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.

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!).