About half of the 850 million users of Facebook access the network through their mobile phones.

This has naturally made them want to start monetising this medium – by introducing Facebook Mobile ads. It is believed that they may introduce this feature next month itself, so that it would be functional before they go public, which is expected to happen in May.

It is actually quite surprising that Facebook has not already started to monetise mobile. It is very likely that future investors would question the reasoning behind this failure to make use of the opportunity to monetise what is one of the most popular apps.

Advertiser Challenges

Generating good mobile ads is a rather tricky task, compared to advertising on desktop computers, as the screen space available is much less. Also, users are likely to be interested only in relevant ads when they are on the go. Ads would need to be short and catchy. The use of graphics would also be tricky as image sizes are likely to be smaller in mobile ads.

Business Benefits

Businesses are likely to jump at the opportunity to grow their mobile user base and make use of sponsored stories to get more brand recognition and potential business via trusted referrals. Similarly, localised ads on mobile could see tremendous uptake by local businesses such as restaurants, hotels and stores.

The Biggest Risk – Users

The biggest challenge for Facebook, though, will be to lure more users to their mobile site and apps via better location features and to keep these users happy without getting them upset about too much advertising in such an intimate medium – especially in the wake of the IPO announcement that has made so many acutely aware of Facebook’s billions.

A study recently conducted by ecommerce firm Baynote, has found that only 90 people out of the 1,032 individuals surveyed in the United States were in any way influenced by retailers’ pages on sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Of this, 59% said that they bought products directly from the retailer’s own website.

In fact, 80% of those surveyed said that the social networks had no influence whatsoever on their buying habits. They claimed that recommendations made by social networks had no bearing on their purchase decisions.

Search and email were the dominant drivers of promotions and recommendations. While 93% of those surveyed used the Internet to research products, 91% rated recommendations from search engines as relevant and 63% found search engine promotions useful.

It was also found that tablets were becoming increasingly popular for browsing through the goods available online, as the relatively larger screen of the tablet as compared to the mobile makes browsing more convenient.

93% of these people also confirmed that they use tablets only as a means to browse the availability of products and then they buy the product directly from a store.

2011 U.S. online holiday shopping experience. Source: Baynote

While this study might alarm some readers, the core findings are not that surprising. Social media remains a great branding channel and should not be perceived as a venue to hard-sell products.

The new version of StumbleUpon will make it easier for users to discover content on the Internet. This is the first time in almost a decade that StumbleUpon has gone in for major changes to their site.

StumbleUpon’s homepage now has a new design as well as anew logo. The earlier blue and green logo has been replaced by this orange and white one.

An Explore / search box on the top right hand corner of the homepage allows users to type a search term or select one from the drop-down menu that appears when typing to discover content related to that topic. These “Channels”, which are now emphasized a lot more on the new homepage allow users to focus on subjects of their interest rather than randomly stumbling across the web.

Redesigned StumbleUpon homepage listing Channels of interest

User profile pages have also been overhauled completely. The new profile layout once again focuses on content discovery, making it easier for visitors to a profile to view and stumble web pages that the user liked. Following users and making new connections is also a lot easier now with the new profile layout.

StumbleUpon user profile

One of the most important updates, though, is the change to the Stumble bar. The toolbar, which can be used with most modern browsers, is still the most popular way for users of the site to discover new content. It contains the same features as before along with a more obvious marker highlighting “Sponsored” stumbles via the Paid Discovery advertising platform, thereby making it easier for users to differentiate sponsored sites from organically referred content.

One of the main reasons for this redesign is the huge growth that StumbleUpon has witnessed on mobile. They have seen a growth of 800% year on year and they wish to give their users a better experience that is reflected across all platforms.

Garrett Camp, StumbleUpon’s CEO, told Fast Company, “We’re doing a complete re-launch of the site, and a lot of it is inspired by our mobile experience”.

StumbleUpon continues to remain the dark horse of social media. The site doubled its user numbers since 2010 to cross 20 million users in October 2011 and is still counted as one of the largest referrers of social traffic in the USA, in spite of its user base being a fraction of that of Facebook.

Last week, Facebook spokesperson, Annie Ta said, “Starting on Monday, we are continuing to slowly roll out Sponsored Stories in [the] ticker across Facebook. Sponsored Stories help people see more relevant marketing on Facebook and they can be twice as engaging as ads on Facebook.”

Facebook launched the Sponsored Stories feature in January this year and the ticker was launched in August. The ticker is placed on the top right of the Facebook homepage.

Sponsored Stories are similar to the Promoted Tweets on Twitter. They show an ad relevant to a status update posted by a user. The Sponsored Story will then be relayed to the contacts of that user, making the target audience feel that they are seeing an ad that has been endorsed by one of their friends and is connected to the status update.

Even though the ticker has received a lukewarm response at best, Facebook says that Sponsored Stories are twice as engaging as normal advertisements. Statistics from Nielsen also indicate that such ads are more likely to be remembered. Our own advertising has also found that click-through rates and connection rates on Sponsored Stories are consistently higher than on regular Facebook ads.

According to documentation on Facebook, the Ticker only displays information to others who are already able to see elsewhere on Facebook. Page Like, App Share and App Used Sponsored Stories are eligible to appear in ticker for others to see, but only if they could have already seen them in News Feed.

It will be a while before advertisers can decide whether end users like the idea of Sponsored Stories running in the ticker, or whether they will consider it to be more of a nuisance.

During the third quarter of the year, brands allocated 20% more on paid search campaigns, but many of them received a lower net ROI from search, according to a study by Efficient Frontier.

This should come as no surprise as the uptake of mobile search has increased dramatically over the past few years, and the corresponding consumption of media and search via these Internet-connected devices is bound to increase.

A graph charting the interest over time in ‘mobile video’ illustrates how the consumption of media on smartphones and tablet devices has grown steadily in the past couple of years. Advertisers are naturally going to follow suit.

Trend in volume of searches for ‘mobile video’ from 2008 to date

Mobile ad spend is likely to amount to between 7-10% of all ad spend by the end of this year. Tablets account for 77% of this amount, showing that they have become a very important part of this market.

Over the course of the last 12 months, mobile search spend increased from 0.5% to 4.2%, representing a 740% year-on-year growth in the market. For retail advertisers in the USA, mobile spend currently represents 7% of search spend and tablets represent 60% of all mobile impressions and clicks.

StumbleUpon has added a new feature called ‘Interest Optimisation’ to their Paid discovery feature. This feature will help to improve the effectiveness of ad campaigns by reaching a larger target audience.

Interest Optimisation has been applicable to auto-targeted campaigns for some time. It will now be available on manually targeted campaigns as well. Even manually targeted ad campaigns will now be served to a wider variety of categories, which happen to be similar to the ones selected by the advertiser.

For example, if a particular campaign were primarily targeted to the ‘mutual funds’ category, with the use of Interest Optimisation ads from that campaign could also be served to the ‘investing’, ‘financial planning’ and ‘taxation’ categories, thus helping to reach a larger audience.

Advertisers who wish to exert greater control over their campaigns might not wish to make use of this feature. They can easily opt out of it by making sure that while using the manual format they click on the option that says “Strictly limit my campaign to only the topics selected below.”

In order to find out how the campaign is performing after using this new feature, the advertiser can access the Advanced Reports interface in the StumbleUpon ads system.

