The Social 6: 8/29/12 News Roundup
By all you know the drill: I share the stories y'all found most interesting over the last 24 hours. So if you disagree with the picks, you'll just have to comment/retweet/favorite things more tomorrow ;)
#6: Social media plays a huge role in product discovery for beauty consumers
This Andrew McDougall piece outlines how social media marketing is on the rise among larger beauty conglomerates such as P&G and L'Oreal.
#5: My Personal Social Story: Why Social Media Platforms Are Fads
April Rudin of The Rudin Group shares her story, which isn't really an anti-social media rant as you might think. Instead, April shows how "social" has always been present in her life, and where she thinks "social" will be going in the near future.
#4: Despite its falling out w/Twitter, Flipboard added 15M users over the past 8 months
While there hasn't been as much buzz around Flipboard lately, it's interesting to see how the adoption of their news aggregation apps haven't slowed down one bit - in fact, they're growing at a 300% clip.
#3: How to stop "social media shiny object syndrome"
Jason Keath of SocialFresh delivers a great piece (as always) summarizing a recent SocialFresh webinar, and outlines 8 steps to take to properly analyze social media shiny objects.
#2: SumAll Social Metrics Tracks Social Activity Against Web Traffic & Revenue
TechCrunch shares how SumAll, a data visualization firm, has launched SumAll Social Metrics, which can help a company track all of its social activity against KPIs such as web traffic and revenue. Another example of how the conversation is changing from how to get your company to engage, to how your company can monetize that engagement.
#1: How to be yourself on social media...without freaking out your boss
This Forbes piece by Dorie Clark (a writer you need to be following) on how to walk the fine line between representing yourself well online, and embarrassing your company. Dorie's tips are great ways any employee can start thinking about their own approach to social media.
4 Ways Fitness Brands Can Use Facebook's Open Graph
Today Rose Yao shared on the Facebook Developers Blog some Open Graph success stories in the fitness category. Among the highlights featured include Nike+ Running, Livestrong, runtastic,and RunKeeper, among others.
Here are some best practices these apps employ in order to resonate:
#1: Make signing up easy. It's not just fitness apps that use Facebook Login to help drive easier sign-ups from mobile, but they are many cases of them doing it quite well.
#2: Make stories social. Fitness apps should add friend tagging, if it's relevant to their app. Nike gives a good example of this, allowing runners to tag who they're running with. On the whole, stories that tag others are more likely to be engaged with.
#3: Help users share achievements. Facebook offers explicit sharing functionality to Fitness apps (and apps in general), so app users can share milestones and other non-routine activity. RunKeeper is one example of an app using Facebook's explicit sharing API to ask users to post their completed activity, such as a new distance milestone.
#4: Make stories visual. Visual stories can often lead to better Facebook click through rates. Fitness apps can publish stories using the map layout for a more visually compelling narrative.