Top Ten ‘Most Shared’ News Sites

We all know that news – be it good or bad – spreads fast. However some news sites trump the rest in terms of having their content pushed out to the far corners of the internet. Are you keeping an eye on the sites that could have the most impact on you or your clients?

Flowtown have analysed the news sites around the globe and have come up with a top ten list. Three UK news outlets make the cut – The BBC, the Guardian and the Telegraph.

The guys at Flowtown explored not only at the ‘most shared’ news sites, but also at the biggest influencers and the top ‘shared’ stories for each of the sites. Unsurprisingly some famous names pop up as key influencers – the likes of @perezhilton, @mariahcarey and even @mchammer – who have hundreds of thousands of followers online and as a result, plenty of online clout.

Looking at the most shared stories across the sites there’s a trend towards consumer technology, social media, politics and celebrity news. Although there were a few surprises – who’d have thought that so many people would be interested in claims that an ‘oriental yeti was discovered in China’ or that ‘proper nouns come in to play in Scrabble rule change’!?

Full infographic here.

Taking the Twit out of Twitter

A couple of weeks ago I attended the Dublin Web Summit. Ray Nolan, one of the speakers and Founder of HostelWorld.com and Worky.com, made a comment that stuck in my mind. He advised not to “tweet away your career” as he believes if you’re on Twitter all the time during your work day then you’re probably not doing your work and are therefore potentially less employable.

I would imagine that everyone reading this has at one time said that “so and so” is “always on Twitter”…how do they do it? There’s no big secret. These people are not glued to their PC, dashing out on occasion for a sneaky toilet break. Only 25% of Twitter traffic comes from the website Twitter.com. Most people use a few third party Twitter applications set up that allow them to conveniently update their profile, regardless of where they are.

So what tools can you use to allow you to use Twitter with ease? Continue reading »

Study: Brands That Do Better Online Do Better Financially

I came across an interesting study over the weekend of the World’s “100 most valuable brands” which concluded that there was a clear and significant relationship between quality online consumer engagement and financial performance.

Wetpaint/Altimeter group looked at how well these brands were engaging with consumers using social media and “how that engagement correlates with their most important financial metrics: revenue and profit“.

They found that “socially engaged companies are in fact more financially successful“.

The report below provides brief case studies on four of the top brands – Starbucks, Toyota, SAP and Dell – looking at the strategies behind their success using social media. Interestingly Starbucks although a humongous global brand has a relatively small social media team of only six people, yet has one of the largest fan bases on Facebook and over quarter of a million Twitter followers.

What were the takeaway points for someone readying to implement a social media strategy for their business?

• Engagement via social media IS important — and we CAN quantify it.
• What’s in it for me? The report quantitatively demonstrates a statistically significant correlation between social media engagement and the two most meaningful financial performance metrics – revenue and profit. Money talks, and it’s declaring that it pays to engage meaningfully in social media.
• Emphasize quality, not just quantity. Don’t just check the box; engage with your customer audience.
• To scale engagement, make social media part of everyone’s job. A few minutes each day spent by every employee adds up to a wealth of customer touch points.
• Doing it all may not be for you — but you must do something or risk falling far behind other brands, not only in your industry, but across your customers’ general online experience.
• Find your sweet spot. Engagement can’t be skin-deep, nor is it a campaign that can be turned on and off. If you are resource-constrained, it is better to be consistent and participate in fewer channels than to spread yourself too thin.

PepsiCo Sponsored Blog Fizzes up in their Face

Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Just as advertising and corporate sponsorship keeps many print publications on our shelves, so too it keeps the wheels of the internet turning. More and more websites are integrating advertising platforms and negotiating sponsorship deals with big brands to ensure they’ve the cash to keep their online show on the road. However it’s often a fine line between making your website attractive to potential advertisers and maintaining the integrity of the site to ensure that you don’t alienate your website visitors.

One such website that has crossed that line is ScienceBlogs – one of the largest online communities dedicated to science.

This week ScienceBlogs got in to bed with PepsiCo, launching a PepsiCo ‘sponsored blog’ – Food Frontiers. However after just two days up and running, the blog was pulled. The result negative PR for PepsiCo and ScienceBlogs unleashing the wrath of their online community. So what was the problem? Continue reading »

Will the @earlybird Catch the Advertising Worm?

Twitter is about to launch another brand-friendly revenue stream…a shopping twitter channel.

The site had given people raised eyebrows in the past as people wondered how they planned to bring in any money! Earlier this year, Twitter began to answer that question by launching ‘promoted tweets’ and ‘sponsored trending topics’.

Now they’re is upping the ante, according to Read Write Web, and have created a new account – @earlybird – that will carry brand promotional messages and special offers for those brands paying to feature on the channel.

Personally I hate being spammed on Twitter – mention a brand name and before you blink you have twenty spam followers offering you everything from inner peace to a vibrator. Biz Stone, the company’s founder, has said in the past that the company “resisted introducing a traditional web advertising model because we wanted to optimise for value before profit” and they seem to be staying true to this belief. This approach to online advertising ticks all the boxes as it’s an unobtrusive, opt-in service i.e. you have the choice as to whether you follow the channel or not. This allows Twitter to maintain the integrity of the site and avoid irritating loyal users.

It will be interesting to see how Twitter handles this shopping tweet stream. Will they divide the promotional offers by category e.g. sports offers, music offers, etc or create different accounts for different offer types? Will they target promo tweets based on keywords and users tweet history to ensure relevance? Will they present users with deals based on location? Given that there are still relatively few Twitter users in Ireland (recently estimated to be around 150,000), it’s likely that many of these promo tweets will be irrelevant otherwise.

At the time of writing this the @earlybird profile has 256 followers. Definitely one to watch.