Analysis

Trying to decide what you want to go to (or back to) college for? How about social media? If you want to become a community manager it makes sense! Or maybe you want to be a data analyst? Either way – these programs have you covered!
Read more

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

So the day after every platform was swamped with news of Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, folks are beginning to wonder why Twitter didn’t make the first move and snap up the extremely popular photo-sharing application. And the fact that Twitter cofounder, Jack Dorsey, was an investor in Instagram has people scratching their heads and wondering, “What was he thinking?”
Read more

Ahh, the tweet seat. Those block of seats reserved for smartphone-addicted patrons of movies, the theater and sporting events. While they’re not everywhere yet, more and more venues are encouraging patrons to bring their phones and tweet during events – but only in specific seating, so as not to bother the other guests.

Sounds like a neat idea (although it definitely has its detractors), but should it be patentable? One company seems to think so, and they’re gunning for at least one event venue with their “ownership” of tweet seats.
Read more

Twitter has filed a patent application to own the “pull to refresh” functionality, which is increasingly popular on a whole slew of mobile apps, including Facebook and Google+. But should Twitter really be able to own something as basic as pulling the screen down to refresh it?
Read more

We’ve seen how Facebook adapts and responds to competitor threats, like when it changed its privacy settings and implemented ‘everything Timeline’ in response to Google+. Or when it began offering a “subscribe” option, allowing users to follow folks they weren’t friends with, and solidly stomping on Twitter’s turf.

Well, Facebook is coming after Twitter pretty aggressively with its latest creation, “Interest Lists,” and it makes one wonder how this will all play out for the little blue bird.

But what if Twitter turned the tables?
Read more

Try as it might to give us a more accurate and transparent scoring algorithm, most of us find Klout’s model inherently flawed – mainly because we know “that guy’s score doesn’t make any sense.” It doesn’t matter ‘which guy’ or which girl for that matter, but what does matter is the fact that we’ve all seen this phenomenon one too many times to think Klout is an accurate way to measure influence.

But don’t give up on it yet! Klout’s +K’s have been around for a while, but these virtual high fives could possibly lead us down the right path . . . or at least make those of use receiving them feel good.
Read more

There has been a lot of discussion both here at AllTwitter and in the Twitter-sphere in general about how Twitter is affecting language.

The latest round of the debate was sparked by some rather incendiary comments made by actor Ralph Fiennes, who claims that Twitter is dumbing down the English language (even though he doesn’t actually have a Twitter account himself to verify this claim).

But those on the other side have a more experienced, if less famous, champion to back their protests up: a linguistic professor has stepped into the fray to pour water on the theory that Twitter is destroying language.
Read more

The social media revolution that we’ve experienced over the past five years or so has made it easy to overlook other proven methods of driving traffic online – often at our cost.

Sure, platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become hugely important for brands and marketers, allowing them to easily move huge amounts of eyeballs to their websites (and products), but this is still a relatively new concept. Links shared via email are still the largest source of traffic for most businesses. And while it’s true that some social bookmarking sites have fallen by the wayside, others, such as Stumbleupon and Reddit, have gone from strength-to-strength.

Read more

The Occupy Wall Street protests are getting increasingly more media exposure, but it’s the social media that’s really fueling their organization. And Twitter is once again in the spotlight as the social network of choice for protesters.

But how did Twitter become such an integral part of the protests? iCrossing did a thorough timeline of the Occupy Wall Street protests on Twitter, and we’ll highlight some of the milestone below.
Read more

Yesterday Twitter proudly announced that it has 100 million active users on the network. This is a pretty healthy statistic, and certainly a lot higher than the touted 21 million active users that was doing the rounds earlier this year.

Twitter, like its peers in the social space, defines an active user as somebody who logs on just once per month. But what about all users, including those who are less active than this? A couple of weeks back I estimated that Twitter’s total membership tally (all registered profiles) should be around the 254 million mark. From this we can deduce that approximately 40 percent of Twitter’s total users are active.

So how does that compare to the other major social networks?

Read more