Twitter’s Suggested Users Now More Personalized

We knew it was coming. It was only a matter of when. Back in November, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told a crowd at a conference in Malaysia that the current suggested users list would be going away, and that it would be replaced by something "more programmatically chosen, something that actually delivers more relevant suggestions." Twitter has now announced the reality of that new kind of suggested users list.

Originally the suggested users list was meant as a way to help new users, and it still is. The problem was that the list was static for everyone, and not all tastes are the same. Now the lists will be more tailored to users' specific preferences.

"Two of the biggest challenges for new users have been finding accounts to follow that appeal to their interests, and finding their friends and colleagues who tweet," says Josh Elman of Twitter's product team. "Over time, we've learned that by making suggestions of who to follow, we can help users get going more easily on Twitter. In our new design, we're taking some steps to continue to improve this process."

"We've created a number of algorithms to identify users across a variety of clusters who tweet actively and are engaged with their audiences," explains Elman. "These new algorithms help us group these active users into lists of users by interests. Rather than suggesting a random set of 20 users for a new user to follow, now we let users browse into the areas they are interested in and choose who they want to follow from these lists."

I should note that our own Twellow service has had a feature in place that provides suggested users on a personalized level for some time, so if you don't like who Twitter suggests (or if you just want to find others), you may want to consider checking that out.

Twitter says its lists will be refreshed frequently as the algorithm identifies new users who should be suggested. Others found to be less engaging may be removed. Twitter offers its own staff-picked list, and a special staff picks for Haiti list as well.

Have You Read This?

> Easily Find Twitterers You're Interested In

> A Suggested Users List for Twitter That You Can Actually Use

> Twitter To Make Suggested Users Feature More Like Twellow's?

The Majority Of Nonprofits Embrace Social Media

The majority (88%) of nonprofit organizations are experimenting with social media to engage audiences, but 79 percent are not sure of its value for their organizations, according to a new survey by Weber Shandwick's Social Impact team and KRC Research.

"We know from our work with nonprofits that most realize the potential of social media and are experimenting with it, but many are not maximizing the full opportunity," said Paul Massey, Social Impact co-lead.

"This survey validates that there is widespread experimentation, and suggests that, in the future, nonprofits that fully participate in the two-way conversations that make this medium so powerful will reap the greatest benefit."

The majority of nonprofits believe their online presence helps raise awareness (92%), keeps audiences engaged (86%) and reduces costs compared to traditional media (77%). Social media is viewed as being successful in helping nonprofits reach broad audiences (67%). Sixty-one percent say the rewards outweigh the risks. For these reasons eighty-five percent plan to make greater use of social media in the next two years and (78%) most require more social media expertise to keep communicating and receiving support for their work.

While social media is viewed positively among nonprofits, there are still a number of challenges. Sixty-seven percent of nonprofits feel that traditional media, including coverage in newspapers, magazine, television and radio are more effective at supporting fundraising efforts than social media (67% vs.22%).

Executives in nonprofits are more skeptical about social media's ability to help them with hard-to-reach audiences such as donors (45%), media (39%) and policy makers (31%).

"While two-thirds of nonprofit executives believe social media has a positive impact on their communications with external audiences, they are less convinced about social media's resonance with donors, journalists and policy makers," said Social Impact co-lead Stephanie Bluma.

"What these results imply is that organizations need to develop more targeted and sustainable digital connections with these critical yet narrower audiences. In the months ahead, digital engagement strategies will need to show value on multiple fronts from brand-building to advocacy to fundraising."

The one area where social media is widely believed to have more impact than traditional media is in mobilizing supporters (58%), an important audience for nonprofits.
 

 

Have You Read This?

>Amazon Offers Payment Services For Charity Donations

>Good Online Experience Leads To More Donations For Nonprofits

>YouTube Nonprofit Partners Get New Features

 

YouTube Talks Up Social Side

YouTube wants you to know that it's not just a place for individuals to watch videos.  This afternoon, the site released some stats (and used the word "social" about six times) to show that users are interacting with each other and with different sites in all sorts of ways.

