SMC Ed.
Latest posts by SMC Ed. (see all)
- Updated Topic: Using Social Media During a Tragic Event - May 9, 2013
- Your Blog Sucks: Business Blog Blunders - April 30, 2013
- Social Media Across Borders: 3 Rules for International Business - April 25, 2013
The tech and social media news cycle refreshes itself more quick.ly than your Twitter feed. We’ve taken the time to weed through the noise and bring you summaries of recent stories that are not only interesting, but will help you understand this social world we’re all living in a little bit better.
Google+ on the rise?
Social media expert Jeff Bullas thinks we shouldn’t keep ignoring Google+. He says the social network is on the rise with 250 million users since it’s launch a year ago, claiming the No. 3 spot in the social networks war in the English speaking world (behind Facebook and Twitter). He even goes so far as to say he expects Google+ to be some serious competition for Facebook in a couple years.
Bullas likes these strengths of Google+:
- 250 million users, with active users spending more than 60 minutes daily on various Google products.
- Google’s upcoming tablet, the Nexus 7, will start at $199, offering serious competition to Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad.
- Google+ app for iPad is in the works (what, there isn’t one already?).
The takeaway: Bullas might be in love with numbers and the brand power of Google+, which are impressive, but we all know G+ is still a social media ghost town that’s a dump site for our Facebook/Twitter feeds. The jury is still out on this one.
Google+ continues to fail
On the flip side of the Google+ coin, social media blog Simply Zesty believes all of Google’s efforts and money going to make G+ a serious competitor of Facebook and Twitter are futile. In the article, “10 Trends Shaping Social Media in 2012,” SZ writes:
“It is nearly a year to the day since they launched Google+ and the stark reality is that it just isn’t working. Google has once again shown that no matter how many resources, or how much money it throws at the problem, it simply can’t crack it. Facebook and Twitter are way over the hill and that is three efforts (Buzz, Wave and Google+) now that Google has come up short.”
Ouch. It’s only been a year and (like Bullas writes above) 250 million active users ain’t bad, even if most of them were tricked into signing up for it through their gmail accounts.
So will Google+ be around in a couple years? Hard to say, but it’s competitors aren’t going to make it easy. Especially with Apple’s recent palling around with Facebook.
Facebook is misbehaving (again)
So the world’s largest social network still loves to take all the personal data you voluntarily give to it and use it to sell ads to you and your friends (and who knows what else). We’re still not totally comfortable with that, but by now we’ve come to terms with the fact that it’s impossible to keep secrets from Facebook — unless we decide to leave Facebook, which is difficult because we’re all addicted.
Facebook is notorious for being oblique about privacy settings and their latest flub includes changing each its 1 billion users’ default contact email to their likely-never-before-used @facecom.com address.
Naturally, switching things back to your previous default email is a little trickier than it should be. Lucky for us Read Write Web just published a four-step guide titled “How to Force Facebook to Display Your Real Email Address.”
Here’re the steps:
- Go to your Timeline and click “About.”
- Scroll down to the Contact Info and click “Edit.”
- Use the drop-down menu next to the @facebook.com email address to change it to “Hidden From Timeline.”
- Reverse the procedure for the email address you want to display on your Timeline, using the drop-down menu to highlight “Shown On Timeline.”
Tweets up, posts down
A recent Huffington Post article reveals that between November 2011 and May 2012, Facebook usage in offices worldwide is declining while Twitter usage is growing.
Here’s some key stats from the study by Palo Alto Networks:
- Facebook use fell from 54 percent to 37 percent of total at-work social networking between November 2011 and May 2012.
- Meanwhile, Twitter use went from from 11 percent to 21 percent of total at-work social networking during that same period.
- Other networks on the rise? Tumblr usage went up 10 fold and Pinterest went up 1 percent during same period.
- Google+? What’s that?
There could be a number of factors that led to Facebook’s decline, such as offices banning use of it. Still the study found that overall time spent by employees on social networks during work was the same — much to the dismay of the management.
By cambodia4kidsorg via Flickr
By Will Silvey Simons • @silveywill
