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You could argue third party applications such as TwitPic and YFrog allowed us to add images to our profiles but it was never really as simple as uploading directly from your Twitter account and the images never appeared as saved galleries on your profile.

How?

Twitter has now added a new image gallery feature which loads a strip of thumbnails of your recently uploaded pictures into the sidebar. When you view a person’s homepage directly, you get a larger image. When you view a profile by clicking on a person in your stream, you get a smaller set. Both allow you to click and enlarge the photos in a very similar way to Facebook!

A typical Twitter slider view

Why?

So why have Twitter added this feature?

Adding new features like this keeps people on the site longer and adds interest to the general text based tweets. It also means people won’t miss images that are uploaded by people they follow as they would usually be buried under a stream of updates as they are a constant feature on a profile.

So?

More interestingly for us at Cloud 9 it allows us to market ourselves and our clients in a better way on Twitter that we could only before do using Facebook. We can brand ourselves in a better fashion and ‘tweet’ with images rather than text and images. As well as text, tweets can ‘retweeted’ to allow them maximum interest. It may seem like double the work but we look at it being double the exposure to a normally out of reach audience.

We’re excited about this new feature and will be sure to be using it! Keep an eye on what we’re doing on https://twitter.com/c9dd or https://www.facebook.com/cloud9digitaldesign

 Facebook launched in 2004 and was originally restricted to Harvard College attendees only. Since then it has rapidly grown into a way of life for people. It now has more than 750 million active users, there are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events etc) and people spend over spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook.

If you are not yet convinced of why your brand should be on Facebook, check out these stats from Experian Hitwise.

1. Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google, accounting for 6.89% of all visits from UK Internet users in September.
2. Facebook is by far the biggest website in the UK for page views. In total, 16.40% of all page views during September went to a Facebook page.
3. Facebook now accounts for 1 in 6 page views in the UK, that’s twice the number of page views received by Google.
4. Facebook is the most popular social network in the UK, accounting for 55% of all visits to social networks.
5. Facebook is the number one search term in the UK. 3.69% of all searches typed into Google, Yahoo! and Bing are for ‘facebook’.
6. Taking into account variations of Facebook with misspellings and abbreviations such as ‘facbook’, ‘fb’ or ‘facebok’ – Facebook accounts for approximately 6% of all searches in search engines.
7. Facebook accounts for 9.58% of all upstream traffic to other websites in the UK.
8. Nearly 10% of Internet visits come immediately after a visit to Facebook, second only to Google in traffic generation.
9. Visits to Facebook have quadrupled in the last three years. In the last year Facebook has grown by 17% in terms of UK Internet visits.
10. In the last year, Facebook has increased its downstream traffic to online retail sites by 12%.

We love Social Media at Cloud 9 and see the huge potential for any Brand to be part of this ever growing social religion. Why not give us a call to see how we can help you grow and give you the opportunity to open new doors.

Love Scandinavian design? – Please ‘like’ Morsø woodburning stoves. Morsø stoves are one of our longest standing customers and we’ve just launched their UK specific Facebook page. The page will feature all the latest products, news, events and the odd special offer too.

Despite email and social media being the two leading areas where businesses plan to increase their spend in 2010, and with 69% of businesses planning to integrate the two, there is very little information out there on how they measure up, let alone interact with one another.

Being the statistics-obsessed folks we are, we decided to get our hands dirty with Google Analytics and study the relationships that our site has with Twitter, Facebook and our newsletters. Along the way, we’ll also touch on some of the aspects of social media that aren’t so easy to measure.

Lets compare email and social media’s role:

As traffic-driving tools
As a means to attract new visitors to your site
As engagement-drivers

Using email and social media to drive traffic to your site

Depending on how much effort you put into your monthly newsletter or social media efforts, the capacity for each channel to drive traffic to your site can be quite variable. We found that a whole month of Facebook updates and tweets drives roughly half as much traffic to our site as our monthly newsletter does over the same period, meaning that the social media crowd (roughly 9% of this combined audience) generated 30% of resulting traffic from Facebook, Twitter and email:

That said, it is difficult to separate follower traffic from what’s generated by retweets – being one of the very cool advantages of using Twitter. Another intangible is the propagation of fan page content and recommendations to Facebook feeds and pages – the traffic generated from this can’t be easily coupled to the fans you have.

