Using social media? Here's three tips to boost results by effectively using hashtags.

More than 27 million people have seen Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake join forces in the fight against #overzealous #hashtaggers.

Here's our top three tips for using hashtags:

1). Beware of hashtag overload: The use of excessive hashtags seems desperate and can even be perceived as spam. According to one study, the number of hashtags for optimal engagement is 7. Be strategic with the help of sites like Websta, Populagram, and TagsforLikes - they’ll tell you what’s trending at any given time to help you maximize your hashtag’s impact.

2). Consider color theory: Stay away from posting anything too dark. Light, bright images produce 24% more likes than dark photos. Photos that have blue as the dominant color also reportedly attract 24% more likes (when compared to images in red).

3). Offer a “behind the scenes” glimpse: People are inherently voyeuristic. Giving your customers a sneak peek into how the sausage gets made can be an effective social tool. If you’re a jewelry designer, post photos of your studio or a mood board that inspired your latest collection. You’ll make your customers feel like they have a closer relationship to your company.

Doctors to parents: Limit kids' tweeting, texting & keep smartphones / laptops out of bedrooms.

The recommendations are bound to prompt eye-rolling and LOLs from many teens but an influential pediatricians group says parents need to know that unrestricted media use can have serious consequences.

It's been linked with violence, cyberbullying, school woes, obesity, lack of sleep and a host of other problems. It's not a major cause of these troubles, but "many parents are clueless" about the profound impact media exposure can have on their children, said Dr. Victor Strasburger, lead author of the new American Academy of Pediatrics policy

"This is the 21st century and they need to get with it," said Strasburger, a University of New Mexico adolescent medicine specialist.

The policy is aimed at all kids, including those who use smartphones, computers and other Internet-connected devices. It expands the academy's longstanding recommendations on banning televisions from children's and teens' bedrooms and limiting entertainment screen time to no more than two hours daily.

Under the new policy, those two hours include using the Internet for entertainment, including Facebook, Twitter, TV and movies; online homework is an exception.

The policy statement cites a 2010 report that found U.S. children aged 8 to 18 spend an average of more than seven hours daily using some kind of entertainment media. Many kids now watch TV online and many send text messages from their bedrooms after "lights out," including sexually explicit images by cellphone or Internet, yet few parents set rules about media use, the policy says.

"I guarantee you that if you have a 14-year-old boy and he has an Internet connection in his bedroom, he is looking at pornography," Strasburger said.

The policy notes that three-quarters of kids aged 12 to 17 own cellphones; nearly all teens send text messages, and many younger kids have phones giving them online access.

Mark Risinger, 16, of Glenview, Ill., is allowed to use his smartphone and laptop in his room, and says he spends about four hours daily on the Internet doing homework, using Facebook and YouTube and watching movies. He said a two-hour Internet time limit "would be catastrophic" and that kids won't follow the advice, "they'll just find a way to get around it."

Source: Yahoo News

Twitter Alerts brings instant emergency notifications straight to a user's cell phone.

Twitter has announced a new service that allows government agencies and non-governmental organizations to send emergency messages directly to users' phones during natural disasters or times of crisis.

Users that sign up for the service called Twitter Alerts will receive "critical information" via a text message or push notification when an organization marks a tweet as an "alert," according to the Twitter Alerts website.

"Twitter Alerts[...] brings us one step closer to helping users get important and accurate information from credible organizations during emergencies, natural disasters or moments when other communications services aren't accessible," Gaby Peña, a product manager at Twitter, said on the company's blog where the service was announced.

More than 60 organizations have signed up for the new system, including the emergency management departments of Louisiana, Florida, New York and Colorado as well as the American Red Cross and FEMA, said Twitter. International organizations such as The World Health Organization and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department have signed up.

Users can customize which organizations they receive alerts from through the service's setup menu.

Source: CNN

Twitter makes another big purchase.

The social media company announced late Monday it is buying MoPub, a mobile-focused advertising exchange, in its fourth major purchase of the year.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Published reports put the price at about $300 million or more, based an estimated values of Twitter's privately-held stock that is being used to make the purchase.
Twitter's statement said that MoPub's technology lets mobile application publishers manage their inventory of multiple sources of advertising.

Twitter, which is believed to be weighing an initial public offering some time in 2014, has been buying a number of tech startups as it tries to transform itself into more of a multimedia hub.

In February it agreed to buy Bluefin Labs, a Cambridge, MA, company that provides advertisers, ad agencies and TV networks with information about social media reaction to television shows.

In April Twitter announced the purchase of "We are Hunted," an Australian music streaming and recommendation service. That deal came a week before Twitter unveiled its own music app.