The popular social network is now in the process of releasing a new advertising format, which will help them to attract more clients, and in effect earn more money.

Building on the fact that Facebook is a social network, ads in the new format will expand when a user’s friend has ‘Liked’ it. When this ad appears in front of a user whose friend has liked it, the ad will expand to allow the user to comment on it and also see other related comments on the ad.

Unlike regular sponsored stories, the expandable ads allow users to comment and interact with an ad unit just as they would any other post that a friend ‘Likes’ or shares. This makes the ad seem much less like an ad, and much more like any other piece of content – image or video – that gets shared on Facebook.

The theory behind this new ad format is the fact that just like movies, restaurants and books, an ad is more likely to be appreciated by a person whose friend has already approved of it.

At present, expandable ads are not available to all advertisers. This ad unit is due to be announced at Advertising Week in New York.

The study was conducted across a sample of over 4,200 people in 6 countries across the Asia-Pacific region. The countries were Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Singapore and Taiwan.

Pre-family men are an important user base because they have good amount of purchasing power as well as influence and they are also quite knowledgeable about technological developments. This demographic in the market is also on the rise as the average age at which a man marries is on the rise.

Targeting this audience when marketing and advertising online requires an understanding of how these men think and what their preferences are with regards to the use of different gadgets such as laptops, PCs, smartphones etc. It is also necessary to know what content they are most likely to access and how and when that may be.

It was found that these men are most likely to use laptops (40%) and PCs (35%) for social networking, as also for important emails and business transactions. On the other hand, the mobile phone is used only 20% of the time for such activity.

In contrast, when this demographic play games, they are about twice as likely to make use of smartphones and desktop browsers (56%). Home consoles and portable game consoles are used only 35% and 33% respectively for gaming. Price and social connectivity are the likely reasons for this.

Uunmarried men in the region browse through information regarding news, entertainment and people most frequently.

Power Editor, the first new feature, is a browser-based tool for creating, editing and managing ads in bulk. Earlier this work was done by Bulk Uploader tool. Advertisers can use their Ad Manager to start using this new feature.

Another feature added by Facebook is the introduction of Account Groups. With this feature brands and agencies will find it very easy to manage their ad strategies on Facebook. The agencies will be able to simultaneously access several accounts by grouping them together. This will give them better account organisation and the access to different accounts will be seamless.

To start an account group an advertiser must set a group of accounts under one name and grant or revoke permission for the entire group. He must then accept invites to join a group and select the groups in the Ad manager account list.

Groupon has entered into an arrangement with the US-based supermarket chain Big Y to offer discounted groceries to their customers through the store’s loyalty cards. The arrangement has been made in conjunction with the marketing company Halo Effect and the consumer behavior analytics company Incentive Targeting.

The first offer made to clients is in a Springfield, Massachusetts store. A shellfish grill pack, consisting of lobster tails, clams, mussels and other sea food bits, which would normally cost $39.99, will be offered as a Groupon deal of the day for $24 (40% discount).

Groupon – Big Y deal of the day

When Big Y customers buy this Groupon deal, they have to enter their Big Y Express Saving Club membership number and when they make the payment it is automatically billed at the discounted price.

This feature will use retail shopping and marketing technology by Incentive Targeting to create and manage the promotion of various deals that will be made available from time to time. They will also monitor market response to the deals. Halo Effect has been associated with Groupon since 2009 and will help out with their marketing experience and expertise.

Groupon only recently filed for an Initial Public Offering and had also announced a new vacation feature called Groupon Getaways just a few days before that.

Industry experts are already speculating that these new services may eventually lead to other retailer driven promotions with participants of loyalty programs via other US chains such as Kroger Co., Safeway, CVS or Walgreens. Supermarket loyalty programmes, such as this, may also eventually help to eliminate fraud occurring through the use of print-at-home Internet-distributed coupons, thus encouraging other players to also join Groupon or similar service providers.

The new ad manager will provide advertisers with graphs and real-time monitoring of their ad campaigns.

A guide will update advertisers about the new features incorporated in the updated Ad Manager system. In general, the new platform will help advertisers find out how well their ad campaigns are performing based on the number of clicks and connections generated by each ad.

In the past, the focus of the ad platform was on the number of clicks delivered to each ad. Now, the system will focus on the reach and the number of connections made from each ad. Connections, in Facebook advertising terms, is measured as the number of people who ‘Like’ed a page, RSVPed to an event or installed an app within 24 hours of seeing an ad advertising the same.

Advertisers will now also get to see the ‘Frequency’, which will allow them to keep track of the average number of times a particular ad is viewed by users, or in other words how responsive users are to a particular ad.

Another metric that is now being reported is social reach. This measures the number of people who saw an ad along with the names of their friends who have already connected with the ad’s subject. This could be a very important factor as people will be more influenced by the positive opinion of their own friends.

New Facebook Ad Manager interface

The new interface will allow users to view all the ads of a given campaign inline itself instead of having to navigate to a new page every time. This will be a time-saving feature for advertisers and is a very welcome improvement.

In general, it seems that the new Ad Manager will help advertisers to better monitor the success of their ad campaigns, while at the same time saving precious time and helping them to connect better with their target audience.

The payment will be in the form of Facebook credits. Each of the selected ads watched by a user will entitle the user to one credit. One credit is equivalent to 10 cents. These credits can later be redeemed to purchase goods from the real world.

This has been made possible after the social network introduced Facebook Deals, which is similar to Groupon’s daily deals. Earlier, users could make use of their credits only to buy virtual goods such as virtual games.

At present, game publishers such as CrowdStar, Zynga, and Digital Chocolate have tied up with Facebook for this new payment scheme. Facebook is reportedly in talks with others such as Sharethrough, SocialVibe, Epic Media and SupersonicAds to sign up for this new offering as well.

They are also trying to forge a similar deal with TrialPay, which will provide additional analytics for advertisers.

So far, Facebook has suffered a low click-through rate for their ads and this new incentive should help to change that situation in the near future.

According to Dan Greenberg, CEO of Sharethrough, which is one of the companies that has already signed up for the new service, this move is “a step away from interruptive advertising”.

Greenberg claims that his company will not just provide advertising in the traditional meaning of the term, but rather it will be in the form of branded entertainment, which users will not only be interested in seeing themselves but will also want to share with their friends.

The new platform provides advertisers with three types of advertising campaigns. They are Light, Standard and Premium. The Light option is the standard StumbleUpon ads version that was offered before the upgrade. The new options offer some new facilities to advertisers.

Targeting by device is one such new facility. This means that the sponsored stumble can be targeted specifically at various devices such as desktop browsers, iPad, iPhone and other Android based phones. This allows application developers to advertise their apps to users on specific devices that their apps are designed for.

The platform also provides advanced reporting, with viral sharing and engagement metrics, traffic analysis and a website quality score. The top-level service option also provides accelerated serving priority, which allows the advertiser to move ahead in the line.

StumbleUpon’s older ad model concentrated only on targeting new traffic for the advertiser or publisher. However, with this new ad platform, they are hoping to be able to engage visitors more.

Paid Discovery ads will show up on the StumbleUpon screen even without the user having to click on a banner. This is the same concept as the original ad model, where users were just led to new sites

Advertisers will still be able to target audiences based on demographics such as age, gender and location and interests.

