Facebook Home hits 1 million Users 

Facebook Home has hit 1 million downloads one month after being made available for Android. Despite this number it appears that demand is on the wane, with 500,000 downloads achieved with the first 10 days of release. However it took twice as long for another 500,000 downloads.

Home has also attracted negative attention in the form of reviews on the Google Play page with over 16,000 two star reviews.

It is perhaps too early to write off Facebook home but with a user base of 1 billion and only 1 million users signed up,the signs do not look good. Have a read of our Facebook home review here.

Matt Cutts – Taking down network of links  

Matt Cutts the head of Google’s webspam team said this past week Google had taken action against several thousand link sellers that were part of a link network.

In fact, we took action on several thousand linksellers in a paid-link-that-passes-PageRank network earlier today.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) May 15, 2013

Twitter CEO resignation

Dick Costolo has resigned as Twitter director of the UK arm of Twitter. This is due to Twitter UK being struck off companies’ house after failing to return any accounting data.

Tweetdeck, a Twitter subsidiary, was also struck off on May 7^th and due to these irregularities Costolo felt it necessary to leave his post.

In reality being struck off from Companies House will not impact on Twitter’s overall business but the restructuring of the company in the UK points to a possible relisting with Companies House in the near future.

European Search Awards 2013

PushON had fantastic news last week after being shorlisted for the European Search Awards for Best Use of Search in Retail for Defib Shop – putting search at the heart of the campaign along with ChillFactore hit the slopes. Our third nomination was for Thomson Al Fresco – making holidays personal, in the Best Use of Search Travel & Leisure category.

Google I/O 2013

Google Wallet - 

On Wednesday we saw Google I/O 2013 getting underway with Google unveiling a host of updates and features to their current services. A new Gmail feature allows users to send up to $10,000 via an email message using Google Wallet.

Will this be able to compete with Paypal?

Google+ Redesign -

Google also introduced a new design layout for Google+, with a similar layout to Pinterest, having stories spread across your timeline featuring photos from that story.

At Google I/O 2013, the company announced 41 new features for Google+, the most important being related to design, messaging, and photo sharing.

Google+ has taken a step towards the focus of the photo and video content similar to Pinterest, improving visibility of stories, and creating an addition to Hang Outs by introducing the stand alone app that can be used for chat.

Automated hashtags have also been introduced, which work similar to those for Twitter, by suggesting a topic for you to include in the hashtags. Google have suggested that it will provide better chances of finding the desired content by adding trending tags.

Another feature is the addition of photo hosting and sharing. The images that are uploaded onto Google+ using the Auto Backup option, now use higher resolutions (up to 2048 pixels) and allow for editing – Autofix, Add Text and Rotate. Autofix allows users to edit with a single click the image saturation, brightness, or contrast. Auto Highlight and Auto Awesome will provide automatic options for Best Shot or creating animations form consecutive photos.

Before:

After:

Google Glass potentially illegal in UK

John Lanchester who writes for London Review of Books, suggested that the technology breaches basic data protection provisions, adding that the recording facility is a breach of ECHR privacy laws.

“In the UK anyway, many or most of the recording functions of Google Glass seem likely to be illegal,” Lanchester said.

“The 1998 Data Protection Act defines data as ‘information which is being processed by equipment operating automatically in response to instructions; or is recorded with the intention that it should be processed.’ I don’t speak fluent lawyer, but it seems clear that definition encompasses the recording function of Glass.”

Google announce Voice Search 

The way we search as we know it could be extinct in a few years if Google’s bold new idea becomes widespread. Google has announced it is bringing voice search to the desktop, via apps such as Chrome we could go about our business without having to type a key.

Although it has been announced details are sketchy about when and how it will all work, watch this space!

That is the end of the RoundUP this week, we will roundoff with a site that we have recently discovered and had alot of fun with. It is called Geoguessr and works using Google’s Streetview, check it out and let us know what you think.

Until next week, farewell

The post Digital RoundUP 20/05/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

#UnitedWelcome – Manchester United’s Social Faux Pas

With news of Sir Alex Ferguson retiring on Tuesday we were shown social media at its most powerful with reports of David Moyes taking over. To our surprise on Thursday we managed to find a link that was to a tab on the Manchester United Facebook page and the text read – ‘#UnitedWelcome – Send your personal welcome to our new manager David Moyes’. This was up on the site before any confirmation of the appointment of David Moyes and news confirming the reports didn’t come for a couple of hours after this was leaked. The leak was caused by United’s only official Twitter (@Manutd_PO).

