Social media– some recent linkage

Sharing some links and some thinking about social media from the last week or two.

The biggest sites in social publishing – seems like the Huffington Post is ahead of the game by miles http://www.buzzfeed.com/mattbuchanan/the-biggest-sites-in-social-publishing

Pinterest is hot. I’ve just started playing around with it. I can see why it’s appealing to women. The shareability, the visuals, the ease of use – all make it a lovely site to play with. I’m currently using it as a digital scrapbook – Delicious on steroids if you like. And as a crafter, I’m really loving the access to a wide range of ideas and projects that I can both admire from afar, but also actually be able to do myself. So it becomes a source book of inspiration in much the same way as I used to subscribe to Essentials and Prima in the early days for their patterns so I’d always have something to inspire me when it came to sewing. Anyway, where you should be sitting up and taking notice, is that Pinterest had 18.7m users back in March of which 80% were women. And a picture really does paint a thousand words. Read more here http://jamiedunham.wordpress.com/2012/06/10/marketing-to-women-a-picture-on-pinterest-is-worth-a-thousand-words/

In other news, there’s been hot debate about the new promoted posts over at Facebook. There has been an outcry. I’m not sure why. The model has been working for mobile social networks such as Peperonity and Flirtomatic from day one. So I don’t get that side of the uproar. The side of the uproar I do get is the fact that Facebook may well be holding page admins hostage to their own fans. You’d think by liking a page that you’d get to see the stuff that was posted on their in your feed. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. I haven’t been monitoring it *that* closely for my Facebook pages for my blog, Swedish Beers and Heroes of the Mobile Fringe and Mobile Monday Shoreditch. And it’s hard to know how many of your likers are online at any one time to see something you post anyway. But the numbers are down and by paying, you guarantee that your post will be seen by x. For me, it’s not a lot of money to promote the odd item and is probably worth it for events and special one-offs. But it’s essentially a tax on being popular. The more popular you are, the more it’s going to cost. Seems a bit unfair but have a read of this article on Dangerous Minds and see what you think. http://dangerousminds.net/comments/facebook_i_want_my_friends_back

One of the things I’d like them to change back is the ability to message people who have said they’re coming to your event – especially when there are changes or when you’re running a new event. But I guess that’s one to tackle for another day!