While the earlier ad platform charged a flat rate of $0.05 per visitor, the Standard Paid Discovery ads will be charged at $0.10 per visitor and the Premium Paid Discovery platform will charge $0.25 per visitor.

Three ad options offered when setting up a campaign on StumbleUpon Paid Discovery

Some agencies in the USA have already been invited to test Twitter’s ad serving platforms, and their clients have seen an encouraging results. This could, of course, be due to the relative novelty of the advertising medium.

Some of the products that have been marketed through Twitter include health supplements and books. In the short period since the advertisers started using Twitter as a medium to advertise, they have found that the money spent is less than what they do on Google and Facebook, and at the same time they have received mare orders from Twitter than from Google and Facebook.

Targeting small and medium businesses seems like a good move on the part of Twitter, especially in light of the fact that Google owes its popularity in large part to this sector of the market.

Twitter has started efforts to develop a self-service platform since last December, and they hope that their 200 million users will respond favourably to their advertising initiatives.

The micro-blogging site started advertising as a means of monetisation only last year. They generated $45 million in revenue through this means last year. They hope to be able to generate $150 million through ads this year.

Twitter is also likely to introduce location-based targeting in the near future, as the service is often accessed on mobile phones.

When a user makes use of a Facebook App such as check ins via Places or Likes, the new ad feature turns that user’s activity into an ad.

For example, when a user checks into a particular restaurant, the news feed for that user would automatically show a posts saying that the user has been to that place. If the restaurant wishes to, they can turn that news feed item into an ad for that restaurant, via Sponsored Stories.

User checking into a Facebook Place

Friends of the user will see the ad for that place on Facebook as an endorsement by that user.

Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Levi’s and Playfish are some of the organisations that have already partnered with Facebook to advertiser using this new feature. A few non-profit organisations such as Amnesty International, Women for Women and Donors Choose have also agreed to partnership with Facebook and trial this feature.

Sponsored stories can be set up on a pay-per-impression or pay-per-click basis. The new ad unit will initially be available on the home page and user profile pages. Later, it will be made available as a self-serve performance advertising tool for display across the entire site.

The Sponsored Stories will be shown in a special right-sidebar module. The name and profile photo of the user will also be shown. Comments by the user will be shown along with the ad – at present it is not clear whether Facebook will provide a mechanism for advertisers to prevent negative comments from being advertised.

Facebook expects that these ads will have more perceived value than the regular ads, as an endorsement from a friend should have more value.

Sponsored Stories are quite similar in concept to Promoted Tweets. The major difference is that with Sponsored Stories, the user decides the content of the ad whereas with Promoted Tweets the advertiser decides the content.

While uses do not have the option to opt-out of Sponsored Stories, their privacy settings will be respected. In other words, the ad will only be seen by those people whom the original feed item was meant for.

During Le Web Conference in Paris, Sebastien de Galleux the co-founder of Playfish and the V.P. of EA Interactive said that one of their very popular games, Pet Society, has about 20 million users at present, which is almost double the number of users for World Of Warcraft.

Playfish, the company that created Pet Society was bought by EA Interactive last year for the sum of $400 million. Pet Society became extremely popular on Facebook. The game allows Facebook users to choose a pet, modify it to suit their taste and then play games, decorate their virtual house and even bring gifts for their friends when they visit them. Some of the customisations and gifts need to be paid for (with real money).

It was revealed that Pet Society sells about 90 million virtual goods daily. Even though most of the goods are very cheap and cost only a few cents, the total revenue generated is a substantial sum. Mashable reports that annual sales from the social game add up to about 32.85 billion goods per year. This figure, according to Galleux is more than what eBay sells, even though it is worth a lot less in real terms.

Galleux says that users are asking for more payment options for the purchase of bulk goods. He also revealed that although Pet Society is extremely popular it is not the most popular game. At present, the most popular game is FIFA Superstars and users are even willing to pay £5 to buy a good player.

According to James Binn, the head of PC gaming at Future Net, “Online games are bigger than ever – driven by social platforms like Facebook, which enable fast, cheap marketing and connect people in new ways.”

One of the largest U.S. retailers, Target, has already made use of Twitter’s Promoted Trends service to advertise their deals. Other large department stores such as BestBuy and Walmart are making use of Twitter to tweet about deals.

BestBuy, a popular electronic equipment retailer has the largest number of followers on Twitter among all the retailers. Kate Kaye from Clickz reports that BestBuy posted 70 tweets on the 26th of November (Black Friday) highlighting the various deals they were offering clients. They also posted their Cyber Monday deals on Sunday itself to entice buyers earlier. This is an interesting move, as reports from comScore suggest that Cyber Monday was the second largest spending day last year, with sales of $887 million taking place on that day alone.

$1 Billion Sales Record

This year too, an estimated 88% of U.S. online retailers took part in Cyber Monday sales and some of them even offered week-long deals. The efforts seem to have paid off well, as comScore reports that Cyber Monday sales for this year hit an all-time record, surpassing the $1 Billion mark!

Among other retailers, Walmart, which has over 90,000 followers on Twitter had 49 posts on Black Friday, with several deals being offered. Home Depot also had 41 posts fro Black Friday advertising items ranging from ornaments and tiles to appliances. Other U.S. retailers who made use of Twitter for Black Friday included Staples, Sears, Macy’s, Lowe’s, J C Penney and Kohl’s.

Kohl’s promotes shopping deals on their Twitter account

Target is believed to have spent thousands of dollars to sponsor their Promoted Tweets a week before Black Friday.

These figures indicate that Twitter in particular, and social media in general, are becoming extremely popular advertising channels and small businesses should also start taking advantage of them in order to reach a larger audience.

Promoted Tweets are a form of advertising on Twitter, in which an advertiser pays Twitter to display tweets at the top of a Twitter search results page or even within a user’s tweet stream.

These ads will now also appear at the top of the relevant Google real time search results page – when a user filters searches to show only “Latest” results.  However, these ads or Promoted Tweets as they are called, will not show up on a regular Google search results page.

Google realtime search results showing Promoted Tweets

While this is the first time that Google has ever displayed ads from another network on their search results page, it may not be the last. According to Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land, who first blogged about these ads, Google has issued a statement saying, “Twitter is pioneering advertising against short-form content, so it was a natural starting place for us. We’re certainly open to continue exploring other advertising models and systems, including those we might develop in-house.”

The revenue generated by these ads will be split between Google and Twitter on a 50/50 basis, according to sources at Twitter.

Other Social Networks To Follow Suit?

If Google is true to its word and starts allowing ads from other networks, could we soon see more real time ads from Twitter, and then maybe Facebook ads and even promoted stories through Digg Ads?

While such initiatives would see a short-term increase in revenue by monetising products that previously weren’t monetised, they’re rather unlikely to really happen except in situations where Google AdWords has failed to monetise a service.

The appearance of Promoted Tweets on real time search results is probably a result of the original deal that Twitter forged with Google. When the deal was forged, Google was in a race against Microsoft to launch a real time search product. Twitter most likely used their favourable bargaining position to require Google to only show ads from Twitter alongside real time search results that were pulled from the social news site. The absence of regular AdWords ads on these pages, when compared to Google search results pages for all other time-range searches corroborates that this was the most likely scenario.

Twitter ads on real time search / AdWords ads on past 24 hours filter

Usually advertisers are always on the lookout to target their ad campaigns at specific and appropriate groups of audiences, who are likely to engage with the campaign and eventually buy the product or service being advertised.

