1. An American restaurant has unleashed a very public and very embarrassing tirade of abuse on its Facebook page following its appearance on the Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. The restaurateurs’ stubborn behaviour on the show caught the attention of Redditors who were quick to poke fun at Amy’s Baking Company on Facebook – leading to the most brilliant of meltdowns on Facebook. File under ‘what NOT to do’…

2. From today, search engine Bing will now show Facebook comments by your friends that are relevant to your search in its Social Sidebar. You can like and comment on people’s posts directly via Bing, or click through to see the original post on Facebook. Bing notes that this addition makes the link between searching and doing – for example, if you search for an event you can immediately see if any of your Facebook friends are attending. It’s a clever addition, but will it turn people away from Google?

3. Capitalising on the coolest feature of Google+, Google has announced that it will be upgrading its Hangouts service as a stand-along web app. Introducing the new app, Vic Gundotra said that Google aims to ‘get gadgets out of the way’ so that people could connect with their friends regardless of operating systems or platform. Hangouts can include text, photos and videos which will be stored so that they can be referred back to later and contacts will be ranked by how often you chat to them.

4. ‘Colin was here’. Three short words that caused uproar this week on Twitter when Sky News’ Twitter posted the mysterious tweet. The tweet was quickly deleted and Sky has blamed the tweet on a hack, saying that ‘action was swiftly taken and we are working with Twitter and our in house security to ensure this cannot happen again’, but of course the internet was quick to respond. Colin has not yet come forward to take the blame / spotlight.

5. Ahead of Eurovision this Saturday, Brandwatch have created a Eurovision dataviz that tracks Twitter buzz in real-time. As tweets happen, they’ll be categorised by country and then further drilled down into topic, including outfit, political, sex factor, appearance, dance routine, stagecraft, performance, voice and song. The dataviz launches Saturday night at 8pm – give it a go while you’re rooting for Bonnie!

Ramsay joins a small club of good-samaritans-gone-viral, including Antoine Dodson who issued the “hide yo kids, hide yo wife” warning to his sister’s would-be rapist and the flame-haired grandma who floored a motorbike-mounted jewellery thief using just her handbag.

2. Twitter has been in overdrive this week after the news of Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement was broken with a single Tweet from Manchester United at 9.18am Wednesday morning including the hashtag #thankyousiralex. Beating Twitter records, 1.4 million tweets were posted about the news within an hour of it breaking, #thankyousiralex was used more than 100,000 times and the original announcement was retweeted more than 18,000 times. The story also dominated Twitter’s most popular topics, making up 8 of the 10 trending spots in Britain and 4 worldwide.

This massive global conversation spawned a spot of clever reactive tweeting as Nando’s and Premier Inn jumped on this opportunity offering their own tributes.

3. As tech giant Apple draws ever nearer to its 50 billionth download (see the live countdown here), it has released a list of its all-time most downloaded apps, giving an interesting insight into the interests of its consumer base. The list, heavily dominated by gaming apps, is surprisingly absent from favourites such as Google services and social media platforms.  The highly-addictive Angry Birds scoops the top gong, with three other variations of the game also ranking highly. You can check out the list in its entirety at the App Store itself.

4. TweetDeck ended its iPhone and Android app functionality and removed support for Facebook integration this week, in a bid to focus development efforts on improved web-based versions of TweetDeck. Over the past 18 months, the popular Twitter-owned dashboard has been focused on building a faster web application for modern browsers and a Chrome app, which offers some more unique features like notifications.

5. Photo app Hipstamatic announced on Wednesday that it will be launching a free spin-off app called Oggl for iOS. Adding in the social networking elements lacking with the classic Hipstamatic app, the idea is for people to take Hipstamatic-like photos and then share them with their network. Oggl’s developers are keen to position it as a place for creative people who use photography as a way to connect with their inner artist. Speaking on their blog, Hipstamatic’s co-founders say “Oggl isn’t screenshots of your favourite album cover- it’s when you hung backstage with the band”.

Additional features include: Share to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr and Flickr, set new “Favourites” for situational shooting, tag location, and tag other Oggl community members in photos.

Although Oggl is yet to officially launch, uber-keen Hipstimatic fans can sign up for early access as the beta testing is tied up, but the app could be available as early as the weekend.