Unlike Twitter and Facebook, email’s capacity to drive traffic has a long tail. Whereas the traffic from Twitter and Facebook comes in bursts lasting as long as it takes for the message to fall off the bottom of the feed (2-3 days), email continues to collect clicks and opens for days (if not weeks) to come. Using the example of our November newsletter, the proceeding 3 weeks drove as much traffic to the site as the first 48 hours after the send. In fact, we still received an outstanding 1,456 clicks through to our site from the newsletter in the third week!

What does this tell us?

• Nurturing even a modest social media community can generate considerable traffic – on average, these followers and fans tend be more responsive than email subscribers, too. Is it because of the participatory nature of social media?
• Email has a very long tail, so consider the timeliness of your message. If a subscriber returns to your email three weeks later, will they still want to click-through?

Using email and social media to attract new visitors to your site

Now that we’ve looked at the number of site visitors received from email and social media sources respectively, lets look at how many of these people had either never visited our site before, or haven’t dropped by in a long time. The results were surprising:

6% of email subscribers who had received our newsletter and consequently clicked through had not visited since March, 2009 (when we made significant changes to our Google Analytics tracking). A lesser percentage of new visits came from Twitter and Facebook respectively. Although these figures may not be indicative of genuinely “new” visits, they do show that a considerable number of subscribers, followers and fans had not visited our site in at least 8 months (if at all). Instead of unsubscribing or unfollowing, they simply hung around, then finally took action on a relevant tweet or newsletter.

What does this tell us?
Email is just as relevant a channel as social media for initiating a relationship and introducing new or lapsed visitors to your content. If you provide a more ways to connect to your brand, you may find that a significant part of your audience may be in touch with you via email or following your tweets, but never actually viewed your site!
Even if an email subscriber hasn’t responded to your email newsletter in the last few months, don’t dump them – segments of your list may be simply waiting for the right offer to come along.

Using email and social media to drive engagement
Once all these visitors arrive via email and social media channels, what do they do? We tallied the average number of pages each visitor went to after arriving at our site and found that on average, Facebook fans visited 1.7 pages more than email subscribers and 2.79 pages more than Twitter followers:

This also reflects what seems to be a loose relationship between the percentage of new site visitors and their willingness to explore a site. Also, from our own link-sharing experience on Twitter, it’s indicative of a tendency to click a link in a tweet in order to snappily read a single article, in opposition to the leisurely site experience that Facebook promotes.

What does this tell us?

• Consider your landing pages and extended site experience – if it takes more than three pages to achieve a goal, you may have lost most of your Twitter visitors and certainly a lot of your email subscribers along the way.

We’re all in this together

Email, social media and your content should be viewed as a collaborative effort. When you integrate your channels (eg. Add an email signup form to Facebook, or links in your newsletter to your Twitter page), any one of your subscribers can be interacting with you across half a dozen social networking sites, plus receive your tweets and email newsletters on a regular basis. To say one channel is more successful than the other is misleading, when they ultimately flow into one another to create, in marketing speak, what is a multi-touch brand experience.

About this data
Email, Twitter and Facebook were chosen for this comparison as all three channels leverage the same content from our blog and gallery. Data was collected using Google Analytics over a one month period.

We’d love to know how you combine email and social media. Do you regularly use Twitter to promote your newsletter? Has your email resulted in more Facebook fans? Let us know about your experience in the comments below.

There are over 3 million business pages on Facebook and over 80% have less than 100 ‘likes’ (or fans as they were known as until very recently).

The fact is that everyone knows how to create a page, but making it really WORK for your business as part of your marketing strategy is whole different matter.

In just 5 months we’ve created a business page for local gastro-pub ‘The Punchbowl’ in Lapworth, Warwickshire, that now has over 1,000 likes. and is more importantly opening a new channel to their customers.

Integrating events and special offers into the Punchbowl’s Facebook feed is a great way of constantly giving a gentle reminder of what’s on, and has increased their mid-week business by over 1,000%!!

Sounds great but it has to be done correctly, and regularly, to have any positive impact on your business. Like any marketing activity it should have a well thought out strategy behind it – forget the ‘half a dozen product shots and pray for an audience’ technique. We use social media lists, email marketing, viral, and good old proven ‘in-store’ tactics to really rack up an online audience that is in-turn driving business.

Fancy a bite of the action? Why not give us a call and ask us how we can maximise your business exposure on Facebook?

As well as providing another valuable point of contact, it will be a great place to catchup with all that’s going on within the business including the Dealer Summer Party held just this weekend (special guest – Jim Bowen from Bullseye!).