The new service from StumbleUpon will make it easier for the advertisers, as the optimal audience will now be selected by StumbleUpon itself. The selection will be based on various demographic factors like age, gender, location, topics of interest etc. This facility is thus expected to give advertisers more cost effectiveness and better Return on Investment.

Now, when an advertiser starts a new ad campaign, he will have a checked box, which will enable this feature to work if the advertiser so wishes. If however he ‘unchecks’ the box the feature will stop being functional.

The advertiser will of course be able to continue to control his budget, and start or stop the campaign at will

The advertiser will also be able to see the difference between the responses to the auto-targeted campaigns and to the manually targeted campaigns for future decision making.

StumbleUpon already has a base of over 11 million users and 40,000 brands or publishers on their site. This new feature should give a good boost to their advertisers.

While it is a very well known fact that social media is growing very fast worldwide, the study shows that in the U.K. 85% of the population is already highly connected to the Internet.

The findings show that users spend over 6 hours a month on social media sites, and while 25% of them write their own blog, 60% read blogs. 64% of users have their profile on at least 1 social network.

About 33% of them have downloaded a video sharing site, and 85% watch video clips online.

Over 25% of adults are known to access the internet through their mobile phones and 29.4 million people visit social networks at least once a month.

While the population in the U.K. is 61 million, Germany 81 million, Japan 127 million, Russia 141 million and in the U.S. 308 million, the number of people in the world connected to Facebook has crossed 500 million.

Over the last year, the number of people watching television programmes online has grown by 600% and about 20% of adults in the U.K. prefer surfing the internet than watching TV programmes.

Social networks have now become the single largest activity to pass the time and nearly 33% of adults in the U.K. express the sentiment that they ‘cannot live without the internet’.

78% to 80% of Internet users in the U.K. use the internet to check information about products and services, thus allowing marketers to reach a large number of users.

33% of users trust online banners and while 90% of users trust the online recommendation of friends, 70% even trust the online recommendation of strangers.

20% of tweets contain references to some brand or product, and online visitors from some social media site are far more likely to make an online purchase, than other online visitors. (71% compared to 7%)

Social media sites allow us to create online content and they also help to connect people with each other and also with brands products and services.

Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School are just two of the many colleges to have done so.

The idea behind this move is to prepare their students to make use of these ever growing networks to reach and engage with their target audience in innovative ways.

Companies such as AT&T, Citigroup, Panasonic etc. have already started hiring employees as social media directors, to develop and manage marketing strategies through the social media.

These companies strongly believe that the social media offer a novel opportunity to interact with their customers and also to learn what they want.

Different colleges are offering different types of courses based on the social media and quite expectedly they are much in demand.

The Champlain College was among the first to offer such a course, and they did that way back in the year 2000.

Apart from teaching students to use the social media, they are also taught to understand the psychological and sociological aspect of the social media.

Some of the schools actually make the students conduct campaigns for the various companies, and study the effect of the campaign, on the performance of the company, before they are certified to have passed the course.

According to ‘All Things Digital’ it has been suggested by sources who are likely to have some inside information, that Twitter is planning to lay out a new feature to help monetize their site.

According to sources, Twitter could be in the process of setting up something like ‘Promoted Tweets’. This feature may highlight certain user accounts, and thus increase their follower base.

While it seems a little different from Twitter’s earlier policy, it is likely that they may create a system by which users could pay to promote their tweets and profiles in order to achieve a larger fan following. Twitter in turn may charge the users based on the number of new followers gained or on the extent of exposure achieved.

A new site, ‘TweetUp’ has already got a similar system, which allows users to build up their follower base.

Since Twitter has refused to confirm or deny any such plans, the available information is very sketchy. However, it is believed that the feature would eventually be web and third party application compatible.

Twitter spokesperson, Sean Garett only says “eventually (the company would) have full suites of both promoted and commercial products.”

In order to promote themselves through this feature, the NBA has sponsored the topic ‘LeBron James’.

When users click on the player’s name, they are directed to tweets about the basketball star from regular users as well as a promoted tweet from the NBA, which is highlighted as a promoted tweet within a yellow box background.

Users who click on the promoted tweet, are directed to a section of NBA.com, giving the NBA more exposure through this feature.

The reason this move is likely to be very effective in the short term is the timing. The basketball star is due to announce any time now which team he will be playing for next season. Basketball fans are literally waiting with bated breath.

The extent of his popularity and the anxiety of the football fans can be judged by the fact that he collected 1,50,000 followers on Twitter within just seven hours of joining the site. The number of tweets and stories regarding him have literally flooded the site.

While it was speculated that he would announce his decision on Twitter itself, his publicist has already rejected this suggestion.

The previous holder of the fastest growing fan following was none other than the founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates. He had collected 1,00,000 followers in eight hours. With the help of trending topics LeBron James’ popularity on Twitter has soared much faster.

Other well known brands that have used Sponsored Trending Topics are Pixar and Coca Cola.

A while ago, Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, mentioned that Google was working on building a full-fledged social network – Google Me. Kevin Rose says that he got his information from a “very credible source”. His tweet, though, has now been deleted from Twitter.

This information has since been backed up by Adam D’Angelo, who was formerly the CTO at Google.

D’Angelo, who worked for Facebook after he left Google, now has his own site, Quora, where he made this announcement. According to him, the Google Me project is more than just a rumour. He says that a lot of people are working on it, and he is very confident about it. He feels that Google has realised that their site Buzz is not good enough o compete with the very rapidly growing Facebook, and hence they would like to set up a full fledged social network of their own, and this is now a high priority task for them.

According to D’Angelo, Google had earlier assumed that Facebook’s growth would slow down in time, but as there is no sign of that happening, they have decided to take up the challenge and start their own social network.

Also, Facebook has now ventured into search, which is traditionally the strong hold of Google, so Google has decided to enter the field of social networks.

Google had tried their hand at social networking in the past with Orkut and later with Buzz, but for one reason or other, both these sites did not too well on a worldwide level, so now they could be starting afresh with Google Me.

It is also obvious that owning a social networking site would improve their potential for advertising, to a very large extent, which means that they will generate more revenue, hence the rush to start the new social network.

The new service has been incorporated in their trending topics feature and is known as ‘Promoted Trending Topics’.

The first such promoted topic is for Disney / Pixar’s movie, Toy Story 3.

Promoted trending topics are clearly highlighted with a yellow box that says “promoted”. When a user clicks on that topic, a search results page is shown with the advertiser’s promoted tweet at the top, followed by “Top Tweets” that Twitter selects based on the number of retweets and then other users’ tweets about the topic.

The promoted tweet in the search results could contain link to pages with more information, just like any other tweet.

Even though promoted trending topics are placed near the bottom of the page at present, the yellow box is bound to attract some attention, especially while it’s new. Twitter might have to bump up the promoted topic ads in the future, once users get used to seeing it and start ignoring it.

Promoted trending topics will appear irrespective of the location to which the trending topics are set. One condition that has been set for the continuation of the promoted trending topics is that they must resonate with Twitter’s user base. If they do not attract sufficient attention, they will disappear just like any other trending topic.

Promoted tweet from Disney for Toy Story 3

While Twitter continues to claim that promoted tweets and promoted topics are not “advertisements”, it is rumoured that promoted topics are being sold for tens of thousands of dollars!

