Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Social Media - But is there an ultimate answer to the perfect time to post? Time may or may not be on your side, but it is at your disposal and direction.

...So what’s the best time to post:  weekday, weeknights or weekends?  Unfortunately, if you survey enough reports you may find that the definitive answer is a bit murky.  Frankly, nothing beats your own analytics (via Bitly, Argyle, HootSuite, SproutSocial, Google Analytics, etc.) to assess the posting times that work best foryour content and your followers.

Bitly metrics may provide some guidance, and they are extensively quoted.  For Twitter, Bitly rightly noted that you should assess the volume of people who are active in conjunction with the total number of posts vying for attention.  Translation: pick a slow time with maximum user vigilance....

It’s been a big week for the evolution of the personalised web, led by Mark Zuckerberg and the unveiling of Graph Search. Much as the product has been lauded –  it filling a gap in social search that we didn’t even really know existed – it has also been met with some criticism, not least around the fact that it limits the breadth of information you can access. The more tailored you make your search, the more limited the search results will be, with the default option of showing you Bing results really being no different to the current search experience in Facebook.

The biggest question that Graph Search raises – and this applies to the personalised web overall – is whether personalisation will ultimately destroy discovery....

The number of social tools is bewildering: what is the difference between a social media listening tool and an engagement platform? What are Enterprise 2.0 platforms?

For anyone who is perplexed by the number of social tools, here is an overview of eight types, based on a report written by our Social Strategist Miranda Man.... 

Social media will be the most important technology channel used by companies to engage with their customers within three to five years, according to a survey of 1,700 CEOs from around the world conducted by IBM. Currently just 16% of companies use social media as their primary means of interacting with customers, but that proportion will rise to 57% three to five years from now.

That increase will put social media ahead of Web sites, call centers, and traditional media. Over the same time period, CEOs see Web site utilization increasing from 47% to 55%, while call center utilization will drop from 40% to 31%, and utilization of traditional media will plunge from 39% to 15%. The only channel outranking social media is face-to-face and sales representatives, although this too will drop from 80% today to 67% three to five years from now....

2012 was Google+'s first full year in operation, so what did Google's young social network achieve in the past year? How many active users does Google+ have

...2012 was Google+’s first full year in operation, and it’s been an eventful one for the site.  Google has spent much of the year rolling out new features and heavily promoting those already available on the site. But in spite of its barrage of promotion, we are still unsure how many people actually use the site....

So who is actually using the site?  According to an infographic released by Google 500 million users have “upgraded” to Google+, meaning they have logged in and had a look around the site.  Of this half billion, Google says that it has 235 million active users posting on the site....