The power of social media strikes again, showing how sometimes preparation for announcements can go wrong and lead to the unveiling of a whole campaign before its actually live. The app is still yet to be published on the Facebook page, so our guesses are… Who did they fire for leaking the information too early? After they spent so long searching for a Social Media Campaign Manager in December. 

Tuesday’s announcement led to unprecedented interest in Sir Alex Ferguson and his retirement, the Guardian via Twitter said they received the biggest ever day of traffic, even bigger than the Pope’s retirement!

The power of football. Biggest day ever for traffic on @guardian website yesterday (bigger than the Pope)

— Daniel Taylor (@DTguardian) May 9, 2013

YouTube Trends 

This week YouTube launched its Trends Map, which provides a statistical breakdown of the different kinds of content that are popular in the United States. The dashboard allows you to view statistics based on shares, views, city region, gender, and age. Lets hope they make this a worldwide feature at some point soon!

Solaborate – Social Network for Tech Professionals

This week saw a new social platform being released into beta, targeted at tech professional to interact with other tech professionals. Based on the early previews and videos/pictures we can see it allows professionals to share documents and presentations, publish questions, conference, chat, video and best practices.

Solaborate even allows for collaboration on the other social platforms such as Facebook, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn.

If you’re interested in signing up to Solaborate you can request a Beta Invite here.

Viber Desktop

Viber is to challenge Skype’s dominance by launching a desktop app which would enable calls, texts and video calls.

Dubbed Viber 3.0 the desktop release is coinciding with major updates for Android, iOS and Blackberry versions.

Viber chief executive  Talmon Marco said;

People spend a substantial amount of time on their smartphones. However, a lot of that usage takes place at home or in the office, where they have laptops or desktops close by.

Bing using Klout as ranking factor

Klout has expanded its partnership with Microsoft by bringing its search results to the top of bing.

Questions that are put on Bing that have long been unanswered will be answered by ‘experts’ who are appointed by Klout ‘influencers’.

CEO of Klout Joe Fernandez said

People are starting to be interested not only in finding information, but also knowing where that information is coming from. When getting advice on how to take care of your garden, for instance, you’d probably much rather get advice from an influencer in the subject rather than someone who was just getting started gardening.

We know what questions people are asking, so we’ve curated the best questions and tied them back to the topics where people are influential.

Users could then +K with the answer if the answer was useful, adding to the experts Klout score.

SAScon

The keynote speakers for the upcoming SAScon have been announced. They are Clancy Childs and John Veichmanis.

Clancy Childs is a Google Analytics’ product manager and is in the know regarding the most crucial tool for marketers. John Veichmanis is Expedia’s VP for Global Paid Search.

SAScon co-founder Simon Wharton said

SAScon is about the accountable modern marketer, digital is at the heart of any modern organisation. Bringing together speakers not only of this notoriety but of this extreme calibre in such a high level conference. It is a real statement of intent from SAScon. 

SAScon is the perfect conference for both the client side agent and the in house marketer.

SAScon takes place on the 6th/7^th of June 2013 and tickets can be bought here.

That’s the end of the roundUP this week we will leave you with this funny VIne that we saw.  You can see more here

The post Digital RoundUP 13/05/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This month we’re beginning a new series of posts that we’re calling FocusON. Each month we’ll focus our posts on a different aspect of digital marketing, and we’re kicking off by talking about Pay Per Click advertising.

To celebrate the launch of FocusON, we’re giving away a Google Chromebook to one lucky reader. Simply visit the PushON Prizes app over at the PushON Facebook page and follow the three simple steps to be in with a chance of winning. HINT: You may want to read FocusON: An Introduction to PPC Marketing first!

Keep your eyes peeled on Facebook and Twitter for updates throughout the month, and don’t forget to share this great opportunity to be in with a chance of winning a Google Chromebook with your social chums!

The post Win A Google Chromebook with #PushONPrizes appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Engage 2013

Engage 2013 took place this week in London at the Hilton London Metropole hotel.