StumbleUpon has, however, chosen not to make a big hue and cry about it. An employee of the site just stumbled the profile of the new entrant and mentioned that he was their official 10 millionth user. He is a 20 year old male from Colombia, and his user name is Nellzom.

In April 2008 StumbleUpon had registered 5 million users and they have doubled that number in the last two years. In fact, the StumbleUpon blog announced that they had 9,908,350 users just over a fortnight ago, which means they signed up approximately 6,500 new users each day in the past 2 weeks.

Statistics released by the company show that they have seen an 118% growth in the number of active users since 2009 and have delivered 5.4 billion recommendations since April 2009, half a billion of which were in March 2010.

StumbleUpon was acquired by eBay in 2007 for $75 million but separated from eBay in the last year. The company is now faring pretty well in its recently re-acquired start-up status.

According to reports published last month, StumbleUpon drove more traffic to third-party websites than many of the other more popular sites such as Twitter, Reddit and Digg.

An average StumbleUpon user stumbles about 25 times a day. Users of the StumbleUpon add-on for Firefox stumble sites about 400 times a month.

The growing popularity of StumbleUpon can probably be attributed to the fact that it is very easy to operate. Users can discover new sites with just one click and also rate them with a simple thumbs up or a thumbs down with just one more click.

The service has reportedly been in the beta testing stage since last December. Twitter started testing the service by inviting a few account holders to use the service and give Twitter feedback about it. Once Twitter is satisfied with the results and performance of the service it will be rolled out to all users.

A few business users were sent an email, which informed them about the new “Twitter Toolkit”. To start beta testing the service, users were asked to visit their Twitter account settings and then to click on the new ‘Business’ tab where they could provide information to help Twitter to verify the account.

Once a business activates its account by clicking on the email link, it gets automatically verified. The user can then activate the business features for that account. Business account users can provide information including contact details and size of the business – small, large, individual or group.

Activated business accounts show the verified logo on Twitter, which was. until now, available only to celebrities and extremely popular individual users. The benefit of a verified account is obvious – the follower knows for sure that he / she is interacting with an official company representative and not some imposter.

Verified business accounts show four tabs in the Twitter Business Center:

• Overview – general information about the business account
• Business Info – users can change the information was provided at the time of account verification
• Verification – confirms that the account has been successfully verified
• Contributors – allows the business to directly add multiple users to a business account.

Screenshot of the Twitter Business Center

In addition to the ability to allow multiple contributors within an account – a feature that was quite expected, given the success of coTweet – another notable feature of the new service is that it allows businesses to accept direct messages even from users whom they have not previously been following. This feature could be very helpful to businesses as far as receiving information and feedback is concerned.

Twitter has not given any indication of when it aims to bring the service out of beta and make it generally available, nor have they announced what the cost of this service to businesses will be.

Facebook accounts for nearly half the traffic generated from social networks and other social media sites, contributing to 48% of the total. The next largest referrer is StumbleUpon, which sends 25% of the total social media traffic. Twitter ranks third and accounts for 10% of the traffic sent from social sites.

Top 7 Social Media sites that referred traffic to global websites in Jan – Mar 2010.

StatCounter has arrived at these figures after analysing 13 billion page views from all their member sites. Their CEO, Aodhan Cullen, says, “From a business perspective the findings suggest that there is merit in having a corporate Facebook page or Twitter account.”

Quite surprisingly, StumbleUpon has managed to remain the second largest driver of social media traffic through the last year. In the U.S.A; it was the topmost source of social traffic in March.

YouTube, reddit, Digg and MySpace are next in line, in terms of driving traffic, with 6%, 4%, 2% and 2% contribution to total social media referrals respectively.

However, Cullen warns that the social media market is known to fluctuate quite sharply and during the last Christmas and New Year season, Facebook was not only at the top but accounted for almost 75% of the traffic referrals.

Last year, the top three slots were occupied by StumbleUpon, Facebook and MySpace, in thet order.

Now, with the recent introduction of Annotations and @anywhere by Twitter and the ‘Like’ button by Facebook the situation could change all over again.

Even though Ning is believed to have over 20 million visitors a month, and had 1 million uniques a year ago, things obviously have not been going too well for them.

They have announced large scale staff cut-backs following a change in leadership – their previous CEO Gina Bianchini left the company last month and Jason Rosenthal has taken her place.

Ning was valued at $500 million one year ago, based on their then-proclaimed user numbers and estimated ad revenues. Rosenthal decided that they need to re-evaluate their working systems. After studying the business, he concluded that they needed to focus on their premium services business.

Premium Ning Networks drive 75% of their monthly U.S. traffic. Network Creators who use these services will need to pay for many more services and features. They are, therefore, going to change their strategy to devote 100% of their resources to building the bread-winning products.

Ning will phase out free services shortly. Existing free networks will have the opportunity to either convert to paying for premium services or move away from Ning.

In effect, paying customers will be required to pay higher prices and free customers will have the choice to either start paying for services or leave Ning and move their networks over to other sites.

Users on the Ning Creators forum thread where this announcement was made have already started talking about leaving Ning. New threads have cropped up listing a number of viable options, which currently include Grou.ps, Spruz, SocialGO, BuddyPress, Lovd By Less and Elgg.

While it makes sense that those who use Ning to build full-fledged networks for their users should invest in the service, a vast number of networks have been created on Ning only because it was the best free alternative. Most of these networks do not have a financial reason to exist, and when Ning shuts down their free service, they will leave the network in droves.

All this while, Twitter has insisted that they do not want to use their site as a regular advertising platform. They have now come up with a plan that they believe will allow them to make some money while keeping their users’ priorities in mind and also letting Twitter continue to be a free service.

Promoted Tweets will be ordinary tweets that businesses would like to highlight to a wide group of users.

The Promoted Tweets will be placed at the top of certain search results pages on Twitter.com and Twitter promises that each such tweet will be completely relevant to the search being conducted. Moreover, each search results page will feature only one Promoted Tweet, which will be clearly labeled as “Promoted”.

Since this is a new service, Twitter will be on the lookout to see how it is received by their audience. If they find that a particular tweet has not found favour with users, or in other words, if it does not receive Retweets or replies and is not marked as a favourite, then it will be removed from the search results page.

Twitter founder, Biz Stone says, “We strongly believe that Promoted Tweets should be useful to you. We’ll attempt to measure whether the tweets resonate with users and stop showing Promoted Tweets that don’t resonate.”

While most users seem to agree that it is high time Twitter started monetising itself without charging users, initial feedback shows that users want Promoted Tweets to be clearly labeled and relevant.

Common sense would probably indicate the same without the need for research. If a consumer elects to receive a brand’s messaging on their Facebook news stream or Twitter feed, that consumer is already likely to be a champion of the brand. It is just natural that such a consumer would then be more likely to buy that brand’s products.

Assuming that social media prompts consumers to buy would be a leap of faith not justified by this research. The only role it plays, according to this piece of research, is to prompt consumers who already like a brand to buy more of its products.

iModerate Research Technologies and consumer market research firm, Chadwick Martin Bailey, conducted the survey on the effect social media has on brand followers in February 2010 across more than 1,500 adult respondents in the U.S.A.

The study reveals that 60% of Facebook fans and 79% of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend brands that they follow or become fans of. Similarly, they are more likely to buy products of those brands.

