Twitter has quickly become the must-have channel for conference back-chat. and empowering – remember that Facebook interview from SXSW’08 ?) Twitter is also a great way to attend a conference without actually being there – just follow a conference hashtag (e.g. #smib09 But watch out Twitter. Image courtesy of Shutterstock Reading what other people tweet during a speech provides an extra dimension as you get a sense of what the audience is thinking.

Callan Green has just published a great post on Mashable about brands who are really getting it right in Facebook Fan Pages. But even if you have 3 million fans, if the extent of their involvement with your brand is that at one point they “became a fan,” is that really benefiting you?” She’s listed five really good examples of Fan Pages: Pringles (viral videos) Coca-Cola (authentic message and respect to fanbase) Starbucks (great status updates) Adidas (linking to social media campaigns) Red Bull (incorporation of Twitter into Fan Page) Invited comments below her post are pulling

Today’s post will address Facebook. In prior posts you will find similar information about LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook In And I described Twitter as a huge party, where every conceivable type of person with every conceivable interest is available for you to mingle with and get to know. This is the last of a three-part series on the three big social networking sites, to help readers understand what the difference is between them. These posts are intended to help you navigate the terrain of these seemingly foreign planets, and to hopefully encourage you

We’ve posted before about why Twitter lists are great and some of the uses that can be made with them. Here’s a guide to how you can use Twitter Lists in this way. Twitter Lists for social media monitoring This is where Twitter Lists come in useful. Image by koalazymonkey via Flickr Over the last few weeks since they were launched to all users, we have been experimenting with them at FreshNetworks and with our clients.

Number of Australian Twitter users for June 2009 was 800,000, according to ComScore. Facebook in particular demonstrated significant growth; Twitter benefited from sudden mainstream popularity in 2009. Facebook led the sector with over 6 million visitors, growing 95% from last year; MySpace — whose social networking star has  begun to fall — came in second with 3.5 Found this over at MarketingCharts : Over 70% of Australian internet users visited a social networking site in June, a 29% rise from the same time last year, reports comScore.

Back in June 2007 I wrote a popular tutorial on writing Facebook platform applications with Ruby On Rails . Time has moved on since and Facebook has launched Facebook Connect which allows you to integrate Facebook into your own sites allowing authentication, registration, friend connecting, and Facebook feed posting in the context of your application. Mashable has a great post on 10 great implementations of Facebook Connect including Joost At Made By Many we are fans of the possibilites of Facebook Connect for lowering barriers of registration, extracting social graph and injecting your social media functions into the daily online life of users.

I have already written List Building Using Ning Social Networks and List Building Using Twitter . will want to revisit Ning and Twitter in the future. However, in this article I discuss the use of Facebook for building your list. On Facebook , friends, page fans I As explained in List Building Paradigm Shift , list building in today’s social media world is the process of acquiring and nurturing a rich and heterogeneous following across diverse platforms which include Rolodex , autoresponders , social networking sites and

Research released by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) in the UK suggests that people are growing increasingly tired of requests to join brand pages or install brand applications in Facebook and other social networks . Rather than a brand trying to engage people separately in Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter and every other social network and forum site, it is better to use these as gateways to somewhere else. The research found that almost two in every three of the 2,000 respondents to the survey were fed up with the constant requests to join groups and try new applications.

The biggest group on Facebook are not university or college students, or even people in their 20s in their first job. According to analysis by iStrategyLabs , the biggest group of users on Facebook are 35-54 year olds. Their study of figures for the US that are publicly available to advertisers shows that over 28% of Facebook users are in this age-range, with a further 12% of users aged 55 or over. Image via Wikipedia In fact the 55+ age-group is the one that has seen the largest growth in the six month to July 2009 – an impressive 514% increase in users.

This week I was asked to talk to the Marketing Directors Network in London about how organisations are using Twitter. We’ve written before about how celebrities are using Twitter and how organisations are using Twitter as an engagement tool . In both cases, perhaps the best advice is just to try using Twitter and to see what happens. Image by MartinPhotoSport via Flickr As a rapidly growing site , Twitter is changing on a daily basis.