If you were lucky enough to attend or watch on the live stream, social updates were being published using the hashtag #Engage2013.

This social event included top speakers from companies such as Twitter, Nestlé, KLM, SAB Miller and Adobe.

Here are a few of the top talks we enjoyed in the PushON office:

Jan Rezab, CEO of social media analytics company Socialbakers. Jan talks about how social media has evolved in the last few years and where will be heading in the future.

Lionel Lassalle, Social Marketing & Co-Branding Manager at KLM, explained the successful social strategies that have proven invaluable for KLM. Lassalle also demonstrates the social tools used and future innovations with software and campaigns used to combine social with the flying experience.

‘Happy staff = better service = happy customers’. #Engage2013

Jeremy Waite, head of social strategy at Adobe, talks about The “Like-Cycle” in social media. The “Like-Cycle” encourages 5 social media challenges, Insight, Content, Loyalty, ROI and Media, with an emphasis on a solid social strategy. The slides can be found here.

Mozilla PENALISED by google

Mozilla the company behind most notably Firefox internet explorer, Thunderbird and other apps were penalised by Google.

The reason, according to a penalty notification:

“Google has detected user-generated spam on your site. Typically, this kind of spam is found on forum pages, guestbook pages, or in user profiles.

As a result, Google has applied a manual spam action to your site.”

Spam in this instance resulted from spammers abusing the blog section for the Mozilla.org site. John Mueller of Google suggested a need for spam filtering and comments being monitored before they go online. Mozilla had 12 megabytes of spam from 21,169 different comments, Matt Cutts (Google celebrity) said those spam comment pages ‘cause users to complain to us about’ and thus ‘action’ was required. 

Although Mozilla got fined by Google, they were never told which page was causing the offence which seems like an incredibly frustrating policy if the offending site has many pages. This is yet another example of Google flexing its muscles in its fight against spam!

UK Government passes Instagram Act – Now All your pics belong to everyone

As of this week, millions of amateur and professional photographers that upload their work on the Internet will be stripped of their rights to their images. The new Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act passed by the UK government amends the copyright law to allow commercial exploitation of images that contain no information identifying the owner. Most digital images floating around on the Internet today contain no metadata, making them ‘orphan-works’, meaning they can now be exploited for commercial use so long as the user performs a ‘diligent search’.

To keep from being ripped off, photographers will have to either remove their work from the Internet, or register it, a costly and time-consuming activity.

Will this new Act make you think twice before uploading photos to social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter?

Tweetdeck apps closing may 7th

This week, we heard news that Tweetdeck mobile app’s are officially closing on the 7th of May and disappear from the Google Play store, according a blog post from the TweetDeck team. Along with this the twitter team will also remove Facebook integration from the apps.

That’s the end of our RoundUP for this week - we will leave you with exciting news for May! Keep your eyes peeled for our competition this month:

Please tweet us @pushonltd or write a comment below, see you next week!

The post Digital RoundUP 29/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This blog post is the thoughts and opinions of one very cynical, grumpy, sweary, company director and does not in any way reflect the opinions and values of PushON as a whole. We appologise in advance if any of the swearing offends. If you are offended easily you may want to look away now.

I was fairly late to the #party with Twitter, dismissing it as a time wasting excuse for avoiding work and a self-promoting bag of bollocks. It was in May 2007 I bit the 140 character bullet and created an account but initially it’s fair to say I wasn’t enamoured.

Here’s my first tweet:

Signing up to twitter to see what it’s all about and attempting to display within a blog template May 22, 2007

If you’re interested (I doubt you are) here’s all my tweets on one page.

Since then I’ve become a regularly user of twitter for a mix of both social and professional reasons. It was slow going to start and looking back I’ve certainly changed and adapted the way I use the medium as time has gone on.

Initial inane tweets during the formative years of 2007, good examples of which are:

So this should be a twitter by mobile phone. May 22, 2007

Haha what a douche bag ‘a twitter’, it’s a tweet you dumb fuck!

Sat in dukes Jun 04, 2007

Everyone needed to know that, right? I think this pre-dates FourSquare, which I’ve never been bothered to sign up to, although I did try generating interest in an alternative during 2010 with a series (actually just 2) of #PoorSquare tweets,

I just unlocked the cheap clothing badge at clothing isle in Tesco on #PoorSQUARE Apr 22, 2010

Just unlocked the “Fine Dining” badge at McDonalds on #Poorsquare Apr 28, 2010

No one else got on board with that though surprisingly.