51% of Facebook fans and 67% of Twitter followers said they were more likely to buy from the brands that they follow.

Vice President at Chadwick Martin Bailey, Josh Mendelsohn says, “Companies not actively engaged are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers – intentionally or unintentionally – about how willing they are to engage on consumers’ terms.”

Consumers of both sexes and various age groups who participated in the study also felt that brands that are not involved on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter are either unaware of the opportunity they are missing or are not very interested in interacting with their consumers.

Considering that Facebook has over 400 million active users and 50 million tweets are posted on Twitter every day, the brands that are not on these networks are certainly missing the opportunity to reach a large audience.

According to eConsultancy, most consumers follow a brand to get discounts, but about 2% of them said they follow the brand to show support for it.

The decision to truncate Lifehacker’s news feed has not gone down well with its former editorial head, Lockhart Steele, who has always been a very active defendant of full RSS feeds. He questioned the owner of Gawker Media, Nick Denton about the logic behind this decision.

Nick Denton responded by saying, “this was a commercial decision”. He further added, “Gawker Media is an ad supported company. RSS ads have never realized their potential. At the same time we sell plenty of ads on our website so, yes, it is in our interest for people to click through if enticed by an excerpt.”

Denton’s statement regarding the lack of profits coming out of RSS ads is particularly interesting. The effectiveness of RSS news feeds as an advertising medium becomes seriously questionable when a popular blog publisher openly denounces them.

Felix Salmon from Reuters seems to have a different opinion, though. He points out, on his blog, that while it might be true that click throughs from the RSS feed to the website generate more revenue, there is no evidence that truncating all RSS feeds would result in higher traffic. In fact, things could work in just the reverse manner and changing from full to truncated RSS feeds may result in a loss in traffic and hence lead to lower revenues.

Peter Kafka from All Things Digital has provided some details about the Twitter advertising service that were revealed to him by “people who have been briefed by the company’”.

According to the details available, ads on Twitter will be linked to the search service, so that only users who search for something on Twitter will see related ads. Other users will not see ads in their regular Twitter stream.

Ads will also be distributed by third party software and Twitter will share the revenue generated from these ads with the application developers.

Twitter ads will continue to use the standard Twitter format – 140 characters of text.

Initially, Twitter will work with ad agencies and buyers, but will change to a self-serve model similar to Google AdWords in due time.

Kafka cautions that the ad platform is still in the testing stages and a date has not yet been set for its launch. It is expected to be within the first six months of this year.

It is not yet known how advertisers will buy ads and what sort of pricing models will be made available – whether the pricing will be based on a cost-per-click basis or in some other way.

If search is to be Twitter’s sole source of revenue, their search platform needs to be significantly redefined in order to make it more useful and effective. Twitter will also need to gather more data about their users in order to better target the ads.

This information was revealed to Rory Maher a research analyst with TBI by sources close to Facebook. According to eMarketer, Facebook has become “the premier destination for marketers who are using social media.

A major factor in this super success of Facebook is the fact that they have concentrated on building ad technology, and this has let Facebook leap ahead of its rivals like MySpace in a relatively short time.

Due to the up-to-date technology which they offer, Facebook is able to charge its advertisers at premium rates. Facebook’s rate card shows that they charge $20 per CPM (Cost per 1,000 impressions) which is much higher than what most other social sites are able to charge. Facebook has also set a minimum spend limit of $50,000 for agencies.
Facebook also offers a CPC (Cost per click) basis service which ranges from $0.15 to $1.10 per click depending on the product being advertised.

They have also greatly increased the use of their self-serve advertising platform. Another important reason for their sudden growth is the fact that their audience has now crossed the 350 million mark worldwide.

Facebook also allows their advertisers to target their audience in a very precise manner, using any number of criteria they want.

Facebook also forms a very crucial part of every viral campaign. Advertisers are allowed to create fan pages, or connect to Facebook Connect, thus notifying all the contacts of Facebook users about the products they are advertising.

Facebook has also recently struck a deal with Microsoft, to incorporate their feeds into the search results on Bing.
All this indicates that Facebook is likely to continue growing next year as well.

While they want to keep it a free service for all ordinary users, they do want to monetise the businesses that have been effectively using Twitter as a convenient means of communication with their clients.

They have already mentioned offering specialised premium accounts to these businesses. Recently, Twitter has launched a new feature in beta. This feature is called ‘Contributors’.

This service will better allow businesses to manage several of their contributors through a single account. The username of the contributor will be attached to the byline of the tweet sent out by the business, thus making the interaction between the business and the client more personalized.

For instance, if Twitter co-founder Biz Stone were invited to tweet on behalf of Twitter, then the tweet from @Twitter would include his username @Biz, in the byline, to let users know the people in the organisation which they are dealing with.

This feature will be available on the Web as well as on APIs and it will further enhance existing Twitter business apps such as CoTweet and HootSuite.

Contributors is still in the developmental stages and hence it has not yet been made available to all. It is currently being tried out by a few businesses and will be rolled out to all others after it has been fine tuned.

Ikea came up with an innovative and yet extremely simple way to use the popular social network, Facebook, to promote their new store in the town of Malmo, Sweden.

While using a social network to promote a product or brand is nothing new, the way they have done it is commendable, simply because the idea is so simple and inexpensive.

Forsman and Bodenfors, Ikea’s marketing agency created a profile on Facebook for the manager of the new store, Mr. Gordon Gustavsson, and then they uploaded pictures of several pieces of furniture in the store in his photo album.

Facebook users were then informed that the first person to tag their name to any piece of furniture in any of the pictures could take that article home for free!

The brilliance of this simple campaign lies in its intrinsically viral nature – when someone tags themselves on a photograph, all of their friends see the photograph, and therefore find out about the campaign. These friends then try to find a piece of furniture to tag themselves by going through the other photos in the album.

Certainly not wanting to lose out on a good opportunity, Facebook users started flocking to the profile at a feverish pace, as word of this campaign got around to more and more friends via the profiles page and Facebook news feeds. In fact users have been asking Ikea to upload more and more pictures so they can get some more freebies.

Ikea is, of course, enjoying all the publicity that is being generated for their store as a result of this campaign.

LinkedIn is now going a step further to endear itself to its identified niche market segment by helping corporations recruit appropriate people for various positions. Until now, human resources personnel had to bookmark the portfolios of candidates who seemed to be appropriate or interesting for a particular post, and then save these for reference at a later date when required.

Now LinkedIn has started a new service for their Premium users, called ‘Profile Organizer’. As the name suggests, the service will allow users who pay for advanced features on LinkedIn to bookmark and save the profiles that they find interesting.

Not only can users bookmark interesting profiles, but they can also create files to categorise their contacts. This way, users can have different folders for personnel in different departments, such as manufacturing, sales, marketing etcetera for easy reference at a later date.

These folders can be categorised under different headings such as occupation and location. The details stored in the folders are not accessible to others, so users can make their own notes about each applicant. Details such as the hobbies and interests of a candidate, as also the details of any interaction with them can be stored here.

The service will be available to regular LinkedIn users for a 30 day trial period. Business members will be allowed an upper limit of five folders, while Business Pro and Pro members can create up to 25 folders. Users can test this new service on:

LinkedIn.com/organizer

The new service being provided will be called Nielsen BrandLift.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook says, “Nielsen is the leader in measurement and is an excellent partner for us as we look to provide marketers with richer ad effective data”.

