Social Media

Social media darling, Pinterest.com, is one of the fastest-growing consumer web properties on the market.  With a jaw-dropping user base of 48.7 million, its status as a digital force to be reckoned with is clear.  Until now, however, the precise value it offers businesses has been decidedly less black and white.

Vine, Twitter’s new social video app, is perhaps most accurately described as “a livelier version of Instagram“.  Released last Thursday, Vine lets you create and share 6-second Gif-like looping videos, and is available for download from the App store for the iPhone and iPod touch.  Extremely easy to use, you simply tap your phone screen once to start filming and a second time to stop and poof you’re a filmmaker (watch out Spielberg).

How businesses can leverage the new social bookmarking phenomenon for digital success

The success of your social media community can not only be measured in numbers, but also in the interaction and reactions that you get from the community. Drew Neisser’s recent case study of thriving B2B web hub, The SAP Community Network, offers useful examples of how to go about using the resources at hand to measure the success of a digital community. Below are the ones that can be applied more broadly to any blog or site that seeks customer/user engagement and success.

With the Experian Hitwise report that was released last week, it appears as though after a month of rapid and unprecedented growth, Google+ is finally starting to slow down. In less than a month, the new social network reached 20 million unique visitors, exponentially faster than both Twitter and Facebook, which took years to reach that same number. But even with the continued and relentless buzz around the social network, it was an impossible growth rate to maintain.