My only tweet from the following year (I’d fully decided that Twitter was a self-promoting pile of shite at this point),

Using Twitter for the first time in a year because it’s most immediate way to take the piss out of business parnetner prior to his vasectomy May 21, 2008

Ignoring my mis-spelling of ‘partner’, this was obviously a pivotal moment of the year. Simon @psychobel was fully immersed in all things twitter at this point, so much so, that he was live tweeting his snip.

I remember some fairly heated debates that year with Simon championing the social media platform and me repeatedly pointing out that few people outside of our industry were engaging on it. That’s still true to some degree (from a personal perspective certainly), however I’m prepared to admit that it’s more valuable and useful than I’d first foreseen (Queue Wharton singing, “I told you so”) and my use of twitter has increased steadily since early 2010.

That said there are some uses of twitter that frankly get right on my tits and it’s time to get them off said tits. I’m aware this might ruffle some feathers (clearly people I follow do this or why would they annoy me) and I’m aware that I’m guilty on times of some of the things I’m going to list.

So here they are; the top 5 things people do on twitter that get on my tits.

Number 5: Use Instagram

I’m not an Instagram user, I can’t see your photo in the twitter stream and I’m not going to click on the link to open Instagram just because you’ve taken a photo of a nice sunset and applied a shitty filter.

NUMBER 4: Holiday Tweets

It’s 27c here, the beer is cold and the babes are hot

I’m in Manchester, it’s pissing it down and I’m working, go f*%&$ ya self.

The view here is absolutely stunning, spot of lunch and a snooze by the pool later I think [Instagram photo link]

How about putting your phone away and making the most of it before you’re back at work, back on twitter and banging on about the shit UK weather wishing you were somewhere else.

Number 3: Parents tweeting about their kids

I don’t have kids, I might at some point and maybe then I’ll convince myself that everyone should know when they’ve stuck a biscuit in the Blu-ray drive and how we all laughed.

I remember the embarrassment as a child of my parents showing photos from the photo album to family, friends, neighbours and visitors, I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a child of today and have your parents broadcast your childhood to the world.

Don’t get me started on parents creating Twitter accounts for their children and worse still, the little darlings yet to be born.

“@benjmurf: Never leave a 2-year-old child and a tub of sudocrem alone in a room together! pic.twitter.com/4zw2vnrUUb” – Actually that one is pretty funny

Number 2: #Foodporn

Where to start with this one? Well first off it’s the self-congratulating, boasting nature that nearly all my top 5 have at heart but in most instances it’s less #Foodporn and more like #StandardFood

Here’s some examples (I had to break my Instagram rule on some of these),

http://instagram.com/p/YZ-wpFH1Wh - That’s not #Foodporn that a fucking toasted cheese sandwich.

https://twitter.com/JohanHakon/status/326366802504466432/photo/1 - #Foodporn? small dishes of custardy looking shit more like.

http://instagram.com/p/YXYWYLKhLU - Oh dear @nedpoulter, sorry buddy that’s just a sausage sandwich, you know this shit won’t wash with me.

Small dishes of custardy looking shit

Number 1: Self congratulating retweets

This really is my number one twitter pet hate and frankly I can forgive all others over this one. These are instance where someone has said something positive about someone else over twitter and then the recipient of that praise chooses to retweet that praise to highlight how fucking wonderful they are.

Have some humility people. Do you replicate this amplified back slapping away from twitter? If I walked across a room to you and said “Thanks for helping you were great today”, would you then open the window and shout to everyone passing “@roywilding says THANKS FOR HELPING I WAS FUCKING GREAT TODAY”? I doubt it.

So unless you’re the sort of idiot who refers to themselves in the 3rd person, take the compliment and say, ‘thank you’ but don’t retweet it thinking everyone else wants to see how great you are.

Look, I’m fucking amazing, someone said so!

So that’s it, my top 5 twitter hates. I’m really not a very nice person so don’t be expecting a ‘top 5 twitter loves’ anytime soon, but please do feel free to share your thoughts on what really yanks your chain about twitter or tell me I’m a cynical, boring old twat that can stick my opinions where the sun doesn’t shine.