BrandLift will make use of opt-in polls on the Facebook homepage. The poll will help marketers to understand the opinion users have of a particular brand and thus the likelihood of purchase intent.

According to John Burbank, the CEO of Nielsen’s online division, Facebook has now become a vital link between consumers and brands, and with this partnership Nielsen will be able to add tot heir knowledge of media measurement. He further says, “we will be able to provide the missing elements to clients seeking better understanding of how web content and online advertising affect consumer behavior.”

This survey will help marketers to receive better market data and it will be made available to them sooner which is a great plus point for them.

Facebook will take care to see that individual users are not flooded with too many polls at once. Also no personal identification will be gathered through this poll, thus maintaining user privacy, which should please users.

The survey will consist of two questions put forward to consumers in standard ad positions. The survey will help advertisers to measure brand awareness, ad recall, message association, brand favorability and purchase consideration.

The service has already been used by a few brands such as Proctor & Gambol, and Sony Pictures on a trial basis. They have reported encouraging findings.

The service will be made available to all marketers in due course.

While Google continues to remain the undisputed leader among search engines, HubSpot’s study shows that it is no longer a good idea to concentrate only on marketing through Google, or even through other search engines.

The survey conducted by HubSpot, across 40 of their customers in four industries, has shown that though search is responsible for a lot of the traffic, that traffic does not necessarily convert into leads or sales.

In fact, they found that social media, email and even blogs are very important sources of traffic and sales. Even links coming in from various websites and directories contribute quite significantly to the traffic and leads that a marketer receives.

Quite contrary to the findings of this study conducted by HubSpot, other recent studies have found that while social media alone now accounts for almost 20% of online ad impressions, the number of actual conversions and the influence exerted by a social media presence was substantially lower.

First they added real time search to Facebook, soon after it was incorporated into Twitter and then they acquired FriendFeed.

Their latest move along this path is the incorporation of @mentions on their status updates, which allows users to respond directly to various comments, event announcements and so on.

To use this feature, the user has to type the ‘@’ symbol in the status update box, and a drop down menu then allows the user to tag friends, groups events etc. The concerned party will then receive a link to this post. This procedure is expected to simplify the use of Facebook.

@mentions, which were earlier called @replies are an extremely popular feature of Twitter. In fact, @mentions are one of the main reason behind Twitter’s popularity as a quick  communications tool.

Several Facebook users made use of Twitter for their status updates. With this new feature, users will no longer need to access Twitter to message their friends. Facebook users will now be able to tag and chat with each other directly on Facebook. It will, in fact, be possible for users to update Twitter through Facebook, instead of the other way around, which has been the case so far.

Marketers and advertisers will also now be able to communicate and interact with their clients through Facebook as they will be able to follow each comment attached to their name. This will be beneficial for them as Facebook has 250 million users and Twitter has only 10 million.

Another major advantage for Facebook will be the ability this feature gives users to broadcast breaking news on Facebook instead of on Twitter.

Though all these changes are likely to have an impact on the numbers of Facebook and Twitter users, one thing to be remembered is that most users use Facebook only to communicate with a group of known friends, whereas Twitter is used to follow the comments and opinions of people with a common interest, even if they are complete strangers in the real world.

According to comScore research, the total number of ad impressions on all social sites put together accounts for 21.1% of the total online ad displays in the U.S.

The most popular social sites, MySpace and Facebook, together received the vast majority of ad impressions. Individually, MySpace received 9.2% and Facebook received 8.2% of all online ad impressions.

Less popular sites like Tagged.com, Hi5, Bebo, Classmates.com and many others account for the remaining 3.7% of all online ad impressions. Each of them receives about 0.1% of the total, with the exception of Tagged.com which has 0.6% and MocoSpace.com which has 0.2%.

The popularity of social networks has increased rapidly in the last few years, so it is quite natural that advertisers would try and make use of this medium to reach the maximum possible target audience. Another motivating factor for using the social networks is the high reach and frequency of usage among target segments against low costs .

Jeff Hackett, Senior VP at comScore, says, “Social media is becoming an increasingly attractive vehicle for major advertisers seeking to optimise campaign reach and frequency, and small advertisers desiring to reach a highly targeted audience.”

One should, however, note the fact that although the number of ad impressions on social sites is over 20%, the actual number of clicks and conversions received from social networks could be significantly lower. If that is the case, social networks are no more than excellent branding channels.

Rel=”nofollow” is an attribute that webmasters can add within the code for external links in order to signal that the link should not be followed by the search engine spiders. Bloggers often use the attribute to disuade comment spam.

The nofollow trend on Twitter started last year when they first indicated to search spiders that links posted under Web, on the right hand side of the Twitter profile, were not to be trusted. They then extended that to links within the Bio as well.

Now, Twitter adds the rel=”nofollow” attribute to all external links, be it links referencing an article or links to third-party Twitter apps that enabled posting the tweet.

Internal links remain untouched, turning Twitter into a walled garden much like Wikipedia, with lots of link juice coming in from other sites but none going out.

As Rae Hoffman pointed out on her blog, all the content on Twitter is created by the profile owners. Twitter is robbing profile owners by disallowing them to reap any benefit from their own work.

Twitter is likely to see some backlash as a result of this decision. Their justification for their decision is that it disuades spammers from abusing the service. However, Twitter is quite good at stopping spammer accounts already. And, moreover, that doesn’t then explain why verified reliable accounts such as @Google and @stephenfry also have their links nofollowed.

The popular micro-blogging service has timed these updates quite well. They are now so big, that minor backlashes and disenssion among SEO, social marketers and developers would hardly affect their growth, which is now self-propelling.

According to Nick Halstead, the CEO and founder of TweetMeme, they have served 1.6 billion impressions of their retweet buttons in the last month, and are seeing an average 20% growth from one week to the next.

One of the reasons for the popularity of TweetMeme could be their reliability and innovativeness. The features they currently offer include one-click retweets, RSS and email buttons, a range of plugins and 11 URL shortening services. The retweet functionality comes with basic analytics showing who retweeted and linked to a particular story. This functionality is planned to be expanded in a soon to be launched service that will allow their users to judge the performance of a story.

Among those who currently subscribe to TweetMeme are Mashable, PerezHilton and Techcrunch.

1.6 billion impressions, however, means that the buttons are only viewed 1.6 billion times a month, not actually clicked. The number of clicks on a retweet button are substantially lower.

Halstead informed TechCrunch that the actual number of clicks on the retweet buttons was estimated to be in the region of 6 million a month, which amounts to a click-through rate of just 0.375%.

Retweets have become so popular due to the fact that it is much easier to retweet an article than to actually type out a new tweet or a comment.

Blog owners and publishers use retweet buttons partly to show-off the number of times their article has been mentioned by others, but also to prompt more readers to discuss the post on Twitter.

This second reason, though, seems questionable, given the low click-through rate on these buttons. If, in fact, the retweet button gets clicks from only 3 out of 1,000 viewers on average, it could hurt small blog owners more than help them as it would only serve to highlight the low number of retweets.

The study was conducted over a period of two weeks, between Monday and Friday and during the hours from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm. 200 English tweets were randomly collected on each of the 10 working days, resulting in a total of 2,000 Tweets.