As usual, YouTube kept a bunch of numbers to itself; don't go looking for either a whole lot of data or many specific digits (think "1.63 million" as opposed to rounded-off descriptive words).  Still, the first fact that a post on the YouTube Blog shared was that "[o]ver one million people are AutoSharing videos to Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader," which is an interesting detail.

Then here's another one: "Each AutoShared Tweet you send out from YouTube turns into an average of seven new sessions on YouTube.com."  So it's not like a bunch of people are just spewing out clips into a void.

Finally, "Over a million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube based on our Friend Suggest feature."

YouTube's turning into quite the little community, then.  And since it plans to keep introducing new social features (and probably reminding us about the existing ones), this aspect of the site is liable to grow.

Have You Read This?

> Yahoo Challenges YouTube On Music Video Front

> Watch: Will Ferrell And Adam McKay Talk YouTube

> 35 Ways To Improve Your Online Video Performance

Email Marketing in a Mobile, Social Media World

It is an interesting time for email marketing right now. Though it is still a quite effective medium for marketers, there are many challenges to deal with. This was the subject of a session moderated by David Daniels of Forrester Research at the Shop.org summit in Las Vegas this week.

What do you see as the biggest challenges for email marketing campaigns? Comment here.

Email contributes to the overload of information that Internet users face on a daily basis. The web is not as simple as it used to be. People have more information coming at them than ever before, be it from social networks, RSS feeds, email, or whatever. Spam continues to plague inboxes (not that these other channels are immune), and that complicates things even more. Now add to that, the increasing use of the mobile web. One may assume that social networks are taking over or even replacing email, but one would be wrong.

Email is not dying because of social media. "Email is still a key tool in social communication," says Daniels. "Understanding audience engagement is key."

Email portability adoption is increasing. For example, just this week Google launched email syncing for Gmail to smartphones (meaning iPhone users can get their gmail accounts synced between their iPhone and their PC). This will make it easier for iPhone users to keep up with their accounts on the go.

Daniels suggests using SMS (text messaging) as an opt-in point for email subscriptions, as well as rendering and supporting the call to action.

Considering that people have their phones with them pretty much at all times, email marketers shouldn't be overlooking mobile. Consider these stats that Daniels provides:

- 25% of email subscribers provide website recommendations
- 20% online buyers post on average 9 product reviews a year
- 77% of the online population find those reviews more useful than the info the company provides

While social media may not be replacing email, it's obviously still growing rapidly. You may have heard that Facebook alone just surpassed the 300 million-user milestone a couple weeks ago. That's close to the same amount of people that make up the entire population of the United States, to put that into perspective.

Many companies are utilizing social media and integrating it into their email marketing campaigns. There's no reason why you shouldn't be doing the same. Incorporate Facebook pages, Twitter, and/or MySpace accounts into campaigns. You can further engage with customers, and in turn keep interest in your emails going.

The key is to stay relevant to users. According to Daniels, "relevance empowered" mailings deliver more top and bottom line improvement than broadcast. He gave a few recommendations for implementation:

- For one, become an advocate for change, and address your organization's readiness to embrace it.

- Secondly, understand the value of subscribers, and focus on their behaviors.

- He says to make it easy for consumers to share info with a lot of people quickly, but to learn about specific social behaviors of customers before creating your social strategy.

- And last, but not least, to "test, test, test."

I'll add a couple of my own cents, and suggest that once your email campaign is integrated into social media, it becomes fair game for going viral and for being found in real-time searches. Essentially, your campaign can be taken from the inboxes of subscribers and expanded out onto the real-time web.

Email marketers shouldn't fear social media. They should embrace it. Of course, campaigns will need to be compelling enough to get people to want to share them.

WebProNews reporter Abby Johnson contributed to this article from Shop.org in Las Vegas.

Do you integrate social media into your email marketing campaigns? Talk to ArisYulianta and Friends... about your results.

Next Page »