I’m just off to promote my own blog post and tell everyone how amazing it is on Google+.

The post Top 5 Things People Do On Twitter That Get On My Tits appeared first on PushON Ltd.

LAUNCH OF TWITTER MUSIC APP

On Friday Twitter’s long awaited music app released, so what is it all about?

First of all this app only allows you to preview songs, if you want to play full tracks then you would need to connect  with a Spotify, Rdio or iTunes account.

The layout is slick and the app is user intuitive. On the left hand side you can see what was trending at a specific time and you can click on the picture which will allow you to ‘preview’ the track.

It is a good way of listening to the upcoming songs and the way it is displayed makes it easy to follow.

I did like the suggested artists feature which for me was fairly accurate. I can only speak for myself and this could be due to the fact I follow a few artists on Twitter itself.

My personal opinion is that if you already have a Spotify or iTunes account it makes sense to use the service. However, if you have not signed up with iTunes, Spotify or a similar service before it is unlikely that you would sign up after using this.

Let us know your thoughts

WHATSAPP IS ‘BIGGER THAN TWITTER’ ACCORDING TO THEIR CEO

WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum said the app was now larger than Twitter in terms of monthly users. It has been reported that there are over 200 million monthly users of the app at present.

The messaging app now sees around 8 billion inbound and 12 million outbound messages per day. Obviously Twitter and WhatsApp are different forums for communication, but social network growth has stagnated as users move over to other services such as WhatsApp.

After turning down Google’s $1 billion bid WhatsApp is going from strength to strength and is going to start charging a yearly subscription of $0.99.

1 OUT OF 5 LOOKED UP ADVERTISED PRODUCT WHILE WATCHING TV

Nielsen released stats on what consumers are doing on their tablets while they are watching TV. Social networking sites and shopping websites were the two most interacted forms whilst TV was being watched.

Image search see a downfall

This week we saw an article released from Barry Schwartz on SearchEngineland, claiming that Google Images referrer traffic drops 63% since the upgrade. The study was part of statistics released from Define Media Group based on 87 different website searches on Google Images. On average they saw a decline of 63%, with the Fashion and Lifestyle, Entertainment, News and Photo photos sing a 78% decline in traffic.

This is the graph showing the weekly image search traffic from the Define Media Group study:

The categories of the image search traffic:

Google will likely say the decline is due to a decline in “phantom visits” where publishers counted impressions in the old design even when the searcher did not click through from Google to the website. When we asked the founder of Define Media Group, Marshall Simmonds, he said “we actually never saw any instance of the ‘phantom visit’ phenomenon and none of the publishers we work with and data we reviewed revealed evidence of it occurring.”

Has anyone else experienced this huge decline in Google Image Search traffic to your site?

That’s the end of our RoundUP for this week- we will leave you with firstly this useful resource for handy chrome extensions.

Also we have all used Excel and we thought we would share this article we came across.

Please tweet us @pushonltd or write a comment below, see you next week!

The post Digital RoundUP 22/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

When I finally saw it pop up in the Google Play store this week I decided to put my preconceived notions about Home aside and give it a whirl. Immediately after installing my whole phone changed. It was as if I had just switched operating system, I was no longer on Android I was on Facebook OS.

Facebook Home is effectively a launcher and replaces your home screen with a full-screen sliding news feed. The user interface now consists of a tiny bubble of my face which can be dragged left to launch Messenger, up to access the app launcher, or right to open my most recently used app. These are the only options available to you and everything else is hidden away behind fiddly drag and swipe options.

The Facebook Home UI.

All of this sounds lovely in Facebook land where guys dressed in hoodies and flip flops laugh at videos of screaming goats all day, but for those of us who want to use our phone for tasks outside of Facebook it is a real hindrance. My apps aren’t just there anymore, I have to go through a series of steps open them. And my widgets have completely disappeared, which for any Android user is like losing a limb. Important features that I had customised to be accessible with one touch such as Google Now, Twitter, Phone, Messages, and Email now take several actions to access. I counted that it took me 5 different actions to open Gmail as opposed to one before. I can’t even see basic information such as the time, notifications, battery indicator, or the weather.

