Connect Social Media

Facebook today upgrades their service to allow live streaming updates of a user’s News Feed.  Users can opt-in to the live streaming feature by clicking a button at the top of their page.  In the past, a user had to refresh their browser to see updates to their News Feed.  As is their custom practice, the change will be rolled out in phases to the user base.

JR Raphael with PC World says the move in a response to the backlash from Facebook users over the Twitter-like update to the site in March of this year.

See my list of Twitter tools, featuring screen captures and videos, in my Likaholix list here.

Learn more about my TwitterViews series here - I go one-on-one with the developers of the top Twitter apps!

You can find Twitter answers to my #twitterguy questions here.

Learn more about how #followfriday works here.

You can learn more about Twitter demographics and who’s using Twitter here.

Learn more about the new social media site Likaholix here.

You could have seen this one coming.  The average user stay in minutes dropped again in March, now down 2% since January.  Users surveyed recently were underwhelmed with the recent Twitter-like updates to profile pages, and Facebook execs made it clear during March that they were taking the feedback into account to make a few modifications.

Still, unique visitor count grew again, topping 90 million unique visitors for the first time ever and up 23% since last month.

A new Forrester report shows that 53% of companies surveyed plan to increase their focus on the use of social media marketing in 2009.  Why?  1) it’s incredibly affordable and 2) it allows you to boost your word-of-mouth marketing effots to new levels.

The lastest Facebook updgrade is a great example — with Facebook pages becoming “public profiles”, marketing messages are more viral than ever across the FB platform.  And Facebook recently moved into the number one slot across the Internet in terms of time spent on their platform.  Another way to say it:  Your prospects are there, and they’re interacting every day.

Twitter is exploding on the market, but is still relatively underused - experts estimate about 8 million Twitter users, compared to about 140 million users at Facebook.

Get your social media strategy outlined today and assign areas of responsibility.  These platforms are too powerful to ignore.

UPDATE 3.17.09: Many companies expecting results from social media without creating a strategy.  “To be successful, social media marketing must be managed as long-term programs, not short-term experiments. To succeed, make sure you have dedicated resources in place, including both social media strategists and community managers,” writes Owyang.

Total Time Spent rankings February