Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

The use of LinkedIn for B2B sales prospecting has increased by 47.8% since last year, according to US research from OneSource, reported in Emarketer.

Around 20 percent of those polled were also increasing their use of  blogs, Facebook and Twitter for prospecting purposes, though the overall majority still do not use social media for prospecting.

The most popular approach for gaining qualified leads remains outbound prospecting, which was rated 3.7 out of five for effectiveness, followed by the company website (2.9), inbound calls (2.6), email campaigns (2.6), shows & events (2.5), social networking (2.1) , direct mail (2.1)  and webinars (1.8).

In January Hubspot research showed that 45% of US companies who have used LinkedIn for marketing had acquired a customer through the site. Company blogs were considered effective for 43% of respondents, while Twitter for 38%  and Facebook for 33%.

An interesting statistic has been uncovered by Adam Clyne in his PR Week blog, that shows only 22% of PR Week’s Power 100 list actively use Twitter. Clyne suggests five possible reasons for this:

1. The PR Industry is out of touch – and has been slow to embrace social media.

2. Social media is not the remit of the PR industry and is the realm of digital agencies.

3. The top 100 is more likely to consist of ‘older’ practitioners and business leaders – whose expertise lie in traditional media and may not have time to Tweet – but their staff may be fully engaged in social media and their companies are running effective campaigns.

4. Twitter is not for everyone.

5. Twitter may not be that important.

My view is that 1 & 3 are the most accurate and related. The profile of most PR agency CEOs suggests Twitter is something their kids are more likely to use than they themselves.

I remember talking to the MD of a sizeable advertising agency a couple of years ago and he seemed almost quite proud to state that he wasn’t interested in Facebook, didn’t use it. The implication was that he considered himself too senior to have to worry about it. The same is probably true of many PR agency CEOs

Sarah Brown, who remains the UK’s most powerful political Twitter voice with 1.1 million followers, posted a video on YouTube yesterday to explain how she will use her Twitter account now the election has been called.

While she says “I’m not really going to change anything” continuing to report on her day as usual, she also says “of course I’m going to be out there campaigning to re elect a Labour government.”

The message seem to be that while there will be no overt political messages contained in her daily tweets, she will still be looking for ways to bolster the PM’s campaign, perhaps explaining the appearance of several photos of Gordon kicking off his campaign via Twitpic yesterday.

It may be that the prime minister’s wife may bring her Twitter power to bear in pictures rather than words in the run up to the election, using a sort of Twitter enhanced photojournalism approach to electioneering.

The one above titled “only quiet moment of the day as Read the rest of this entry »

London heads a list of the world’s major cities with the highest number of Twitter user accounts, followed by Los Angeles and Chicago, according to research by Hubspot.

Hubspot has also discovered that Twitter accounts that include a profile picture have ten times the number of followers than those without, based on an analysis of nine million accounts.

Using Hubspot’s Twitter grader tool, you can also score your own Twitter account for influence out of 100 points and see where it stands compared to more than 6 million accounts that have also been graded.

Top ranked Twitterers include Mashable, The New York Times & BBC News

New York City ballet dancers are offering followers an insight into the normally opaque world of professional ballet dancing, The New York Times reports today.

And it’s no air brushed version, with dancers revealing the pain they suffer for their art: “Hi, I’m Devlin and I’m an MRI-aholic” reads one. “Once again I took 2 days off this week. My body is wrecked. At the chiropractor now getting fixed.” says another.

One dancer, Mr Alberda even indicated a possible dispute with ballet master in chief, Peter Martins, writing “I’ve heard the voice of God and he is an angry God with a Danish accent who doesn’t like my acting”

Management of the ballet is taking a relaxed attitude towards the tweeting, City Ballet’s Katherine E. Brown said: “We rely on them to use their good judgement and discretion. We really don’t put parameters around it for them. This is really their personal thing.”

Twitter has announced that its war on spam has reduced levels dramatically since it peaked at around 10% in August.

The chart shows that as of February 2010, Twitter spam has been reduced to around 1% as a result of what Twitter describe as a battle “to improve the Twitter experience”.

Twitter has defined what they consider spam as “a variety of different behaviors that range from insidious to annoying.”

Three such behaviours are described in their blog post yesterday; “posting harmful links to phishing or malware sites, repeatedly posting duplicate tweets, and aggressively following and un-following accounts to attract attention.”

“Like it or not, as the system becomes more popular, more and more spammers will try to do their thing.” says Twitter.

80% of visitors to company blogs are coming for the first time, a survey from Compendium has revealed.

The findings suggest that a company blog is more important as a new business tool than was previously thought.

First time visitors come from two major sources, referring sites and search engines, confirming that good quality content that is keyword optimised, will pull traffic to company sales funnels.

Research amongst Furlong PR customers suggests that 75% of blog traffic comes from social networking sites and 25% from SEO.

Compendium’s survey also looked at use of Twitter. Approximately 43 percent of companies surveyed had established a Twitter account.

Twitter usage was highest among B-to-B companies with 87 percent maintaining an account.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has conceded that 140 characters are not always enough to get your message across, especially when it comes to summarising the amazing growth of your micro-blogging site in the last year.

Stone used 1552 characters in his email newsletter to account holders yesterday, offering some insight to the highlights of Twitter’s ‘annus miraculous’

Accounts opened were up 1,500%, Twitter employees rose 500% to 146 – the latest being Aaron, “an engineer focused on building internal tools to help promote productivity, communication, and support within our company. We celebrated with a little dance party.”

Stone mentions the new features introduced – Twitter lists, retweets and mobile apps, plus the humanitarian and charitable uses Twitter has been put to, “Twitter is more than a triumph of technology — it is a triumph of humanity. Projects like Fledgling and Hope140 were inspired by you.”

In a veiled reference to the huge proportion of unused accounts, estimated to be 83% of the 50 million plus opened, Stone says in the opening paragraph “If you haven’t visited in a while, we’d like to invite you to come have a look at http://twitter.com — we’ve been busy!”

Twitter has announced its number of daily status updates or tweets has now passed 50 million, closing in on Facebook’s claimed 60 million.

Announced on its blog, Twitter describes the exponential growth of the service since it began:

“Folks were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, we are seeing 50 million tweets per day—that’s an average of 600 tweets per second.”

According to a report by RJ Metrics last month, while Twitter is adding accounts at the rate of 6.2 million per month, only 17 percent of these are active each month.

For some reason the Winter Olympics has left me cold this time, practically frost bitten in fact but as a sports fan, I worry I’m missing something so the Twitter Tracker from US news channel NBC looked a good bet – you click on a photo of an Olympic star and it shows everything being said about them.

Not knowing who any of them are though, is a drawback and in terms of holding interest, Twitter Tracker goes downhill rapidly from there – like whoever won the skiing.

The main Twitter feed is a better bet. NBC’s has 65K followers – a gold medal winning ski jump ahead of the official Vancover 2010 one which has 13K followers – worldwide, slightly embarrassing, Richard Madeley has more than that.

There’s a volte-face when you compare their Facebook pages though, Vancover 2010 has almost one million fans, while NBC’s Facebook icon directs to my personal Facebook page, at least on my computer – and I have no fans at all.

Furlong PR has a mighty 7 fans though, a very select bunch, I urge you to join and unlike private members club, One Alfred Place, I promise I won’t try and throw you out for overuse.

By the way, does that Evan Lysacek have a look of Robin Cousins about him?