Latest Social Media News & Articles

Rob Tarkoff, CEO of Lithium, says he always walks away from prospective companies that have a “Director of Social Media.”

There’s certainly not even a remote bit of controversy in saying that customers are truly the lifeblood that sustains the survival of businesses today. But are you doing everything you can to stay connected?

Snip.it, a social sharing tool, now belongs to Yahoo, a company that surely hopes to maintain some semblance of relevancy at a time when Internet travelers are leaping headlong into social sites and mobile apps.

Embedded tweets have been updated, and Twitter has made design and technical changes to the popular format.

As one of the best New Yorker cartoons wisely noted, “On the Internet, no one can tell you’re a dog.” Now, a new social network named Spraffl is championing the idea that, for dogs and everyone else, location-based anonymity is the cat’s meow. 

Small business all-in-one sales and marketing provider Infusionsoft has announced they’ve bought GroSocial, a social media marketing software company. With this acquisition, Infusionsoft aims to create a one stop marketing tool for small businesses.

Attend virtually any sales or marketing conference today and you’ll see numerous graphs depicting marketing and sales funnels that take leads from awareness through interest, discovery, decision making and ultimately the purchase itself. At each stage, a percentage of leads makes it through to the next stage.

In the United States, the past 36 hours have been a whirlwind of political pomp and circumstance as we watched President Obama get sworn in for his second term in office. Intentionally less dramatic than when he won his first election in 2009, more than 600,000 people gathered on the National Mall to bear witness to the historic event, while millions more watched from their living rooms or from their desktops.

Steve Faktor is the author of Econovation and the Harvard Business Review article “Happiness Will Not Be Downloaded.” Faktor is an entrepreneur, futurist and digital commerce expert. He was a senior executive at American Express, Citi and MasterCard.

For this week’s Facebook App of the Week, we’re looking at Post Planner, an application that auto-posts information to fan pages or groups.

In their most recent update to the Facebook Messenger application for iOS, Facebook has introduced a free calling feature via wi-fi or data connections for US users. 

  At its mystery-shrouded event in San Francisco, Facebook has unveiled Graph Search as a potentially massive new feature to help find relevant results among the photos, likes and other information that users put up on the social service. 

A new social networking platform, Branch aims to improve the way people communicate online by encouraging more meaningful conversations.

The Janrain User Management Platform (JUMP) provides website owners with a solution for acquiring and managing users across social channels. Investors apparently believe in this product, as the company has now obtained US$ 20 million of a new US$ 33 million round of financing.

In this week’s Facebook App of the Week we’re looking at iFrapp, an application design tool.

URL shortening website Bitly (renamed from Bit.ly) has announced that users will now have access to a social API, which includes three different services: a real-time search, attention spikes and URL metadata.

Customer contact vendor Aspect Software is joining the social media bandwagon. The Chelmsford, Massachusetts-based company has announced its cloud-based Aspect Social, a partnership with Lithium Technologies that provides tools for contact center agents to engage with customers via social media.

For this week’s Facebook App of the Week, we’re focusing on App Builder, an app design tool.

It’s time for the first Mobile App of the Week in 2013. This week we’re looking at Pheed, a social network.

With social media and customer feedback continuing their upward climb, what trends in social intelligence will this new year offer? Social intelligence provider newBrandAnalytics, which analyzes social media feedback for operational insights in various industries, is venturing some predictions.