Social Media Digest: Burger King Hack, Pinterest Popularity and Google Glass

Welcome to this week’s Social Media Digest! Don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments or via Twitter.

1. We couldn’t kick-off this week’s social media digest without mentioning this Twitter catastrophe – Burger King and Jeep’s hacking drama. Burger King’s Twitter account was hacked earlier this week, with the culprit changing BK’s profile image to the McDonalds logo and posting a number of tweets – most completely unrelated to Burger King. Jeep suffered a similar blow, with what seemed to be the same hacker(s) taking over the account. When the official teams regained control of the pages, they shared a friendly exchange:

Fortunately for Burger King and Jeep, it’s not all bad – Burger King gained over 30,000 followers during the hacking! Noticing this, MTV and BET ‘fake hacked’ their own Twitter accounts in the same style. The more cynical tweeters quickly guessed that the MTV hack was unrelated to BK and Jeep, and some spotted MTV’s Marketing Director’s tweet about the hacking before it happened. MTV later admitted that the takeover was a stunt to promote their TV show, Catfish, in which participants learn who their online friends really are.

2. In more Twitter news, the social media platform announced that it was to begin assigning a value to every tweet. Twitter revealed the change in a blog post, noting that tweets will be assigned a value of ‘none’, ‘low’, ‘medium’ or ‘high’. Twitter hasn’t declared exactly how the tweets will be assigned a value, but factors such as views and engagements could be taken into account. The social network service has also just introduced its new Ad API which will allow marketers to control campaigns more closely. Could this lead to a torrent of advertisements on the site, or will users prefer the new ad experience?

3. Google Glass has been storming social networks following it’s launch this week. The wearable Google Glass headset, activated with the incredibly high-tech ‘OK, Glass…’ command (which sounds like something straight out of Inspector Gadget!), is capable of taking photos and videos, looking up information on Google and sharing whatever you’re looking at online. Google has launched a competition, challenging people to explain how they’d use Google Glass in 50 words or less. Over 8’000 entries will be chosen to gain the chance to buy the product. The price? Just $1,500.

4. It was announced this week that Pinterest is very closely competing with Twitter to be the most popular social network, and it’s gaining speed faster than you might think. As predicted by Umpf’s Adrian in this blog post last year, a late 2012 survey by the Pew Research centre has revealed that 67% of American internet users are on Facebook, 16% on Twitter and 15% on Pinterest. Considering the age of Pinterest, this tiny difference is a huge deal – the 15% stat is up from 12% in August 2012, meaning that it might not be long before the pinning platform overtakes Twitter completely.

5. A new study has revealed that Facebook influences your mood more than any other social network. Apparently the platform causes the most stress, but also creates the most positive mood too. The study by Rebtel found that nearly half of respondents listed Facebook as the site that had the most favourable effect on their mood, followed by YouTube and LinkedIn. Twitter followed Facebook as the site that caused the most negative feeling.