Home also takes over your lock screen and only allows you to unlock your phone after you choose a specific app to open, it then takes you to your old lock screen where you still have to swipe and enter your pin. So effectively it adds two or three extra steps to unlock your phone. This is a real inconvenience, although it can be disabled in the options.

The news feed itself doesn’t exactly lend itself to the full screen experience. Images don’t fit on the screen properly and look dark and pixelated, even high-res images. The posts displayed on Facebook Home appear to be completely random, sometimes it would show me something posted 5 minutes ago and other times it would show a post from 3 days ago. With such a push for content to be instant Home seems to be overwhelmingly slow and irrelevant. Home is also very slow, after pressing the home button on my device when inside another app it sometimes took 5 seconds to load the Facebook Home screen. Another issue I found was that after scrolling through a number of posts there was no way (that I could find, anyway) of returning to the most recent post.

Engagement is one thing about Home that is easy and intuitive. Simple ‘Like’ and ‘Comment’ buttons in the bottom left hand corner work nicely, although I did find it easy to accidently hit the ‘Like’ button (always awkward).

One of the most talked about features on the launch of Home was Chat Heads. Despite the name, Chat Heads is a feature that makes a lot of sense. One thing that has always bugged me about the phones I’ve owned (both Android and iOS) is that messaging takes you out of whatever you are doing. Chat Heads tackles this by allowing you to view and reply to a message on-the-fly without it interrupting what you are doing. This feature works quite nicely and is something I would like to see implemented into Android.

How Chat Heads appear.

So after using Facebook Home I’ve decided I’m probably not the target market, but even looking through the eyes of an avid Facebook user I can’t see the benefits of it over the standard Facebook app. It’s clunky, disruptive, slow, and actually makes the whole Facebook experience rather tedious. The main reason I, and most people I know, own an Android device is for the customisability, Facebook Home takes all of that away. It cuts off access to your widgets and home screens and makes it difficult to access other apps. It’s early days, and it may well improve with future updates, but I fear that once Zuckerberg and co. roll out ads on the platform it will be even more unusable.

I’m not alone in my feelings toward Home, the app has an unimpressive 2.2 star rating in the Play store. Here are a few comments from other users:

“Not an intuitive app. Made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours.” – Victoria Wiley

“It limits my phone. If I wanted a single company to take over my homescreen appearance, I could use an iPhone.” – Lee Milstein

“Not intuitive and it makes my phone butt ugly.” – Ric Brown

Although, it seems to have won a few fans:

“It does exactly what it’s suppossed to do. It has a beautiful interface and is quite handy for people that use fb often.” – Keanu James

“Simple and easy to use. I love it.” – Gregory Ro…

Have you used Facebook Home yet? What do you think of it?

The post Hands On with Facebook Home appeared first on PushON Ltd.

This past week Google announced that it will give its users a ‘digital will’ option for their online data. The premise behind it being that users can decide what happens to their online account after they die.

It has been dubbed “data-after-death” and lets users tell Google what to do with emails and other data if their account becomes inactive.

Google email and YouTube posting can be deleted after three, six or twelve months of inactivity. Alternatively they can choose to give access to the data to specific people.

This got me thinking, what happens to all your data when you have gone? What about your Facebook page or Twitter? Social media usage has been increasing at an exponential rate but no one has considered the implications to the data on there.

Both Twitter and Facebook have policies in place to allow users to request that an account be deleted in the event of users passing. Twitter users can obtain a permanent backup of all tweets from a designated account.

What if you do not want to close your Social Media accounts? How about carrying on your social media activity even after you have died?!

Here are a couple of options;

Dead Social

Dead Social enables a user to send out messages after death from various social media accounts.

The key features are;

• Send messages directly to your private Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin account
• Send out a final message and / or series of scheduled messages
• Release unseen video and audio messages

DeadSocial covers all the post-death social media options, scheduling public Facebook posts, Tweets and even LinkedIn posts go out after someone has died. The free service will publish the text, video or audio messages directly from that person’s social media accounts or it can send a series of scheduled messages in the future, say on an anniversary or a loved one’s birthday. For now, all DeadSocial messages will be public, but the company plans to add support for private messages in the future.

LivesOn

This caught my attention because I read about the service and watched an episode of Black Mirror that contained very similar themes.