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below or via Twitter – @Umpf / @EllieHallsworth

- Websites such as Pinstagram are no longer needed due to the introduction of Instagram’s web profiles

- The effects of Facebook’s acquisition of the app are becoming more obvious, especially with the introduction of Instagram’s new ‘Add people’ / ‘Photos of you’ feature last week – very similar to Facebook’s photo-tagging system

- Instagram now boasts 100 million monthly active users, with 40 million photographs uploaded every day and 1000 comments made per second

Fortunately there are just as many, if not more, Cats of Instagram as before…

Instagram has proved its staying power as one of the biggest social apps and this means that if it’s not part of your PR and social campaigns, you’re probably missing out on a huge demographic. So, who’s using Instagram, what are they doing and why does it work?

Michael Kors #FallingInLoveWith

To celebrate Valentine’s Day 2012, fashion brand Michael Kors launched its #FallingInLoveWith campaign with support from Fanbase Media. As part of the campaign, Instagram users were asked to take a photo of a Michael Kors item that they covet and upload the photographs to Instagram with the hashtag #FallingInLoveWith. Users posting with the hashtag were given the opportunity to win Michael Kors products, and all images uploaded were pulled through to a dedicated website. #FallingInLoveWith is a clever campaign encouraging fans to showcase Michael Kors products themselves, rather than the brand doing so. The chance of winning is an additional incentive to post photos – more than 1,700 photos have been uploaded using the hashtag. Giorgio Armani launched a similar campaign to showcase its range of sunglasses entitled Frames of Life, which received more than 3,000 images uploaded with the #FramesofLife hashtag.

Kate Spade

Rather than focusing on one specific campaign, fashion brand Kate Spade’s Instagram posts engage users with every photograph. Whereas Kate Spade would be likely to create a lot of buzz just by posting photographs of products, the team post more photographs of behind-the-scenes happenings, food, New York (where the brand is based) and seasonal images, such as these Easter egg-dyeing pictures – all of which promote the brand’s values of colour, playfulness and fun. Instead of showcasing this season’s colours using fabric swatches, Kate Spade posted a picture of ice lollies to do so and by posting images such as this four o’clock life saver, the brand makes itself seem approachable, down-to-earth and friendly. Kate Spade’s fun strategy is certainly working – the brand has over 332,000 followers on Instagram.

General Electric

While Instagram consists of mainly photographs of fashion, food, faces and cats, General Electric (GE) have created a surprisingly engaging feed. For example, a photograph of wind turbines in California received over 1,400 likes and a behind-the-scenes image of aviation expert Daniel Kerr received over 700 likes while showcasing some of the things that go on behind closed doors at GE. The GE feed makes technology and learning interesting and proves that Instagram lends itself to any subject if the team behind the photographs are creative enough. The GE Instagram has over 131,000 followers.

Comodo

Despite the trend of eateries shunning smartphones, New York restaurant Comodo launched an ‘Instagram menu’ last year, encouraging visitors to snap photographs of their food and post them to Instagram with the hashtag #ComodoMenu. Anyone that uses Instagram knows that it’s full of foodie pictures and it’s smart of Comodo to jump on this trend – Comodo added the #ComodoMenu hashtag to its menus and lets new patrons know to check the hashtag if they can’t decide what to order. The #ComodoMenu hashtag currently boasts over 900 images (warning: do not view on an empty stomach).

Nike

To promote its NikeiD customisable creations, Nike launched a clever PhotoiD campaign which allows users to log-in to its site and create a unique shoe based on their Instagram photographs. To create a shoe, users must visit http://photoid.nike.com and log-in to Instagram. You can then choose one of your Instagram photographs (Nike asks you to confirm that you own the images before you progress) and a style of shoe, and Nike will create a completely unique shoe based on your image! Your individual shoes can be shared directly to Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Google+ or Facebook directly from Nike’s site and users can even buy the shoes they’ve created. Here are a few examples of creations made with the Nike PhotoiD site –

Despite being a basic photo-sharing app, Instagram is a versatile platform that – as you can see – is being used by social media teams in a variety of ways. What’s your favourite Instagram campaign?

Earlier in the week it was revealed that Facebook’s active user numbers have dropped in the UK by almost 2 million to 26 million, according to data taken from marketing research firm Nielsen.  Facebook announced in these results that it now has 1.11 billion monthly active users around the world, almost a fourfold increase from this time last year.

These growth areas are not in profitable regions for advertising revenue, especially important as Facebook is now a publicly traded company and subsequently answers to shareholders which shifts the companies emphasis to a profit based one.

Facebook’s UK numbers. Source: Nielsen

The report was positive for Facebook’s finances as profits were up to a total of $219m in the first three months of the year, up $14million from 2012. Total revenue was $1.46bn, up $400 million in the same period.

Perhaps the most positive aspect for Facebook is the continued rise in mobile access – mobile advertising now equates to 30% of all Facebook advertising and it is fast becoming the most popular access point for active users in the developed regions.

