As the year begins to draw to a close we’re seeing lots of predictions for next year, including my own. Twitter and Facebook both released their trends of the year and Google told us what we searched for the most in 2012. I have included some predictions here but I’ve also found a great checklist for bloggers / article writers, an interesting article on how often we should get involved in conversations about our business online and the most annoying hashtag uses.
Have a great weekend. I’ll be back next week with my final roundup of the year.
The Internet of things explained
The Internet of things connects all the electrical devices around us enabling us to streamline and even eliminate menial tasks. This is going to be one of those phrases you will be tired of hearing by the end of 2013, it’s not new but it’s a concept that is gaining ground. I’d almost say it is inevitable that something like what is demonstrated in this clever interactive infographic is going to happen. In parts the concept delights me and in part is scares me.
Do people really click on the links in your blog posts?
You might notice that the sections of text I am making links out of this week are considerably longer than usual. The reason for this is that I am testing one of the theories put forward in this article from Hubspot. They started measuring the click throughs on links from their blogs and analysed the data. They discovered a few things including that longer anchor text results in more click throughs. The article is full of other interesting snippets of information and is really useful if you do a lot of internal linking within your own site.
Five annoying ways people use hashtags in Tweets
I wrote an article about the abundance of hashtags on Twitter earlier this year. When used well a tag can bring a community together, help us share and enjoy live and virtual events and spread the word about campaigns. When done badly they can make tweets unreadable. If like me this makes you grumpy or if you find that you have a bit of a hashtag addiction yourself it’s worth taking a look at this article from All Twitter outlining five ways that hashtags can be annoying.
Article writing checklist
I can be guilty of hitting that publish button on a blog post before I’ve spell checked properly or read it through to make sure it makes sense. Time always seems to be at a premium but unless bloggers take a moment to sit back and make sure the post is really ready to go it can result in them becoming unreadable. Having made mistakes time and again I was delighted to find this article. It’s a really handy checklist for bloggers or article writers outlining what to do before you hit publish. There’s also some tips on blog planning and commenting.
Who is using Google+?
I seem to be getting into more and more conversations about Google+. I am asked are people using it, who is using it, do we really need to have a page? The answer I give to point 3 is always a resounding yes, for the two former questions this infographic from Social Times might help.
A quick look shows that the biggest segments are English speaking, American, single men, aged 18-24. I was happy until I saw the 18-24 bit! These headline stats are all we can see for now but if your target market happens to fit those specifics you should definitely, definitely be on Google+.
The biggest Twitter conversations of the year
I am totally fascinated and a bit obsessed by tweet per minute statistics. For example, during the Olympics tweets peeked at 116,000+ Tweets per minute, when President Obama appeared on The Daily Show there was a peak of 327,452 Tweets per minute and although there’s no concrete statistics I love the ‘Summer Wars’ case study that saw viewers of the film creating their own live event by tweeting a phrase every time one of the characters said it. For more on the trends and the year on Twitter check out Twitter’s own ‘2012 Year On Twitter’.
Why you shouldn’t join every conversation about your brand online
Monitoring mentions of you, your business and brand should be one of the first things you do when constructing a social media policy. There are free tools like Google alerts that can help you, there are paid tools for those who have the budget but none of these tell you when you should respond to people talking about you online.
We may assume that we should always respond, particularly if people are saying negative things about us but this isn’t always the best policy. This brilliant post tells us why.
And from Spiderworking.com this week
Screen cap, annotate, add arrows all with one app
This weeks cool tool is a great one for blogging on the go. When I’m working from home I can use my mac to get screen grabs and edit them with GIMP, when I’m out and about it’s harder. This weeks cool tool does it all in one and is available cross platform. I’ve installed it on all of my devices. Find out more about how it works here.
Why isn’t there a search box on my Facebook business page?
This is a question I’ve been asked a lot this year. If you set up a pure Facebook business account or if you migrate a page you will find that your functionality is limited. Luckily this can be easily fixed by adding an admin. Here’s how to do it in one minute.
10 digital trends to watch out for in 2013
What does the near future look like? I’ve been trying to predict it, here’s 10 trends I think we should keep an eye on in 2013, some of them will happen, some of them will just begin to take off, some of them may not work at all. I’ll look forward to looking back on this one this time next year.
It’s a long post so if you’d like the headlines here’s a slideshow I made of the key points.
If you enjoy reading my blog please nominate it for the Social Media Examiner Top 10 Social Media Blogs. Last year I reached the finals but I’ve been working hard all year long to make it better. I would be over the moon to make it in to the top 10 this year. To reach the judging stage I need to get a lot of nominations so please nominate www.spiderworking.com by visiting this post and leaving a comment including the link and why you think I should win.
photo credit: repazeblack via photopin cc
Hi Amanda
did you know you could upgrade the Analytics code on your blog and track outbound clicks? This is really handy and I presume that every blog and audience will have different CTR’s – as in common in most content networks.
great to see G+ growing – 18+ features released for the mobile experience – possibly catapulting it to the fore of Mobile Social Apps. I see this appealing to the tech savvy crew, who really lead the way for the rest.
That’s good to know David, thanks! Yes I’ve always loved Google+ but tend to dip in and out as not enough people are there. The advantage of course is that pretty much all the content that is posted is good, unlike Facebook!
Communities will really open it up and give people more to do!