Essentially LivesOn analyse’s a user’s tweets and learns about what is frequently tweeted and the style of tweets. The idea being that in time a tweet from LivesOn would be identical (or as close) to what the original user would tweet. Tweets will begin to populate on your LivesOn feed. A user has to nominate an executor for the account and they can decide whether to keep the account live.

LivesOn’s slogan is;

When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting

Legacy Locker

The previous two examples specifically dealt with social media accounts, Legacy Locker deals with your online presence as a whole. Legacy will manage your Facebook, Paypal, Linkedin, iTunes and Gmail to name but a few.

There are different levels of accounts from free to $30 a month. The free account will store and hand over 3 logins to one beneficiary and send out a farewell message to your loved ones, the top tier account has unlimited access.

Would you be interested in any of these services? It would be great to know your thoughts.

Please Tweet us @PushONLTD

The post When life logs you off, how to stay online appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Twitter Music

We were given a glimpse of Twitter music over the weekend but only via the site – http://music.twitter.com. On Friday, rumours were going around about the launch of the new Twitter Music app, with Wiz Khalifa, Black Shelton, Soft Reeds, Pete Yorn, The Glitch Mob and Ryan Seacrest all saying how good the new Twitter music app is. The launch was expected to be on Friday, however, updates suggested that the weekend was the target, to be launched with the on-going Coachella festival.

If you now try to log into the site, you can grant access to your account but then the site will take you back to the original page.

What will the Twitter music app look like? Will it spell the end for Spotify? Only time will tell, we can’t answer any of these questions until Twitter release some more information about the App.

Blab - Social Media Conversation Predictor

News broke this week about an exciting new tool called Blab that can be used to predict social conversations that would emerge within 24,48 and 72 hours of them happening.

Blab can also track real-time conversations in any language and allows you to see what content, images and videos are being shared most within your social audience.

Using this information, Blab can improve key areas that your brand can benefit from, including Consumer Insights, Content Marketing, Pre-emptive Brand Protection and Search Engine Optimisation.

We look forward to testing this tool out, and predicting the social trends for the PushON social audience.

At Blab we’re mapping the conversation canvas to give you the most up-to-the-minute understanding of your brand’s audience—who they are, where they are and what they are talking about. Then in 24, 48, and 72 hour time frames, we’re accurately predicting how those conversations will grow and where they will migrate.

Foursquare 6.0

The latest update from Foursquare (6.0) adds an ‘Explore nearby’ search box and map to the main page of the app. This works perfectly to help find out what your friends are doing and shows what’s going on within the local area.

The update also allows for more accurate check-ins and trending popular locations while recommendations and further away goings-on are shown in a separate section.

Universal Analytics

Online marketing and off-line marketing collides. LovesData have hosted hack day using the Google Universal Analytics beta. The applications they have demonstrated strongly suggest that ‘big data’ will rule the roost in not just online, but also offline marketing very shortly.

Google – Map Maker

Google expanded its Map Maker edit tools to cover the UK this past week.

The software allows users to add details to specific sections of Google maps such as information about buildings, national parks and other details that may be of interest to its users.

Any suggestions or amendments are reviewed by other users and Google itself before they are accepted.

Map Maker users can edit and add four types of content:

• Places – such as a restaurant, gym, cinema
• Roads, Rivers and Railways – such as bicycle routes
• Building outlines – use of 3D images for houses, monuments
• Natural features and Political Boundaries – lakes, parks and natural structures

Another feature called Map Maker pulse allows users to see real time updates and displays submissions made by other users. The more users are active they get more ‘confidence’ which means future submissions will be subject to less inspections. 

This is another example of how crowd sourcing has cut costs to map areas by its own users rather than paying to get it done from a company.

That’s the end of the RoundUP for this week, we will leave you with this – GOOGLE STREET VIEW Hyperlapse: This tool allows you to creates a warp-speed Street View back and forth between a pair of points on a map. Give it a try!

The post Digital RoundUP 15/04/2013 appeared first on PushON Ltd.

Here are some of our top tools and webpages that we recommend:

SocialBro

SocialBro is a great tool to analyse Twitter followers and monitor performance.