Twitter Celebrates “Ed Balls” day in style

No weekly social media report would be complete without mentioning Ed Balls day. The second anniversary was celebrated on Sunday the 28^th April, in honor of the Shadow Chancellor tweeting his own name and for some reason not deleting it!

Here at Umpf we organised our very own way of joining in on this momentous occasion, you can read all about our “Ed Balls” football shirts in a previous blog post here. The stunt was featured on BuzzFeed, MSN, The Mirror and others.

 Self-Destructing Tweets

A new Twitter app is offering the ability to post self-destructing tweets – think SnapChat for twitter. Users can compose a tweet and set the desired amount of time for it to automatically delete itself. The program is called efemr and it was inspired by the need to protect how information we post may be used in the future. The app itself is a standard Twitter connect set-up it then monitors for time related hastags, for example #5m will delete your tweet five minutes from the time of posting.  As this article from wired.co.uk states, it is likely that the big potential here is for marketers or agencies likes ourselves to exploit time based competitions or campaigns.

Social Brands 100

The Headstream Social Brands 100 list was published this week over 700 brands from 23 industries were included. The announcement was only a shortlist and we will have to wait till the 23^rd May to find out the final rankings. Last year Innocent, famed for their slightly wacky social media style were the winners, we will have to see if they keep their crown.

Retail brands make up a large proportion of the shortlist, in total 16 industries are represented in the top 100. Brands were ranked for 6 weeks on their Twitter, Facebook and Youtube activities.

Do you agree with the list? Are there any brands you think deserve a mention? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Path

Big news for private social media platform Path which has this week passed 10 million users. The site launched back in 2010, the emphasis behind Path is that messages and photos can be shared very privately amongst specific friends and family, without having to be shared to everyone on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. According to The Next Web the site hit 2 million users back in February 2012, it then took four months to rise to 3 million. The CEO of Path, Dave Morin now claims the site is gaining 1 million new users every week.  Much like with Facebook, active users is probably the most essential statistic as this what advertisers will look at when making decisions.

Certainly good days for Path, we will keep an eye out for their progress.

Instagram Updates

A significant update is now available for Instagram, the app has enabled a tagging feature which is almost identical to the one you will find on Facebook. The new ‘Photos of Me’ section will collate all the images you are tagged in, previously the only way this could be achieved was to @mention users in the captions. It is important to note that currently only the owner of the photo has the ability to use the tag function, you do have full control of any tag a user makes of you allowing you to delete or hide them if you so wish.

This video from Instagram introduces the new service http://vimeo.com/instagram/photosofyou

Although Twitter and Facebook both have their own strengths and weaknesses and one may better suit a brand than the other, this blog aims to assess each platform and what they can offer marketeers.

Facebook

According to new research, if you’re not checking your Facebook at least 14 times a day, then you’re below the national average. Findings reveal 79 per cent of smartphone users check their devices within 15 minutes of waking up, yet peak Facebook viewing time is during the evening, just before bed. On average, we visit Facebook 13.8 times during the day, for two minutes and 22 seconds.

What does this mean for brands?

If people check Facebook an average of 14 times a day, it’s imperative that brands establish a presence if they want to connect on a personal level. Taking information directly where their audience spends time conversing with friends and family, helps brands to build a day-to-day relationship with individuals.

According to the same research, the total daily average mobile time on the site via our smartphones is 30 minutes. This is probably spent browsing through newsfeeds while we’re on the move, meaning it’s more important for brands to stamp their mark within this window, being at the front of the customers’ mind and ultimately influencing purchasing decisions.

The complexity of Facebook allows companies to engage with fans on a deeper level – through the use of apps, embedded links, photos, polls, and a very lenient character limit, brands can effectively communicate their messages without the need to cut out words or letters to fit into a 140 character post, like Twitter.

Offering exclusive offers, competitions and product news helps to build a community with a fan base which love and respect the brand. It is the hub to read reviews, see new products and website details, and get a feel for a brand’s customer service.

Engagement is what’s vital. Posting content that attracts likes, comments and shares, not only ensures that messages are being seen by a wider audience, but offers insight into the customer-base and what they like. Using comment feedback and analysing which posts get the most likes helps to create more ‘likeable’ content. This will produce a dedicated and targeted community of brand advocates who want to shout about your business and influence friends to join them.

A huge benefit of using Facebook is the monitoring system of ‘Page Insights’ – these provide statistics on total reach, engaged users, virality, and audience demographics. I use these regularly to assess which posts get the most attention and reach and try to replicate similar content to maintain a consistent level of engaged readers.

