First of all, I just want to make it clear that I adore both of these two innovative social media properties. Even though, I’ve noticed that the past year was all about the Twitter. Actually, it’s quite crazy how much coverage it has received from social media citizens compare to its “big brother”. Therefore, just to make it fare I’ll try to identify 5 main reasons which makes Facebook superior social media platform over the Twitter.

The 5 Reasons:

Size. Does the size matter? Well it does in Social Media or in fact in any media. In terms of the audience and reach there is quite a big difference between Facebook’s 400 millions and Twitter’s 75 millions users. Moreover with the Twitter’s growth slowing down up to just 3.5 % a month it’s seems its going to be very difficult to catch up with the social networking behemoth. Read the full story

Note: This is the guest post from socialemailmarketing.eu

This blog is all about the impact of social media on marketing in general and on email marketing, specifically. The Social Marketing Forum and its Facebook page are all about social media marketing, peer-to-peer advice, discussions and the sharing of insights.

However, all “administrators” of the Social Marketing Forum also have their own blogs and Facebook pages.

I was the only until now who had no own Facebook page. Not that it’s a must of course (worse, I blog about email marketing all the time, and I even haven’t found the time to start an email newsletter yet…).

Well, anyway, today I launched a little Facebook page for my blog. It will not contain the posts on this blog, I mean, not all of them. I will just add one now and then. Read the full story

Note: Social Media Citizens collaborate with different blogs in Europe. The bloggers we collaborate with are also the co-founders and admins behind the Social Marketing Forum. This post is written by Jonas Klit Nielsen from the Mindjumpers blog.

During last night (European time) a bunch of emails started ticking in from Facebook. The headline reads: “Your weekly Facebook Page update”.

It’s no secret that Facebook is trying to build up the page to become more and more valuable for business, and in this respect, statistics are the way to go.

The page insights have been available for a while and they give you something to navigate with, but when we deliver weekly reports to our clients, we still have to manually figure out how many new fans have joined since last week and so on. And only if you have more than 10.000 fans on a page you will be able to see the page impressions.

The new report from Facebook is simple – but very valuable. It gives you the following numbers: Read the full story

The new ambitious changes on Facebook will seriously affect our Internet experience. According to Anne Herngaard , there core technologies that will make it happen can be grouped in three categories:

“1. OPEN GRAPH: Connecting websites with Facebook so that you can connect content outside of Facebook with your personal profile. This will instantly be added to your news feed and your Likes and Interests will be build from the activities you do around the web.

2. SOCIAL PLUGINS: Consists of easy-to-use widgets to incorporate on your website with a simple code to provide the user with a more personal experience. The new plugins include ‘Like’ buttons, activity stream plugins that transfers your news stream, a Recommendations plugin, a ‘Sign In’ plugin, and a Social Bar that will appear as a dock at the bottom of your site. This way you have socially enabled you site with some simple html.

3. GRAPH API: A more open platform for developers to work with, so that Facebook will be easier to build around. This will entail new tools and services to incorporate on your own website. For instance developers can search on updates on public Facebook pages and develop services that may tell what people are saying about your brand.”

So how it will really look like?

I believe very soon you are going to notice such kind of recommendation widgets on all major websites and blogs. It’s important to notice that you won’t have to login to your Facebook account to share the experience with you friends. Nevertheless, your action will be automatically reported on Facebook as you can see in the pic below.

What can be seen as a minor changes or add-on from the the first sight, actually might be a revolutionizing Internet technologies. We will start sharing our lives not only on Facebook, but all over the Internet. CNN identified an interesting side affect of all this – we will only see the web that is liked by our friends and might forget the beauty of exploring the new territories on our own.

Is Facebook building the new community-driven question-and-answer (Q&A) platform? I think it is. I‘ve just noticed an ad on Facebook, according to which Facebooks is looking for better testers for their new product:

“We at Facebook are preparing to launch a brand new product to the world. We think it will be as exciting as Facebook Photos and Facebook Events, but we need your help to make it great.”

From the description of the testers role it sounds a lot like crowdsourced answers platform  something like Yahoo Answers or Answers.com.

“As a beta tester, your job will be to ask great questions and provide great answers about your favorite topics. Economics? Skydiving? Relationships? Mexican Restaurants? It’s up to you. You’ll be the first person outside of Facebook to use this product. Your expert writing will be seen by tens of millions of people — including job recruiters. And we’ll bring our best beta testers out to California to tour Facebook headquarters and meet the team.”

Interesting updates are coming up on Facebook. I wonder what kind of business model will be associated with it? Is Facebook going to be selective in people answering the questions? Would love to hear your ideas about these news?

Jim Kukral is a serial web-entrepreneur, professional speaker and consultant,  who at the moment spends most of his time helping entrepreneurs and small business owners learn how to find success online. For over 15-years, Jim has advised small businesses and large companies like Fedex, Sherwin Williams, Ernst & Young and is credited with building some of the first major Fortune 500 websites and blogs in America. Jim is the author of  “Attention! This Book Will Make You Money” and “The Ultimate Pitch”  and has been featured in Top online and offline print publications such as Forbes, Brandweek, Entrepreneur, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, BusinessWeek, Inc …to name just a few.You can follow Jim on Twitter, Facebook  or Linkedin.

G: How and why did you get into social media?

J: Like everyone else I saw it as a way to communicate more easily with my friends, and later on, potential customers.

G: What is it like to be a real Social Media Citizen?

J: I monitor Twitter and Facebook and Linkedin all day. It’s always there, but not a huge part of my day. I find it a distraction actually and I’ve been trying to spend less time worrying about it. When I do, I get more real work done.

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