To get started, you can simply use the tool in the Google Chrome browser. Once installed as a browser tool from the Chrome web store, create an account and link the Twitter profile to the account. This will then synchronize your current audience but results will not be seen fully for a long period of time (as shown below):

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SocialBro has a setting that allows you to see when your top 100 followers are most active on Twitter via a chart telling you the optimum time to tweet during the week. Using these times, you can then enter this data into tools such as HootSuite or Buffer to publish tweets at these times:

SocialBro is also useful for finding out who has unfollowed you, in order to keep your Twitter followers/following ratio down.

TweetDeck / HootSuite

As we all know, Twitter announced a few weeks ago that it will be discontinuing three of its TweetDeck apps for iPhone, Android and Air. However you can still use it on Chrome appstore and in other web browsers.

TweetDeck allows you to follow a live stream of tweets from your followers. Another benefit is that you can monitor hashtags and keywords, this  allows you to be able to get involved in and strike up a conversation with the publisher. You can also keep track of more than one account on TweetDeck which is great for businesses with more than one account or client. Many agencies use this to post across platforms, for example to post one article across Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, but from my experience, this looks like a lazy technique to be social.

Hootsuite is a great tool for allowing you to monitor all of your business’ social platforms in the one place. As you can see from the image below, it allows Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube and Foursquare to name a few. But the same problem arises where you get the duplicate content being pushed across plaforms, with tweets being published on Facebook and Google + with hashtags and mentions being included which can be a put off for many of the readers.

As with TweetDeck you can monitor tweets and hashtags, the only negative we can find with Hootsuite is the layout and text side being annoying, with no way of making the text any bigger in the same way that TweetDeck does it.

FollowerWonk

Followerwonk lets you search Twitter bios to find keywords that you are looking at targeting. You can enter keywords and then ask it to search particular locations. Another useful tool within Followerwonk, is the Analyze followers section. We use this to look at the people following competitors and then we can contact them or reach out to them via Twitter or personal website.

Twellow and Just Tweet It

These are directories that improve the popularity of your twitter profile and can help gain followers.

Twitter Counter

Twitter Counter is a tool that helps show a visual overview and graph of your Twitter stats. Twitter Counter tracks statistics for over 80 million users. It helps you set targets for followers and predicts how many you will have over a particular period of time.

Buffer

Buffer makes it easy to share any page you’re reading throughout the day. You can keep your Buffer topped up with at least 10 tweets and they will then be automatically share posts for you throughout the day. More Tweets can be scheduled if the retail version is purchased.

Bit.ly

Bit.ly is a link shortening tool that allows you to keep track of the clicks and data fromcontent that is being published across all social platforms. This data can be used to show where the audience is engaging from, whether it is Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter and the country where these clicks are coming from.

Google Reader + News / Flipboard / Feedly

Currently we use Google reader to keep up to date with the latest blogs and relevant content being published online. This helps to find content to publish on our own twitter and Facebook with updates that can involve engagement and opinions from the audience. With these interactions, others will see and this helps to gain followers in the long run.

However, with the news that Google Reader, one of the most popular RSS feed readers, is shutting down on July 1, 2013, we have been looking for alternatives to keep us up to speed with all the news in the digital world.

Google News is also useful for finding the latest articles that are not published by blogs. My monitoring activity on Google news you can be one of the first to update your audience with any breaking news or important information that’s worth sharing.

Flipboard

Flipboard is currently only set up as an app for Tablets and smart phones. It uses RSS feeds to present you with a simple news feed, by ‘flipping’ between the news stories the layout is much like a magazine. Flipboard presents your information in a simple and interactive way, making it a nice app to use, while on the go. The main drawback of Flipboard is the missing desktop version, but the app makes up for it with its beautifully crafted design and user interface.

Feedly

After the announcement of Google Reader’s retirement most users were worried about exporting their Google Reader feeds. Feedly makes this process seamless you can simply import your list and it is that simple. The layout is very user friendly and in many ways it is better than Google Reader which is no mean feat.

Klout

Klout measures your influence based on your ability to drive action on social networks. They crunch your social data to give you insights into how influential you are and what you are influential about on your social platforms.

Lets us know what you think and if there are any tools or sites we missed out that you find useful for your Twitter social.

Tweet us your thoughts at @PushONltd

The post Twitter Tools to Help Improve your Business’ Social Presence appeared first on PushON Ltd.