However, thanks to Facebook’s most recent algorithm, EdgeRank, it’s not always that simple. EdgeRank is the Facebook algorithm that decides which stories appear in each user’s newsfeed. The algorithm hides ‘boring stories’ and posts not of interest to a user, so if a story doesn’t score well, no one will see it.

In an essence, stories (Facebook posts) are scored on:

1. Affinity – the closeness of Facebook users – if they have a close network who they interact with on a regular basis, then their Facebook stories are more likely to appear in their friends’ newsfeed

2. Edge weight – how much ‘weight’ the story has – i.e. the level of engagement. Stories have more weight if they include photos or videos, instead of just text and links. Comments also score higher than likes.

3. Time decay – if a story is old, it will lose points – maintaining comments and likes improves its score, thus still appearing in people’s timelines

It’s really important that marketeers keep up-to-date with new Facebook algorithms to ensure they’re posting content that will maintain a high consistent reach and engagement. Although it remains impossible to check your ‘EdgeRank score’, you can see an indication of it by looking at ‘reach’, available to see via Facebook Insights.

Twitter

Depending on the nature of the brand, the 140 character-limit can work favourably or it can be a detriment in effectively communicating messages. Brands that employ a witty, banter style on Twitter, such as Paddy Power, may only need 140 characters to make their mark.

And while hashtags are synonymous with Twitter, some marketeers still undervalue its potential to create a buzz and reach millions within a short period of time. Twitter Director, Bruce Daisley, describes Twitter as the chat room; the hashtag as the channel – they are vital to marketing.

Tweets with hashtags experience two times more engagement when using a hashtag and a tweet’s retweet rate amplifies by 12 times when they ask followers to retweet – yet only ONE per cent of brands are doing this!

Twitter is the destination for real-time marketing and utilising this will influence real-time engagement. With keyword targeting focusing on the ‘when’, brands can capture their audience as soon as they express intent. Utilising Twitter to generate buzz has been proven to lever existing above-the-line ads, driving more sales than additional ads spend.

One brand which executed real-time marketing exceptionally well was Oreo during the Superbowl blackout. Oreo set the benchmark for quick, witty and relevant marketing thanks to its highly responsive team of marketeers. As more journalists and consumers are using Twitter as a news source, innovative pieces of real time marketing like this have consequently achieved great PR coverage too.

Apps like Vine also enable brands to further humanise themselves. Yes, Facebook has Instagram, but Vine is a quirky bitesized-video sharing app that generates creative user-content. A video is much more interesting than a photo!

As Twitter users are generally younger and tech-savvier, it’s important for companies to approach new apps – such as Vine and Instagram – with open arms, in order to convey their personality and generate interesting content which sparks conversation and interaction with a hard-to-impress age group.

It’s especially important to employ these apps that users can operate on the move as a whopping 71 per cent of Twitter users tweet on a mobile device.

Yet again, they both have their own use in generating creative user-content and can’t directly compete with one and other, but Vine opens a plethora of marketing opportunities that are still yet to be explored. I also personally feel that Vine is better integrated with Twitter than Instagram is with Facebook.

With great complexity in the form of apps, photo albums, lenient character space, polls and Page Insights, Facebook offers a world of marketing opportunities on a dedicated brand page.

While Facebook has brand pages, Twitter has the hashtag. One downfall for Twitter is a brand’s profile doesn’t act in the same way as a Facebook page – Facebook admins have overall control of their brand page and the content on there. They can choose to delete spam or abusive messages, whereas hashtags can easily get hijacked and brand admins can’t do anything about it.

I do like the straightforwardness of Twitter. As they say: “the most effective campaigns are the simple ones”, and the majority of social media news stories are derived from Twitter. Marketeers are subject to increasing Facebook regulations, policies and algorithm changes, which makes it challenging to compete for maximum reach and virality.

Ultimately, it always depends on the positioning of each brand, the image they want to deliver and what they want to get out of social media. For more mature brands, it would make sense to steer away from peculiarities that may come across via Twitter, but instead opt for Facebook which allows brands to present a ‘full picture’ of their brand.

Although the two are very different, I currently see Twitter as a supporting tool for Facebook and believe Facebook is more beneficial for brands who wish to communicate effectively and directly to their customers.

However, as more brands capitalise on real-time marketing and focus on the ‘here and now’, Twitter is looking to be the channel with more room to grow and diversify, developing and acquiring apps such as Vine and the new #music app to offer more marketing opportunities. Meanwhile, Facebook will keep updating its newsfeed look and algorithm that brands have to compete with.