Last month it bought Trendrr, a New York based company that tracks social media activity around TV programming. The terms of those deal were also not disclosed.

Source: CNN

New York Times hit with malicious attack.

A tweet from the official Times Twitter account was directing readers to an alternative website, news.nytco.com, if they were having difficulties accessing the main site at nytimes.com. Readers in Europe and Asia were reporting problems Wednesday.

Marc Frons, chief information officer at the Times, told employees Tuesday that the outage was the result of an attack on Melbourne IT, the company's domain name registrar, according to the New York Times.

Frons told the Times that the hacktivist group Syrian Electronic Army was responsible for the attack, "or someone trying very hard to be them." The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of hackers aligned with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The group sent a tweet claiming responsibility for the Times attack, and SEA also claimed that it took over Twitter's own domain on Tuesday afternoon.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has begun looking into the website disruption, a law enforcement official told CNN. The "preliminary inquiry" is still in its early stages, the official said.
The Times did not reply to a request for comment.

Two weeks ago, Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for hacking Outbrain, a news recommendation engine that appears on websites including The Washington Post, CNN and Time. The hacked news links were redirecting to a site controlled by the hacking group, which supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and has taken credit for several recent cyberattacks.

The New York Times' own website had suffered an outage the day before the Outbrain hack, prompting speculation that hackers were responsible, but a spokeswoman for the paper said that outage was the result of complications associated with a scheduled maintenance update.

Source: New York Time

Facebook has adopted the hashtag symbol.

Hashtags are coming to Facebook to help users better surface conversations.

Support for the all-but-ubiquitous topic organization system was rumored in March and will roll out to a small percentage of users Wednesday. Facebook will roll out hashtags to more users in the coming weeks.

 

The social network wants to make it easier for users to find content already on Facebook, and functional hashtags are the first step. According to Facebook, many users already post hashtags anyway, so why not make them work? Hashtags will be both clickable and searchable, so, for example, topics like #NSALeaks or #NBAFinals will now exist.

 

Hashtags from other services, such as Instagram, are clickable as well. Users will also be able to compose posts directly from a hashtag feed and search results. That could make adding real-time content to specific streams easier than before.

 

How nice...now we can see more #smile #happy #selfie #sunshine crap clogging up our Facebook feeds, just as it does to our Twitter accounts.

 

Source: CNN

Think social media isn't important to your business? Think again!

With over one billion users on Facebook alone, you're missing out on a large advertising opportunity if your business isn't present through social media. Check out this 4 minute video for some interesting facts:

New Web tool warns people if their tweet will get them fired.

Researchers from Hannover, Germany, have come up the FireMe! Web tool as a way of warning Twitter users if their tweets will get them fired.

Ever wondered if your tweets will get you fired?

A team from the University of Hannover in Germany has created a Web tool that warns people about their reckless tweets.

FireMe!'s goal is to raise awareness about the dangers and consequences of people being reckless online.

Kawase said he thought of the idea after attending a talk at his university about how the Web is influencing the work environment.

"After the talk I immediately started working on FireMe!," Kawase said, adding that he thought it would be a fun topic for research.

According to New Scientist, the team found that in a single week last June, nearly 22,000 people had tweeted about their boss or work in a negative way.

In order to illustrate just how extreme some tweets can get, FireMe! provides examples of actual tweets that got people fired.

Gilbert Gottfried was fired by Aflac for joking about the tsunami that hit Japan. New York University law fellow Nir Rosen resigned from his fellowship after his remarks about Lara Logan's sexual assault.

So how does FireMe! work?

According to Kawase, the system crawls Twitter with a set of predefined sentences that mention something negative about bosses or the workplace.

"Before it was an alert system — once we identified the user who had said something bad, a tweet was sent to warn them about the dangers of sharing such comments," Kawase said.

The alert system received a mixed response, Kawase said.

"Most people didn't care about getting fired," he said. "Still, 6 percent of users who got the alert actually deleted the tweets."

Twitter recently requested Kawaze to stop this alert system because it was violating the company's policy.

Today, Kawase's team has a website where people can see "bad tweets" via a live stream and check their own FireMe! score on the FireMeter.

Kawaze adds that the FireMeter is non-scientific. "It's goal is to improve engagement with the website," he said. "It's a mixed calculation considering the number of mentions to the boss, work and profanity in the users' timeline."

Source: MSN, New Scientist

How wonderful...now you get to see hashtags clogging up your Facebook feed, just like Twitter.

Facebook is working on incorporating the hashtag, one of Twitter's most iconic markers, into its service by using the symbol as a way to group conversations, said people familiar with the matter. It is unclear how far along Facebook's work on the hashtag is and the feature isn't likely to be introduced imminently, these people said.