The tweets received were then analysed and divided into 6 categories. These were – news, spam, self promotion, pointless babble, conversational and pass along value.

Spam and self promotional were expected to be the most common tweets. However, this was not the case. Of the 2,000 tweets the distribution among categories was as follows:

Considering the fact that Twitter has recently changed their home page, changing their tagline from “What are you doing now?” to “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world”, it is quite surprising that news based tweets ranked last in the group. It probably means that the new direction that twitter plans to take has not yet really caught on.

Also, one expected the self promotional category to be more frequently used, but that is not so either.

While there are those who would be too happy to run down Twitter because the vast majority of tweets are pointless babble, Twitter loyalists would be quick to point out that the ability to post some useless statements and comments about oneself, were the whole purpose of Twitter when it was first started.

Users will have a considerable say in what kind of ads they want to see. Just as they can vote up or down any articles, videos etc. on the site, they will be able to do the same with the ads. The ads will however be clearly marked as sponsored content.

Thus, the more popular an ad is, the more it will be voted up, while the less popular an ad is the more that ad will be ‘buried’ or voted down. Accordingly advertisers will be charged at a higher rate for the less popular ads, and will be charged at lower rates for the more popular ads. This way, eventually, the advertisers would decide to discontinue the unpopular ads, as they will not work out to be cost effective.

Through this service, Digg is making sure that their audiences get to see ads that they are interested in, and advertisers will try their best to produce ads which users will like.

There is, of course, a slight possibility that users may decide that they do not want to see ads on Digg, and therefore start ‘burying’ all ads.

Digg will initially roll out the ads gradually to a few users, and based on their feedback, make appropriate changes in the service. Over the course of the next few months the facility will be made available to all users.

Social media platform Wetpaint and digital consulting firm Altimeter Group conducted a study of the world’s top 100 brands, with regards to their interaction with consumers through the social media sites and their level of revenue generation.

The results, which were revealed recently, show that companies with the highest level of presence on the social media registered an impressive 18% growth in revenue in the last year, while companies with poor or no presence on social media sites registered a drop of 6% revenue in the same time period.

A lot more than just social media presence contributed to the above rises and falls in revenue, but social media awareness definitely did play a role in the overall fortunes of the companies involved.

The top engaged brands were as follows:

1. Starbucks
2. Dell
3. EBay
4. Google
5. Microsoft
6. Thomson Reuters
7. Nike
8. Amazon
9. SAP
10. Intel and Yahoo! (tied)

The only brands that added links in their email marketing messages to social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace were Pepsi, Sony, The Gap and Hewlett Packard.

Links to Facebook and Twitter in email marketing campaigns have increased drastically over the last couple of years.

In the same time period, the ratio of number of emails linking to Facebook and to Twitter has reversed.

In 2007, 215 campaigns were linked to Twitter and 729 campaigns were linked to Facebook.

In 2008 Twitter had 2,540 campaigns and Facebook had 12,650 campaigns.

However in 2009 Twitter has received 41,399 campaigns until June, while Facebook has received 41,052 campaigns during the same period.

Twitter had been trailing behind Facebook in January and February 2009. In March the two companies were running neck and neck. However since April, Twitter seems to have established a clear lead over Facebook.

However, recently some changes seem to have been made in this arrangement, whereby, the links are directed to Digg, instead of going to the publisher site, even if the users are not signed in on Digg.

As a result, thousands of users are pushing traffic to Digg, instead of to the original site that they wanted to link to, without even being aware of it.

Initially those who experienced this change wondered if this was an intentional change, or an error on the part of Digg. It has now been confirmed, via an email from Digg Support to Mashable, that this is an intentional change, and is “working as planned”.

This change will also be applicable to Digg URL’s that were created previously.

Digg has made these changes without informing their users. As a result, thousands of Digg users have no knowledge of the fact that they are diverting their followers to Digg instead of the intended site, which seems quite unethical, and is very likely to upset the publishers who happen to be Digg’s main source of content and traffic.

Digg founder, Kevin Rose has pleaded ignorance of these changes as he was on vacation for two weeks, and he says he will look into the matter.

After a very encouraging opening on Friday, with collections of $14.4 million, the rest of the weekend turned out to be something of a damp squib by comparison. While Friday’s collections made observers predict a first weekend collection of around $50 million, the actual takings at the box office amounted to only about $30 million, which is a very big let down, and rather unusual.

Trade analysts and others from the field, are suggesting that the popular micro-blogging site Twitter caused the downfall of the movie. It is believed that reviews sent out on the social platform could have discouraged prospective viewers from going to see the movie.

While this may certainly be true to an extent, one needs to evaluate objectively why the tweets sent out were so largely negative in the first place.

Could it be possible that the movie was really not what the audiences may have expected, and therefore it did not do well?

The article on Time.com indicated that the second Transformers movie and Ice Age both performed very well during the same time frame, in spite of both being in their second week.

The trend for Bruno on Twitter, seen above, shows a definite spike on Saturday, with Bruno-related tweets accounting for 0.71% of all tweets, followed by a steady descent. The same pattern was seen a week earlier, for Transformers, albeit with a much higher peak – 2.13% of all tweets – followed by a sharper decline in discussions, as seen below.

Comparing Twitter streams for Bruno and Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, both have equal numbers of positive and negative reviews today.

However, the real reason becomes more obvious when we compare the US and UK markets. Tweets from the UK are largely positive, which probably reflects its success at the UK box office – 2nd biggest opening ever for an 18+ movie – whereas tweets from the USA focus on the gay content and the sexual obscenities.

Cultural differences, especially rampant homophobia in the USA, are probably a big factor that could explain why the movie is faring poorly in the USA. Another factor could be that the movie is just plain bad. To be fair, though, it is certainly possible that the existance of Twitter allowed viewers who could not stomach the flamboyant homosexual fashion designer to spread their views faster than normally would have been possible.

This is also one of the steps the site is taking to generate for more revenue for itself, which should definitely make their investors happy. According to Silicon Alley Insider, the introduction of an ad network is another step they are taking with the same goal in mind.

TechCrunch spotted a ‘Pay with Facebook’ button on the Group Card application. This new system for payments will be available to all accounts that use Group Card.

This new button is similar to the Facebook Connect button, which had been introduced a while ago.

When a user clicks on the ‘Pay with Facebook’ button, an overlay opens, asking the user to confirm that he/she wishes to pay through his Facebook credits.

Other payment modes, such as Visa and MasterCard will continue to be available to users.

This service will shortly be extended to other applications as well.

Just as users vote up or down the news stories on Digg as per their preference, they will now be in a position to vote up or down the ads displayed on the site.

If users like an ad they Digg it (vote it up). If they do not like the ad, it gets voted down. Digg will then decide the rates they charge their advertisers, depending on the number of votes an ad generates. If an ad is really popular, it will garner more votes. Such an ad will be charged at a lower cost per click rate, compared to ads which garner fewer votes and are relatively unpopular.

In turn, an advertiser is likely to display a popular ad for a longer length of time, than he would display an unpopular ad, as he would have to pay a higher amount for the unpopular ad.

The ads will appear alongside the main stories and will be clearly demarcated as sponsored content. They will be linked to the main story, trailer or product review.

It will still be quite some months before this platform is launched as it is still in the early planning stages.

Even after it is launched, Digg will look out for user feedback, to further modify the platform as required.