the time spent online. According to comScore, U.S. Internet users spent 11 percent of their time online in 2011 on social media sites.

Need help navigating the world of advertising in social media? Drop me at note at brent[at]stirsolutions.com and we can setup a free 30 minute social media marketing consultation

E-mail marketing giant Constant Contact has acquired NutshellMail, a service that lets businesses track and post updates to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn via e-mail.

It's a mashed up world where pretty much everything will be social media enabled -- so much so that we'll soon stop calling it social media because most sites and tools online will come socialmediafied by default.

Comprehensive analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes App Store showed very plainly that people were looking for an app from Twitter—we didn't have one so they generally got confused and gave up. Obviously, we saw room for improvement. Starting today, Twitter for iPhone and iPod touch is available for free on the iTunes App Store.