On short-messaging service Twitter, the hashtag—a word or phrase preceded by the "#" pound symbol—is a way for people to collate many Twitter messages about a single news event or topic, like the selection of the Pope (#PopeFrancis). The hashtag is closely associated with Twitter, and fans of the service use the hashtag as short-form creative expression.

Facebook is testing whether to follow Twitter's lead and allow users to click on a hashtag to pull up all posts about similar topics or events so it can quickly index conversations around trending topics and build those conversations up, giving users more reason to stay logged in and see more ads. Instagram, which Facebook acquired last year, already uses hashtags, allowing users to sort photos by the symbol.

Facebook's work on a hashtag is a sign of the heightening battle between Facebook and Twitter, as both compete for mobile users and fight for advertising dollars. For years, Twitter and Facebook seemed to occupy different poles of the social-media spectrum. While Facebook was the home of close friends and family, Twitter was the real-time broadcasting device for the rest of the world.
Facebook has now increasingly moved onto Twitter's turf. The Menlo Park, Calif., social network is prodding users to share more content with the public. In recent years it has mirrored some of Twitter's features by creating "subscriber" lists for users, and allowing people to tag celebrities and brands with the "@" sign.

Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled a simplified website redesign. Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was building the foundation to be the best "personalized newspaper" for users, an ambition Twitter has also expressed by working closely with publishers and improving its news-surfacing engine. Facebook, which also recently revamped its search engine, has also said it plans to make public posts searchable in the future.

 

And while closely held Twitter is a fraction of Facebook's size, it is competing with Facebook for mobile and online advertisers, especially as some advertisers flock to Twitter to advertise against real-time moments. Twitter has bulked up its sales staff and released more advertiser-friendly products. Last month, Twitter opened its ads platform to third-party partners so that advertisers do not have to directly buy ads from Twitter.

 

"Historically, Facebook has come first for advertisers and Twitter has been a nice add-on," said Debbie Williamson, an analyst for eMarketer. "Twitter has been more aggressive."
Twitter is expected to make about half a billion dollars in advertising revenue this year, according to eMarketer. Facebook generated $4.3 billion last year from advertising.

The gap is narrower in mobile advertising, where Twitter is expected to make $249 million this year, versus Facebook's $851 million, according to eMarketer.

So, if you love seeing people #always #use #hashtags #on #every #single #word #in #their #post, you're in luck! Thanks a lot Facebook.




Source: Wall Street Journal

Burger King has been hacked!

The Twitter account associated with the fast-food chain Burger King was suspended after an apparent hacking that defaced the page with messages that the account had been sold to rival McDonald's.

The @BurgerKing account name was changed today to "McDonalds" and the Golden Arches' familiar logo was added to the page, as was a message that the account had been sold to McDonald's "because the whopper flopped."

The page has since been taken down, but images of the defacement are still visible on Web cache.
Before the feed's suspension, hackers posted tweets that included racial epithets to Burger King's some 83,000 followers -- a tally that ballooned by about 25,000 to more than 108,000 after the hack.
The online hacktivist collective Anonymous appeared to take responsibility for the hack in a tweet that mentioned a new operation dubbed #OpMadCow, although it was not immediately clear what the aim of that campaign was.

Burger King said it shut down the feed when it learned of the hack and apologized for the unauthorized content tweeted from the account this morning.

"We have worked directly with administrators to suspend the account until we are able to re-establish our legitimate site and authentic postings," the company said in a statement. "We apologize to our fans and followers who have been receiving erroneous tweets about other members of our industry and additional inappropriate topics."

See a screenshot of the Twitter account below:

Are you Twitter addicted? Are you a shopaholic? You're life just got a whole lot easier!

Twitter and American Express have just announced their new partnership, Amex Sync, on Twitter. Here’s how it works:

• First, American Express cardholders sync their card with their Twitter account.
• Then, when they come across products or offers that are eligible in their Twitter feed, the social shopper needs only send out a tweet that includes a special hash tag, such as #AmexConcertTickets or #BuyDigitalCamera, and Amex will then send them an @-reply with a confirming hash tag.
• Lastly, the buyer sends out a second tweet with the special hash tag within 15 minutes of the first tweet.

This can be used prior to shopping in a physical store, where the user would not have to show their phone or a coupon, but would just need to use their Amex card to get the deal.

As a special introductory offer, American Express kicked off the new partnership with a $25 American Express gift card for $15 to those who signed up and tweeted #BuyAmexGiftCard25 as part of a limited deal that expires March 13.

View a video on how this works below:

Source: The Business Journals

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